Most JRPGs that are known for their difficultly just require a lot of grinding. While this game is difficult, grinding is almost never needed, and instead your success is entirely based on your team's composition. There were multiple times where a boss killed me on their first turn. However, just by changing my party to have different elemental resistances and different moves my second attempt would be a cake walk. Considering your protagonist has customizable stats and moves, and your other party members are all recruit-able monsters, there are tons of combinations. Any boss can be easy but you have to figure out how to change your team to do that.

There's no city maps so you just have to memorize where shops are. Basic ship movement like using your thrusters to turn requires a perk. The inventory has too few categories; all weapons are under a single tab instead of separate tabs for pistols, shotguns, etc. Of course, there's also glitches, especially with AI path finding and dialogue.

Even though Bethesda games tend to be rough on launch I at least know that they'll be amazing once modders fix them. I don't think that'll happen for this game though. The game has tons of loading screens and doesn't feel open world at all. Space exploration is basically non-existent. So even if the modders fix the maps, the ship movement, the inventory, and the glitches, they can't fix the core premise of the game being unfulfilled.

This is the best episodic JRPG of all time, but I think it's an inherently flawed idea. The worst part of any JRPG is the start as you just spam your best move to win. As you progress through the dozens of hours however, the culmination of building your party, stats, abilities, equipment, etc. out of the hundreds of options available makes JRPG gameplay actually interesting. Live A Live never gets to that point as each story ends before there's any interesting team building. This is a game you play in spite of its boring gameplay to see the great writing.

My favorite games are text heavy JRPGs, yet I thought this was just okay. The combat is fairly shallow. There's few orbment slots which are basically your sole method of customization as the equipment is mostly linear upgrades. The gameplay involves a lot of backtracking to talk to specific people.

The storytelling reminded me more of Western RPGs. There's a bigger focus on the setting than any individual characters. This works in Western RPGs as they tend to have a short main quest, meaning you only do the side quests that you care about. This doesn't work for me in JRPG, as the linear main quest means that there's a ton of information that I don't care about.

If you love lore and fairly standard JRPG combat that doesn't get in the way of the tons of text, then this is the game for you.

If you haven't played a lot of games then you'll want to play only the greatest games. Eventually though you'll reach a point where you've seen the same formula for great games over and over, and while they're still great, you'll crave something different. That's when you play this game.

Is Eternal Sonata a great game? Probably not. It is unique, and most importantly, it's good enough. A lot of weird and experimental games are a pain to play but you'll never struggle to get through this game. The gameplay is perfectly serviceable so that you can see the truly one of a kind story. If playing something new and different is your primary goal then play this game.

For most of 14's existence it has not been a great game. We all know about the troubles of 1.0, but even after that problems persisted for years. ARR and Heavensward did not have cross-server party maker, it was only added in patch 3.5. Doing raids back then were laborious just because your pool of teammates were limited to just your one server, not to mention the poor quality of life like cooldowns not resetting on wipes, which was only fixed in 2016 towards the end of HW.

Even when Stormblood had these fixed it then had its own problem. The Return to Ivalice alliance raid series was needlessly difficult, and your relic weapon was tied to the grindy FF11 styled Eureka area, which meant actually getting the gear for raids was now the problem.

Then comes Shadowbringers and we finally have a great expansion. It's easily manageable to get the gear and team together for savage raids, the jobs are better balanced, and the fights are fun and memorable. Even the story is more consistent, now without the fakeout deaths of HW or the split focus of SB. There's few things I can say were wrong with this expansion, it's a 10/10.

So what's wrong with Endwalker? Nothing really, on paper it's just as good as Shadowbringers. However, you have to look at the larger context. 14 expansion are very formulaic. Each expansion there's six new overworld areas, three alliance raids, 12 savage raids, etc. These even come out in the same consistent patch order. This fact didn't bother me going into Shadowbringers because that was the first expansion that actually made me want to do all types of content. Now, even though Endwalker is good, the monotony of knowing what to expect from a 14 expansion has bored me. If they don't have any ideas left on how to improve the formula then they need to change it.