one of the final bosses of the story mode (not the final final one) had me so bad i abandoned the game for 4 months and then very quickly realized that fuck this and cheated so i could max out every skill and make all the party members level 70, not much else cause i still wanted to engage with the game lmao (it still wasn't a complete walk in the park, but not "i'm killing everything in two hits" type of cheating) but outside of that it was overall very good and entertaining and the characters were good 👍

random points:
-i think i liked how the battle system was so broken this time, felt cathartic sometimes
-even then, the two optional-to-win fights were extremely hard, but not impossible and i did them in a few tries (im ignoring the one that's timed lmao who in their right mind ever gives you a timed battle in a turn based rpg)
-i'm gonna miss how these first 5 games looked, genuinely a very charming artstyle and just kind of cute overall (i do not like the way cold steel looks at all lmao)
-using a guide is required, as i'm seeing a lot of people being absolutely caught off guard by the final big twist of the game, still think those quests that foreshadow it could've been optional instead of hidden perhaps
-wazy should've been a viable romantic option, falcom you fools
-i don't get why this game wants to give lloyd a harem, he was fine with two girls vowing for his attention, why make tio one of them.
-"omg lloyd you're so dense i want to fuck you" repeat this for an entire chapter and you have the intermission and scenes where lloyd speaks from his heart to a girl (sometimes even boys) (what an icon tbf)
-clearly, lloyd is aroace with how much he doesn't give a single fuck about speaking his emotions to other people, or maybe he's just a little neurodivergent perhaps /hj
-can't wait to get to cold steel and have all of these issues with the writing hightened
-the final boss is awfully hard, prepare well with a lot of burst orbs and whatever else you think you may need for a really difficult fight that hits very hard

A really solid RPG that I got to support my local gamedev scene (Chile) so I'm glad that it was as enjoyable as it was. Solid story and solid game balance. The latter's exception may just be the final boss, but, also, I think that may be alright(?) when I consider the plot at that point (and the extremely overpowered sniper you can get for Rourke lmao). The rest of the bosses sometimes felt like a struggle for my life despite not losing once against them, a feeling I think is great when it is about a boss in this type of story in particular. So, just an overall very consistent and very fun game with fun chracters whom I all felt close to my heart by the end.

I also appreciate the distinct lack of any direct/mentioned romantic tension between any of the characters, just all friends part of the same rebellious group. As an aroace person it was fun seeing a story kinda discard those notions altogether.

Maybe my two other gripes, one silly and one kinda serious, is that you can't pet the animals, while the other is that I hoped that you didn't get to choose who to hang out the few times it prompted you to, it kinda made me not care as much about certain characters compared to the ones I got to spend time with, but, also, that's just kinda how life is while being chased by the embodiment of the worldwide military industrial complex controlled by empires as it creates excuses to start wars sometimes! So maybe this complaint is also a little silly.

edit: i can't believe i originally wrote jrpg instead of rpg lmao brain is completely consumed by The Rot

its a mess, the combat trials are way to fucking hard, the last one specially, the final boss gives you almost no direction as to what to do, knuckles' glide controls like fucking shit, but, i still teared up a bit with the ending

i enjoyed the towers, but this is mostly because im a "hit your head against something a million times until it works while listening to something fun" type of person and, if anything, play it for the ending, so switching to easy mode and searching for tips and guides for the difficult parts helps

during the final level of mission 11 i genuinely felt like i had gone into a trance-like state, able to see both what the game was about to do and what i had to do to get to it, my hands and brain felt like it had become one with my cutely decorated nintendo switch and, as i got that first try ace medal, i felt like as if i had just experienced a lucid dream where everything had been under my control despite everything else trying to take that away from me

no one, not even the middle-of-the-road story, can take that experience away from me