The charm that this series had to start out with has really faded with how rapidly they've released these games and with how little they've iterated on the formula. The same issues of sluggish UI and exploration, an obscenely high encounter rate, relative simplicity and ease of combat, and general story shallowness remain. The series has certainly lost me with this one. It started out with some promise of diverging, with a pseudo-monster collection element, but this is beyond half-baked. There isn't a large variety of monster cards to collect, and they're locked behind randomness -- you have a random chance of getting three chests at the end of a battle, some of which contain monster cards and some of which contain regular items. It turned what could've been an interesting mechanic into something I found annoying. The story is also fairly predictable, with its twists being broadcast since the first hour or so of the game. Hopefully they take some more time before the next one, because they need to work on some of the core aspects of the game which are now grating.