I wrote this for another thread in the old forums, but It's basically a review (of sorts) so I'm gonna post it here. Spoilers right away. You've been warned.
So the game is pretty standard fare to start, you go to four temples, kill the bosses guarding the elemental crystal, then purify said crystal. Once this is accomplished you go into a pillar of light and the protagonists wake up at the starting inn with all the crystals mysteriously unpurified and all the sub-bosses and other characters still unmurdered. The protagonists are understandably confused, but this time you start with your airship so you can just go back and do it again without all the delays and fetch quests of the first run. Or if you are a completionist you can go around the world and kill all the sub bosses again and get slightly different dialogue. I didn't because I was already getting kind of sick of the game and found the characters ranged from boring to annoying.
So you kill the temple bosses again, purify the crystals, and go into the pillar of light. Once again you wake up at the inn with everything undone, so the characters decide to keep doing what they've been doing because, why not? Again you can go on a globetrotting murder spree for slightly different subplots if you really want to, but it's entirely optional. So this time after you purify the temples one of the protagonists who had amnesia suddenly remembers something that conclusively leads him to believe that one of the characters guiding the party is EVIL and that purifying the crystals is a very bad idea, he communicates this to the rest of the party sans the evil one. Once they go through the pillar of light and wake up at the inn again they decide... to go and purify the crystals again... because. Just because. They have a notion that this is exactly what the villain wants them to do, but screw it, they don't have any other ideas so why not go along with it?
So you just continue with your routine purifying the crystals and going into the pillar of light. I haven't really made it clear how repetitive this is. The temple bosses get a little tougher each time, but it's the exact same fight and I never needed to really grind at all until the last cycle. Worse than the repeated bosses is the repeated dialogue. It really gives the impression that your protagonists are brain dead. They *remember* the previous cycles, but every single time you purify the crystal it's the same dialogue, word for word. Every time they are surprised that a monster is coming out of the crystal. Every time Airy explains the crystal purifying technique. Every time Ringabell wonders if this is really the right thing to do. In the Exact. Same. Words. We've done this 15 times already, would it have killed them to make the characters the slightest bit self aware, since it's actually a major plot point that they don't lose their memories between cycles. I am told that the sub boss murder spree does get mixed up a bit, and you fight different combinations of them and get additional little snippets of story that don't really gel with what was going on in the first cycle, but whatever, optional tedium, so don't care.
This is a different crystal than the last time. See the pipe thingy in the corner?
All in all you fight each crystal boss FIVE times, you purify a total of 20 crystals, all the while the characters are getting extremely strong hints that this is dumb and the wrong thing to do, but you have to do it in order to get the true ending. There is actually a really well done fake ending that requires some out of the box thinking to get and would have been a far better suited to be switched with the true end, but alas the world is doomed unless you stupidly follow directions you know don't work, given by someone you know is evil, to accomplish something you don't understand. This alone is enough to make you hate the protagonists, even if their one note personalities hadn't already done the job.
This is only one of the problems with the game, the biggest, sure, but not by all means all. There's the inherent problem with job systems, wherein you are only told what skills each job learns after you've leveled it up, meaning there's no strategy to character building unless you have a wiki open or level up every job, by which point you will be so over leveled there will be no purpose to strategy. There's the problem with Tiz's quest to rebuild his destroyed town that makes no sense at all and is a thin excuse to squeeze a mobile game in. Tiz is upset that his town is a crater and that everybody is dead, so he resolves to rebuild Norende... in a completely different location, and populate it with entirely new people. It's Norende in name only, who exactly does this help? And when does he even have time to do this? And more importantly, where the heck is this place? We've gone to 3 different worlds now and all changes to the world have been reset, but New Norende still stands safe in its little pocket dimension. There's also microtransactions built into the game, which alone is enough to tarnish the entire experience.
I could probably go on, but I'll stop here.
So the game is pretty standard fare to start, you go to four temples, kill the bosses guarding the elemental crystal, then purify said crystal. Once this is accomplished you go into a pillar of light and the protagonists wake up at the starting inn with all the crystals mysteriously unpurified and all the sub-bosses and other characters still unmurdered. The protagonists are understandably confused, but this time you start with your airship so you can just go back and do it again without all the delays and fetch quests of the first run. Or if you are a completionist you can go around the world and kill all the sub bosses again and get slightly different dialogue. I didn't because I was already getting kind of sick of the game and found the characters ranged from boring to annoying.
So you kill the temple bosses again, purify the crystals, and go into the pillar of light. Once again you wake up at the inn with everything undone, so the characters decide to keep doing what they've been doing because, why not? Again you can go on a globetrotting murder spree for slightly different subplots if you really want to, but it's entirely optional. So this time after you purify the temples one of the protagonists who had amnesia suddenly remembers something that conclusively leads him to believe that one of the characters guiding the party is EVIL and that purifying the crystals is a very bad idea, he communicates this to the rest of the party sans the evil one. Once they go through the pillar of light and wake up at the inn again they decide... to go and purify the crystals again... because. Just because. They have a notion that this is exactly what the villain wants them to do, but screw it, they don't have any other ideas so why not go along with it?
So you just continue with your routine purifying the crystals and going into the pillar of light. I haven't really made it clear how repetitive this is. The temple bosses get a little tougher each time, but it's the exact same fight and I never needed to really grind at all until the last cycle. Worse than the repeated bosses is the repeated dialogue. It really gives the impression that your protagonists are brain dead. They *remember* the previous cycles, but every single time you purify the crystal it's the same dialogue, word for word. Every time they are surprised that a monster is coming out of the crystal. Every time Airy explains the crystal purifying technique. Every time Ringabell wonders if this is really the right thing to do. In the Exact. Same. Words. We've done this 15 times already, would it have killed them to make the characters the slightest bit self aware, since it's actually a major plot point that they don't lose their memories between cycles. I am told that the sub boss murder spree does get mixed up a bit, and you fight different combinations of them and get additional little snippets of story that don't really gel with what was going on in the first cycle, but whatever, optional tedium, so don't care.
This is a different crystal than the last time. See the pipe thingy in the corner?
All in all you fight each crystal boss FIVE times, you purify a total of 20 crystals, all the while the characters are getting extremely strong hints that this is dumb and the wrong thing to do, but you have to do it in order to get the true ending. There is actually a really well done fake ending that requires some out of the box thinking to get and would have been a far better suited to be switched with the true end, but alas the world is doomed unless you stupidly follow directions you know don't work, given by someone you know is evil, to accomplish something you don't understand. This alone is enough to make you hate the protagonists, even if their one note personalities hadn't already done the job.
This is only one of the problems with the game, the biggest, sure, but not by all means all. There's the inherent problem with job systems, wherein you are only told what skills each job learns after you've leveled it up, meaning there's no strategy to character building unless you have a wiki open or level up every job, by which point you will be so over leveled there will be no purpose to strategy. There's the problem with Tiz's quest to rebuild his destroyed town that makes no sense at all and is a thin excuse to squeeze a mobile game in. Tiz is upset that his town is a crater and that everybody is dead, so he resolves to rebuild Norende... in a completely different location, and populate it with entirely new people. It's Norende in name only, who exactly does this help? And when does he even have time to do this? And more importantly, where the heck is this place? We've gone to 3 different worlds now and all changes to the world have been reset, but New Norende still stands safe in its little pocket dimension. There's also microtransactions built into the game, which alone is enough to tarnish the entire experience.
I could probably go on, but I'll stop here.