I'm not sure why people give the game such a high rating? It's similar to some of the free flash games I played as a kid, only less polished. Like fire emblem only without the ability to do much in combat or forge relationships that matter. For a project made in something like RPG Maker or Stencyl or Scratch, it's decent, though not the best I've seen from new developers.. But there's too many problems with the interface to call it polished, and for the price, there are way better games.

The story's a bit heavyhanded with the foreshadowing for my taste, and spoiler cutscenes are unwelcome such as the one following the very first chapter that shows General Antares may not be the villain. Nevermind that I spent every moment leading up to it internally screaming that my character ate up all of the pomp and grooming from Zelos. Especially while he was encouraging my soldiers to drink before our first battle and celebrating before we'd even met an opposing force. Uh huhhh. I was hoping for some choices in what my character says or does with the story.

The deal-breaker for me though has got to be the UI. The little tooltips that pop up when you cursor over a Trait are helpful, but why wasn't this done for many other key features of the game? It is jarring and frustrating to need to close out of my army management menus, open up the compendium, and sift through the categories and long list of entries until I find what I'm looking for. And no, I'm not asking for more exposition by NPCs or a shortcut to the compendium, which can still take a while to read through. Succinct, concise information so I know what I'm looking at when and where it's relevant is what a tooltip can offer. Having Jules show me around the first town could have been an immersive way to teach the player features of the game, but because he explains everything all at once, it can be overwhelming and annoying. Aside from tooltips, you could add a little question mark/speech bubble next to these options in between chapters to have Jules explain what something is when the player is curious or needs help. Nobody likes unsolicited advice, especially when some of those things are already clear to the player.

I think it took me about 5 minutes or so just to figure out why I couldn't change class on anyone but the "hero" character, not to mention during this time I found the different class articles frustratingly disorganized to a first time reader. Alphabetize the list, please please please. I concluded that it's sorted by tier, but even within those tiers it still feels disorganized and a chore to find what I'm looking for. But back on my struggles with changing classes: when the player attempts to change a class before that character's reached max CP, nothing happens. Literally nothing happens. I was unsure if I was clicking on it wrong, it required a keyboard input, if I was reading the resource symbols wrong... without any sort of feedback from the game as to what the problem was, I was frustratingly at a loss for how to resolve said problem.

I want to like this game, and I can see it has a ton of content. I also anticipate there may be parts of the story I will find less predictable to pique my curiosity further in. The army management and combat reminds me of titles like Tactics Ogre and Unicorn Overlord, but if the armies and battles are to be the core element of fun or frustration for me, I'll need to see some improvements in the UI. I'll keep an eye on updates in the meantime.

Fun gameplay once you get it working. That is what motivated me to sit through a lot of this weird mess, but now I hit my breaking point.
I saved in the middle of a big battle because I had to leave. Came back, loaded up the game, mistakenly loaded the manual save because I thought my last save was a manual save. It wasn't, it was a save that brought me back to the town. AND it auto-saved over the actual battle-save that I've tried to do. Meaning I lost about 2 hours of playtime and have to re-do my entire godforsaken army.

This is just one of the many issues this game has. Atrocious UI (seriously atrocious. Atomically atrocious. Its BAD). Boring music. And my number 1 hateboner: The absolutely idiotic story. The braindead characters. Dialogues that make no sense unless you assume everyone involved is lobotomized. Writing worse than what the average 5 year old hands over for show-and-tell. A complete mary-sue protagonist with NO redeeming qualities yet loved by everyone, because everyone seems born with only a singular brain cell. A story that only a western weeabo could come up with, but in bad.
I'm not kidding, this is probably the first game I've ever played where the writing made me actively angry with how outrageously stupid it is. Plus the dev has a giantess fetish, plain for everyone to see.

I might continue the game down the line once I've calmed down from losing 2 hours of boring army-management. Because the actual gameplay is fun. 9/10 gameplay, 1/10 everything else and that's me being generous. The lead writer of this game should be put in chains and have people throw tomatoes at him or her. Not to shame him, but so he or she might gain experience what its like to interact with actual humans and find out how they actually converse with each other. To learn about SANE character-motivations. And maybe get an understanding of cause and effect relationships. Even for anime kusoge the writing is embarrassing.

I understand many people like this game, probably because they were smart enough to skip all dialogue, but I can only give a thumbs down. The two crashes and the saving issue lost me here.