Preface: I have not finished this game, but I plan to in the future.
As it stands, I love pretty much everything about this game except for the portion that takes up the majority of gameplay time: the battle system.
Maybe I just haven’t understood the battle system properly or I’m not taking proper advantage of it, but in this context, I found the Active Time Battle (ATB) system incredibly finicky.
I have two issues with it:
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There were a number of times in battles when I (and the enemy) would just sit there for a good while doing absolutely nothing while the ATB guage filled. Say what you will about the ATB system, but if this is a somewhat regular occurance, then the system isn’t great.
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The battles never seemed to “flow” (if you get what I mean). You know how in other regular turn-based battle games, you issue commands to your party as fast as YOU want to? If you have a set strategy, you can use that pretty easily since the turn order is (mostly) predictable. That doesn’t happen here! Turn order feels very inconsistent!
The premise of ATB sounds very nice, but at least in this game, I found it rather frustrating.
However, I really enjoyed pretty much everything else about the game. Characters, story, soundtrack and visuals (I LOVE the pre-rendered backgrounds) were great!
