I enjoyed the first one right up until I hit a boss fight that felt like I was beating my head against a wall. Can't remember which one it was now...
Flashed back to an old Post Brothers comic book:
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Played through 1, still need to go fight the
Tap for spoiler
secret end boss.
Hoping 2 and 0 are worth it because 1 was a nice return to retro gaming style and so easy to pickup and put down.
I liked 1 enough until the first 2 chapters of all the characters were complete, but then it immediately felt like it hit a grind wall. With 8 stories it's long enough already--why would they pad it out any further?
2 was exceptionally good. It fixed a lot of the bad fights/progression/story issues. I had a good time with it. Much better than 1.
I never finished the 1st one because I found the complete lack of connection between the stories frustrating. I get that they wanted you to be able to play with any combination of the 8 characters, but the story suffered heavily.
It was just 8 separate games played at once with the same mechanics, and the lack of any real overarching story meant the narative scope of everything felt small.
That's a fair point. The narrative was very much a choose your own adventure with mostly interchangeable parts.
I enjoyed it for those reasons, though, because it gave me the feeling of old FF games when players got to decide completely on party makeup. I thought it was nice that I could get my chosen team to level 60 and then just blaze through the characters I hated and focus on what I wanted to do.
I really like the first one, but OT2 felt very padded. At 30 hours I think I was less than halfway through the game. I got frustrated and put it down, never got back to it.
Same, played the first into late game and
Tap for spoiler
Secret classes/bosses
Second I played most of the characters to their third quest maybe about halfway though the game and the day/night addition was fun but the narrative style and level gating in the second could use more work imo.
When you say padded, do you mean like most anime where they just add unnecessary conflict to fill out the story, or was it more like extra steps to get to the main story?
The one thing I didn't enjoy so much from 1 was the way each story followed the exact same arch.
The main story points are further apart level-wise, leading to more grinding. There’s also more fluff side story content involving multiple characters instead of just one. Which isn’t bad in itself, but none of it is actually optional because of the leveling curve. And the two multi-character “side plots” I did… anime is an apt comparison, they kinda felt like hot springs episodes. No bearing on the overarching plot.
The way it was done, the story beats for individual character plot arcs are very far apart. 30 hours in, I only had a few characters through the second parts of their stories.
I was pretty engaged with a few of the individual stories (the thief, the healer, the merchant, the scholar) so this was really frustrating.
I tried the first one a few years back and it seemed right up my alley as far as art style and gameplay but I gave up after finding my fourth character because all four of them had personalities and dialogue that were grating on me. I like jrpgs and I can't remember another one I bailed on explicitly because I found the dialogue annoying.
When I looked through reviews they seemed mostly positive, and even for the critical reviews that did share my complaint it was mostly an afterthought to other concerns that were not a big deal to me personally. If anyone felt similarly and also tried out the sequel I'd really like to know if it's any better in that regard because I really wanted to like the first one.
No, I feel you. I did finish the game and enjoyed it overall, but the dialogue and writing was jarring. I'm not sure what exactly it was, but I was particularly annoyed by the characters being such clichés and the dialogue in the cutscenes being soooo slow (overused animations, dramatic pauses in every sentence, ...).
Being clichés was exactly it, I would find all of the other things perfectly tolerable if the characters had depth. I think three of the four introductions I saw just felt like "this character has actual values that you, the player, will totally align with" but completely hamfisted. If the protagonists are going to be the good guys then a story making that clear should be enough, rather than having "being the good guy" be an entire personality at the very start. (The exception to that came across as a generic oonga boonga beast woman, so having her dialogue be the least taxing for me to read was not exactly reason for optimism.)
I expected they're all going to be given more depth as the story advances but I didn't feel excited to wait around to see if that makes them less annoying, especially with four more intro stories remaining.
If you've played the second game I would like an opinion on if that one has a better cast.
I have not played 2 yet but plan to when I can catch a decent sale. From what I read, the writing is better and there also seem to be some QoL features might help with the pacing of the dialogue and cutscenes.