Interesting to see this have so little reception here. The game is GREAT if it is your thing. It does that Voidspire Tactics thing, where a solid JRPG battle system is grafted into a nonlinear exploration heavy environment with tons of hidden secrets and different paths to progress. Those produce the most enjoyable experiences, because nonlinear exploration, sandboxy gameplay and tons of secrets aren't exactly the strengths of JRPGs. It also fits pretty well with the oldschool Final Fantasy vibes, since the NES and SNES had way more secrets and more interesting dungeons than the PSX JRPGs on average.
So what do you actually do in this game? You play as a party of four generic heroes, traveling the lands, finding 16 crystals which unlock a new Job for you in addition to the six starting jobs, and then you probably kill god with the power of friendship.
The combat is quite similar to FFX, turn based combat with tons of speed manipulation and a visible initiative order.
The progression system is an evolution of FF5/FFT, mix and match any two classes, equip up to 10 skill points worth of passives from all classes. Being able to realistically mix passives from 5-6 different classes helps the game a lot, so you have an incentive to swap your mastered Rogue/Ninja or whatever into a different class just to nab another neat passive for that little bit more efficiency.
The game is fucking tough on hard difficulty, I die to random mobs here and there, and I only have a ~50% chance of killing each boss first try. There have been bosses that have killed me ~10 times. That is pretty much the sweet spot for a JRPG, any more and it gets frustrating, below that and I tend to get bored.
Enemy design is pretty good aswell, a lot of the difficult bossfights are also quite cleverly made, for an example a mushroom boss gave me a lot of trouble. He casts a status effect on you that makes you unable to choose which target to use your skills against, and then he summons two adds which are not really worth killing with single target attacks.
Gameplay wise this is all the good stuff, little to complain, except that so many skills are weapon locked. For example it is pretty hard to combine the excellent archer skillset with anything, since it is exclusive to the bows which not many other classes utilise at all.
Between gathering crystals, multiclassing and killing bosses you also need to explore the world. Here comes an element in that will be a dealbreaker to a lot of people. There if a fuckton of platforming and parcouring in this game. Think of Kingdom Hearts 1, but turned up to 11. You constantly need to make very tight jumps to progress, there are some near pixel perfect jumps which are straight up required to progress. This is especially annoying on keyboard and mouse, wasd is NOT made to do weird jumps where you need to change your vector mid air three times. The platforming feels like Minecraft parcouring, because of the blocky nature and the ridiculousness of some of the required jumps. You frequently get rewarded with cool loot for choosing to explore and trying hard jumps, but if you don't like this sort of gameplay stay away, the game is filled to the brim with it.
Story and characters are effectively nonexistent. The solo dev didn't even try here, and that is alright, the game is impressive enough as it is.
Here some images from the Steam release which best show the experience:
Said Mushroom Boss that gave me a lot of trouble, and you can see the detailed initiative tracker which also shows enemy moves and aggro in advance.
An average exploration area in the game, chock full of jumps you can make to reach different places. You can jump on the left lantern here, to jump over to the red blooming tree, probably to find a chest or something for example. That or jump on top of the ninja, and then from there to the area above him.
I highly recommend this, but it is a very specific game, for specific people.
