Originally I had wanted to play this game when it first came out, but it was console-exclusive for a while and I haven’t played on one of those since the PS2 era. Then I sort of forgot about it while waiting for the PC port until suddenly remembering it last month.
The game starts out quite good but somewhat quickly runs into a rather severe issue: Fate Ghosts. They’re terrible. They accomplish nothing beyond degrading the story and character behavior, so I guess the devs just really wanted a big set-piece endgame fight to go out on and couldn’t think of a better way to implement it.
I wasn’t particularly thrilled by the combat system either. If you’re going to do real-time battles you should not force people to switch between characters during those battles in order to hit enemies’ weaknesses (or force you to use abilities for multiple characters concurrently for that matter). It’s just a giant pain in the ass and I was already tired of it by the fourth chapter.
Normally this would be where I’d say that I won’t bother playing the next game in the series… but since the ghosts will presumably be absent it may just end up tolerable. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.