I will start by saying that, as someone who enjoys turn-based RPGs, I did enjoy playing this one, but it has some issues that really bother me, and they are actually big enough for me to not recommend this one. I will start by the pros of this game
Pros
- The game has a very nice progression, where you actually feel yourself getting stronger the more you go through the game.
- The combat system itself is fun and challeging, it doesn't feel like you are just doing the same action with the most optimal option dmg on every character, you actually have to think what skill to use and on which enemy, timing with your characters speed.
- The game does have a lot of hours to play, and interesting puzzles to solve, though it can be a con to some, for me this is nice,
- The game does have a good amount of customization, as you have a lot of characters to choose from, and you can decide which magic element they use, and which playstyle you want on them. That said, this is not really well balanced, and there are characters that are clearly better than others, by a rather large margin, and they have a fixed way that makes them better in a specific playstyle, not really allowing much customization unless you don't care about being optimal.
- The graphics of the game are really nice.
Cons
- The game does sell itself a bit for having 100+ characters, but tbh a big part of them you don't even spend a whole minute talking to to recruit them, and they don't really have any big story or influence anything, really, and as said before, the diference in power between units are quite large, making me think, why bother then.
- The game has a really bad inventory system, designed this way for the players to have a sort of ''resource management'' game, and it does, but it is also really bad, as you feel like you cant carry anything in your bag, and leads to the next con.
- If you like to play with mages, which is the case for me, this is problably not the best game for you, as you basically are not allowed to use magic anywhere else if not on the boss of the dungeon you are in. Basically, every minimally useful spell costs 100MP+, and characters usually have 300+- mana on the endgame, meaning you can basically use 3 spells with a character per dungeon, which is really basically nothing, and tbh the spells are not even that strong in this game. And yes, there is a mana potion you can carry around, but you cant really buy them until really later in the story, and even then, you cant carry many of them in the bag due to inventory size being really constricting
- Your character moves kind of slowly inside dungeons and towns, and the only way to make you move faster is using one of your chars accessory slot, which is an important part of their strenght, or using a support character, giving up some other buffs, and the fast travel is only unlocked a bit before the halfway point of the game which is really bothersome.
- You cannot save whenever you want, you actually need to go to save points, and they really aren't everywhere.
- This is more of a rant as I use the keyboard to play, but the key mapping in this game is really bad, and you actually can't change it, and it took me a long time to adapt to it, but it makes me thing that the one who decided everything really doesn't play games on keyboard.
- The story itself is actually very cliched, and there really aren't any twists or turns or anything special in it, which is not a bad thing by itself, but I am someone who likes to read everything, but this one got me really bored.
- The battles are slow, and the war battles (kind of a story minigame) are even slower, and there is no skip buttons on animations or anything.
- There are some minigames, and the card one is actually fun, though a bit too easy once you understand how everything works, but the other 2 (the cooking and the beyblades) are actually just a mashing the Enter Key kind of minigames, and for me it just didn't work that well.
- The UI in this game is actually really bad, moving between menus is really tedious, and you have to confirm many times to do even the smallest of the tasks

There are some other things that I probably didn't comment on, as I don't want to write too much, but overall, this is a great game, but thorough the game, I caught myself thinking several times ''It just looks like they had a meeting on how to make the worst QoL possible for the game'', because you really feel all the little incoveniences of the game as you play it, and they really add up to frustrate you, and I personally think they are reason enough for me to not recommend it even though I enjoyed the game itself.

It's probably my favorite game of this year. Pretty much exactly what I wanted and more from. They made a game laser targeted at me specifically and still exceeded my expectations.

They essentially made a mid-budget-PS1 jRPG in 2024. It has some very "dated" elements (like only being able to save at inns or save points), but is incredibly polished and detailed. It's a slow burn to start but once you get the HQ it really starts to shine.

I highly recommend it.

The game feels bland than most of JRPG.
Too much focus on the nostalgia that they forgot to fix or add quality of life feature.
1.Combat mechanic is very basic turn based
2.Stat feel useless, just choose high atk & high def characters.
3.Not much special item that affect your combat playstyle.
4.Story is too predictable
5.Mini game doesn't feel rewarding but feels like a chore that you have to do to recruit all heroes.

I hope dev learn from this mistake of creating another copy of Suikoden 2 and focus on creating a game with unique mechanic on top of quality of life changes.