Well I'm about 11 hours in now, and I'm not sure if I'm going to bother much longer. This isn't a bad game. Most of it functions well enough, but I haven't seen much that is really more than serviceable. The art's decent, but nothing to write home about, as is the music. The setting pretty much looks about as generic JRPG as you can get, with very little being memorable. The cast is very large, but that means that they don't get much development, with few getting more than 1 character trait. Nanami is really the only one of the central protagonists I got at all attached to, but she's nothing to really write home about. I still wish she was the protagonist rather than the non entity you control, though. The story feels pretty by the numbers, and the main villain is evil for the sake of being evil, to the point where it's not clear why anyone who doesn't think drowning babies sounds fun would follow him. Luckily he has little screen time. The writing in general works, but doesn't really stand out, with the exception that the writer really, really seemed to love those fake out "Dost thou love me? But thou must!" choices. Basically, they keep asking you what you want to do, but if you chose the option that the writer didn't want you to, it just brings you back to the same choice until you pick the right one. I wish they'd just have not presented fake choices. None of that is game ruining or anything, but it means that nothing's grabbing me.

What has been straight up bad though are the tactics sections. Occasionally, you go into an almost Fire Emblem like mode and control groups of soldiers. I love that sort of stuff, but at least so far, it's been very poorly executed. The primary problem is that you can only move one square at a time. Really. This means that combat is just dreadfully slow and prevents you from doing anything more than the most basic, obvious actions, since doing otherwise isn't worth the time it would take. Also, these battles have so far only allowed the player to control a couple of units, meaning that you'll spend several minutes watching the AI fight itself and waiting until you can do something. Luckily these are only a small part of the game, but it's weird how poorly they're executed given how competent everything else is.

Overall, this game feels pretty much like someone took every SNES RPG they could find, put them in a blender, and served us the bland puree that came out. Maybe I would have liked it if I had played it when it first came out, but at this point, it feels like I've already played through it over and over. I don't know if it's just me or if it's one of those games where you needed to be at the right age or in the right time to really appreciate it, but I'd recommend just picking up an SNES RPG at random over this. Maybe it gets better at some point, but I feel like any game should be able to show you what it is by the 10 hour mark.