Agarest: Generations of War (2013)

Agarest: Generations of War has an interesting central concept that never manages to create anything special with the tools it has available. While the dating sim portions of the game do succeed, even if they are overly awkward, the slow pace of the storyline combined with a lack of clear innovation does more harm than good. But, if you want to play an RPG that will last you an extremely long time, and are unconcerned with its pace, then you could do far worse than this. generic though not terrible story -gameplay mechanics are too grindy - the game feels padded with generic battles (half could have easily been cut out) -once you have a decent party setup, the battles no longer become interesting and I'm just going through the motions (every battle is the same and there are too many of them) -the light and dark system is the worst implementation I have seen in a game. You will always want to be on neutral to get the "true ending". If you finish the game on either dark or light you get an unsatisfying abrupt ending equivalent to a game over. Considering the game is easily 50-100 hours long and the light and dark system is purely there to decide between two bad/abrupt ending and a true ending - the system should have just been stripped out. Imagine playing through 100 hours only to get a game over and having to sink in another 50-100 again to get the proper ending.

Overall, it seems like the developers were fans of jrpgs and srpgs and brought together all the elements they thought were fun. But by throwing in everything without properly crafting each system. the game comes out as a boring, repetitive mess.