Finished this one last week, so here are my thoughts.

This is a decent take on FF: Mystic Quest. The creators wear their influences very openly on their sleeve (and body and face for that matter). The game is about 45% dungeon (and the accompanying puzzles), 45% battle, 5% talking to people, 2% healing, 2% exploration, 1% "story".

Dungeons are frequent, which is fine, but they are WAY too long. One of the early, major dungeons took me hours to get through and figure out the puzzles.

Puzzles are tricky, and VERY repetitive. There are a few different types of puzzles - activating and de-activating combinations of colored flowers to move their vines out of the way to continue on; navigating through a city, avoiding guards' flashlights like Breath of Fire 3 (maybe also 2?); and the vast majority involving pushing things around, either barrels to clear a path, or the number one most mind numbingly repetitive puzzle in the game, trying to get a sphere into a goal by moving various obstacles around to make a path for the sphere. This last puzzle repeats over and over and over and over again, getting trickier and more time consuming each time.

Several reviews and synopses I read made a point to say there were no random battles, that enemies were on the map and could be avoided. This is partly correct, there are no random battles, however, unlike Mystic Quest, every enemy you encounter blocks your path, and you must fight all of them. Very few battles are avoidable. Battles also take forever, no matter how strong you get, due to a number of gimmicks that just slow things down - you may be able to just wipe out the enemies in one turn, but first they'll put up blur, then raise their magic defense, then be immune to some elements, then for some reason also act first and berserk and blind your whole team. Battles are very long and never too easy, which could be a pro for some.

Otherwise, the game plays like a combination of Mystic Quest and something like Lufia 2, minus any environmental interaction with things like bombs on map screens. You go from town to town, upgrade gear, buy items, gain levels, it's a perfectly fine turn based RPG. You get your full team pretty early on and it doesn't change from there. Each character learns a decent variety of skills, and very rarely do any of them become obsolete, so a good amount of variety and strategy can be employed, which is appreciated.

The plot is... well, the plot at first seems really straightforward. Something bad is happening, people blame magic users since there was a war with magic users (a la FF6) and bad stuff happened. You go off to figure it out. Intertwined in this, without giving any spoilers away, the main character has a hero figure father who went missing, so there's a lot lifted from inspired by FF10, as well.

It all goes off the rails, though, and I totally lost the point a few hours in. There's a bit of character back story, but nothing is ever really explained, the world building isn't very good, so you're just kind of like... okay, and? All of the character interaction is cringey, not because of the text, but because everyone is just so... mean and weird to each other. Like why is this team adventuring together if they hate each other? There are some loose connections, but those also aren't explained well.

Throw in some magic elemental crystals (sound familiar?) - although I have no clue why you're gathering them in the first place - get chased around by a very obvious Kefka rip off, find your way to destroyed magic area of the past, and... do some stuff. I cannot tell you why stuff is happening because it's not explained in the game at all. There's a very anticlimactic boss fight, and then it's over. There's a difficulty spiked new game plus, if anyone wanted to play through it again.

The visuals and the art aren't great. I mean, just look at the cover art on this game page, it's ugly and amateurish. Why is the girl character's neck so freaking long?? Something seems off about the in game graphics as well. Size of sprites and proportions seem off, animations are lacking, and many characters and scenes just looked squashed and unpolished. Some bits are really nice, though, like the scene at the top of the volcano you visit, or the creepy skull animation whenever the lead's father shows up. Why couldn't the rest of the game be that slick? The music throughout is alright. Some tunes are cool, many are forgettable, some are just straight rip offs of other game music. The last dungeon's music is a blatant forgery of the music that plays in Sin in FFX. The script is fine, there are even a few funny moments.

Something that stood out was how well paced the end game side quests are. This tied in with the included DLC was a good shot in the arm of enjoyable fun, between competing in the arena, hunting down and customizing powerful relics, building up my arsenal (while not being flooded with stuff constantly making just-gotten-gear instantly obsolete), and enjoying exploring the world a bit more. This is the kind of stuff I would like out of a small game like this, a little more fun and interest in the world, rather than huge, single-minded dungeons that are exercises in tedium.

The game is not terrible, and you could certainly do worse. I didn't enjoy the characters, I felt dungeons were too long, battles were frustrating, and the story was shoddy, so I wouldn't recommend it. If you like the grind, "thoughtful" combat, long dungeons, and the chance to practice a very particular type of puzzling, then you may love it!