Just updating my review. Did everything to be done, minus max everyone out, in just under 120 hours.

• Got all items
• Got all fairies
• Did both routes
• Watched all 9 endings

The only thing I didn't do is go through the game on Hard difficulty, but I don't feel the need.

I liked the game, the characters are fun, and the ending is mostly satisfying, but the repetitive nature of combat (despite customization options) and mostly recycled assets keep it at 3 stars. Additionally, some armor and fairies are gated so late in the game, that obtaining them, let alone grinding the fairies to learn all the skills (LET ALONE grinding them many times over again to re-learn the duplicate skills) is just not at all worth it. Like what is the point of Gozer at the point you're able to obtain him?

If you play the game thoughtfully, you'll breeze through it. You might have to grind a little if you set the difficulty to Hard.

I tried to shake things up with the NG+ playthrough, so my team this time was Lola, Noie, Ethel, Pippin, Sherman, and Fleur. I brought Rinne when they didn't force you to bring Fleur. I could never get Sherman to contribute anything meaningful, so he was booted for Galdo since the DPS boost and added range of his melee attacks made things go much faster. Then towards the very end, Fang took over for Noie since I needed more heavy single target damage than Noie could provide. I had a fun build for Pippin where he was primarily a counter-bot. I gave him an accessory that expanded his range to go almost anywhere on the map. So he could get right in the middle of things and counter-attack everyone to death. Lola with Rita as her fairy plus magic boosting passives easily made her my most reliable damage source. That, plus I could usually get my team in a straight line next to her, so Heal Broad was plenty for keeping up healing on the whole team. Except for Fleur, she usually hung out behind them for the song range, but she's the tankiest character for whatever reason, so healing was never a concern for her. Seriously, why is the bard tankier than the tank?

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About 91 hours in, I just finished my first regular playthrough on one of the routes and the platinum trophy. All in all, pretty enjoyable. I ground out every possible thing to grind. Some of the drops for item synthesis eluded me, the game claiming they could be farmed on the map (they never appeared) or dropped by an enemy (nope).

The game gives the illusion of large amounts of customization and set up, which is true to a point, but never necessary. Some large AOE magic, a few strong melee attacks, and the most basic healing spell, and you’re all set through the end game, even on hard difficulty. You don’t even need to synthesize good gear from items, the stuff for sale is perfectly fine to carry you through.

It’s too bad there isn’t any post-game content like Advent Dark Force to utilize the better gear, more thorough speccing via Fairy abilities and passives, and strategy.

At the end, you can choose to view various ending scenes with a different person. I had a save right before this choice, and beat it for the first two, but stupid me saved over that with the next boss fight, so I couldn’t make the choice any more. So I’m hoping the endings are the same between the two story routes.

I’ve started a NG+ and am after said second story route. Just kind of blasting through on easy until I get to the split again.

My final team wound up being: Fang and Galdo as primary physical DPS, Tiara for heals and some magic, Apollonius as a tank (though really just secondary phys DPS), Marianna using Rita for some huge ranged spells to wipe out mobs, and Fleur because she’s forced on you.

For the muse song system, most of the time I had Fleur use Shadow Boundry to speed battles up; followed by Notes of Faith (Physical damage boost since that’s what I used most); the healing one if incoming damage was really heavy, and the defense one if there were a lot of damage sources but mitigation could handle the job (might have used this one more but the AoE is weird, like a long, narrow line that doesn't get wider even when you expand the range, just longer). I tried the auto-counter one and that rarely triggered so just wasn’t worth it. And I never used the magic boosting one. A magic defense boosting one would have been great.

Since there’s so little info out there about this game, I’m thinking of writing some sort of guide. Even just to compile information, like a searchable doc that has all the Location Shaping items, a list of the Fairies and their abilities, and so on. It would have saved me some time.