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This review originally posted on Backloggd

Star Rating: 4.5 Stars

In typical fashion (edit: lmao, I have no typical fashion here), we're gonna pro/con this. I suck at writing reviews normally.

Pros

• Estelle Bright
• The setting is really interesting. Country and society shortly after a magitek discovery seems to have led to a peaceful time.
• The plot in general was pretty engaging, with each chapter's issue feeding back into the core throughline.
• Estelle Bright
• I really like games where you equip stuff for magic. The Orbment system letting you mix and match the Quartz that give you passives like "10% blind chance" or "HP + 15%", and then getting spells based on how many points in each element you have? Oooh baby. And then with some sockets being on a line, so they only count with other ones on the line so you have to reconfigure and reshuffle the same quartz for the spell list you want.
• The final cutscenes have both the feelings of triumphant culminations, and gutpunching revelations.
• Had some lines that made me laugh out of nowhere that were also very in character.
• I liked a lot of the characters and each of the major party members' arcs felt good. Agate's could have maybe used a bit more stuff to do, but no real complaints as it is. And I guess I need to wait for a later game to figure out Olivier's whole deal
• Estelle Bright

Cons

• You run out of Orbment spots early if you do some grinding. Each character can only equip like, 6, and (usually) 1 or 2 are tied to that character's element so you can't put an HP 3 (Water element) into a Fire Only slot.
• The fucking cliffhanger ending lmao.
• Combat attempts to split the difference between a Tactical RPG and a traditional Turn Based RPG. When you attack a target, if it's not next to you, it takes the most direct path to the enemy, so you have less control over positioning unless you spend your entire turn to Move. It uses a turn order system where you can see who's acting when, and there are some abilities to interrupt but I never felt like I had many that worked? Maybe it was due to my magic setup idk. This is a minor minor minor gripe, I just needed something else in this section.