I completed the game, took me 15 hours, which is totally fine since every encounter is handcrafted. There's one optional encounter I haven't beaten and a couple I have not found. The game is good, I am very glad it got translated and I recommend it, especially considering it's also cheap.
Presentation is good, sure your characters as the monsters are not super detailed but the style is charming, the environments look good and the movement feels very good, you can walk as fast as you can, performance is very good with loading times only when you launch the game, you can customize the appearance of your characters and various relics are added to your base as you get those, which is a cool little thing. The simple plot is cool and the few NPCs you meet and are generally various kinds of shopkeeper are charming.
You create a small party of 3 characters. There are 8, different enough classes to choose from, with big skill trees. You gain levels fast, get one skill point at each level up and at the end of the game you'll have covered about half of the skills trees of the characters, which is perfect, that's where you characterd look like what you wanted them to look like. It's always a bit sad when one of the reason is that the party is tiny but the fact is that you can build very different parties, you can really make your own unique one and I really liked my final party.
You'll get to explore a couple of small dungeons, getting back in the previous ones for extra loot from chests as you unlock keys and tools (don't expect more than a couple of tools), or even more satisfying, when you're strong enough. All encounters are handcrafted and handplaced, plenty of them containing minibosses, which is certainly one of the strong points of the game, another one being that at most points in the game there are probably a couple of encounters you can reach which you're not strong enough yet. Overall the game was a bit too linear for my taste, there is really a big way where you have to do everything in order to unlock the next part, with often only a few chests sideways, but I think opinions may differ on that front, maybe I'm a bit too harsh, and overall I did not think exploration was bad, I even though it was good but I think that's mostly due to the handcrafted encounters rather than the occasionnal levers, keys and stuff. When you live a dungeon (or when you die) enemies come back but you get to unlock tons of shortcuts made so that if you leave the dungeon after unlocking the last shortcut you can always get back to that point without having to fight any enemy. To be more precise, in general a sequence between two shortcuts will be one boss or a series of 3 or 4 non-boss encounters. In general you'll get back to town and come back after such a sequence, besides you have a Return to base command to get there directly. You've got an automap which is cool looking and where you can add icons if you want.
Both types of sequence of fights are fun to deal with. You have three bars, HPs and Stamina which are refilled after a fight, even if a character is unconscious (for Stamina it's fine but for HPs it's a bit boring) and Spirit (=MP) which is only refilled when going back to town. Bosses have much more HPs than non-bosses and in both cases the encounters are for a large part about getting forward before your spirit bars get to 0, you don't automatically get more spirit (nor stamina) when levelling up but only with some passives from skills and equipment, and then you have to do with what you have.
You always know what the enemies will do during a simultaneous turn. Your characters have a stamina bar, a Rest command which restores their stamina, and apart from various offensive skills they also have a basic Guard command which allows to significantly reduce the damage from most attacks during the turn at the cost of some stamina as well as several unlockable stronger defensive skills costing Spirit depending on their class (warriors can cover a second character on top of themselves, for example) which will probably do the same but better. Dodging can be an option, generally not without a good skill doing that. Speed also is, typically thirsting with a dagger will be quicker than a fireball and finishing an enemy before it acts is sometimes the best option. Many skills have a cooldown, which is boring especially since it seems unnecessary when the stamina/spirit system is robust enough. Rows are also a thing, short range attacks losing accuracy when they're targeting a far away enemy. Finally there are damage types, which sometimes can be super relevant and sometimes not, like you wish it was. For my team combat was very well balanced, there are quite some encounters I did not beat the first time, and there are some I needed several retries, including near the end, I was pleasantly surprised by how fun the combat stayed all over the game. The game also ends up with a satisfying enough boss fight.
You have only 3 equipment slot, and given you're probably gonna used some two-handed weapons then kind of only 2 slots for some characters. That's a bit disappointing. There are not tons of interesting items but there are a few, one strong weapon prevents you from using any skill, and my mage switched to a damaging battle staff for encounters where his magic would have been useless. Note that unlike chest content (or at least I think so, I can't verify), enemies, possibly except some bosses, only have a small chance to drop their (fixed) loot, either iron (=money), directly pieces of equipment or crafting material, and redoing an encounter could get you something you did not get. In practice whether you like that or not it's really not that important, I was angry at first but the truth is that it has little impact in the game, there's more than good enough stuff to find in the chests to just be happy to get one more good piece of equipment once in a while instead of being angry that there's some randomness involved. There are some shopkeepers (you'll probably buy nothing or close, it's for people who would not get anywhere outside the main way, and I'm not even sure they will buy anything), some NPCs doing crafting and sometimes you can choose between different things to do with a same piece of material, which is a good thing, and also a smith who can upgrade your weapons and armors for money which unlike the others is very relevant and will use most of your money.
After playing the demo I expected slightly better exploration, dungeons seemed 3D with a z value rather than disconnected floors to me while in fact they're not really, I misinterpreted. Also there are not many tools to unlock, mostly keys and I thought the game was linear, I would have welcome some big optional sequences or some big plot sequence you can do in any order. People may have different opinions on that last point and anyway, exploration was good due to handcrafted encounters while the combat held up during the entire game more than I thought it would at first, these two reasons are more than enough to make it worth it. I recommend it.
