You know how they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Because someone should direct the protagonists of this game to an asylum.
It boggles my mind that, even though the game insists over and over again that the right thing to do is to 'disobey,' doing so leads to the false ending. Which further boggles me because in reality getting the false ending keeps the world devouring god from being released, essentially making it the good end. I mean don't get me wrong the final boss is cool (even if I'm currently taking a break from attempting but I was on his final phase), but as is a frequent problem in JRPG's the characters I'm controlling do not at all feel like they have any right standing up against such world breaking power.
The two twists in the game are easy to see coming dozens of hours before they actually happen, which I guess is standard JRPG fare. That's a problem with this game in general, it's all standard JRPG fare really. It tries to tout the brave/default system as a breath of fresh air, but it still felt like the same tired menu-based combat with excessive grinding to me. The dungeons are all a slog, with none of them feeling unique save the very last dungeon. The encounter rate is ridiculously high...or at least it was until I learned I actually had the ability to manually turn them off all along after the third or so go around in the time loop.
Speaking of time loop, that's the games biggest flaw by far. When you've finished up with your generic 'restore the magical elemental crystals of the world' plotline, you enter a pillar of light, and you wind up in a parallel world where the crystals need to be restored again, only now there's no plot, just a constant push to restore the crystals. And then you do it again. And again. And finally a fifth time. And then if you somehow managed to get through that without ever once deciding 'well let's just see for fun what happens when I destroy a crystal instead of restoring it' you finally break out of the loop. This might have been fine if the differences between the paralell worlds were more substantial, but the only difference is a slight increase in difficulty of the bosses that you already beat and probably have no interest in fighting again. Ok, by the time you get to the fifth loop the optional bosses become ridiculously hard, but when it comes to menu-based combat designed around you being able to utilize game-breaking synergies, being ridiculously hard is seldom a good thing. I should also point out that during the third loop, the game is absolutely screaming at you to stop restoring the crystals and try destroying one instead, and the false ending isn't a bad ending so it's not like they're misguiding you. Point is, I was sick of this game by the third loop, and for the last two I just set the encounter rate to zero and difficulty to easy until I finally got to see new things again.
The biggest strengths this game has are the job variety and the music. I admit for a JRPG that first strength is a very noteworthy strength indeed, and I never got sick of any of the music, but the game is held back by locking its story behind repeating the same dungeons and bosses far too many times for it to stay fun the whole way through. It basically strings you along for however long you're willing to let it, and when you finally have enough it slaps you with the false ending (which again is by no means a bad ending, in the sense that everything turns out ok, but you still miss out on the true final boss which to me is unacceptable) for obeying the game when it tells you to disobey.
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