Looks and sounds fantastic, but...
Man, this game.
In some ways it is a truly artistic masterpiece with stellar art direction and outstanding music and voicework.
On the other hand, it often feels like it is at odds with itself.
The gameplay has a really interesting system of breaking open the enemies guard by exploiting weaknesses, however this also means that the battle system is very slow, which when combined with a high encounter rate makes battles quickly begin to grow very stale. While bosses get to make more use of this system, there it is held back by awful balancing as due to the way the game is designed, you will quickly find yourself over-leveled for most of them, keeping you from ever engaging with the boss mechanics.
But where it really falls apart is in the story which is structured as 8 independent scenarios, and already there a problem can be gleaned. That being that even though this is a party based RPG, the stories are "truly" independent. While your characters will travel together, there is no chemistry or interaction between them. You could cut out all the other characters and you would never notice that they are missing. Something not helped by the fact that each individual story doesn't really bring something interesting to the table by themselves to make them stand out. This makes the whole thing really boring.
This whole independent business then start to bleed over into the gameplay to cause many issues of it's own. I already alluded to the games poor balance, but where it really rears its ugly head is in how your party gains power. There is a total of 8 characters, but you can only ever have 4 active and there is no leaked experience on top of switching between them being a very awkward process. This means that any characters you are not using will fall behind fast, and as some parts of the story requires their presence, it means that you will have to grind, a lot. And this for all characters.
Where this really becomes a problem is with the final boss where there is a massive difficulty spike and requires all 8 characters to be at relevant levels (and the boss itself is hidden behind a massive boss rush with no saving I might add) The grinding required without any real options to improve it is utterly staggering.
All this comes together to make the game just feel like it is wasting your time.
As such, I can't recommend it in spite of it's other merits. The core design simply undermines so much else of the game.
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