dekomata

As much as I loved this series, the first game in the series is pretty bad. And I'm not gonna be biased about it at all as I've played through the game and went through hell accomplishing some of the stuff thrown at me by this game. Repetitive combat, boring dungeon layouts, and a messed up item system hurts the gameplay of this game, made worse when some of the backgrounds and enemies are ripped STRAIGHT from other games (Trinity Universe and Ar Tonelico being some of them). I also should mention that battles become nothing as soon as Neptune learns a certain move that you can spam over and over with no penalty until you win. Character DLC is pretty crap too since said characters join your party but you need to buy a ticket in order to use them, save for the actual DLC characters that came after them. What hurts it more is the game doesn't explain anything about how the shares system works, which is essential if you want to recruit 3 specific characters. It also doesn't say that restarting a fight that you died on hurts shares too so if you die too much and just choose to retry when it asks you to, it secretly removes your shares, which will make it impossible to recruit those characters. The story itself isn't that bad, and its good for laughs, but then the game just starts repeating itself storywise once you get further. Even then, the final boss is disappointing, who returns in the next 2 games as a stock boss enemy. Overall, I wouldn't really touch this game again since the other two games from this series are a whole lot better than this one. I'd only recommend it to a VN fanatic or a crazy otaku who doesn't mind playing a half baked game involving girls who represents today's consoles. RPG fans should look somewhere else since this game would most likely not be worth their time. Even though this exact game got me into this series, I really don't see myself touching it ever again.