If you are thinking of buying this, just don't. Decided to complete the whole game including the dlc before writing a review but i'm done, just not gonna suffer through the ridicilous colosseum witch this game absolutely DID NOT NEED.
First of all let me say couple of things. Have liked some of their previous games a lot, as in Rogue Galaxy is still one of my favorite games of all time. Second I dont mind hard games but just being hard for hardness sake alone is just dumb. Now in to the game itself.
I purchased this upon release but when I started it the first time I encountered my very first hurdle, which stopped me from playing this more than once. I might have some level of ocds so when the text bubbles are in the screen less than a second I have no chance in hell to read most of it. This "feature" of the game stopped 3 of my attempts to play the game, and how this "feature" of the game passed initial play tests is mind boggling and it seems it is not something they have any intentions to fix. I finally managed to force myself to just ignore the issue so if there was actually something important or useful, I would have no idea 99% of the time.
Next, the game is riddled with bugs, lots of minor inconviniences or some that made me chuckle, but quite a lot bigger issues as well. None that I encountered wrecked my game, as in I could not continue the save, but plenty that broke the game, so prepare to relaunch the game every few hours.
Now for the content itself. The story is fine ish, ain't anything mind blowing but wasn't expecting it to be either. The absence of studio Ghibli is very obvious, so no animated scenes, just static images. Voice acting is again nothing amazing and when used in full, works just fine I guess. But how they switched between using it and not is jarring. And more often than not when only used in one word to express a whole ducking sentence is dumb.
The game play itself is mostly just tedious. There are quite a lot of game mechanics jammed in to this but most of them feel gimmicky at worst and just unfinished at best. Most of the game combat is so easy that it's just a speed bump but a tedious one at that. I don't mind the difficulty myself but there was very little of interest in the combat itself. And the "army battles" are just wasted opportunity. Just a bare bones idea witch boils down to rock-paper-scizzors, and was personally glad when I was done with them. I get it that more grandeur strategy fights are not for everyone but just how they distilled it to such a farce lose all my interest in it. Same with kingdom building, its bare bones at best. And once you were past a certain point it became pointless. Again I play actual kingdom builders myself so this "lite" version just becomes a chore to get over with.
The games main quest is fine for what it is, but side quests are lackluster in my opinion. There are some actually fun and interesting quests for sure but 90% is just bloat, dumb or both. And actually couple fundamentally infuriating quests just for a joke at the end. Also the whole idea in the game is build a kingdom from scratch and fill it with people, but the more you do that the emptier the rest of the world gets, sort of hollow. Also the enemy types are far less than I expected there to be. Most are just reskins of previous ones and even bosses are usually random roaming enemies after couple hours.
They implemented quite deep item system in this which was fun, but nothing really used them in a meaningfull way. Sure the crafting used them but most of the game you don't need to craft, enemy drops were more than enough to equip your party. And once you absolutely NEED to craft witch is in the dlc it becomes an absolut seizure of a grind. Now consumables are profanely different. Sure you could amass a hoard of consumables but in each fight there are limited number of uses fore each, which again is barely worth a mention in the main game, but dlc is a different beast entirely.
So for the main game all and all, its tedious slog but not impassable. So if you absolutely must, its still playable. But do not for the love of god even look at the dlc. Every single one of them is more grinding than the last and I would say that worse than the last. There is in fact extremely little actual content in each of them, most of it is just grind after a story clip after grind after story clip after grind. Now if the combat would be interesting and fun I would not mind grind but in this game it is not so. And finally the pinnacle of actual stupidity is in the last dlc which implements moronic end game colosseum that this game absolutely DID NOT NEED. Even if it included only challenges through 1 to 20 I wouldn't mind. Tedious again for sure and some even little bit of fun and intriguing challenges. But its after that, when the brown stuff hits the fan. I admit that I quit in 22nd challenge of the "Solosseum slog" but I refuse to torture myself over something so absurdly ridiciolus as this, without actual worth or prize in the game. And I have beaten other colosseums in other games so I dont mind the idea.
I beat the base game around 120 hours and even then it overstayed its welcome. The dlc added about 80 hours of endless and pointless grind to a game I just wished to be done with. I truly tried my best to satisfy my sick mind and complete this 100% but just not worth the squeeze. Save your sanity and do something else. I know I didn't, and I am more dumber for it.