TL;DR - A solid, addictive quick-fix of turn-based JRPG goodness that, development-wise, has only gotten better with each update. Whether you buy it for the very-worth-it $15 price tag or wait for a sale, if you love turn-based RPGs, GET. THIS. GAME.

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I genuinely cannot overstate how deeply I enjoy this game. From the aesthetics to the gameplay, this is basically heroin to anyone with a fondness for turn-based JRPG games, but want a quick-and-easy fix that doesn't require tens of hours of story and investment to get to the most out of it.

There won't really be any organization to this review, I'll just be rattling off the positives as they come to mind. But rest assured there's a LOT of positives. I'm also going to talk exclusively from the perspective of Chronicle (story) Mode, as I haven't TOUCHED the rogue-like mode.

The early-FF pixel art injects happy brain chemical straight into my whole body. It's consistently appealing and clean with very few visual bugs, at least, during my time with the game. The story is a simple, timeline/dimension-crossing romp. Unlike most RPGs with time-travel, you don't need to suspend your disbelief from a skyscraper, open your third eye, or crack open a wiki to make sense of it. Your character, Claire, made a space-time portal and fell into it. Oops. But hey! You meet an older version of Claire from another timeline who tells you cultists are trying to bend spacetime over a table and run through it like a train. Your job is to stop them, with the help of the various characters that you'll collect from different times, places, and universes, who the cultists captured to use for their schemes. Simple. The music is... solid. Not really anything you'd plug into the aux and blast as you fly down the highway, but it serves the games aesthetic and overall vibe just fine. That said, there's not much variety and it can get VERY repetitive after a while, so you wouldn't be blamed for muting the music and playing your own. More variety in the soundtrack is something I'd like to see. And there's a good chance this feedback might actually do something since the devs are ALWAYS listening for player input.

Attentive devs means that stuff is constantly being reworked to be more satisfying, be it visuals, music, sfx, or mechanics. In particular, a recent change implemented a leveling/skill point system, as opposed to the previous system of requiring specific skill BOOKS that match certain skills' attributes to level them up. This one small change cut down on a lot of the RNG grindy-ness that would initially make me burn out on the game after a while, since characters' strength and progression relied on lucking out by getting the books you needed for each skill. Progression is now much more consistent and tangible seeing as you can get skill points through leveling up, completing character-specific quests, or defeating a certain boss for the first time with each character. I understand that this is basically trading progression based on a dice roll for progression based on a checklist, but personally, I VASTLY prefer being given clear instructions on what I still need to for each character versus crossing my fingers and hoping I get the books I need.

Additionally, this quest system and leveling change encourages experimentation with party composition, since with the skill book system, you could just run with your strongest characters and use the books to upgrade the rest on the side. And you SHOULD want to experiment with all the different characters, because they're all largely unique in terms of how they operate. There are literally too many characters for me to go into detail, with MANY more still on the way, so I'll leave the specifics as something you discover for yourselves. The main takeaway is that the quest/leveling system of progression rewards playing around with the wide variety of characters and finding what you like most, and every small victory is INCREDIBLY satisfying.

My one major gripe with the game is that I wish there was more variety in terms of the events that can occur as you make your way through each map. You start seeing the same groups of the same enemies in each encounter, and encounters basically happen 9 times out of 10 for every map node that isn't EXPLICITLY showing an event.