izigame.me

The best way I can summarize my thoughts on this game is with this statement: It feels like this game was made by people who truly love the genre but aren't blinded by nostalgia.
At the time of writing this, I haven't beaten the game yet but I am quite far in and thoroughly enjoying it.
Update: I have since beaten the game and can confirm it maintains its excellent quality throughout the whole game.
This game is heavily inspired by classic JRPGs like the first few Dragon Quest games. However, it is full of QoL features and more modern game design. Here are some highlights:
- You have more party members than you can use in battle, but they all equally earn XP so you don't need to awkwardly swap them around to ensure they're all levelled up.
- Speaking of swapping your party members, you can do it in battle really smoothly. As an example: if it's your thief's turn, you can swap them out for someone on your back line, such as your mage. However, this doesn't use up the turn. You can swap out for the mage, then use the mage to attack. If you swap to the mage but change your mind before you attack with them, you can just swap right back to the thief or another party member.
- Healing items and abilities heal a percentage of the target's health. This is great because instead of ending up with 6 different types of potions that all eventually become obsolete, you only have three types of potions: 50%, 75%, and 50% to the whole party.
- You can save your game at any point (as long as you're not in combat or a cutscene, of course), and the game has frequent autosave. The manual saving is also extremely quick; You only need to click a few buttons to save to your most recent save slot, and it saves almost instantly. This might sound minor but it makes a big difference after playing so many games that make saving inconvenient.
On top of all the QoL features, the game itself is great. The characters are well written and easily stand out among each other. The story is interesting and entertaining without being pretentious or overly complex. The combat has some fun mechanics to twist the classic JRPG formula, but not so far as to turn it into a different genre. The music is also great, with a variety of tones to suit the moment.
While some games feel like they limit themselves to fit a "classic" game style, this game instead feels like it utilizes the classic style to its fullest and is instead enhanced by it.
I'm not saying this is a perfect game. However, any complaints/criticisms I have are extremely minor and honestly don't feel worth writing about.
Finally, something to know about this game: While this is a direct sequel to the first game, I can say it easily stands alone as its own game. I didn't play the first game, but I had absolutely no trouble following this game. I feel like I was also able to piece together a lot of the story of the first game, as this game does a good job giving you all the context you could possibly need without any lore-dumps or exposition. As you go on this adventure, you hear pieces of the previous adventure in a very immersive way.