izigame.me

There are a lot of issues with this game that made me pretty much hate it by the end.
The base characters and story are fine, can technically go through it without knowing much the of Uta story and be ok but some stuff makes more sense if you do know the Uta story stuff. Though in a not knowing the story situation the ending really sucks.
The base combat is pretty by the books for 3d rpgs with the only semi-unique addition being an action wheel that is hit or misss (big miss with it not having some stagger lock resistance. If your characters do get staggered by a group of enemies there is a non-zero chance they can stagger lock you making it so you never get to go again until you lose the fight. It's rare but I did have it happen once.)
Graphically it's fine, not amazing and kinda similar to 3d rpgs made in the ps3 era. One exception is town npcs which end up looking straight out of some ps1 or ps2 era game.
Ran into major and minor bugs and glitches, stuff from cutscenes visually freezing and audibly stuttering to a ladder animation not ending, me getting back on the ladder to try and fix it only for the game to hardlock and require a force close. Also game seems pretty unoptimized, without a semi-fix from the forums just being in some zones stutter so bad it can induce headaches.
This is a bit of a nitpick but enemy variety is actually really bad, except story bosses and like 1 lone exception in the last zone most enemies are seen pretty early into the game with everything afterwards being recolors, resizes or both. Even the optional super bosses are just recolor/resizes of enemies you've been killing the whole game.
And my biggest gripes and honestly the reason I'm not recommending this is a couple things compounded.
1. So many things in this game have required small animations that need to play to do stuff, like jumping down a 1-way ledge requires an animation of walking to the right spot and hoping down. A ladder requires a walk up and fade to black animation to get on it followed by a climbing animation. and you do these things a lot, even more when farming materials in certain areas (also areas like the mine the game has you go through multiple times that has multiple ladders you need to climb which really adds up over the course of the game.) Also the pacing of some cutscenes, in an early part of the game you go to a desert, get a cutscene walking in, the walk to a building and get a cutscene of the building. After getting a sandstorm cutscene (that also has a shorter cutscene that'll play every time you trigger the sandstorm after the first time) and finding 3 statues that have mini-cutscenes for each one you go back to the building and do 3 more mini-cutscenes doing 3 actions (one of which is the only use of the jump in the game) afterwards you get a cutscene of a door opening, walk into it for a load screen into a cutscene which leads to a boss that goes into a cutscene, then you walk a little bit to a plaque which then has a cutscene, then you walk a couple more steps and then get another cutscene. This is probably one of the worst offenders of this but it made me pretty off put at the time.
2. This has aspects of the previous section but the final zone you go through called the Mausoleum, while cool in concept as a big space of interconnecting bio-spheres you go between with different tilesets and enemies the zone itself almost made me quit the game outright. Basically every door to another sphere has a cutscene that always plays usually then into a load screen (not a long one but still) and some spheres can be rotated to connect doors to other spheres but the first time you rotate a sphere (like every sphere that can rotate has this the first time you do it) you get a long cutscene of the sphere disconnecting form other spheres then zoom in to see it rotate from inside and then doors lighting up if they connected with a final zoom on the "switch" that just moves back to a default position. Every other time you rotate it you just get the spin and then the zoom in on the interface thing.
Alone these wouldn't be that big of a deal but unfortunately you got through these zones multiple times, with some paths being multi-sphere length dead ends and have to fully back track, along with rotating the rooms multiple times. Also one of the lowest achieves for the game is filling out the ABLs and the reason for it is a couple require materials from enemies in the Mausoleum and these materials have super low odds of dropping. I took multiple hours trying to get singular drops from enemies and it involved going through a 3 sphere path, then back tracking all the way out and going back in again which involved seeing door cutscenes and load screens 10 times per route and you only get to fight 1 of each of the mobs with rare drops per this cycle.
To add to that the game has insta-kill for enemies lower level than you, specifically enemies 5 levels lower that your parties average level and you need to get a field preemptive strike on them to trigger it. This of course has the exception of "big" enemies which are just scaled up enemies that no matter if you're 10-50+ levels over them you are forced to go in and manually kill them which added to the time because every one of the rare drop enemies were "large" types. You should really be able to auto-kill large enemies at 10 levels over, it's dumb not being able to.
Much to what the game is it's very obviously the teams first attempt at a normal 3d rpg and it shows. And despite buying it on sale (~40$) and spending like 40 hours almost 100%ing it (I way over grinded and wasted time, some of it was also just leaving the game open) it didn't really feel worth the money spent, the good aspects were overshadowed by the bad for me and by the end I just wanted all the cutscenes to end so I could close the game and not look at it again. Hopefully if the team does make some form of a sequel they got enough feedback from this to fix everything but there's no telling.
I just can't recommend the game with how it felt for me while playing it and after finishing it. There's much better 3d rpgs out there either through visuals, or functionality and many that are either cheaper or go on sale for cheaper than this one does. It really feels like a 3d rpg from the ps3 era and not something that came out within the last couple years.