I stopped playing the game after about 13 hours. There's just too much micro-management of me, and the manual pausing during combat is simply not my style. Since this game is based on the D&D combat system, I simply don't get why it had to be real-time. Had it been turn based, it would probably been so much better. Another thing this game fails to properly adapt from pen & paper RPGs is the proper complexity and reward of combat. In a proper P&P RPG, you have about ten combats per level, and the combats are complex, tactical, and take lots of time without getting boring. Here, combat is overly repetitive, which is made even worse by the fact that the combats don't last so long, meaning you have to repeat the exact same steps over and over again in rapid succession. Finally, the music. I will never understand how people can botch the music like this, when there are so many great examples to learn from. I eventually muted the music and replaced it with soudntrack from Monster Tale, which instantly made the game more playable for a couple of hours or so. Then the repetitiveness became too much for me. As a last note, it probably is not repetitiveness per se, but the specific kind of repetitiveness found in this game that kills it for me. I've played plenty of RPGs which had me do the same thing over and over again for a hunred hours without getting bored. I'll leave figuring out why this game fails to grip me like this to someone else. If you want to play a good RPG, I'd suggest looking at games like The Legend of Heroes instead.
This game plays more like a bonus dungeon to the first two installments of the Trails in the Sky series. Effectively, it consists of a series of dungeons that must be completed in order, and doesn't come anywhere close to the first two games in terms of story. That being said, it is still a good game, and if you enjoyed the previous two games and don't approach the game with too many story-expectations, you are also going to enjoy this part. All of your favorite characters are making a comeback, and the game also introduces three new playable characters. With a total ledger of 16 characters, this is one of the games with the most playable characters outside the Suikoden series, and there are parts in the game where you'll be using all of your characters split around a number of parties, so there's no "bench warm" dilemma. Quickly summed up again: If you played the first two games, then you'll also want to play this one. Don't expect too much from the story, and you might even be pleasantly surprised.
