A recurring theme of negative reviews of this game is that the player didn't actually finish the game before reviewing.
Well, I'm sorry to say that this is another such review. But I did get 8 hours into the game before the last of my patience with it evaporated, so I think I've seen enough to have a fair opinion?
First off, there are serious pacing issues, as many other reviews have noted. The game is an absolute slog. Literally everything about this game is just too slow. Outside of battle, the movement is too slow (a run button would've worked wonders). The loading is not optimized, so there are loading screens at the beginning and end of every battle (given that this game uses traditional random encounters, this problem shows up often enough to get annoying) The battles themselves can be slow as well, especially bosses, where victory often involves outlasting the enemy with cheap heal spells and winning through attrition.
Secondly, THIS happened. About 5 hours in SPOILER ALERT
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a major plot point had me overthrew the crooked leader of a city. Afterward, it was set up as some sort of meaningful choice to decide which of the local NPCs should be the new leader... and then the game just picked for me. That was really jarring, and I initially assumed the choice was just cut content that the devs excised very poorly when they didn't finish it. But then I looked up a walkthrough and it sounded like I actually was supposed to get a choice? Two choices by default, and a third better one if you do all the sidequests. But I got no choice, it just picked for me. So I guess my game just bugged out. Either way, that was a very off-putting experience that left a bad taste in my mouth.
And that really didn't seem to be the only time the game failed at properly implementing one of its more interesting ideas, it was just the most jarring instance.
So after three more hours failed to impress me enough to salvage my opinion of the game, I just called it quits.