This turn-based JRPG has some of the most imaginative navigation and art design I've seen in any game in recent years. Its refreshing approach to random encounters and item management is fun but has its drawbacks too. It's got a unique dungeons and dragons dice roll system which adds to the gameplay.

The start of the story is a rather cookie cutter approach to games, especially RPGs - you start off as an unknown protagonist thrust into the story of an ongoing battle between the King dragon, Elves and men.

Along the way you meet and make friends with your support classes and uncover the hidden truth behind the war. As you can imagine the ultimate goal is to defeat the king dragon and restore peace to the land. The story is well written with lots of subtext and world building done through books and conversations with characters along the way.

The gameplay is solid for the most part. The map traversal is great as you're not trudging backwards and forwards but you get to move a cursor across the screen to interact with NPCs, locations and hidden areas. Which brings a point and click feel to the gameplay at times. (I do wish we could speed up the cursor movement speed though.)

There is a percentage chance for completing certain actions, these actions are stat based. The more you do them the more your stats improve. The actions are alchemy, cooking, crafting, foraging and battling. This mechanic is one of my favourite things about the game as it means you're often given surprise outcomes if you fail or succeed.

The battling and spells are deep with custom builds for your main party. Your party size is 4 characters, balanced against stronger enemies and bigger units to fight against. Although in the later stages of the game you can one shot big groups rendering them pointless.

Visually this game is a delight - the art styles for the sprites and enemies is great with really good colours and strong designs. The level design is well done with a tightly knit interconnected map. The map and traversal system are great too with the hand drawn art style and an old map to explore.

There are hidden areas within the bigger map and smaller locations too which is great to explore and find the hidden treasures. Music wise it's very good with strong JRPG inspired music throughout. There is a lovely song you hear during the closing stages of the game too which is really well done. The one downside is that they failed to loop the music effectively meaning during some of the longer fights the sound abruptly stops and starts again.

Performance: I played this on the Switch 2 while it was ok in the most part, there were stutters whilst loading into battles that are quite noticeable. The game timing also keeps counting when your Switch is in sleep mode which is frustrating as my play time says I did around 70 hours which was probably closer to 25 hours.

More importantly though there are a few bugs which caused complete reboots. 2 of which happened during major boss fights during the endgame. This was really disappointing, where some of these sections are longer than others the auto save didn't kick in which meant re-tracing my steps past one of the difficulty spike sections.

Value: Taking around 25 hours for the main game with a few optional bosses available I'd say it's good value for money. There's replayability value here too as you can definitely do different character builds to see how it changes the gameplay.