Trials of Mana

Oh, this game should have been catnip for me! I love ARPGs. I have been waiting literally 15 years to play this game. I wanted something pleasant and smooth brain to hack away with in the late evenings.

And there were good parts. The character progression system was solid; the environments were pretty fun, albeit very of-its-time. The combat got repetitive, but was by no means bad.

But the bad parts were deep. The game ran poorly on Switch; lots of cutscene jankiness, lots of loading screens. The combat difficulty was oddly spiky (the final boss of the game pales in comparison to "the wall boss", which is bizarre.) And the paint-by-numbers shop and town system felt... perhaps true to the SNES era, but utterly devoid of life for what I expect now.

It was short (around fifteen hours), and I have no desire to play again with the three characters I didn't use.