I've just finished my long game for the monthly theme, it was enjoyable at times, but disappointing in general. Zestiria is one of the games in a very long series (it goes back to 1995), and the first one which was released on PC. The games are not connected directly between themselves, so each one tells a different story. In my opinion, Zestiria's narrative is just bad. I don't mind stories of exceptionally good guys defeating the ultimate evil, but this game tells it in a most boring way possible. By the way, the world (and some characters also) gives a bit of Avatar the Last Airbender vibe.

3D graphics and animations are crude and simple, not much better than in Neptunia or in similar games, unlike anime opening and some hand-drawn cutscenes, which are awesome. The combat system is over-complicated for no reasons, it takes more than a hundred tutorial screen pages to explain it, but at the same time the game is not very good at explaining things. For the first 10 hours of gameplay I was doing mostly button-mashing, and some things left unclear even after I've finished the game (for example, I didn't understand semi-auto controls of characters at all, but a two-minute video on youtube answered all of my questions). I think there are 200 or more types of attacks (all characters + combined), and all of them good or bad for different types of enemies, and you're usually meeting 2-3 types of different enemies at once. It's not hard on moderate difficulty, you can even go with full auto, but it's far from exciting, especially if the battle requires you to chase and hit and hit and hit rubber enemies again.

The stats system and equipment were made by people who just love numbers. There is no difference in a wide variety of items, except their stats, so your characters are always look the same (except a few clothing/accessories choices), All you do is balance between equipment combinations, because there isn't any really good item throughout the game. I imagine completing the game at 100% would take a huge amount of time - for example, there is an achievement for beating the final boss without retrying on maximum difficulty or on 5th playthrough! I wasn't able to do it on moderate, because there are three consecutive battles, and you have to fight the last one alone, without your companions and their powers (I was exactly at 1 hp at that point). Although it is possible even for me to beat the game on hard with a bit of determination, the point is I don't think I would ever want to play Zestiria again.

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