[GranteedEV]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

I did this, and I found that these quests were really pretty meaningless. There were a couple that were sort of interesting I guess, potentially important going forward, but the rest... well, helping decorate for the festival or finding books for a librarian doesn't seem like it'll have any payoff, frankly. Maybe you meant this to apply to SC or Third?

Third for sure, and I'd say Azure. SC is more of the mundane quests IIRC.

For First, I was mostly referring to the tower quests, because they tie into the second game's plot. But yeah, I may have oversold their importance. It's been a while since I played First.

For second chapter, do beware that the first half of the game has a bit of backtracking through places you went in first. It's not the whole game, but it's definitely the worst part of it.

Ultimately, it felt like the whole game is less about the game's story

Yeah, this is why I called First a "prologue" to second. Or, if this were an old PSX game, it'd have been "Disc 1 of 3" with Second chapter being discs 2 and 3.

Spoiler!

It also felt like a bit of a rip-off that there was really no payoff to who Lorence was.

That is a strong part of the plot in Second.

Combat is solid, again, nothing blowing me away - it wasn't a situation where I was looking forward to getting into my next fight to try out a new skill or new weapon or a new spell, but it also wasn't exasperating (I think having visible on-screen encounters a la Chrono Trigger rather than FF-style random battles is helpful in that regard)

THat's fair. I'd say the combat's a good bit better if you play on Hard difficulty, especially for boss fights, but that also makes regular encounters a bit drawn out. I wouldn't say it has the best battle system by any means but on Hard, I do enjoy the bosses.