There’s an adage I try to live by when reviewing games anymore, and I consider it to be a key to being as fair as possible to as many types of games as possible, even those I may not prefer. The goal is to do as good a job of evaluating the game against what objectives its developers were seemingly trying to meet, and what its target audience will likely enjoy, not necessarily on what I may personally enjoy. To make that work out I have the advantage of thousands of games on the Switch under my belt, so the bar is set as much as possible by a game’s peers, and how it measures up against those. Again, not so much up against arbitrary opinion.

As you may have guessed, considering the length of what essentially serves as a disclaimer above, this is a title I struggled to enjoy. I’ll readily admit that I prefer games that at least give me a taste of either some action or simply something to do within a reasonable period of time. No matter how great the story may be, simply moving through screen after screen of dialogue for an extended period of time without me getting to do much more than click to the next panel and read is a drag. In that vein I’ll throw out that it took almost 30 minutes before anything resembling gameplay made itself known, which didn’t get things off to a great start.

Somewhat adding insult to injury, the initial tactical combat, judging by the standard set by many of the game’s peers, was simply too simple to be satisfying. Granted, when it comes to tactical combat we’ve seen some wildly varying approaches and levels of success, with just as many games getting too complicated and encumbered for their own good as ones that have failed to be interesting. The shame in this case is that the further along the game goes the more interesting pieces begin to fall in place, but there’s simply too much tedium and unsatisfying time wasted to get to there. Yes, you may embrace the game’s look and story, not minding the slow wind-up to something better, but if you’re looking to be engaged even within the first few hours you may struggle with this one.