Beautiful sprite work and fun combat that could have used a little more complexity. Once you figure out the jig it doesn’t really ever change and the only enemies that have gimmicks that matter are one character’s sidequest bosses.

The story is pretty weak, but charming and cute enough until the end. The game ends fairly abruptly and, quite frankly, is one of the dumbest story resolutions I’ve ever seen in a game. There was so much fun lore building up throughout the game yet the final boss and sequence just kinda have nothing to do with most of it except for the mulligan from the very beginning of the game. The resolution to that mulligan is also beyond lazy and stupid. I don’t want to spoil anything here, but it was some Looney Tunes antics level of event that retroactively spoiled the entire game for me.

It’s such a quick playthrough that knowing that’s all you get makes me unable to really recommend this to anyone. Juice wasn’t the worth the squeeze for me.

Going forward, when discussing games that are “mid”, Terra Memoria will live at the front of my mind. This game is exceedingly average in every way. The narrative is acceptable, the characters are fine, and the combat is there.

That doesn’t mean the game does nothing interesting. I like the overworld exploration and how new skills for characters are hidden behind interesting puzzles, though at the same time I do feel that as a result skills are drip-fed to the player and thus players will spend a majority of their time using the same skills. Tying skills to each other in duos and forcing you to choose one or the other is also a novel idea, though of the duos I found there was usually one that was simply more useful.

Most novel was the idea of having three active party members and three supporters that change how their partner’s skills work with the press of a button. The three supporters are randomly assigned at the start of each battle and can massively aid (or sometimes hinder) in tougher battles. Turning AoE attacks into more powerful focused attacks (and vice-versa) is especially useful, while transforming an attack of one element into a randomly chosen different element or making an attack heal or heal attack are much more situational. The latter ability I particularly disliked with the attacker Moshang, who doesn’t have a heal to transform for several hours, though if you’re not a masochist like me who embraces chaos you can opt out of some character combos if you choose.

If you’re looking for a story, the one here is pretty threadbare, centering around the cause of the loss of magic crystals that the society is based upon. Characters have their own subplots, like Syl’s (who is effectively the main character, at least of what I played) search for her lost parents or Meta’s identity crisis, and while this can be interesting there’s also very little updates to these subplots in the midgame. I also think that, while the characters interact in a very friendly and wholesome way, their relationships can be somewhat boring because they’re all friends as soon as they meet each other and there is never any intra-party conflict like you can find in some more (personally) interesting JRPGs.

A major factor in Terra Memoria’s favor is the vibrant and bustling world. They really embraced the cartoonish style of their world’s design and every character and location is bursting with color and personality. Each new town or encampment you find feels distinct from each other and keeps you looking forward to where you’ll end up next, and NPCs often feel like recognizable individuals. It’s a very fun and interesting world to run around in, even if it wasn’t enough to keep me in the game until the end.

I enjoyed my time with Terra Memoria until I didn’t, and it really did just come down to boredom with the narrative and characters, which didn’t seem like they were heading in a particularly interesting direction. The fantastic worldbuilding and novel (if often trivial) combat may be enough for others, though, and there’s certainly things about this game worth experiencing, even if in execution I felt they often fell flat. It’s a nice little sugary treat you can have between more substantial meals, one that you’ll forget you had in a day or two but can be worth it in the moment.