What an unexpected treat. This game is an immensely solid addictive RPG. I really didn't expect much but was blown away by the depth and enjoyment I got out of it.

You control your main character, a witch called Pieberry, in her quest for pie. The main gameplay loop is you explore, you gather, you fight enemies for materials, then return to base and craft stuff.

The game plays most similarly to games from the Atelier series, and could honestly stand up with some of the best there. The gather craft fight repeat loop is immensely addictive, and the game just does so many things right.

Not only do you craft new gear or items to use in combat, but you also craft a lot of permanent stat boosts. Beyond ordinary combat, there's SO many systems of advancement in the game and the game allows you to engage with them as little or as much as you want, kind of like Disgaea. If you want to buckle down and grind your way to complete overpoweredness the game lets you, and it's so fun doing it. Pretty much everything respawns in the game, you can go back and refight bosses to get their rare drops (often permanent stat boosters) over and over. Upgrade your pets, upgrade your spells, upgrade your weapons, evolve your weapons, upgrade your merchant, upgrade your training methods which grant higher rates of stat boosts during training. Upgrade everything.

I like how the main story quest takes you only about 75% of the way through most dungeons, allowing you to come back and find harder enemies and secret treasure and sometimes optional superbosses in the back rooms.

I like how you can track the current spawn status of every enemy and gatherable on the world map, which makes rotating around to collect what you want a breeze.

I like the little minimap expansion contraction instead of zooming it.

The combat system features deceptive amounts of depth. You control only Pieberry and her single health bar, but she can summon numerous pets in combat which get their own turns and their own attacks, but enemies will only ever attack your single health bar. You get a choice of magic which typically does bigger damage over a wider area but costs MP or high damage single target physical attacks which usually are "free." The real appeal is you are constantly getting an expanded arsenal of abilities to choose from over the course of the game. Instant cast attacks that don't cost a turn, defensive shields, slows, dots, reraises, instant use items, inherent weapon abilities, one-per-combat super attacks, and more than you have to juggle the cooldowns of. You just feel powerful all the time with so many options to choose from. I especially like how the game allows you to swap weapons each turn for free, so if you want to min max and swap between weapons that have high MAG during each magic cast and a high STR sword for physicals, it'll let you.

The story is not great, but certainly decent. Dialogue is mediocre but the characters are interesting and the art is good even if the overall graphics are just passable. Some of the music tracks are very catchy.

Again. this game is REALLY fun! I highly recommend to any Atelier fan.

I was about to refund this but I'm glad I didn't.
Once you get to the staff upgrades it starts expanding the mechanics and story in a way that is much more enjoyable than I felt the initial impression was.
If you want super easy mode, pick the Life Staff. (The whole game is not very hard anyway)

Just make sure you always wear headphones if you live with anyone else because my god Pieberry's voice is UwU.
"Are you winning, son?"

My wife left me, good thing this game is like crystal meth. But when I stop playing this game, I still miss my wife and cry myself to sleep