Sadly I beat the game....
Honestly, this is the WORST Mana game by FAR. The plot was concerning, like they tried to take a page from the Tales series but done poorly, They want you to care for one of the main characters family/village but failed HARD. The whole village was insufferable and I didn't care if they all lived or died with how they acted. A lot of NPC's are copy/pasted throughout the game, which would be fine if they were background characters with no name, but some of those models are named here and there. Two of the are even voiced, but their models are still just used over and over again.
The "storytelling" was interesting in a bad way. An enemy would do something like summon a monster, the Main would defeat said monster, the summoner would run away by going THROUGH the main characters group and they'd be like"oh no, they got away. How are we going to stop them?" like WHAT!!? This also happened MULTIPLE TIMES.
Traversing towns is a slog. For whatever reason as soon as you enter a town/village or a city you can no longer double jump or dash/ air dash. Which means you can't just get around as easy as you'd like, which is only annoying because there's literally NO explanation as to why, you just CAN'T, even though you could in the prologue.
Tho overworld voice acting and little quips get annoying real quick. GRIZZLY is the most mind numbing thing to hear in the world while you're just trying to explore the overworld and listen the the music (which honestly might be the ONLY good thing in this game). Grizzly Syrup are giant egg looking things in the world that you collect to trade for items. Only problem? there are WAY TOO MANY. By the time I beat the game I traded and got everything I could get for them and still had hundreds left over, and no they're NOT infinite. They could've been items in the chests as those items are just as useless.
Really the only PRO is the music, when it's not ruined be nonsense chatter...

Firstly I just want to clarify that I refunded this product after 90 minutes so I am not going to comment on the story of the game as I feel I really haven't scratched this.

As someone that LOVED Trials of Mana, I came into this game with an open mind and optimism for what this game has to offer. However after 90 minutes of playing this, I soon realised this wasn't a game I was willing to dive into for the many hours that I had previously done with Trials of Mana.

First point I want to make clear, this is not a terrible game. I've seen a lot of comments and reviews bashing this game but actually its OK, in the end there was just too many concerns for me to ignore and I decided to refund this and come back to it later.

Pros
This games looks beautiful, and there is no denying they have made some amazing areas and the characters look great too (albeit generic at times). The music is wonderful, similar to Trials of Mana the game produces some great soundtracks and the sound effects compliment the game quite nicely. The combat was actually fun too, which I think is important if you are going to be spending the next 30 plus hours using it, I don't think its perfect but its straightforward and easy to learn.

Cons
My first concern was the actual performance of the game, I had already seen that people had to install mods for this game to run with less stutters and glitches etc. That is never a good sign for a new release. Secondly, the character model themselves seem to never agree with the terrain. Sometimes you'll just catch a foot or leg glitching out on a bit of rock or a change of angle. This may sound minor but when you see a foot do a 180 spin just because its stood a small rock, that stuff will start to bug you. Once again, this was never present in Trials of Mana. When using Val at the start in idle mode, the basic outfit you start with even clips into itself. Another small issue but if thats the starting outfit, you would expect some collision there. Another issue was the immersion. I love the areas and the music and the first time I saw a field of crops I wanted to run through it so bad....what I didn't realise is that the crops have no collision on them, so you just walk straight throw them, and same with the bushes. They went to the extent to allow for water collision and snow but they couldn't do it for grass, fields of crops or bushes. It is these little things that started to stack up and take me out the immersion. On the prologue when you use double jump for the first time my character landed and went INTO the platform. Only my head was showing, and then later on after a cut-scene the game just simply froze. I could move the camera but nothing else. Not a deal breaker but just letting you know it happened. The defining moment for me was the combat. I mentioned above that the combat is good, and it is HOWEVER there is an option in the settings which I like to use which turns off battle animations. When the player uses a CS, it stops the 4-5 second video playing of them carrying out the strike. I turned this off (just a preference) thinking this would just shorten down some of the combat as I knew I would personally get bored of seeing the CS over and over again. To my great surprise when you turn this option off, rather than the player carry out a simple move mechanic to provide the CS, they just flashbang the screen with a white overlay and once your retinas have regained sight, the enemy is on the floor dead. WHY WOULD I WANT TO WATCH A 2 SECOND FLASHBANG EVERYTIME I CARRIED OUT A CS!!

After hitting all of these issues, and they really just are small changes (which I really hope change in the future) you can see why I eventually decided to refund this and come back to this down the line. Because for 50 pounds, its just not clean enough. Too many little things which are not sorted, and a few choices which they made (like the white screen flash) which I just personally don't like. In Trials of Mana I felt immersed and I didn't mind if the story was silly or the voice acting was over the top, it was fun. This game looks like it could be like that but at the moment I am just not buying into it. I hope to be wrong in 6 months time.

A fantastic return to the series being good. Its full of JRPG tropes, but this is a strength. it knows what it is, and is navigating that idenity well. The ARPG elements are simple and engaging, and i found myself seeking out fights to try things out, or just to experience gameplay.