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...

I did enjoy this game, the mechanics were fun and overall the story wasn't that bad, there have been certainly worse. The characters were interesting and the music is probably the best thing about this game. Some aspects of the game/story were rather predictable, however that isn't that bad. It's a pretty good beginner JRPG for someone who has not played a lot and wants to get into the series or JRPGs in general. The ending is however a bit blander than expected so don't go expecting something amazing.

One issue I did have was the game constantly crashing. I have tried this game with 2 different graphics cards and still would get black screens then crashing. I don't know if this is an AMD issue (both cards were AMD, however I did use different cards/drivers from AMD) or just the game in general, however it would generally crash after playing for ~2 hours straight. So save often is my recommendation!

I have beaten the game and likely will not return to it, but figured I'd write a review since I finished it.

Story/characters decent. Voice acting of main character more than a little annoying. Julei voice actor very good.

Combat, world, and art direction excellent.

A shame the studio got closed.

Would buy again.