Just finished this. Played it on Halloween and finished it up tonight.
I liked the writing, the art direction, the job system, the abilities on the map, the bobbing mini-game was fun, it felt like a cute little adventure game (even had the telltale "repeat the same thing 2-3x" setup).
...but the battles were
awful. The battle system itself wasn't bad. Doing it sort of like Paper Mario is enjoyable enough. But the slowness (partially because of all the animations) of the battles and shallowness of them made them dreadfully boring. Everytime I knocked on a door I was in FEAR that there was a monster behind that door. Not because he was a scary monster, but because the thought of spending the next 2 mins in a zzz battle vs. a 5 second skippable candy bag animation clip was ughh.
The best example of why it's not the battle system itself but the way throwaway battles were done is that the boss fights were
good. Especially the harder bosses. Choosing the right costumes and battle stamps and playing smart got you through bosses, especially if you were underleveled. The bosses felt like a good turn-based rpg.
But the normal battles posed no threat and it was mainly about
how can I kill the enemies ASAP to end this boring battle and you really couldn't do it all that fast since as your attack power grew with levels, so did the enemy HP as they leveled with you
In a good turn-based rpg, a grunt battle should be in and out of the battle within 20 seconds if you know what you're doing. Even slower, longer battles would be fine if the battle system was exciting, but here it's extremely simple and your attacks are very limited so you're doing the same thing over and over and it's just boring.
So yeah, while I enjoyed most of the aspects of the game, the standard battles pretty much ruined a lot of the game for me. If the game had been 10 hours+ I probably wouldn't have even finished it. It was a constant pull between "I'm having fun" and then a second later a battle starts and "I'm not having fun". It's definitely the Doublefine production I've enjoyed the least simply because at least Psychonauts and Brutal Legend were constantly fun even with their faults.
Also as an aside I'm not sure what the audience for this game is. The simple battles and overall style of the game feels like it's aimed at kids. As if a parent was making "my first rpg" for their kid. But this isn't a DS or Wii game. It's a XBLA/PSN downloadable title and I really don't think that's the right market for games aimed at 13 and under crowd. Maybe I'm wrong and 7 year olds are browsing the XBLA store and buying games with their lunch money, but it just seems like this would do better as a DS game or something.
