Horizon's Gate

I will admit I bounced off this game twice after playing for about 20 hours each, before getting hooked with my current playthrough where I have about 103 hours played. Mainly because I wasn't playing very well and it felt like I wasn't making much progress. This time I'm doing 3000 gold bounties that other players are having issues completing. This game puts Final Fantasy Tactics' job class system to shame. You have your traditional job / subjob. But you can also have up to 1 extra ability from 2 different classes equipped once you get ability crests. Or, you can equip tablets in your accessory slots that either let you use an ability at rank 1 or upgrade an ability 1 more rank. Even past its normal limits. Also, the ability crest system let you bypass being stuck on a single job / subjob combination because that is the most optimal one and if you try out a different one you feel weak. Instead, it lets you choose to keep one ability from that class that you like the most while trying out a different job / subjob combination. And the game doesn't lock you into just that one ability for the ability crest, you can switch which one ability you want to keep using. This game respects how people want to play and their time. For example, instead of going "oh I got *another* set of mythril armour", time to throw that into storage. You can melt it down at the forge and turn it into a mythril bow. You can't do this with all equipment but its still nice for more common equipment. It also respects your time by awarding exp for the whole party that is participating (although there are ways to make one member have more exp than the others). Instead of in FFT where you're stuck in a corner of the map telling yourself this is the epitome of gaming while you cast bravery or whatever on yourself for exp, in this game you're off looking for a new enemy to fight or a new location to explore. Mind you the starting area is predominantly groves, which is a single fight then your reward. But this game has a single dungeon that you can do repeatedly for tablets and other gear. It also has guild missions if going to that one dungeon gets too stale and you want to fight other monsters. It also has dungeons with multiple rooms, but the dev didn't handcraft multiple room dungeons for every location, or make the ones he did make easy to get to. Or, you can always just say ♥♥♥♥ one nation in particular and raid their boats and do that for money and exp. There is also an arena you can battle in. On the topic of money, money doesn't become worthless as quick in this game as it does in other games. There always seems to be another port to upgrade for things you can't have otherwise obtained elsewhere. And you need money to spend on trading goods. And boats. And keeping the crew fed and happy so they don't mutiny. Im 105 hours in my current playthrough and I haven't upgraded all the ports yet. At a certain point in FFT I remember money being worthless as there was nothing worth buying. And that was well before reaching end game. All the stuff you needed was from enemy drops or monster hunting. Or attempting to steal something that couldn't be obtained after the thing was already dead for reasons that never get explained other than to pad the hours it takes to complete the game. The music is very good once you get outside of the starting area. Its an alright song but it gets on my nerves listening to it so much due to trade taking me back there so often. I like the crubtown song. I am kind of bummed the port you can build only lets you listen to some of the songs in the game instead of having them all available. The story in the vanilla version of this game, while serviceable in my opinion (you're out for revenge), it is just the background to the game which is more of a sandbox of a game where you try out different builds and job combinations. I've heard there are mods that add more story based content but I'm still having fun with the vanilla game and learning its ins and outs. If you want a game with more story look into Kingsvein from the same dev. I plan on playing that one next after trying out the mods for this one. I will probably try cranking up the combat difficulty from veteran to intense for that run and see how it goes.