Here's my review:

Overall, this game is fun, with few drawbacks. The story is passable, mostly a reason to run around and explore a cool world of diverse environments, treasures, and monsters. The cutscenes were slow; I wished there was a way to just read the text instead of waiting for the voice over to finish. The artwork was nice, though.

The best aspect of the game is the many diverse options available in party-building; the player gets to create their own story. The base game doesn't tell you what skills each class has, but I got a bit of a heads-up by reading comments. I started one game, got a taste for the combat, and started a new game with a new party theory and ran with it until the end.

The leveling system works well, and the addition of permanent bonuses from all herbs was a nice touch (no useless herbs taking up inventory space). Skill books that you could use right away to improve a skill, without needing to wait to maximize them, was also a nice touch. (Level 30 of a skill costs as much as level 2. Only the first level costs extra.)

The "worst" aspect of the game for me was needing to run around areas to trigger ambushes until I'd cleared the monsters. This was tedious, though rewarding.

There are enough monsters that you should always be able to fight monsters at your level or weaker; no need to beat your head on a tough mob. Experience gear and the learning skill make this better; I invested in that early on and didn't look back.

Gear seems important early in the game, but at the end only the weapons really mattered. My party was level 65-ish for the final boss fight, and the characters were so strong I didn't bother replacing the original experience bonus armor/jewelry I had gotten them.

I finished this game, which I don't always do. I didn't encounter bugs, and the puzzles were fairly intuitive. The real fun for me was the party-building and getting to prove out what I was doing on tougher and tougher monster parties. I'm hoping to see a sequel.

Just finished it as well, ironman hardcore, after getting to level 23 or so on the middle difficulty to get a feel for the game, and after reading the character guide because otherwise there is no way to know what skills a class gets and whether they matter, etc. (Or some of the mechanics, such as that level itself is a stat that strongly affects combat rolls, separate from the skill, attribute, hp, and pp bonuses, which isn't typical in RPG's.)

I agree with the OP and really love the game. While the story isn't the reason to play the game, and isn't really a big part of the immersion, I did find it to be unique and it did have a mystery contained in it that I found i was interested to hear the end of, and I found the ending quite unique and satisfying.

Roccandil isn't wrong about gear being not all that important, in a sense, in that you can win the end fights without it being optimized if your party is otherwise very high level and well built, but gear is definitely helpful in general throughout the game. No, you won't lose to the final boss because your gauntlets aren't perfect, but also gear is very limited and there is no way to get perfect gauntlets anyway other than luck and/or sleeping for days of real life time and years of game time to wait for merchants to reset, and even then they don't sell the highest level gear.

For gear to "matter" by that definition, you would have to do everything else right, get to the final boss, but have tier 18 gear instead of tier 20, without all the best enchantments, and then you'd have to lose for just that reason.

I agree; the ending was rewarding. Interesting info on the level mattering in combat rolls; I didn't know that. :) Thanks!

I thought the gear system was a little weak, but perhaps that's only in comparison to the party/leveling system, which was a lot of fun. I'm not sure I like experience/leveling bonuses, though; if they exist, they tend to be what you need to get, thus reducing choices.

One thing I didn't mention is that I learned to buy only a few extra skill points between levels, spacing them out to make getting skills up easier (since you can only advance a skill by one level per levelup, no matter how many points you have).

Yeah, I agree that xp bonus skills and items are probably better to leave out, and a better loot system would be ideal. It would be kind of fun to be able to play a Xulima game where loot was random at the beginning, but otherwise static, actually like the skill books on stands are (they seem fixed at the start of the game, even for the last temple, for example). The hidden mechanic about lvl being a stat should at least be explained, so that it becomes a strategic choice that you are aware of.

I completed the game on high difficulty too. It was fun and all, I really liked the fights and the character developement. Each class was good and useful in different circunstances. I didn't find any class to be "useless" (even if the Cleric and Mage are maybe a bit too strong).

The gear system, what annoyed me the most was all these moments when you can afford all the gear you'd need but have to rely on random restock of the merchants. It's so frustrating to keep sub-par equipement - but then again it's not such a big deal. The really annoying thing was all the time you spend looking for XP. Walking around to trigger the attacks, going from places to paces because you don't know where are the ennemies you can beat. That's not always fun.

A very important thing about my mage was to stop myself from leveling the spells asap. Because it's better to keep a spell that you can cast 3 times in early fight than to have a "better spell" that forces you to recharge PP too often. You do more damage per PP but less per turn and that's what matters. Oerall the skill distribution is important but it's very hard to understand what the consequences wll be - like the weapon skills, when do you really need more ?

The end... well, the ending cinematic was nice and interesting. But the actual game ending ? I mean, it's just another temple with another boss... I found it very anti climatic.

I like the game but I don't want to do another playthrough right now (even if I'd ike to see how the classes I ddn't pick are working (the summoner mostly), it's too much of a time investment. But I still think it's a treat to anybody who likes turn based RPG, it was spot on on so many things. I wish other indy RPGs were at this level.

Thanks for all the tips here from those of you who finished this. I stopped playing a couple months ago because it got tedious to me. My party makeup was causing problems, I chose a few of the wrong traits and couldn't change them.
I had fun playing but the grindy feeling eventually got to me.
I've favorited this topic and will definitely come back when I'm ready to start over.

it is possible to put tons of items on your characters, so they'd get 80% encumbrance (doesn't go above that). Time flies 5 times faster this way (and no food consumption if you run in city).

It is especially easy to achieve so in beginning of game (when party's total strength is low), just gather few rounds of cereals and your characters will become overloaded :)

Though I still hope developers will consider re-randomizing merchant's gear (and chest contents) upon reloading in their future patch.