izigame.me

I purchased this game, along with the DLC, when it was heavily discounted. I am only giving a positive recommendation if you do the same. I would not have been happy if I had paid full price. TLDR: 6.5/10

I'm writing this review after having beaten the games main story line, and I'm going to have some vague spoilers, so please keep that in mind. I played one save only for the 95 hrs I have in the game, beat the final boss, and closed the game. Higgledy-help-me.

I'll break it down into three parts, hrs 0-30, 30-60, and 60-90. I'm assuming some of those hours were just me AFK to eat and stuff. This wasn't all one play session, but I have been on a break from work... so it was pretty darn consecutive.

0-30 hrs:
This was the most fun and exciting part of the game. The world was fresh and vibrant and seemed very expansive. I played with all graphics settings maxed out, and the game shows some age but looks lovely. Lots of fun Ghibli-esque graphics and orchestral music. Reaching the kingdom building sections of the game made me very excited to keep playing. The games combat style reminds me of the Dark Cloud series, albeit within the shell of a Final Fantasy style "bump the enemy and engage combat" mechanic. In fact a lot of this game seems very, very much like the Dark Cloud games.
The military combat section of the game start here, I enjoy them at this time. All is well.

30-60 hrs:
The games orchestral soundtrack is very lovely, however orchestras are expensive. This means you will be hearing a lot of the games soundtrack over and over again. By this point in time I had begun hearing french horns in my sleep. I would say at this point in the game I was completely sidelined by building a kingdom. I had made a number of concessions with myself about this game. It wasn't exactly great, but it was fun. The kingdom building is very constrained, you do not get to design a town. At least Dark Cloud would let you build buildings freely on a grid. This part of the game is more akin to a mobile game. You put buildings in the one place they go. Then you need citizens, which is cool! I enjoyed collecting new people with new abilities to my town. I had no idea what a lot of the buildings did, but I was content to just build and collect people.
I did whatever main story line stuff I needed to do to unlock the next batch of possible citizens. This game has more fetch quests than I have ever seen in one game before, with citizens sometimes requiring 2 or 3 different fetch quests before they will join you. If this game was the only thing to survive an apocalypse, future aliens would assume that an Earth King's job was to bring people apples and cloth.

60-90 hrs:
I reached my tolerance with the game. Unlocking the late game travel option was not fun. This is the part of the game that falls flat for me. My fresh and ever positive outlook began to wane. Eventually I found that there is a LOT of empty content to this game. I feel like more was planned, something happened to this game. There are vast parts of the over world that have little to nothing to do with the main game. Previously unreachable areas, like the desert and frozen lands, are only ever briefly visited and contain no cities, villages, or much of anything other than the same mix of ~15 enemies this game has. There is a massive and interesting set piece in the frozen land that has nothing to do with the game. I would have thought there were cool quests to do with it. Nope.
I reached a point where it was either keep building my kingdom, or complete the main story line. I had several of my categories at S rank, and so I thought, well time to finish it. I did most of the final missions in one go. It was incredibly underwhelming. There's a frustrating military section. There is another large city that's completely empty of citizens or interesting lore. A series of mini boss battles that were easy despite me being under leveled, and then some very nice cut scenes that wrap everything up.
Don't get me completely wrong, I enjoyed a lot of the end game story line, but there were just so many things I did that didn't matter at all. Most of the kingdom building didn't matter. I don't feel the Higgledy guys mattered much, other than being adorable and fun to have around. I could have cut my play time in half and finished the main story, I didn't use most of the party characters. Lots of little things. Decent fun if it's 90% off and you want a feel good JRPG (just don't buy the DLC).

Overall: 6.5/10 Great play value/dollar only when on sale. Great for younger/teen audience as well.
Graphics: 7/10 It's a mixed bag, the over world looks like RPG Maker, but a lot of the art is nice.
Lofty & Higgledy's: 10/10
Music: 8/10 But after the 2,000th time, I think I could transcribe the sheet music from memory.
Game play: 5/10 Very basic combat, lots of re-used gimmicks and sub plots from other Level 5 games. The military mini-game is as other reviews say, confusing. I also couldn't find a way to level the military up enough to do about HALF of the later game quests. I ended the game with my squads at around Level 22. Citizen gathering starts fun but gets tedious. A lot of this game starts fun and gets tedious. Puzzle sections are frustrating too, or anything timed.
Story: 7.5/10 Decent story, fun cast of characters, lots of nice citizen dialog. Very full story early game, but kind of saves all the last cutscenes for the ending.