So I played an indie-turned base game called
Skyborn. Probably 8 hours long if you're playing on Easy or Normal, 10 or 11 if you're playing on Hard and doing the optional dungeon as well which I did.
The story isn't anything particularly special. It did its bit though, and it moved from beat to beat fairly quick. Really, in retrospect it's kind of surprising how just how fast it did move.
I do enjoy how user-friendly and quickly the gameplay pacing is in movement and in battle. I set my dash to automatic and outside of one or two sequences where you're forced to move slow, it was nice being able to move around briskly. Battle sequences also move really fast too. There's the attack animations, but nothing that makes it move excruciatingly slow. Stuff like being able to toggle easily between Normal and Hard, saving anywhere, and generous HP/MP save spots are good anti-frustration features, along with your characters automatically regenerating MP so you don't really risk running out while in a dungeon. Having it clear who moves and when is also handy. Games that move this quickly really are a joy. However, the big issue I have is that you can't tell what buffs and debuffs and status effects the enemy has active. You can see when an enemy gets a status effect and when that status effect wears off, but you can't check in between. So you essentially have to remember which ones it has, or else waste time trying to get another status effect inflicted.
And that does matter, because playing on Hard Mode, status effects are absolutely critical. Basically any boss fight after the halfway point is a fight of getting critical status effects on the boss before it can eliminate your party. Paralyze is a nasty status effect, and one party member is able to inflict it on basically just about any enemy
and boss except for a select few (one mechanical boss, and I think the last two bosses). Then it's a matter of debuffing the boss with several different stacking techniques from all your characters, buffing your own party, attacking, and reapplying debuffs and buffs as required.
Speaking of Hard Mode, I think the difficulty is basically like a bell curve. It starts easy in the beginning, rises up towards the middle stretch, then falls off at the end. This is essentially because you have to clear a bunch of very tough optional fights to get into the game's one optional dungeon, which gives you a lot of goodies that make the endgame more of a cakewalk. You get some free stat-boosting items in this dungeon, and you can also buy the same stat-boosting items late game. However, currency is limited in this game, so clearing the optional dungeon allows you to buy still more stat-boosting items.
There's something in this system called Augments, which basically are gems you can slot onto your weapons to get increased stats or other effects. You can buy them, but the best ones are obviously not buyable, and you cannot reuse them on new equipment. Augments are a cool idea, but it's also why I mentioned the above difficulty spike and then plateau. I saved all my best augments until the endgame since they're not reusable, then absolutely curbstomped the regular enemies on my way to the endboss
Overall, still a nifty fun romp
There's a stinger scene at the ending with a cloaked character. I assume the character is implied to be the main antagonist, but it's strange, because the cloaked character's sprite has blue eyes, and the antagonist has brown eyes. Then I reloaded my save before the final boss and went through the scene with the antagonist. His character art has brown eyes, but his sprite on-screen has blue eyes. Huh.