I wish this game had just focused on the battlefield portion as it's a perfectly fine, fun card battle game. But the friendship building exercise is tedious and one you can never really lose. I was skipping so much during these long-winded talks while walking through the grounds. I also must call out the entire atmosphere of the game - I'm not sure who thought the magic/occult aspect would map well onto these characters. A big of a confused mess at times.

There are some enemy types and bosses that are painfully plodding to play against but the core of the game is solid since it's one of the rare occasions where building characters a certain way actually has meaning and there's an interesting niche everyone in the cast fulfills. I also think the abbey stuff is solid, too. The main plot is mostly a nothingburger but I generally liked the chemistry between party members and there were meaningful choices to be made with the small activities.

The card-based gameplay is excellent, but everything else is total garbage, and there's so much of it that constantly gets in the way of the one thing the game does well. Everything in the abbey sucks ass, and you're forced to spend so much time there engaging in cringy nonsense that you can only skip through one line at a time. Some of the worst writing and voice acting I've tried to endure to get to enjoyable gameplay, but I just can't do it