Couldn't find a contact thread so made this - don't flame me for the google searching of the forums.

Anwyay, this game is pretty cool... looked nice before i bought it and i liked the general style and interface after i got ahold of it...

Some niggles though:

1) Takes a loooong time to save.
2) You have to wait on your food to digest before you can eat more....
3) GRINDING?! On a portable game? ARE THEY MAD?!!

Number 1) i can live with.

Number 2) is a pain in the ass.... 10 seconds to digest something means that you are dead before the fight is over.... In a game, 10 seconds is a long time when you are unable to avoid attack, being very confined. But again, that is workable since you understand that this is the system - as long as the game doesn't give you encounters which make it impossible to eat more than three items within the encounter (but require more - and it does!) then everything is okay.

Number 3 is a deal-breaker for me. I played through the first island without a problem and went through the second one until i came up against the first boss of a one-two boss punch combo. Bam! I was dead.

So i figured, no biggie... there's no penalty associated with death and you just start back at your ship. I went through the dungeon again, several times, to make sure i was pretty powerful. I defeated the boss.

Went back, saved and healed. Returned at fought the second boss. Died. Ground through the dungeon again.... several times... Saved... boss'd and died. Rinse, repeat (on my 5th time now) and still dying.

What the hell?

This is supposed to be an accessible game that is portable... it's on the DS?! Not since the save feature of New Super Mario Bros. have i seen such a bad design feature.

I then decided to be smart and see if i could better use some "decals" (which are essentially performance enhancing tattoos)... i did:

Battle decal +2 strength, +3 stamina
Wisdom decal +3 to earth, water and fire magics
Personal Decal +2 courage
weapon decal +2 damage

I have 122 health and even though i can almost kill this second boss i just can't eat more food to replenish my HP.

So i read through an FAQ - thinking i had missed something. Turns out i didn't. Turns out that you have to seriously grind through the early (and probably, late) game to get anywhere. The problem with this is that now i am pretty much maxed out on the enemies that i have at my disposal, they don't give me enough XP to level up easily at their and my current level.

Now i want to stop playing this game. The whole point of casual and portable games is that you are supposed to be able to advance through the game without having to put in similar amounts of grind/reward in compared to a sit-down console game where you expect to be tied up for a good couple of hours.... not to mention that games on the DS are generally pretty short in content and hours which means that the grinding has a much smaller area and novelty when compared with the size of the world in a final fantasy game (for example).

I've been playing for 3 hours 22 minutes and have barely got into the game... i'm beginning to hate it (as i came to dislike NSMB). What are these devs thinking?