This game is huge! It took me a little over 2 hours to finish.
Corris is a cool character who makes me laugh. I've only played Piercing of Darkmoon Tower and Priestess of the Forgotten Hero, so I didn't get all the references to other adventures and characters but I appreciated that they're there.
I found it challenging to defeat the minotaur, and I couldn't do it until I gained several levels by fighting enemies in the field. Even then, the minotaur does so much damage that it was a tense fight. The mine dungeon right after it felt pretty tense too and I had to spend a lot of resources to make it through. The rest of the game after that felt very easy and I found I could mostly get away with mashing attack and occasionally using a heal spell. I used some buffs/debuffs on bosses too but I don't know if I actually needed to or if it just made the fights faster.
The Light Ball mechanic as a replacement for random encounters delighted me, especially when I found a hidden enemy in a certain area. I did get a little annoyed by certain places with unavoidable time-consuming encounters in the second half of the game, since the fighting and resource management had become very simple at that point. But I also appreciated the amount of encounters you could avoid with careful movement once the Light Ball reveals them. I like dodging symbol encounters in RPGs.
I was quite shocked by the romantic subplot between two characters that barely talked to each other. I think I was supposed to imagine them growing closer to each other during the battles and travelling. However, the payoff was very cute. This was a nice game.