"What I find iffy about the whole presentation is that I rarely get a sense that my ragtag bunch of anime misfits are actually interacting with each other. The first part of the game, you tour all the home villages, randomly touching people until one goes, "Hello, random group of strangers! I'm about to embark on a very personal quest that will define the rest of my life! Why not tag along?" And that's your new party member, smilingly joining up with a group of what might be cannibalistic serial tax-dodgers, for all they know, accepting that they're going to have to mutely witness the personal bullshit of seven complete strangers before they come back around to sorting out whatever put a hair up their own arse. It's particularly jarring with characters like Primrose, doing the "I am dishonoured and alone and have nothing left in this world but my quest for violent, bloody revenge" bit, never acknowledging the seven colourful dudes in varying stages of adolescence with whom she shares a sleeping bag every night. It's only right at the end of the game that any connection between the eight stories is established; before that, it's eight separate stories rather than a story about eight people. Every time you go through a new chapter of one party member's story, everyone else just disappears up their butthole for the duration of the cutscene. Sometimes, after a cutscene, a little button prompt comes up, and you can teleport the relevant character and one other party member to the Interaction Dimension, where they discuss what just happened, but I don't see why they couldn't have worked that into the scene; made it look like some actual organic relationship-building was going on, not just a spot of post-match commentary like Statler and fucking Waldorf."