it all took for ever to "get to the action"
Yeah, but that being said a lot of the time that's an introductory thing. Other times it's an actual recurring theme throughout the game, which is why I said it kinda depends. If you want a game where you get to the action, Ys is almost definitely for you--the stories are solid, but not that special or deep, and there's CONSTANTLY action--it's an action RPG and there's few dull moments, really, and not a whole lot of time spent on arbitrary stuff like choosing between a ton of different equipment options or a billion skills or whatever.
Fire Emblem has a lot of text but it ultimately depends on you as to how much you read. A lot of it can be avoided or skipped but part of why Fire Emblem is enjoyable IS the text, so yeah... but you could speedrun it/play the core of the game without much trouble.
Huh. I played TWEWY for the first time this year, and I thought it was average. It had some interesting ideas. Sometimes they worked well, sometimes they didn't. Some of the mechanics were tedious -- just how often are you meant to check the map to see what brands are "in", and reorganize your entire set of gear to take advantage of that? I suppose you could just set yourself to your highest level, turn on auto-control for your partner, and switch the game to easy mode. If you want to not play it at all.
I... lol.
Yeah, I rarely ever change my clothes or anything based on the brands unless it's part of a quest. What's noteworthy is that certain areas tend to have certain trends going stronger than others and if you're going to train, it's nice to do that. But if you paid attention to the game, what pins and clothes you wear into battle change the trends in your favor, so with enough battles it doesn't really matter--and only the VERY bottom of the trends list has any negative bonuses, so it's very rare that it's a problem wearing whatever you want. I went for a while with minimal changes to my deck in my most recent run.
The reason why people like it is because there's a lot of depth to not only the equipment, but there's a solid and rather unique plot, likeable characters, a unique art style, awesome (in most people's opinion) music, and a unique approach to the game in general. It also has one of the most impressive battle systems I've seen yet, and I've played quite a few games; if you can master using your partner and Neku both, it's really rewarding. It's difficult, but it's so much fun.
It also handles things like difficulty and farming really well; grinding really isn't necessary and you can change the difficulty at any time along with your level (HP). You can even not play as the other partner if that's difficult for you. That being said, I really suggest people slowly work towards using their partner since it's part of what makes the gameplay so enjoyable (and why people complained about Live Remix, though I also enjoyed Live Remix quite a bit).
Just my thoughts on it, you're free to share more things you thought were "tedious"... the only tedious parts for me were really rare, like there's one wall you clear by dressing up Neku in Mus Rattus stuff or something which is annoying if you don't already have it, and another time where you have to use either pins of a certain brand or unranked pins to clear the floor (or your partner... and you can just set it to easy and clear it quickly if it's a pain--there's always some sort of workaround, the game doesn't really punish you much for being bad, being lazy, not mastering the game, or anything else, especially compared to other games that take a lot of grinding, game mastery, tons of restarts, etc.--I mean, the game lets you retry ANY battle, including on easy mode!).
...Sorry I kinda love that game and got carried away again teehee, I'm totally biased so yeah, I respect the fact that people can in fact not love the game even though I personally truly think it's a masterpiece (and I'm generally very critical about using that word lol).
