So I'm playing through the 3rd right now (just started the labyrinth chapter- 5 I think?) and I am overall enjoying it (Kevin is great, I surprisingly like Ries a lot, especially their relationship and how Ries isnt afraid to call him out on his bs. Also like the dungeon crawler aspect much more than I expected to) but my main problem with it so far has been the pacing, esp when it comes to the lengths of the doors.

This is coming from someone who had no problem with the pacing of FC and I generally enjoy slow burns a lot, it's just I feel that some of the doors have been a bit too long and drawn out for their own good. I'm really busy with school this time of the quarter so I only have a bit of time to play each day but whenever I sit down to play the 3rd I always feel like my time has been wasted in some way bc it always ends up turning into me just sitting and watching a door for a couple hours.

I've been catching up on the ones I'm behind on now that Estelle, Agate Schera joined my party which has resulted in my doing moon doors back to back for the past couple days with getting no actual gameplay time in. I guess a large part of this falls on me for underestimating how long the doors were gonna be but my OCD kinda prevents me from moving on in the story until I do all the doors I can, which resulted in my play session yesterday just being that godawful fishing minigame which was probably my worst experience with this series so far.

I'm hoping that now that I almost have all the party members the pacing will get better and I wont get backlogged like this again but it's just been dragging the experience down a bit for me, which is a shame bc overall the content of the doors is great. My last point is that it also just feels a bit too disjointed and disconnected from the main story? I get that that's kinda the whole point but I just find the whole concept a bit too random within the rules of the world too but eh. And also this is a minor thing but I've been playing with voices on and it just bugs me a bit that literally no one has mentioned Schwarzritters resemblance to Loewe despite them having the exact same voice (Joshua?? Hello??) Lmao I'm just waiting for that to get explained

But overall I still am enjoying the game (the music is GREATTTT but I do find myself missing the main leitmotif from SC a bit lol) and all the QOL features (finally fast travel and being able to change everyone's equipment at once!) this aspect of the game has just been bothering me a bit :p