At first, I gave Regalia: Of Men and Monarchs a recommendation after playing a couple hours, noting the gameplay was fun and the writing was good despite the long loading times. I have put in 5 more hours, and I cannot recommend this game at all. At least to me, I still found the writing to be to my liking, humorous and bright, but after a few hours, there are some huge problems with the gameplay.
At first, the gameplay was pretty standard Final Fantasy Tactics style sRPG, tough, but the kind of tough I liked. Then I got a couple hours in, the combat became frustrating because the skills the enemies were employing were making me feel like I literally needed to get lucky in order to take out an enemy before he wiped my team. Frustrating to a degree that I didn't feel it was fair. This is playing on the normal difficulty, with the only other difficulty being a story only difficulty. Now, I may very well just suck at this game and therefore my skill is not allowing me to enjoy it, but the combat felt cheap.
If you do manage to survive a battle, they you come to a camping stage where you can rest to revive players. This is where the games interface is a problem. Since hitting the interact button makes you interact with the closest object to you, because of collision detection, I couldn't enter the tent to revive my fallen because often the closest thing to me would be a character you could talk to. This also happens when you want to save. In order to fix this, you need to exit out of the campsite, which includes a 45 second loading time, and enter back in the campground and hope the characters are placed in a way you can actually select the campsite to rest. Sometimes, Id have to do this two or three times to get a "good roll" in order to select to either save or rest.
I also feel like perhaps there might be too much dialogue and not enough battling. The game kind of seems more like a visual novel with sRPG type battles.
The loading times are as bad as any game I've played on the Switch. Every time you need to select something or move somewhere required a 45 - 1:30 load. I cannot recommend anyone play this unless you get it at a HEAVY discount, or possibly hope for a patch. I am so sad, because this game had so much promise to me with the witty/charming writing and the base building seemed alright, but too much of the game feels broken or cheap.
On another note, I'm glad to see Tennis World Tour coming to the Switch! I was kind of eyeing that because I was a fan of the Top Spin games. If the Switch version is good, that's the version I'll get. I played a ton of Virtua Tennis on the Vita.
