Golf Story is a fun little adventure that merges retro style golf with RPG elements and after finishing the game I found myself wishing there was more.
If you've played a golf game on the original NES or pretty much any console golf game before the joystick era you'll know what to expect from this golf game. The game play is similar to that of...
Early in the game some battles did seem to take a while with enemies having a lot of HP. But, to be honest I think those people didn't really learn strategies that can take out enemies quickly. In Octopath I took a much more aggressive approach to battles than I usually do in RPGs. Knowing when to charge your attacks can really affect things. Boss battles can be lengthy but even those decreased heavily as I went through the game and learned the subtitles.
When it comes to JP grinding I really had to do very little. Most of it occurred after I beat the game and wanted to finish other quests. A character can only hold onto one secondary job at a time and the only permanent thing they hold onto are the skills you can learn with each job class. So there were a few skills I wanted everyone to learn but I almost always had JP to pass around. So, you really don't need to and shouldn't be having every character learn everything of all the jobs. Now I took a somewhat leisurely approach to the game and explored a lot so perhaps that affected things.
Honestly the only time I see a balance issue coming up or having to heavily JP grind is if you try and race through the game then you might have to tackle these issues. Honestly I didn't have them, like, at all. I've done far more grinding in almost every Dragon Quest game I've ever played.
Two things you didn't touch upon that other reviews have made me leery of:
1. How does battle balance feel? Some other reviews have complained that even random trash encounters have too much HP, and the battles take way too long.
2. How's the JP grinding? Any game with a Job system that exists outside of the basic XP/level system can really go overboard with how long it takes to grind up the Job skills you need (e.g., Final Fantasy Tactics).
100% agree with you that the story is a bit of a mess compared to DQ4 and DQ5. I honestly can't remember what it was about except that it involved dreams somehow. Also 100% agree that grinding for vocations was a complete buzzkill. When I think back to my time with DQ6 in ZSNES on my crappy old Athlon64 PC, all I remember is grinding battles for vocation mastery while watching TV on a different screen. Not a good sign.
I think the point I was trying to make is that Nintendo made some drastic changes to the normal Zelda formula. And while in this instance it was not only acceptable but a nice change of pace, I don't see this as a winning formula that should be copied for the next 10-20 years.
When I spend over 100 hours on a game and have a great time almost the entire time I think I'm perfectly justified with my 5/5 rating of a game. No game is perfect and me pointing out a few minor problems won't stop me from rating it that way.
The amount of complaints and caveats you have with this game does not strike me as if you actually had a 5/5 experience. It seems more like you're trying to tow the line for the Nintendo status quo.
Sounds kind of like the annoying situation with White Knight Chronicles and White Knight Chronicles 2 retreading the same ground and feeling more like two parts of a half-assed whole instead of a game and a sequel.
Occasionally I've played video games that freeze/crash from time to time. But, that's usually once or twice during the entire time I play the game. This game routinely crashed every couple hours and what I was doing didn't seem to matter.
