Arietta of Spirits

I played this and Under the Island around the same time and you might think playing two games with similar styles, mechanics, and inspirations might unfairly bias me against the relatively less-good one but actually Arietta of Spirits is just bad on its own terms. Though presented as an exploratory open-world game, it has near-zero points of interest or character except at the ends of its over-long, generic paths. The geography is a bland base for thoughtless combat encounters. Proper Noun Fantasy conventions weigh down the story like concrete death shoes. I'd say it feels like an early test build somehow traded places with the final game, but shouldn't the earliest version of a game have more… spirit than this?