Finished half the chapters. I Like half of the game, and hate the other half.
Good:
- Combat is interesting, with interesting mechanics. It also feels like the first version of a much better system. It's odd that this game came out two years after Valkyre Chronicels. VC does many similar things that could have been copied, at least when it comes to making the mechanics clear to the player.
- The shields system is very good.
- Tri attacks are a really great approach to formation attacks seen in other games. I wish they had time to do more with this system.
- Customizing guns is really really fun. I wish it was integrated with better crafting in the style of Arcanum (you actively go looking for specific items rather than grind ten Metal Dongles).
Bad:
- Not sure why critical mode is in the game, it's almost always an insta-lose when you get it anyway. Why have a dead end as a game mechanic? Why not keep playing normally until you run out of hp?
- Tri attacks stop halfway when trying to go through terrain. Why not prevent the player from doing it ahead of time, considering the poor camera controls?
- Losing 1000 hp means you lose 1 Bezel gauge... why 1000? Why not the entire hp bar?
- Arena is a complete slog. It's clearly there to ramp up playing time instead of making it a better game.
- Moving around the overworld takes too long. The special elevators that are composed of two levels interlinked by a loading screen should be removed.
- the tutorials in general are bad. Even when they're well written the game shows them at the wrong time.
- the combat tutorials are poorly made, but I like that they're available from the start, so the players can tackle them at their leisure. You don't need advanced techniques to start the game, but it's nice to have access to them from the get go rather than being spoon fed them over ten hours of gameplay like many other AAA games do.
- There's way too much trash combat, compounded by re spawning enemies. The game would have been way better with hand placed encounters.
- The maps have the potential to impact the combat, but they rarely do because of the copy-pasted encounter design. 90% of the fights are in an empty rectangle with five enemies placed at random.
- Because of the previous two things, going through a series of fights feels really repetitive. The system is good, but the fights don't really use it.
- I like the general hexes system used in the overworld, but in practice you get can stuck without white hexes, which means you can't continue the main quest. Grinding for half an hour gave me one white hex... so yeah, poor system. You have to grind to continue playing, and you might get bad RNG and stay stuck. Regardless, I don't care for grinding to begin with, so that's poor design as far as I'm concerned. Maybe it should only be used for colored hexes.
- The writing is just bad. Standard anime dialogues with proper nouns peppered in-between. Shame the game doesn't focus on what the intro promises, which is hunting monsters with cool guns in Gothic environments. At least than the writing wouldn't have been as grating.
The game as a whole isn't really worth playing, it has too many bad parts that waste players' time with not enough to compensate. That said, I enjoyed it because the battle system is original and fun, so if you're ok with flawed games that do one thing well than you might end up liking it as well. I think the best option is to play it until you you find yourself grinding identical fights, and then use an end game save to try out the different combat challenges in the arena. The combat is the best part, so trying it out in the arena without all the outside jank is probably the best option. The gun customization is great, so also check it out.
I hope the game gets sequel, at least a mechanical sequel if that makes sense. The combat system should be reused in some other game.