I wish this was a normal game. The first two story chapters do their respective sinners wrong but each canto gets better and it doesn't stop. You get to explore the world and wonder how the next canto will top the previous one. This is a sequel hacked into gacha, if it stayed a normal game it'd be a spectacular rush where both story and gameplay get better and better and reach for the stars. Canto 6 ditches gacha dungeons from previous cantos and is the closest it gets to the experience limbus could've been. And unlike some songs mili does for other series, the limbus ones are always story relevant, sure nobody will say anything if you want to listen to them outside the game yet the ideal is to wait for context and reach the epic ruina boss. Remember to read leviathan first ofc. Despite what some people might say If you arent familiar with previous games and the comic you won't know what's really going on since the start.

And sure, it has gacha issues I won't deal with since you can probably imagine like endless grind and dailies and gambling and crap, it's awful. You are going to read about how this is the best possible execution of gacha and it's just faint praise. I guess the first things you'll also notice are autobattles and the ability to read if attacks are going to land or not, such as Dominating and Hopeless ones, which is neat qol that is not present in ruina. Autotargeting enemies is something ruina has (press P) but barely works. In limbus it works for the worst fights but it's a gacha game. It would be a good idea if this was a normal ruina sequel of a couple encounters, one against mobs to play quick and farm resources followed by some boss to spam special attacks against. But this is gacha about autobattling a dozen fights against nothing until you reach a somewhat challenging fight, then you might start reading and manually deal your clashes like in ruina. This is why dungeons at the end of most cantos are weird, it's where the plot gets good and gameplay takes even more of a dive, encounters are just not interesting, there might be some bosses who require you to read, but it's just droning through mob fights and saving a ton of resources to launch your special attacks later. Compared to ruina I hated my first 60 hours or so in limbus. Again, they just kind of hacked great ruina combat ideas into a gacha game and made it braindead enough.

This is the game for the current pm crowd and some people just don't have it in them to play games well, even though it's this braindead, because of uis, because of bad tutorials, but really some are just not good enough and will never make it past a boss. If this is you, it's still nice to watch this on youtube. But I think it's self sabotage since the ludo in limbus is actually nice to experience unlike the dumbass self flagellation of lobcorp and this side of limbus just gets cooler as it goes. I persevered through gachashit and was rewarded

tldr cool world to explore + cool ludo

Echoing the thoughts of some people here, I wish indeed this was a normal game. The game -- and the series, really, has a great foundation in its lore where the weird becomes commonplace and the weird is lethal. Oftentimes you might ask why the City operates in this way, but the game often does not explain it to its surprising benefit.

This is no different in Limbus, though given that you're actually managing a bunch of low-tier misfits now with little experience compared to a washed up Fixer in the previous game, things that seemed incredibly easy to the previous game's characters are lorewise pretty tough here.

I will say outright that I ditched the game during the tutorial due to some amount of confusion and dislike of the presentation of the game.

You start out with a system where you have to line up actions and they will carry out those actions seamlessly. Compared to the previous game's manually assigning which Dice would clash with another enemy's dice, this is much, much quicker to execute. Unfortunately, it seems that it in effect has made it much harder for you to view who's clashing with what, not helped by the standard gacha tutorials restricting the actions you can carry out

Further exacerbating the issue is that if you're playing on the phone, some important icons are stacked on top of icons, making it hard to see, and the game is reliant on being able to perceive colors in order to see which sin types are resonating with which action you're performing.

The game also requires multiple keypresses in order to view a character's skillset, having to do it one by one per character if you want to see what your team member does.

All in all, this does not make for a good first impression and an unpleasant experience, which is a shame because the plot is great here; Dante (the Main Character) is a defined 'loser' that has to earn the trust of the people under his command, and the City still remains as oppressive as ever.

Will I pick it up and deal with it? Maybe; not likely, even if someone told me if I did the same on the Rats in the previous game (no, I didn't; but I did use a mod that gave me 99 copies of a page after burning a book), but I think it's too much an ask if the official game can't even provide tutorials (in normal Project Moon style) instead with people referring newcomers to a certain youtube channel's guides (which to be fair does not go too in-depth to the point it can't be understood by newcomers) in order to understand the basics.

Also, the phone version... just works(tm). It was fantastic that after I tabbed out, the game just froze and won't respond. I think I see why people recommend playing this on the PC, what with its miniscule UI being suited for bigger screens, and... that.

But I don't like playing gacha games of any form on the PC. And it's still a bit too much to ask people to wade through confusing content before they arrive at something peak, though I have no doubt that Project Moon can, and has already gotten to that point.

Project Moon's attempt at simultaneously cashing in the goodwill they built up with their two previous masterpieces by making a (fucking) gacha game while also trying to maintain their reputation by making the game less greedy than other gacha games while maintaining their high-quality storytelling. The result is a game that's ludonarratively much weaker than its predecessors and, uh, has bullshit like energy mechanics gating story progression behind real-time waits (unless you want to pay of course)... but still kinda justifies its existence by being a platform for Project Moon to create a long-form ongoing story set in its fantastic fictional universe.

The later cantos really do have great stories, but the game also suffers from a really horrible push and pull where they clearly want this to be a Real Video Game like the previous ones so there'll be bossfights that are actually challenging but that challenge ends up feeling completely hollow compared to previous games as unlocking/leveling up new IDs/EGO to try out new strategies on hard fights is locked behind f2p/gacha bullshit.

Unfortunately I can't stop playing because the story really is that good.

It's a Gacha game with energy mechanics to prevent you from playing at a certain point. It does look fair compared to those REALLY SCUMMY Gacha games by having a good battle pass, unlike whatever the fuck the likes of Genshin or Star Rail tell you a battle pass is, the pity system existing and being okay-ish, and the game giving you plenty of currency to pull with. It's still absolutely a fucking gambling simulator, so it's not going to get any points for that, but still, it COULD be worse.

The gameplay is frankly terrible, the only real gameplay is team building, so again gambling for the good characters and the good attacks, then picking your team based on the foes' weaknesses/strengths, followed by using your energy to farm EXP tickets to raise their levels, followed by actual gameplay which begins with an invisible dice roll deciding the speed of the characters followed by every single action being a dice roll to see if you succeed. Do you see the problem? You can theoretically have a perfect lineup for the enemies ahead and still fail due to dice rolls.

The ONLY reason this game should ever be considered by you is the story, which seemed so far so good to the end of Kanto 3 which is where I gave up out of boredom. The characters, the setting, and the art that brings those to life are all top-notch. The game is also fully voice-acted which is not a thing every gacha or even a normal game has, which took me by surprise. This is the only thing that strung me along and I'm going to work my way backward thought Studio Moon's catalog to find more about this world, but Limbus Company is a certified stinker.