The story has always been weak,
And the writing's easy to critique,
But the gameplay is king,
And Gemdrop's big swing,
turns this classic into something chic.

One of the most content-packed games that I have ever played, I have still not gotten sick of it yet. Incredibly impressive attention to detail and full voice acting literally everywhere arouses my loser ass that cannot read attentively. I want Karlach to ignite my balls. I haven't been so genuinely engrossed in a game's plot or characters in forever and it feeds the little man in my brain who yearns for bedtime stories. My only complaint is streaks of personal bad luck except that contributes to comical failures that end up being fun regardless.

I finished my first playthrough with 150 hours and I am already planning for my 2nd and 3rd playthroughs.

One of the most fundamentally satisfying combinations of gameplay loops make this feel so effortlessly solid just from reading the basic description that you hunt fish in a tiny roguelite loop during the day to sell them in your sushi restaurant at night. That is a perfect premise already. The presentation, music and steady supply of new systems, upgrades and tons of little gameplay twists and flourishes then elevate this to greatness and most remarkably keep a consistent fresh pacing over the almost 30 hours it unexpectedly took me to complete this, never running out of steam. It struck a similar nerve for me as Cult of the Lamb last year which I was just as hopelessly addicted to, so beware, Dave the Diver will leech your time and you won't even notice it.

I have had mixed feelings on this game ever since I began playing it. On paper, this is a game I would love, a revenge story focusing on two brothers in a medieval dark fantasy world with the gameplay of a character action game and rpg progression, its like it was made for me.

However the longer I played the game the less I began to like it, I found little things that bugged me, I found I was rarely if ever invested in the seemingly never ending flood of cutscenes, the rpg elements seemed almost non-existent, and the combat revealed itself to be more shallow than I originally thought. I realized this is a game of breathtaking highs and mind numbing lows. I started to dread playing the game as the lows seemed to consume the highs for hours at a time until we come to this point now where I'm writing this review and the things that stick out in my mind about this game after finishing it are the numerous problems I had with it rather than the stunning highlights.

I'll go over what I liked first. The visuals and overall presentation are stunning, I had minor performance issues but I can excuse them when the game looks this good. I found the first probably 40% of the story to be very engaging and exciting. This section focus almost entirely on the protagonist Clive and his personal arc. This section feels like it should have been the entire game and ended much too early in my opinion. I constantly wanted to see what would happen next and I was looking forward to learning more about the characters and the world. The combat looks and feels good even if it doesn't have much depth. I really liked some of the characters and I thought Clive was particularly good. Along with the last point I thought all the performances were great, I played in English and it felt like everyone brought their A-game. And finally, the boss fights and set pieces are some of the best I have ever experienced in a game and were fun enough to keep me playing through the second half of the game. That is where the positives end for me, however, the things this game does well are done to near perfection and make me hesitant to straight up say I disliked the game.

Onto what I disliked. The second half of this game was a genuine slog to get through. The story goes from being personal revenge narrative that is hyper-focused on a single character and their struggle into a very generic jrpg plot with an attempted political drama backdrop. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but the politics fell flat for me once I realized that there are very few differences between the political factions, they all want the same things, and they almost never collide with each other leaving me to question the heavy focus the story gives this section with one exception which I won't spoil. Without interesting politics all that's left is the aforementioned generic jrpg plot which also feels underdeveloped, neither the characters nor the world itself react or change because of the massive events that take place in the set pieces, which makes the story feel stagnant in my opinion.

I've gone back and forth on how I feel about the combat, but as of right now while writing this I can't say I think the combat in this game is good. They did away with almost all traditional rpg aspects including a controllable party, turned-based combat, elemental weaknesses, and even ability selection from the past two real-time Final Fantasy games for something more closely resembling a character action game. I don't mind the change on paper, Devil May Cry is one of my favorite franchises, I love games like Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising and a big part of that are the easy-to-learn-hard-to-master combat systems those games have. Unfortunately the game doesn't really commit to either style of gameplay. There are loose rpg elements although I'd argue they are too simple to really think about in most cases, equipment is just stat increases, and the skills mostly come down to if you want single-target or AOE damage. This would be fine if the character action side was polished enough to stand with the best of 'em, but its not. There are no combo extension tools, air mobility, stylish combos (or more than one combo in general), or even multiple weapons/stances. The main thing feature it brings are the Eikon abilities which each give Clive one unique ability to use in combat along with it's skills which as mentioned before, mostly boil down to simple damage. These abilities are pretty cool and some of them are incredibly useful even if a good number of them feel kind of same-y. However, because you can only equip 3 at a time, I gravitated towards the 3 I thought were best and never changed them, I also don't see myself changing them at all if I ever replay the game because the abilities are either clearly inferior to others, or they don't change the gameplay enough to warrant using over something else. The combat simply doesn't have the depth or replayability of the average character action game. This leaves the combat feeling that of an action rpg, but the rpg elements are missing, see what I'm getting at here? Add onto this the lack of controllable party members and it leaves little room for variation. It feels like there was supposed to be more to this. Each Eikon changes the element of Clive's magic, the problem is because there are no elemental weaknesses this change means nothing. It makes more sense to me to look at it as if there were originally things like elemental weaknesses and controllable party members but they were cut and the developers just gave everything to Clive. Overall I thought the combat was okay, I didn't get bored but I wasn't wowed by it and I'm certainly to itching to play more of it, I prefer FF7 Remake and even FF15's styles of combat over this game.

The structure of the game becomes very formulaic at a certain point. Clive will go to a new place on the map and do some of the most boring quests you can imagine, receive a kind of entry pass, go through this game's version of a traditional dungeon which plays more like levels from DMC, then there is one of those amazing set pieces I mentioned earlier concluding with Clive facing off against the minor villain of the week. This happens over and over again except it feels like the quests you are forced to go through become more and more boring the longer the game goes on. This brings me another major problem, the quests. These main filler quests and nearly all of the side quests are awful. They are designed like MMO quests, "go here get this", "retrieve 3 of these things and maybe fight an enemy", "talk to these people in order" and so on. I originally planned to do something I almost never do, I was going to complete all of the side quests, and those who know me know I do not often do side content without a very good incentive. I thought this was feasible because the number of side quests given in the early game is so low. I thought I could get some xp on the side doing these boring quests every now and then. However, as the side quests became more numerous more frequently and the main quests started to resemble the side quests more and more, I gave up, it was just too boring. These filler main quests also contributed to the problem of the game being too long in my opinion. Many of the quests felt like complete filler that could be taken out completely and the game would lose nothing of value. I've heard that there are nearly 20 hours of cutscenes in this game. If this number is accurate I will have spent more time watching cutscenes than playing the game yet I still don't know surface level details about the game's world and many of it's characters. What was that time spent on? I honestly don't know because one would assume the game would convey much more information than it did during that time.

This review seems much more negative than I originally intended, the more I think about this game the less I like it. Almost everything I think is good about the game occurs in the first 10-15 hours and then the quality falters more as the game reaches it end. Right now I'm giving the game a 6/10 although that could easily go up or down depending on the day and what part of the game I'm thinking about. I was quite disappointed by Final Fantasy 16.