This review contains spoilers
A game I found to be pretty mediocre all around which I consider to be a worse thing than being an interesting mess like XV. It's a game with a lot of missed potential, especially in regards to the storytelling. A lot of scenes are good in a vacuum but lack the buildup and context to really make use of them. I found it a fairly frustrating experience because the game threatens to be genuinely good at times but never quite gets there.
To start with the positive, the combat eventually becomes fun, though the game doles out your abilities extremely slowly early on causing the first couple of acts to be a bit tedious. You don't get any real character building opportunities until towards the end of the game's third act when you finally have enough eikonic power sets that you have to choose one to leave unequipped. But once you do get access to that stuff, the combat becomes more interesting, if a little "find your own fun". And yes as everyone and their mother has pointed out, the boss fights and the soundtrack both slap immensely. I also ended up quite liking the final antagonist in this one and his presence is a big factor in the game's final act being the most engaging (at least for me).
As for the negative.... well I guess let's start with the gameplay loop. The sidequests are all extremely boring and pointless, and usually feature one-off NPCs with very little personality and very little to say. Game's like this often use sidequests to explore bits of the world's lore in interesting ways, or as a vehicle for character work, but outside of a handful of (still pretty rubbish) quests, most of them are on the level of "bandits have attacked some merchants and we need to save them". This part of the game is stymied significantly by the game's party system meaning the game doesn't know what characters will be present for any given sidequest, so Clive is usually the only character commenting on anything, and our boy doesn't exactly have much to say. It's unfortunate to say the least.
The game misses a lot of it's emotional beats for me by having pivotal information be given to the player either far too early or too late resulting in what could have been an emotional scene not working. An early example of this is Clive's arc in the first act, in which he is forced to come to terms with being his brother's killer. This arc climaxes with Clive fighting his inner demons and accepting the sins of his past, forgiving himself, and gaining the resolve to atone by joining the effort to make the world a better place for the heavily oppressed Bearers. A powerful scene on paper, except that the player has known that his brother is in fact alive for about 5 hours of gameplay, rendering Clive's struggles essentially meaningless. Perhaps they were going for dramatic irony but the scene where Clive comes to terms with a sin the player knows he never committed is played as being triumphant rather than tragic so it's hard to believe that was the intent. This kind of thing happens several times later on, often with pivotal information to the emotional impact of a scene being hidden in the game's lore codex; a lot of tell and not a lot of show.
The cast is largely not very interesting, the vast majority are no-nonsense all-business stoics who rarely show their inner emotions, and the rest are smarmy jokesters who never show their inner emotions. The cast also get very little opportunity to bounce off of each other, and the supporting cast are often sidelined by the plot, meaning you never really get to see much of them, and when you do they only have Clive to talk to, a man who resists being bounced off of with every fiber of his being. The villains largely suffer from being insufficiently set up with a couple of exceptions (Kupka and Ultima) making their downfalls rarely narratively satisfying. They also kill off the most (only?) entertaining main character in the game's second act.
The game tries to go for a more mature tone but is often gratuitous or laughable in it's handling of it's subject matter, ironically making it a much more shallow and juvenile feeling experience than previous games, which tended towards the philosophical. There's really nothing going on beyond the surface level in this one.
All in all the game, weirdly, ends up reminding me of a particularly shoddy season of Kamen Rider: Only the main character gets to do anything, supporting characters are frequently sidelined, the rest only stick around for a single episode, and the plot is fairly surface level, but damn if it isn't exciting when he does a Rider Kick.
To start with the positive, the combat eventually becomes fun, though the game doles out your abilities extremely slowly early on causing the first couple of acts to be a bit tedious. You don't get any real character building opportunities until towards the end of the game's third act when you finally have enough eikonic power sets that you have to choose one to leave unequipped. But once you do get access to that stuff, the combat becomes more interesting, if a little "find your own fun". And yes as everyone and their mother has pointed out, the boss fights and the soundtrack both slap immensely. I also ended up quite liking the final antagonist in this one and his presence is a big factor in the game's final act being the most engaging (at least for me).
As for the negative.... well I guess let's start with the gameplay loop. The sidequests are all extremely boring and pointless, and usually feature one-off NPCs with very little personality and very little to say. Game's like this often use sidequests to explore bits of the world's lore in interesting ways, or as a vehicle for character work, but outside of a handful of (still pretty rubbish) quests, most of them are on the level of "bandits have attacked some merchants and we need to save them". This part of the game is stymied significantly by the game's party system meaning the game doesn't know what characters will be present for any given sidequest, so Clive is usually the only character commenting on anything, and our boy doesn't exactly have much to say. It's unfortunate to say the least.
The game misses a lot of it's emotional beats for me by having pivotal information be given to the player either far too early or too late resulting in what could have been an emotional scene not working. An early example of this is Clive's arc in the first act, in which he is forced to come to terms with being his brother's killer. This arc climaxes with Clive fighting his inner demons and accepting the sins of his past, forgiving himself, and gaining the resolve to atone by joining the effort to make the world a better place for the heavily oppressed Bearers. A powerful scene on paper, except that the player has known that his brother is in fact alive for about 5 hours of gameplay, rendering Clive's struggles essentially meaningless. Perhaps they were going for dramatic irony but the scene where Clive comes to terms with a sin the player knows he never committed is played as being triumphant rather than tragic so it's hard to believe that was the intent. This kind of thing happens several times later on, often with pivotal information to the emotional impact of a scene being hidden in the game's lore codex; a lot of tell and not a lot of show.
The cast is largely not very interesting, the vast majority are no-nonsense all-business stoics who rarely show their inner emotions, and the rest are smarmy jokesters who never show their inner emotions. The cast also get very little opportunity to bounce off of each other, and the supporting cast are often sidelined by the plot, meaning you never really get to see much of them, and when you do they only have Clive to talk to, a man who resists being bounced off of with every fiber of his being. The villains largely suffer from being insufficiently set up with a couple of exceptions (Kupka and Ultima) making their downfalls rarely narratively satisfying. They also kill off the most (only?) entertaining main character in the game's second act.
The game tries to go for a more mature tone but is often gratuitous or laughable in it's handling of it's subject matter, ironically making it a much more shallow and juvenile feeling experience than previous games, which tended towards the philosophical. There's really nothing going on beyond the surface level in this one.
All in all the game, weirdly, ends up reminding me of a particularly shoddy season of Kamen Rider: Only the main character gets to do anything, supporting characters are frequently sidelined, the rest only stick around for a single episode, and the plot is fairly surface level, but damn if it isn't exciting when he does a Rider Kick.