I really enjoyed most of my time with this game. The combat is super fun, and gets deeper and deeper as you unlock more character abilities and nodes on your brain tree.

I think my problem lies in how they chose to tell the story. You choose between two protagonists, Kasane and Yuito. Their stories largely diverge and reveal different pieces of information, the idea being that you play both stories in order to get everything out of the game. This on the surface is fine, but in practice you're still playing the same game. You go to mostly similar locations, you talk to mostly similar people, you play through dozens of occasionally interminably boring Bond Episodes (some are great though). And then at about 70% of the way through the game the storylines converge! So you play the last quarter-ish TWICE if you decide to play through both characters stories.

I just can't help but feel like there would have been an interesting way to weave the stories together so that you're playing both at the same time, swapping characters where it feels natural to see where the other character is and what they're up to.

I'm really keen to see what they would do with a sequel and I hope they have a play with narrative structure and how to make that a more enjoyable experience.

Note: I finished the game as Yuito and by the end of it I was exhausted and had literally no desire to play Kasane's. Good 40 hour RPGs introduce new events and settings across the 40 hours. This one just makes you play the same 20 hours twice.