A real summation of OF's continuous efforts to modernize and change the series to keep with the times. OPPW4 has some of the best graphics, most stylish movesets, exciting music, and interesting mechanics in a musou in recent memory, the giant characters are cool, and I like the way they try to smooth out progression with a common upgrade pool.

I'm just tired of every one of these games becoming such slogs to play. As the developers have tried to expand the mechanical arsenal of the player to compete with more popular action RPGs that now dominate the console gaming landscape, their grip on core gameplay has come loose. Any enemy less than a unique officer might as well not exist as you breeze through them, no longer even useful for resource management as off screen battle work are not in play and special moves operate on cooldowns rather than being integral character functions. Boss type enemies have absurd hyper armor, preventing you from actually comboing or doing more than chip damage until they are put into a tightly timed stagger state, and you are frequently knocked out of combos or special moves as the devs decided we didn't need dodge offset anymore, and also gave us a stamina meter? God help us if OF ever makes a Soulslike.
It just makes an already repetitive game so much more of a slog, all the missions completely blur together, the mid-mission objectives and bases do nothing and don't matter, nothing fits together as smoothly as it did in PW3. It doesn't even come close to the sophistication required for the Nightmare Log and the high level scoring and secret objectives and 3. 4 can be fun at times but jeez is it buried under a mess of modern musou horseshit