A surprisingly well developed universe brimming with intresting lore set in an incredibly grounded setting featuring political strife, interplanetary wars, corporativism and a techno-magical ether/lifeforce known as Lumen. I would totally watch an original series set in the world of Opus. It's fantastical.
It's also bogged down by one of the most aggressively mediocre stories I've ever seen in a videogame. Borderline one dimensional characters who are basically walking anime stereotypes with zero personal growth aside from the final hour and a trope-filled narrative with minimal development.
If you've seen the first scene where the cast is introduced: congratulations, you've already seen it all. The honorable male protagonist with a savior complex and a tendency to apologize for everything he does, the female idealistic pariah with a heart of gold (who's obviously also the MC's platonic love interest) and her sidekick slash adopted protegé - a kid with a troubled past who literally spends the entire playthrough cussing and belittling the protagonist on every dialogue interaction they have. It's as grating as dragging your face through a mile of broken glass. Their motives stay the same throughout the entire game - and you'll be reminded of them quite a few times. Basically all the time.
Hilariously enough, the only character with any semblance of a well written story was the bandit leader known as Bones, who initially shows up as an antagonist and after being unexpectedly saved by the protagonist, gradually comes to term with his own life choices while serving time in prison.
As if the story wasn't bad enough, the gameplay revolves around an absolutely terrible system of RNG encounters, dice rolls and an abysmal resource management mechanic. Your reward for guessing the right outcomes is getting enough money to buy fuel and resources to continue your journey. Your penalty for being unlucky is having to do even more dice rolls... so you can continue doing the aforementioned dice rolls. Exhilarating.
Exploration gameplay gets the job done, you basically walk from point A to point B, but for a game that prides itself so much about its relationship with music, the "puzzles" (if one could even call those sequences as such) are extremely uninteresting and repetitive.
It's a 10h game that would've been infinitely better had it been just an average 3h visual novel. There's some good story there and touching moments ruined by everything else in between.
I only stuck through its entirety because of the raving reviews - after I realized it wasn't getting any better than that, I was already too far so might as well power through the rest - sunken time fallacy and all that. Maybe it's good enough for people who are used to generic, cheesy emotional anime narratives, but for everyone else, there's better games to invest your precious time into.
It's also bogged down by one of the most aggressively mediocre stories I've ever seen in a videogame. Borderline one dimensional characters who are basically walking anime stereotypes with zero personal growth aside from the final hour and a trope-filled narrative with minimal development.
If you've seen the first scene where the cast is introduced: congratulations, you've already seen it all. The honorable male protagonist with a savior complex and a tendency to apologize for everything he does, the female idealistic pariah with a heart of gold (who's obviously also the MC's platonic love interest) and her sidekick slash adopted protegé - a kid with a troubled past who literally spends the entire playthrough cussing and belittling the protagonist on every dialogue interaction they have. It's as grating as dragging your face through a mile of broken glass. Their motives stay the same throughout the entire game - and you'll be reminded of them quite a few times. Basically all the time.
Hilariously enough, the only character with any semblance of a well written story was the bandit leader known as Bones, who initially shows up as an antagonist and after being unexpectedly saved by the protagonist, gradually comes to term with his own life choices while serving time in prison.
As if the story wasn't bad enough, the gameplay revolves around an absolutely terrible system of RNG encounters, dice rolls and an abysmal resource management mechanic. Your reward for guessing the right outcomes is getting enough money to buy fuel and resources to continue your journey. Your penalty for being unlucky is having to do even more dice rolls... so you can continue doing the aforementioned dice rolls. Exhilarating.
Exploration gameplay gets the job done, you basically walk from point A to point B, but for a game that prides itself so much about its relationship with music, the "puzzles" (if one could even call those sequences as such) are extremely uninteresting and repetitive.
It's a 10h game that would've been infinitely better had it been just an average 3h visual novel. There's some good story there and touching moments ruined by everything else in between.
I only stuck through its entirety because of the raving reviews - after I realized it wasn't getting any better than that, I was already too far so might as well power through the rest - sunken time fallacy and all that. Maybe it's good enough for people who are used to generic, cheesy emotional anime narratives, but for everyone else, there's better games to invest your precious time into.