Beat em up and point and click actually work together. The art, voice acting and gameplay are brilliant. The Beat em up difficulty is fair and fun. But what bugs me is the puzzles esp . Those are not well crafted. Good puzzles should be challenging and come with clues that trigger players’ interest and give them a sense of achievement. Games like Nine Witches: Family Disruption and Norco nail it! But in Brok, clues present themselves too obvious and not in an appropriate order. The sequences of puzzles also fail to make sense. For example, . Too many layers of puzzles while giving players no clues about the sequences of each one. If I do not talk to the npc twice, I will be forever stuck there. Puzzles should be well designed and reasonably challenging instead of letting players rely on clue tickets.
I love everything about the game but the prison puzzles really put a bad taste in my mouth. It’s a 10, but with these puzzles, I give it 7.

Oh man, Square Enix, why have you forsaken this IP and won't give us a port, a remaster or even a remake of this amazing game :D Xenogears, even if it's obviously unfinished, is a fucking masterpiece. The themes addressed here are simply not found in current JRPGs which is super unfortunate. Among other things, it deals with the abuse of religion and power, human experimentation, racism, metaphysics and much more. The soundtrack is one of the best I've ever heard (Mitsuda at his best), the combat system (or rather combat systemS) is innovative and fun, the characters are almost all very well written and the story is the big highlight of this game. Unfortunately disc 2 really isn't finished but also not as bad as its reputation and yes, the story is completed and finished, only some passages aren't playable and are presented as a slide show.

The game is phenomenal, it's amazing that Square was capable of producing something like this in the past.

This game is full of things i didn't expect but the biggest are how earnestly and boldly it leans into its yuri and horror aspects. It pulls no punches when it comes to these girls being textually gay as well as having , while not downright disturbing, very good horror scenes.
the level design is really bad like not even rpgmaker bad but it seems to have been made in a nightmare world where iterations of "get to place in time" are things people look for in games. I think it inflated my play time by actually 3 hours and is the reason that as much as i want to i will not be going back and getting any of the other endings anytime soon (i looked them up on youtube)
i kept trying to formulate excuses for the game but i think maybe astral shift needs to hire an actual game designer.
The only other games I can compare this to design wise are "classic" rpgmaker games but those are excused by the fact that they are free, often short games. I payed money for this so yeah there is an expectation there that it would not employ this shit to artificially make the game longer? scarier? more dificult? I actually don't know what the fuck its trying to do.I compare it to rpgmaker horror games because it is clear (almost textual) that it's where this game comes from, but it really irks me when people call it an rpgmaker game, there is a distinction between aligning yourself with that legacy and literally BEING MADE IN THAT ENGINE. There are idiosyncrasies that rpgmaker has that this game surprisingly captures but its not made in the fucking engine. I dont want this to just become a catch all term because i am a huge fan of things made in the engine and as not all games made in it are horror games starring girls not all games that share its aesthetics and mechanics are.
There is however one thing this has in common with "rpgmaker horror" games : theres something about rpgmaker games and the like being so fucking into their own shit that they forget to think of the player. like this game and so many before it will just have actually hard chase sequences right after cutscenes w no checkpoint in between like yeah fuck it get trapped in the time loop nightmare dimension untill you figure out how to do this very specific movement, bitch. its admirable and in this game has to be intended because no way have 10+ years of rpgmaker horror games passed and no dev has thought hey maybe this is infuriating,lliiiike theres something there right? the games not scary but its oppressive its annoying it makes you feel trapped and i think thats kind of beautiful
maybe im just bad at playing games? But it almost feels like getting 100 game overs is part of the game design
esp on parts that seem like they have no way to predict where hits will come from
and every time i finish a night segment and get back into the main game the comical vein that has been pulsating on my forhead retreats and i enter a state of bliss untill the inevitable next night when i will actually take a bite out of my switch.

My favorite thing in this game is the art and insane creativity in presentation. I audibly gasped when I saw the handmade assets. Not gonna say anything else about the art because its actually perfect.