Previously, I'd have given this game 1.5/5 at best, there was the vision and potential of something that could have been really good, but everything felt extremely clunky, incomplete and half assed. With the afterlife expansion (which is free by the way), it feels like they remade the entire game from scratch. Everything feels way more polished, way more complete, way more fun overall. New areas, new weapons, new bosses, reworked mechanics, it has a lot of welcome additions that the main game seemed to be desperately missing.
It's still not really a perfect game by any means, and there are frustrating parts that kind of suck the fun out of your experience
(-some bosses are complete pushovers and jokes if you parry, while some other bosses feel needlessly tanky or gimmicky
-Finnesse weapons do laughable damage, even at lategame, which makes somewhat of a sense as it seems like a sensible drawback to make faster weapons weaker, yet how weak they feel just..makes boss combat especially incredibly unsatisfying, and basically forces you to constantly rely on parrying and nothing else to do noticeable damage
-upgrading your items feels way more worth the trouble than the previous version, but upgrade materials are still annoying to get, and the game's option of scrapping weapons and armor to get upgrade materials doesn't really work as, no matter how high level of an item you scrap, no matter how rare or special it is, from your shittiest item to your mightiest, any item you scrap will only give you a single upgrade material, while upgrading a single item to its full capacity can take up to 50 of these materials
-a lot of the cool weapons you get early game will have way too high of a stat cost for you to use them, meaning you spend a large amount of the game trying to get to the level where you can finally use that cool item you found way back at the start, though this may also depend on the class you choose)
Even with its flaws, the game manages to be so much better than what it was, it's voice acting is solid, writing is pretty decent and has a lot of funny stuff here and there, and the art feels nice to look at. I'd say if you gave this game a shot back in the day but gave up on it, give it a try again, you may be pleasantly surprised.
It's still not really a perfect game by any means, and there are frustrating parts that kind of suck the fun out of your experience
(-some bosses are complete pushovers and jokes if you parry, while some other bosses feel needlessly tanky or gimmicky
-Finnesse weapons do laughable damage, even at lategame, which makes somewhat of a sense as it seems like a sensible drawback to make faster weapons weaker, yet how weak they feel just..makes boss combat especially incredibly unsatisfying, and basically forces you to constantly rely on parrying and nothing else to do noticeable damage
-upgrading your items feels way more worth the trouble than the previous version, but upgrade materials are still annoying to get, and the game's option of scrapping weapons and armor to get upgrade materials doesn't really work as, no matter how high level of an item you scrap, no matter how rare or special it is, from your shittiest item to your mightiest, any item you scrap will only give you a single upgrade material, while upgrading a single item to its full capacity can take up to 50 of these materials
-a lot of the cool weapons you get early game will have way too high of a stat cost for you to use them, meaning you spend a large amount of the game trying to get to the level where you can finally use that cool item you found way back at the start, though this may also depend on the class you choose)
Even with its flaws, the game manages to be so much better than what it was, it's voice acting is solid, writing is pretty decent and has a lot of funny stuff here and there, and the art feels nice to look at. I'd say if you gave this game a shot back in the day but gave up on it, give it a try again, you may be pleasantly surprised.