Wish this game had auto-advanced dialogue in all cutscenes. Initially, you think it does, but after the first 2 hours, a lot of dialogue needs you to constantly press x to advance.

One thing I do like is that in the skill menu, you can tag 1 skill per character in your party and the game will notify you when you have enough skill points to purchase the skill.

Though, I'm not a fan of the game's lock-on mechanic. I played on manual. It uses an automatic hard lock-on that allows you to switch between targets except you can't turn off the lock-on and your character doesn't face the enemy that is locked on so it is very normal in this sense to attack and miss because your camera isn't always following the locked-on target as one would expect. However, it mostly works out because it's clear that the game doesn't want you to always move around during combat. In that case, doing combos and landing attacks works better because a lot of moves have gap closers. There is still the big annoyance of the fact that the camera doesn't follow the enemy that's locked on nor will it automatically change to the nearest enemy unless you press the lock-on button again.

Combos are handled in a manner where the game encourages you to not just spam the base three-hit combo nor should you spam the same power moves, aka artes. Instead, you want to mix them up because if you spam your base combo, your character stops moving for a full second after it ends and if you spam the artes within a four-combo string, they will do less damage to the enemy and have reduced stagger ability. On top of that, you have the burning sword which allows you to do special moves that deal more damage than a typical arte but at the cost of health instead of AG.

I was not a fan of the balseph boss. Readability is an issue due to the amount of bullshit effects that he does that obscures the screen.

Ganabelt is a tough boss, a very tough boss. I died 5 times back to back against him. The fight has the same issue as Balseph with too many effects happening on the screen at once. Ganabelt uses a lot of projectiles with particle effects and the game also specifically wants you to use boost attacks frequently to break his shield, this leads to a messy mirage of blue, red, & green lights all blocking the screen at once. Far too much visual noise in the game in general. It is disheartening in games like this where you can do 6 back-to-back super moves on a boss and you barely remove 1000 health in his 24000 health bar. This type of game design is not something that I like at all.

It's also from this point onward that I realized that every major humanoid boss will enter their super mode where they can't be stunned and they can spam astral artes once you reduce their health down to 50%, and many of them will typically take 10 - 15 seconds to charge their ultimate move in which they're stationary and you're allowed to do a bunch of free hits on them but you can't interrupt the ultimate move. Ultimate moves typically cover a large portion of the battlefield with a huge damage area of effect attack. The issue with this is that while you can't interrupt them, they can certainly interrupt you because these ultimate moves always play an unskippable cutscene. There are quite a few moves (boost strikes and mystic artes) in this game that have unskippable cutscenes mid-combat that have pros and cons. The big pro with them is that they typically do a good amount of damage, the bad news is that they interrupt whatever the party is doing and reposition the enemy. If you or an AI party member is doing a high damage attack, charging up an arte, trying to heal, or mid-combo, the cutscene will play and completely stop that, and once the cutscene is over, it will move the enemy away and reposition the camera too. The fortunate thing is that it also resets the enemy's movement so you can get breathing room if a group of enemies or a boss is kicking ass. It's shit though if you're doing really well and you have to be forced to stop because an AI party member did a mystic arte. Fortunately, you can disable those artes from AI usage like you can disable just about every other arte in the game. It's just typically beneficial to enable them because of damage and usefulness.

Most side quests are broken up into kill all enemies, fetch items, or heal people quests. They're not spectacular, however, I love the fact that you can complete some side quest objectives before you even meet the quest giver. So if a dragon is terrorizing an area and you encounter the dragon and kill it or if you went to an underground cavern and killed a powerful zeugel - then later on stumble on the quest giver and they ask you to kill a dragon in the field or kill a zeugel because merchants want to use an underground tunnel for quick travel, your party members will tell the quest giver that you already killed the dragon or zeugles in the underground area. Too bad main quests aren't like this, they're more linear and their quest items and objectives won't even appear until you progress in the story. For such a long game, there isn't much enemy variety. I understand this because each party members boost attack directly counters or interrupts a specific enemy type but you quickly realize that you're fighting the exact same enemy over and over and it eventually got annoying. It's not the worst implementation of low enemy variety but directly coming from Kingdom Hearts 1.5, it was a surprise.

Overall though, the game world design and quest structure are very linear - not in the shimmy through tight corners like FF7 remake linear - but in the quest objectives only have one way to complete them and only one area you can through. In the manner that even though the main plot of the game is to kill 5 Renan lords and liberate 5 realms of the Dahna homeworld - you will only do it in the exact order that is outlined in the game. Even within the main quests, you will be obstructed by invisible walls for areas that the game doesn't want you to go to yet.

However, I do like the progression systems in this game. They're divided into levels, skills, and arte proficiency.

You have levels that you progress through by gaining xp which increases your 6 stats. XP is only gained in battle.

Each party member has their skills divided into multiple skill trees. Most skill trees are unlocked by completing objectives like cooking x meals, saving x NPCs, finding x owls, creating x weapons, destroying armor with your arte x times, etc., and individual skills are unlocked by using skill points. Skill points (SP) are gained by winning in combat and completing quests. So they're separate from just leveling up. Then you have your arte proficiencies which is where you increase the efficiency of your activated skills by using them more in combat. The only downside is that you won't unlock certain skill trees till you progress deep into the main story because certain side quests, NPCs, recipes, owls, etc. aren't encountered until then and this is a very linear game.

Then after that, you have combat points and the battle chain bonus. After every combat encounter, you are graded based on how quickly you killed your enemy, what moves you used, whether your party was knocked out, etc. You gain XP and SP, then you get a multiplier bonus to XP & SP if you did well and you get none if you did bad such as winning but having all party members knocked out. What the battle chain bonus does is give you even more bonuses and a greater item drop chance on top of the previously mentioned bonus if you keep on doing well in many combat encounters within a short period. I'm surprised more JRPGs don't have this mechanic because it ridiculously alleviates how long one spends grinding if they choose to do so while also giving an even greater incentive to continue combat. It only sucks that the battle chain isn't unlocked as a mechanic until you reach the 3rd realm of the game. Overall, leveling up and upgrading skills is very slow in this game. You will still gain just enough XP & SP to be roughly the same level as the major boss of the main area/dungeon. Outside of that, even defeating 20+ enemies that are each 20 levels higher than your party won't net you 1 level up. All of this level pacing gets thrown off within the end game. Right about that point you'll unlock side quests that will give up to double XP. Those quests have some of the hardest boss fights in the end game and you'll likely lose them if you aren't on the same level as the boss and if you lack healing items. By that point, all that's left is to beat the game. When you get into the post-game content, however, this game has a good amount of it. You can now fight against all the previous major boss fights except this time they're all buffed to the max level of 99. There are 6 new dungeons in alternate worlds and four new real boss fights in this, the other two are rehashes of bosses in the base game. It is important that I point out that leveling went through the roof in post-game. Within 4 hours, I was able to get 30 levels in the post-game. That's more gains just in the post-game with no farming, just fighting through each area once and their boss. It's a bit ridiculous because this pacing would've been significantly more rewarding for the preceding 100 hours. On top of that, you unlock the "devil arms" for defeating each of the bosses of this area with one caveat. 5/6 of these weapons have worse stats than the next best weapons in the game, but devil arms can be upgraded to 9999 attack, elemental attack, & penetration. They increase in all these values for every enemy you kill. I didn't waste time doing this because by this point I had already beaten every boss in the game and had no interest in farming low-level enemies to increase damage. My only thought from there is, why not introduce devil arms at an early or midpoint of the game? From there, you'd have more incentive to try using a weapon that starts with lower stats but can eventually become one of the best weapons in the game, instead of getting it after you already beat the game. On top of that, there's a new game+ with many difficulty modes. I haven't tried the hardest difficulty mode, just hope it isn't BS with giving bullet sponge enemies even more health.

Even as a party-based action RPG they've been able to severely minimize how much micromanagement you have over your party by giving you a heap of options. You can play the game manually, semi-auto where you don't need to control your movement in combat, or auto where the game plays out combat for your main character and party without your inputs. You can switch to any of your party members mid-combat and take control of them or you can leave them to act on their own. The upside of not controlling your party members is that they have access to all their active skills/artes and can use them as they please, if you control them you only have access to six ground-activated artes and six activated air artes. The AI is good enough to control your other party members good enough to fight on their own if set to manual, however, when set to auto with AI controlling the entire party there are things that aren't good enough. For one, I realized that the AI won't use dodge counterattacks, counter edge, boost attacks, or a boost strike which is weird as fuck. I understand why you wouldn't want AI doing boost attacks because they're more situational and take a while to regenerate, but the player would always want to use a boost strike on normal enemies to instant kill them and always want to do counterattacks and counteredge due to the fact that they instantly cross the battlefield to the enemy and have huge invincibility frames.

They go even further by giving you a strategy menu where you can detail exactly how you want your computer-controlled party to fight with tactics such as "use the skill "steel" once when encountering an enemy that is at least 1 level higher" or "use an ailment removing arte on anyone affected with an ailment while having 25% or more CP". It's great and I'm surprised more of these non-turn-based party-based RPGs don't have this. Dragon Age: Origins did but I wished the FF7 remake had this.

However, the game starts to spoil itself later on after the fourth major region by having a lot of combat encounters back to back. The hitboxes and button presses in this game are imprecise at times, and once you lose Shionne you lose your best healer. Dohalim isn't as good of a healer as Shionne because the game's AI wants him to engage in combat more frequently than her, even if you set the strategy to focus on healing.

Even earlier than that, after the 3rd major region, the game massively inflates the health of every single enemy. Combat now becomes extremely tedious because you need to mash a large series of buttons constantly to take down enemies that don't necessarily require better tactics than what you had in the early portion. It makes combat incredibly tiring and especially annoying. Seriously, you'll fight bosses with 150,000 - 200,000 health where your regular attacks do 90 - 150 damage and they can do 1000 - 2000 damage to your meager 2800 health bar with one hit. Far too many damage sponges as the game progresses.

This is a good time to start discussing healing and the CP system. Healing through artes/spells/skills in this game is done with a shared pool called CP. CP is also consumed by non-combat optional things like breaking scripted boulders, ice, magic barriers, and/or healing people. The only way you can heal without using CP is either sleeping in an inn, or camp, using restorative items that you buy or find in the world - though there are a few of them, and healing in a magic light right before major boss fights. This sort of healing makes you have to constantly consider how much you want to heal because you have a limit to how many healing items you can hold at a specific time. It becomes significantly more punishing mid-game because of the lengthy dungeons with no camps/inns, very few healing item drops that aren't locked behind a CP-required interaction event, and the large number of damage sponge enemies you have to fight. While you can fast travel out of dungeons and fast travel into certain floors of dungeons, doing so will respawn every enemy. This creates a weird loop where you must be fairly prepared before going into one of the major dungeons, you'll kill many enemies and eventually fight 1 or 2 major bosses and a few minibosses, get good item loot, but you can't forge those better weapons and buy the better armor unless you leave mid-dungeon so you're strong enough to fight the bosses. Without doing so, those bosses are an annoying affair with huge hitboxes and massive health bars. So you're heavily incentivized to beat every major side monster boss because they will expand your CP.

As for money, I think the game does a fine job with the economy. You have things you should be buying because forging weapons costs gold, creating accessories costs gold, and buying items costs gold. You have to forge all the weapons in the game since there are no weapon drops. While there are few pieces of armor you can find in the world, most of the armor you wear has to be bought. Same for restorative items. If you don't farm, early - mid-game you'll have to somewhat spend time worrying about not having the absolute best gear because you likely don't have enough gold or you haven't encountered the enemies that drop the necessary crafting items for better weapons. Mid-late game, however, you'll typically have more than enough gold to buy all you need because the lengthy dungeons have huge stashes of gold and items to sell.

So far my biggest gripes with the overall story is how it treats its setting, side characters, and pacing. As I progressed, I realized that each subsequent realm in the game engages in some form of oppressive government between the renans and the Dhanans.

The first realm was a slave state where the renan lord was cruel and harsh and ruled over every dhanan with an iron fist and kept them in chains. The second realm was more of a police state with a Gestapo in which the Dhanans feared for their lives and snitched on their fellow countrymen for food and safety but the dictator restricted them from owning things and letting his Gestapo run the place arresting and torturing people. The third has a benevolent Renan ruler that liberated the dhanans from slavery and gave them equal treatment and position within his realm 7 years prior. Due to that, the Dhanans don't want to leave the realm nor do they want to support a major rebellion. The fourth realm's rebellion was led by a successful dictator who sacrificed his people to drive out their old lord, but he ruled with an iron fist. The big issue with all of this is that all these ideas aren't explored in-depth and just feel very surface-level because we don't spend too much time within all these areas - just about 5 or 6 hours total - and all the side quests are very simple as previously mentioned and don't aid in large scale worldbuilding or characterization. Each of these realms could be its own game or could be vastly longer, but by the time you follow the main quest and kill the lord of the realm, the only reason you need to go back is typically one side quest that's about the aftermath of liberating that specific realm because the story is urging you to move forward > kill lord > and immediately go to the next region. There should be more engaging side content revolving around the setting because the premise in itself is interesting to require that. Insofar as dialogue and character interactions are concerned, there are 300 skits in this game which are pretty much companion cutscenes where they discuss and comment on the other characters, events, locations, politics, and their feelings toward what's happening within the story. It's great because you get to know more about what your party thinks and it provides large amounts of exposition. Just think this sort of thing would be better if it was done in a side quest or in a more environmental manner from the other characters within the story than short stilted cutscenes from your party.

Ultimately, the game was vastly longer than I expected. I ended at a little over 100+ hours which I didn't expect. I am not a fan of the latter third of the story with all the alien, conspiracy, and friendship nonsense that the game devolved into. It was almost a very expected result according to the battle shonen I've played. I don't know why they didn't just spend more time giving the previous main plot of slavery, Dahna, and Rena depth instead of the whole great spirit manipulating aliens manipulating humans thing. By the end game the game dumps a lot of exposition through many cutscenes and hallway > loading screen dungeons while having a very lame villain in Vholran. I didn't talk about accessories because I don't think there's much to talk about. It's the only real way to build your party that doesn't always have one good choice. It will make you properly strong in the endgame once you start finding 5* ores to create accessories. I ended up enjoying my time with the game.

Took about 8 hours on normal. I bounced on and off at the beginning of this game but came back nearly a year later in Act 3 and the game clicked.

There is something within the dialogue, the bombastic characters, and the over-the-top manner in which weapons and kills occur that strongly clicked with me and I just played the game straight and beat it in a day after that point. It's in the same vein as Borderlands, broforce, gears of war, and a few other macho shooters except it isn't as silly as the former in terms of trying to be a comedy and it doesn't take itself as seriously as the latter.

It's called Bulletstorm because most of the fun in this game is based on all the "creative" ways you can kill enemies with your weapon + environment + leash combos. Its entire combat is predicated on this which is why it's a bit weak in the beginning when you only have the pistol + assault rifle which are the most boring weapons in the game. By Act 3 when you've unlocked most of the other weapons in the game you generally have many fun weapons that have different alternative firing modes that allow you to constantly pick off, crush, explode, and impale enemies with their type of ammo, or into the various environmental hazards. The names of the 130+ executions popping on the screen, the sound + visual effects, and the goofy & aggressiveness of the enemies lend themselves to me laughing through a lot of this game from that point on. The game has a cool sliding mechanic that allows you to slide at any point, it's a bit faster than sprinting and it kicks enemies into the air. The leash is the other central mechanic that allows you to pull enemies and certain objects toward the player and suspend them midair in slow motion.

However, there are a few things that nagged me. This is a linear FPS which was common in the 7th gen of gaming. That means you can't jump at all, and your protagonist has slower movement that ends up with him getting stuck into environments at times. You have permanent companions throughout the entire game, but they don't do as much damage as I expected. I hate this sort of thing in games where you have companions but they are less than useful.
The other thing that stuck out like a sore thumb was the fact that you have all these cool weapons yet you can only equip three at once, and when you go to the store and buy ammo for an unequipped weapon, it will unequip one of your current weapons and equips that weapon. It was odd, but this seemed to be a no-brainer for the devs because upon beating the game, you unlock overkill mode which allows you to equip all weapons at once and further allows you to have unlimited ammo for each weapon as long as you've completed all their skill shots. This is the preferred way to play the game for me, it's not a difficult game and it's not the type of game where I would enjoy losing a lot of health and constantly hiding to regenerate.

There's a cutscene bug at the beginning of Act 7 involving a story revelation that still isn't fixed.

Finally, the game ends on a surprise sequel bait cliffhanger, but the game never got a sequel and will likely never get one. Overall, it was a fun time. It is good shooting fun.

Classic difficulty, no scaling, turn-based mode, monk with no subclass. Regretting playing in turn-based mode in the early game, combat doesn't start becoming interesting till you have a part of 3 - 4 and you're level 4. Ideally, you should be able to flip-flop between RTwP & turn-based, even if the game has to reload because it only affects combat.

Monk class active abilities: Mortification of the soul, raised torment, stunning surge, swift fury, turning & iron wheel, skyward kick, the long pain, the dichotomous soul, launching kick, resonant touch, inner death & whispers of the wind. The most useful ones ended up being mortification of the soul, stunning surge, launching kick, skyward kick, resonant touch, & whispers of the wind.
The monk has two resources used for abilities, one that doesn't replenish in combat and another that fills as the monk takes damage. Mortification of the soul damages the monk and doing so fills the latter resource, but it costs 0 of the former resource. The damage it does is low enough that it's easily manageable, because of this, the monk can effectively use most of his active skills in combat without running out of resources. On top of that having resonant touch applies a passive bonus where the monk can activate resonance touch and every enemy that the monk has hit in combat takes a bunch of damage based on how many times they've been hit by the monk. Whispers of the wind is pretty much a flash move where the monk jumps from each enemy and hits all of them numerous times, in most combat encounters this means that the monk will clear the entire screen and damage everyone. You can easily spam this move each turn by just using mortification for a very small health loss for a big AOE move. For the enemies that don't die easily because they have huge health or armor, they're hit a lot which means they have a huge resonance score which means activating resonance touch leads to them taking huge damage.

In turn-based mode, knockdown & stun attacks are incredibly useful because they stack and make the enemy lose 1 or more turns. This is incredibly useful against enemies that can't be interrupted when they start casting a spell because they can still be knocked down. This is where launching kick and skyward kick are super useful, the former can cross the entire screen and will knock down all enemies in its path, and the latter can knock down any enemy I used it against that wasn't too high level.

By level 18 - max level, the monk is so OP that I can break through a lot of the game's combat fairly easily in turn-based mode. It was really fun and she was the big damage dealer and tank at the same time.


I wish the game allowed you to level up your party members when you're in the overworld, or when you're on your ship. It seems like a bizarre oversight. Would also be great to have auto-play for dialogue.

I do wish the game controlled better at times. I dislike the fact that they used the entire touchpad only for tutorials. This is a waste because tutorials only pop up whenever you encounter some new mechanic or system for the first time. Why not map the damn map or inventory to the touchpad? As it is now, you have to fucking go to the game wheel every time to bring either up.

Some good things out of the gate: There is a "fast" mode outside of combat that seems to double or triple game speed. There's a max of 1.8x game speed and a minimum of .5x speed choices in combat which means combat typically doesn't drag on with you watching slow animations. That's great.

I like the fact that you have an unlimited inventory and that you have area loot where you only have to click once to loot a pile of corpses. Though I wish there was an option to put loot within trash or favorite it.

Also, you can respec your skills & powers but can't respec attributes and class. It's good that you can do this in any tavern, it kind of sucks that the base traits can't be changed.

Most of the time your companion's skills can directly impact dialogue & scripted skill checks, or contribute to your skill stat for those skill checks. God, why don't more party RPGs do this? However, one baffling choice was the various scripted choices found on many of the islands where the game automatically uses your party member with the lowest attribute for that specific stat check. I don't think this is ever explicitly mentioned in the game, it's something I realized after save-scumming specific scripted encounters and noticed that the game constantly "failed" the stat check by checking the same companions even though I had others that had high enough attributes for the check.

On the bad side, the game still has many technical issues. 45 hours in, I had two crashes on PS5. Went up to 5 crashes 55 hours in. 40 crashes 100+ hours in. There are random freezes mid-game, though this is infrequent. There are times when the game will shuffle the order of save files so the latest save file isn't at the top. Many times you can't select any option in the menu wheel until you reload the game. When you enter sneak mode, and then leave, your character can't run anymore until you enter and leave sneak mode again. When you have too many buffs and debuffs on a character, it will block your options within the action bar during combat. There are areas in the game where enemies are invincible because they can't be targeted while they constantly attack the player. Outside of combat, when you switch to using the cursor, it locks onto a door and won't let you select the ground to move your party.
One huge issue in turn-based combat is the fog of war implementation. If combat is started in an area, all enemies are immediately aggroed, even those far outside the vicinity and those still in the fog of war. So what ends up happening is that the game will shuffle through every single enemy in the list and many times the enemies don't move, they're just invisible behind the fog of war and you end up waiting 30 seconds till their turn ends before you can do anything. I'd recommend playing the PC version because it likely has fewer technical issues than whatever this porting studio did.

In general, this game sits in a place where it really isn't too hardcore but not too simple either. You still have to rest to gain back many of your skills and heal your injuries, but you don't have too much restriction where your health automatically regens to max outside combat.

One thing that annoys me about certain isometric RPGs is when their mechanics don't consider the terrain or positioning. I'm in Engwithan Digsite and have a perfect opportunity to ambush a bunch of monsters while having the vantage point of being above them. The thing is that this game isn't one of those games where you can always attack enemies if you're a floor above or below them, many times you have to move to their level on the battlefield. It ruined my tactic of using Eder to just shoot the monsters with a bow and arrow because pressing attack forces him to move close to their position before he resumes the action. So it is fairly inconsistent in that manner.

Companion pathfinding still isn't great after. One of your companions can detect a trap yet the rest of them will still walk into the trap afterward. I swear there was a game that figured this out.

Turn-based combat again. A lot of times, the cursor will tell you that your party member can move in a certain direction, just for you to try moving there, then you can't because another party member is in your way, and all your movement points are wasted and your party member is forced to walk back to their original position.

As for the pirate motif, I quite enjoyed it. Not like there are many pirate/colonial period-based RPGs in the first place. There are a few ships you can purchase in the game, and they're all available for purchase after you get your ship. One of the more mixed things stated about this game is the text-based turn-based ship combat, it can seem complex because it has a different combat system than your typical party combat, however, I didn't think it was that bad. I do think it becomes too formulaic after a certain point. Once I learned that you just need to turn, fire cannons, and repeat this, ship combat became a bit braindead. It was smart that you could board ships from the get-go, intimidate, or flee with percentage chances but I think being able to just board a ship almost anytime when you're losing is a bit cheap because the enemies on ships tend to be weaker than what you typically encounter on the different islands and quests.
Combine this with the very large amount of bounty quests in this game, there are about two dozen, and you get a bit tired of "go here kill x person" quests.

The game has three major expansions, each focusing on a separate god and each has one of the sidekicks as a focus which is good on paper because the sidekicks are the companions with the least characterization, dialogue, and story presence in the base game. Beast of Winter focuses on rymrgand. Seeker, Slayer, Survivor focuses on Galawain. Forgotten Sanctum is based on Wael. Beast of Winter and Forgotten Sanctums are dungeon crawls while Seeker is mostly a series of repeatable combat arenas. I played all these when I reached the max level of 20 which was past the recommended level for each of them, but this didn't seem to be a big deal for Forgotten Sanctum because that expansion has the most difficult boss amongst the three expansions.
Beast of Winter felt like the story didn't go anywhere which was odd. We start with this weird cult of Rymrgand but most characters in there don't have much to say, only less than a handful have real dialogue and half of them are only focused on their small side quests. It just seems like the dialogue is inconsequential, the new godlike companion just reveals to us that he's a fraud who was never really in contact with his god and he fears the dragon that comes around killing their followers. They're a death cult waiting to die but this is less interesting by this point because there game has so many other gods that are more or less death cults in the form of Berath - who we work for - and Eothas - who is the main antagonist. After that, we fight a fairly easy dragon fight and then we're told by Rymrgand to kill the dragon because the dragon has found a way to make itself immortal and rymrgand can't kill it. The interesting content of this expansion comes after this when we enter the beyond and we experience three important parts of Pillars of Eternity lore with the death of Saint Waidwen, the partial fall of Ukaizo, and some of Engwith. You don't have to do this, but completing them allows you to bring in up to three spirit companions that can weaken the dragon boss. It's great content and not intensively combat-focused if you care about Pillars lore and by this point, I was interested in it. Afterward, it led to a boss fight with the dragon that was lackluster to me. The dragon has a big health bar but doesn't deal too much damage and gets knocked out easily against the monk's skyward kick. After beating we just go meet Rymrgand he doesn't thank nor reward us and tries to force us to join his covenant which doesn't have any real consequence throughout the game. I ended up fighting his avatar and winning but the consequences are still the same. Going back to the cult village all of them are still there and our godlike companion just tells them all to keep following their faith.

Seeker I have less to say. There are over a dozen combat arena fights but at this point, they were all far too easy and they rehash enemies we've fought throughout the base game. Seeker also abuses something quite terrible within turn-based mode and that's having numerous enemy waves that spawn mid-combat and ruin the turn order mid-turn. At least the final boss of the DLC was quite a challenge.

Forgotten Sanctum is a much bigger dungeon crawl than the rest and takes place in one underground hall. I quite liked all the Vistas, it has more involved quests than the other DLCs, and on top of that, this DLC is more intimately connected to the other characters and quests in the base game, specifically the archmages, and Eothas because it allows you to have a different major ending. In terms of combat, this one has the most difficult final boss of the three DLC. The other combat encounters are more annoying though.

As for the mega battles, I dislike their length. There are 5 of them, all optional though one is optional depending on the story choices you make since it is the final boss of the game. The other four have higher levels than the max player level of 20 and all have incredibly high armor & defense, but each will drop a mythic gem that can upgrade items past legendary. Since there are only 4 gems you can get at max then you can only upgrade 4 items past legendary. I ended up fighting three of them. The first one I beat was sigilmaster auranic.

This boss is overall designed poorly. She has a bit lower defenses than the others but her combat room has 5 obelisks. Every few turns she will activate one of the obelisks and they come with an effect that applies to your entire party regardless of where they are in the arena. My issue with this fight is that it bends many of the rules we come to expect throughout the game. I died against her once so I restarted the fight and rested prior with some high-level food. I ended up approaching the fight by cornering her and constantly using skyward kicks and mule kicks. This is important because both abilities knock her down which means she skips a turn which means she can't cast her spells nor activate the obelisk. I ended up beating her down to 0 health doing this, then the problem hit me. She doesn't die with 0 health, the game won't let her do so. So while she's knocked down with zero health, the game will make her stand up, activate all the obelisks at once, and then immediately kill her. What a crock of bullshit. You can't win this fight by defeating her using an intelligent tactic, the game will force you to do otherwise and force you to fight all the obelisks which spam unblockable moves that will hit all party members regardless of where they are in the arena.

Next was the crystal spider, like Aurania this is also an endurance fight that lasts over an hour. The spider has very high armor and defenses and 8 smaller spiders spawn frequently. Killing the smaller spiders reduces the defenses of the big crystal spider. Even at max level the crystal spider still has defenses that make it borderline impossible to land a hit. Just like the other mega bosses, it has attacks that do multiple hits to one character in a single turn which all the other enemies don't have. In any case, this one is easier because the small spiders do little damage and die easily. However, to bring down the defenses of the crystal spider to an appreciable point, you have to kill 80 - 120 small spiders. Yes, it's that tedious in the turn-based mode because the fight now becomes extremely long and boring.

The final mega-boss I fought was the guardian of Ukaizo. This one is more interesting because it exists within the story proper. The gods warn you that the guardian guards Ukaizo and will kill anyone who tries going there, and Ukaizo is the final location of the game. This fight was also long and the boss had numerous immunities. As it goes down from healthy > hurt > bloodied > near death, it will summon other tough enemies to aid it in combat. This one had the stronger minions of all the final bosses because of the titans and powerful mages it brought. It's also a three-headed mecha dragon which means its design is cooler than the other megabosses. Unfortunately, there is no good reward for fighting this boss in terms of loot. Eothas will mention that you defeated the guardian after the fact but that's just one sentence of dialogue. Due to that, this is the real final boss of the game, but apparently, I only fought it because I decided to go to Ukaizo without allying myself with either the Principi, Huana, Valian, or Rautai. It surprised me because I didn't expect this fight at this point.

I was disappointed with how little dialogue most companions and all sidekicks have throughout the entire game and also the flow of conversations when companions decide to say something. You can complete most companions' story quests by the early-mid portion of the game, afterward most don't have anything else to talk about if you initiate a conversation with them. This is even worse when exploring the world because most companions just don't say anything. I could tell that the developer's favorites were Eder, Ydwin, Xoti, and maybe Pallengina and Aloth. Two of these were in the first game so it makes sense. The former three have a large amount of dialogue but in conversation and exploring the world. Shockingly Ydwin is only a sidekick but she has a lot to say about the expansions and the base game. She ended up being one of my favorite companions.

So that's the finale of Pillars of Eternity 2 for me. It was an incredibly long and bumpy ride. I had a lot of complaints about the length of this game, which I think is likely alleviated by playing in real-time instead of turn-based mode, it's unfortunate you can't switch between both after starting a new game.
I had complaints about the easiness of this game, but it seems Obsidian tried alleviating this with one expansion and 5 optional mega-bosses. I think this would've been better if these mega bosses weren't pushed off to the very end of the game.
There are far too many technical issues with the console version.
The game has great-looking environments but the dungeon crawling and combat leaves much to be desired. The base mechanics make the former typically too easy, and turn base mode makes the latter too tedious. However, some of this can be alleviated due to the large amount of "difficulty" options that are available to the player. However, most of those difficulty options will only open up to the player after they've beaten the game. Will I replay the game on harder difficulty to try this anytime soon? No.
While the story is heavily focused on the divine, religion, colonization, & politics, the companions are incredibly dry in this game and many story threads end in an unsatisfying manner. The last point will matter more depending on how much you accept the futility of going against the gods.