It does a few things well, but by the end it’s a slog.

The good of it is that combat when playing as Yuito, after some time in it, feels pretty good. The middle of the game is where it shines. You haven’t fought so much that you’re tired of it, and you have access to everything to make combat flow and feel excellent, pulling off combos. Then they add in the other characters, and you have 9 powers to choose from, which each are fun to play with, especially after unlocking multiple activations at once.

Eventually though, whether you explore the side stuff to get better gear or slightly more interesting cosmetics(there are a ton, but they largely are minor things to stick on the characters rather than a wide assortment of interesting pieces, and most are a huge grind to get) or deepen the side stories with the other characters, you’ll be fighting the same enemies for 75% of your play time and it wears very thin.

I’m not sure how this arc feels with kasane as I couldn’t stomach the game playing as her. The three hours I tried felt so bad in terms of her combat and her overall character before the plot goes anywhere interesting that I was going to abandon it. Save her for a second playthrough if you end up enjoying this all the way through.

The music and aesthetics are good. Enemy designs despite not having enough variation towards the end fucking slap. Weird organic mannequin and metal beasts with huge lightbulb brains. The environments are bland but with enough flourishes to make them a little interesting, like the holographic street signs all over. Again they are shown repeatedly so much they also become tiresome and offer too little variation between them to keep it interesting

I do not know if this game’s creators intended this, but the whole thing feels like it’s apeing off platinum some. The enemies feel bayonetta, the world feels like a blander astral chain(go play that instead imo), the music feels like knockoff NieR. That’s not a huge knock on its own, but everything is just so much more bland.

The writing and pacing is also a very mixed bag. It explores interesting and compelling themes and builds decently(but not wholly unique) characters but presents them lazily. It feels like half assed translations taken too literally and done with the expertise of a smaller, forgettable anime franchise that is decently well liked but discarded quickly.

I don’t love visual novel style presentations of story beats in any game, but there are a few ways to do it that are bearable to good. A couple examples, beautiful 2D portraiture of the characters on top of the environment, or high quality illustrations of the environment, have 3D models do some minor motions while a high quality portrait exchange happens at the bottom. This one kind of plucks the worst of all worlds and has stills of the 3D models and moves their mouths in a static and ugly way, with occasional 3D cutscenes.

Altogether I don’t think it’s a total skip, there’s a lot of fun to be had with this but I feel like there were a lot of poor choices or constraints that made the game fail more than it succeeded

The big war troll with an Australian accent is called "Brûz". Get it?

GET IT?!

The game is fine. More of the same, and I got RAPIDLY tired of the nemesis system this time. Story feels like nothing then suddenly ties into the films. I thought I had finished it when it told me to "Keep Mordor in a state of perpetual war. Only then can the Free People of Middle-earth prepare for the War of the Ring". Sounds like standard post-game shit to keep you playing. Thus, I went looking to see what folk thought of the ending, and discovered a final cutscene you get for holding the forces of Mordor back. You need to withstand 20 sieges in a row, and losing one of them sets you back to 0. You can fuck that sky-high.

!!!TRUE ENDING SPOILERS BELOW!!!

The cutscene shows that Talion held back the dark for decades before succumbing to it and joining the Nazgul, taking Isildur's place. Meaning he was there stabbing the empty beds, and chasing down Arwen. Then later when Mount Doom went nuclear he was riding a fellbeast and got clipped by a flying boulder, and for some reason in that cutscene he has his mask off and we can see his face. Cut to him looking normal again walking in a nice field, dropping his weapons, and no doubt going to rest with his family.

Wow, I care so much now that I know some jobber Nazgul who got murked by a rock was actually my good friend Talion.

Look at this.