I've always loved this game to death since I was a kid. I have almost 300 hours total combining endless beta and base game hours and the game's art style, music, character designs and mechanics were all incredible but I felt like over time, especially around the release of 2nd Encore, this game would face more and more changes that would really start to deteriorate the game in quality.

I always had gotten the impression that Mike Z was a giant piece of shit who was out of touch and unreasonably rude to his staff based off his dev logs on his YouTube channel (turns out I was right) and he was responsible for a lot of the ridiculous changes that game has gotten throughout time in terms of game balancing and just an overall trend of changing things that did NOT need to be changed.

But of course, an obvious factor for not being able to give this game a good review in good faith is the fact that they'd have so many updates where they would consistently keep removing things from the game, the "censorship" update that everyone talks about was just the boiling point and the changes they made with manipulating the story (The absurd changes with Big Band's story) changing character designs (Ex. Parasoul) and removing "lewd" art from a game that has always had sex appeal and its raunchiness as one of its main appeals shows how out of touch and bitter the current developers of this game are and how fucked this game has gotten over time.

I'm sure a lot of loser coomers started shitting on the game when they found out they changed the story shit with Filia and maybe they barely played at all when that update came out but I think its in extremely bad faith to defend an update that straight up removes content from a game that already has an extremely miniscule player base.