I like this game more than I probably should. Gameplay-wise it can get a little repetitive due to the sheer amount of battles it throws at you, and the story, while good at the time, isn't really anything special compared to what we got in later titles. However, the vibes of this game is just amazing. It's edgy in a way that ends up coming off as legitimately cool. The setpieces and unique locales, the music, everything comes together to give it this grand scale that the other games up to this point don't even come close to. Pacing issues and repetition can't hold me back from loving this game.

Bad and not even in the fun way. It's just incredibly boring. I can accept this came out before the first remake and wasn't as large scale but god this feels so dead in comparison. I went from looking forward to what fun new characters might be around every corner to actively dreading having to wade through more dialogue and wanting things to be over as fast as possible. Gameplay is also very weird, the game tries to handwave it's own balancing issues by having enemies with massive health bars slowly whittle down your health with weak attacks, and then overloading you with hundreds of healing items and just expecting you to use them after every single battle, rather than creating something that's actually fun and somewhat challenging. Progression is also all over the place with you constantly having to backtrack between the same areas every 5 minutes.

Don't play this game. Watch a playthrough or read the digest version or something. No amount of story relevance is worth going through how boring of a 7-8 hours this is.

A weak set of middle routes (Kotomi and Zakuro) can't hold this back from being genuinely one of the strongest experiences the world of VNs has to offer. Expands upon a lot of the ideas SubaHibi spent 50 hours tiptoeing around while being a far more compelling read on top of that.

Doesn't peak quite as high as SubaHibi, and certainly doesn't work as a standalone piece (there are several scenes that would mean nothing to you if you hadn't read that beforehand), but I think it's something that stands as an equal to that.