This game really delivers on giving you that early 2000s feeling of watching a chill anime late at night on Toonami and having your mind blown that cartoons can have solemn emotions.

That is all it provides. Everything else is traaaash.

It feels good to fly and swat at bad guys I guess but it's so boring. And the boss fights are boring.

All the characters are boring too except Rock Thunderheart.

The combat is pretty nothing. The quests are mostly tedious. The story starts really good but the string of twists after Route A ruins it for me. I love the excessive bloom and aesthetic of the world and characters. The atmosphere and feelings you get running around the game world make the game worth playing above all else. The music has some great stuff but most tracks are too short and loop too often.

All the pieces are in place for me to love it but every element just needed to be way better. The game is an exciting start and a dull slog by the time you're reaching for the true ending. Route C and D ask way too much of you for what little new content there is.

Opening the chests gave me some really good SNES jrpg feelings. Good time.

All action RPGs should rip off the damage scaling that Kingdom Hearts 2 had. The combat in this game can be pretty fun if you just rush through the story and keep the enemies within 3 levels of you. But if you're a bit too underleveled its nothing but chip damage. A bit too overleveled and everything dies before they even have a chance to register your presence.

Good for Taro getting to include lots of actual cool SHMUP sections throughout the game. He loves SHMUP. Just a shame that they made the SHMUP sections so easy that they become busywork. SHMUPs are usually challenging. Almost unforgiving. And Nier Automata taught me that they're probably built like that because otherwise theres nothing to them.

Story is fine. 9S is one of my favorite characters of the this gen.

This remaster just wants to be a total replacement of a game the developers at Bluepoint clearly think is already perfect. They change nothing. They improve on nothing. They dont even have the decent to make of the colossi worse. It's the same game. It's disgusting. It's a replacement.

They're never gonna replace the Mona Lisa with a version that has more defined hair, detailed skin textures, and no artistic liberties because clearly the background of the Mona Lisa would look better if it resembled a photograph. That's what this game is. I hate it.

The game is fine and all but the real star was the Pokken Pad. Please everybody buy a Pokken Pad. It's the best NES/SNES controller out there. The D-pad feels so good. It ain't clickity clack but it's perfect otherwise. The shoulder buttons are BIG. I never I realized I wanted shoulder buttons to be big before but now it seems like a decades long mistake finally corrected!

Get the Pokken Pad, get Pokken Tournament (it's good!), play all the NES/SNES games on the Switch with the Pad, and finally play FFVII with the Pad.