I finally went and finished CS4, something i should have done 6 months ago to be quite honest.
It had already been too long since CS3 back when i first started it, and CS3 itself i played a fair amount of time after CS2. I've always had to take long breaks between each game and thus my overall opinion of the franchise is often quite fragmented.

When it came to playing CS4, I quite honestly was having trouble at first. Act 1 felt like a weaker CS2, very filler-y and meandering, but I pushed through and played until roughly the start of Act 2.
I then took another break for 6 months or so, and randomly decided to go back to it last week, determined to get it over with and be finally done with this, like it was a chore of some kind.

At first glance, nothing had really changed, hell, it was even becoming worse. I picked up right where the game's story takes a nosedive in relevance and the bonding events multiply the most, which prompted me to get extremely tired of the game's shit extremely quick.
It didn't help that other aspects of the game felt terribly uncooked and half-finished. The soundtrack is amazing at best, an uncohesive mess at worst, the overpopulation of the cast makes most characters feel more like glorified NPCs than standalone people with thoughts and feelings, the gameplay goes from stupidly unfair to ridiculously easy with a few simply adjustements and you lose interest quickly, and so on, and so forth.
In the meat of Act 2, I very seriously considered this to be the franchise's worst game, and while i didn't hate it, i just wasn't having that good a time.

So what happened? With the end of act 2 and the beginning of act 3 came a lot of setup for the game's true stakes, and my interest immediately perked up. We were getting scene after scene of interesting plot and lore that was finally worth all the trouble of the first two acts.
The bonding events leaped in quality (mostly because dodging all the heart ones at first let me do the non-romantic variants instead), and while the pacing was still a bit off with way too many events, their writing made them engaging nonetheless.

It's really as simple as that, I was beginning to actually enjoy myself. Act 3 was really good, and the Finale was absolutely excellent, as well as everything I could have asked for from a Kiseki game.
The penultimate fight and the reveals that accompanied it were particularly breathtaking. So much of Kiseki goes from setting up information that a later entry uses to set up its own foreshadowing.
That's what I love the most in this franchise, and if they keep going the way they are, i'm sure i'll love the next entries as well.

So...do I like this game? Yeah. I like CS4 a lot. Unfortunately I also dislike some of its aspects, and I can't exactly say I appreciate having to play 90 hours of meandering filler for 60 hours of decent plot.
And that's why i'm so conflicted with this game. There is so much good that proves to me the devs knew what they were doing, and then there's some bafflingly infuriating design choices, as well as extremely half-baked filler additions that impede my enjoyment of it.

I will give CS4 credit where it's due however. For all its flaws and idiocies, it made me realize what I loved about this franchise, and why I loved it so much in the first place. It helped me realize what made and broke Kiseki after almost two years of my opinions being wishy-washy because of a garbage fandom's influence.
I cannot say yet if my opinion on CS4 will be fully intact by the time I replay the whole franchise in an attempt to cement my opinions, but for now this will be good enough.

CS4 is a...maybe a 7, maybe a 10, and maybe even a 2. I don't particularly care. All I know is I like it.