Honestly while I love this game a lot I do feel like several of the routes feel like wasted potential (Nanami and Yua's specifically)

I'm glad they most likely noticed this and had less but more fleshed out routes in Chaos;Child however

Rimi, Kozue and Sena's routes as well as the common route and true ending were amazing though so a couple of mid routes don't really drag it down at least

Now I'm not caught up to the story so my thoughts on that may change (for now it's kind of whatever) but I can't help but think how this feels lesser to GFL every time I play it

The combat is all mostly automatic which requires a lot less thought and effort than GFL's super fun strategic gameplay and I'm only sticking with this for the Steins;Gate collab tbf

It's also funny being bombarded with pop up ads for microtransactions every time I log into the game

It's not bad by any means it's just kind of the gacha game of all time which is unfortunate because GFL has an amazing story and fun gameplay so I had hopes. At least the presentation here is super clean and polished.

This game just does not at all feel good to play? The dodge and parry feel very unnatural, the grapple is clunky and the combat in general is just eh

Also I'm not fond of action games where you use the triggers to attack which is personal preference but anyway I decided I'll remap the attacks to the face buttons to make it more fun to play but this game has to have the most dysfunctional button remapping I have ever seen so that was impossible lmao

Just go play fortnite or something

Honestly, I first played this game about a year ago? I don't know why but I was so quick to judge the game from the first few moments of the prologue alone and just ended up hating it to the point I dropped it

After playing through the Mary Skelter trilogy Death end re;Quest 2 caught my eyes and of course I HAD to play it however this meant going back to actually play through the first game before that since I'm not a fan of skipping things. I was kind of dreading this since I did initially really dislike the game... However upon starting up the game again after a year on a fresh save I can say that it's quite possibly one of the most creative JRPGs I've ever played albeit held back massively with a low budget

The gameplay starts off fairly average I guess? Nothing remarkable but the story is what hooked me. But the gameplay does present a lot of interesting mechanics like the genre changing mechanic which as awesome as switching to action gameplay mid turn based battle sounds it's unfortunately pulled down by the budget like I mentioned

The characters are all a lot of fun and all have interesting dynamics which definitely plays into the overall enjoyment I had of the story as a whole (which I won't get into any detail of since I'm not a fan of spoiling things so go play it yourself!)

The writing was surprisingly pretty smart and self aware and ACTUALLY utilised the gaming + internet aspects of the story surprisingly well Those aspects actually being utilised well was one of the big highlights as well since most stuff that pull the "trapped in a video game" plot line kind of quickly dribble into it becoming a generic fantasy whole DerQ utilises this aspect all the way through with the ability to swap between reality and the video game as you uncover the many mysteries the story presents you with

This is more just a write up on some of the thoughts I had on the game so I'm gonna end this off here but I'm looking forward to the sequel with how it looks to delve fully into being a full on horror JRPG which is something I've been wanting for as long as I've been into JRPGs