Very good feeling hacky slashy game. I have a few minor complaints about the boss design, mostly in that at least on hard most of them feel like you're playing the lottery waiting for the attack pattern that will actually let you get a hit in and hoping they don't randomly chain attacks with no cooldown.

Aside from that minor complaint though, Falcom knows how to make an action game that feels smooth as butter to play, with just enough options to keep it from being a pure button mashing experience. The story certainly exists with some nice twists, but if you're playing this you're here for the action which this absolutely has.

Thoroughly mediocre. It's a shame because there's some interesting bones there but everything is incredibly slow, normal battles take way too long, and the game is often not afraid to waste your time. The story is about what you'd expect of PS2-era Mega Man writing, which is to say mostly just kind of confused and fumbling around a point without ever making one. One positive point is that the game does let you do some fun things with builds, equipment choices are often actual choices and there's a lot of little secrets to find if you go looking, but the game honestly just needs to be faster.