This game has a lot going for it and does a lot of things pretty well. Unfortunately, for every single thing it does well, there is an equally opposing negative, summing it all up into a mediocre, cookie-cutter experience that's not particularly worth your time.
For the positives, the open world is incredibly beautiful and superbly well realised with so much attention to detail and recreates an actual real-world location fairly faithfully. It's fun to walk around and explore Shibuya in all its neon glory and there's a fairly wide variety of locations. The combat is decent and there's some strategy to some of the combat encounters. Each of the ammo types has its own unique utility and you'll find yourself swapping between them fairly frequently. The collectables scattered around the city also offer a ton of flavor with historical facts and glimpses into the deep cultural history of Japan and its relationship with spirits, death and the occult. The game also features some pretty funky, mind-bending sequences that are fun to go through. There's also a skill tree that's tied to exploration in that the more you explore, the more rewards and the better you get which, in theory, seems like a great system that pushes you to explore the city more as you collect floating spirits and save the people trapped in the city.
And as I said, every one of these positives has a negative.
The open world navigation is tedious and clunky. There's a parkour-light system but you're constantly hampered by level geometry and confusing maze-like verticality. There's a power-up that's almost essential if you expect to move around with any fluidity but the artificial limitations imposed on it make it equally annoying to use. There's also a level cap beyond which you cannot unlock new skills which means if you somehow failed to unlock it before you reach level 50, you're permanently gimped. The combat gets super old really fast and most of the encounters end up being very similar very early on. There's a lack of actual enemy variety and you'll end up resorting to the same tired old patterns before long. The ammo mechanic is also fairly annoying in that you need to break certain highlighted items in the world to collect them. This makes certain combat encounters annoying because you run out of an ammo type and you have to try and kill the enemies which get you more or find things to break. The boss fights are incredibly easy and terribly disappointing and barely work as spectacles because, yet again, you're just doing the same thing as you would with regular enemies.The collectables are way too numerous and require quite a bit of hunting on occasion and you'll run out of motivation to get all of them before long. The funky segments are too few and far between and only make you want more of them but the game does not have many to spare and you need to go out of your way and complete many side missions to even see most of them.
The things that push this from a "meh" to an outright "no" are the incredibly bland and lacklustre story that go nowhere and the TERRIBLE performance. The performance dips for no discernible reason at random moments and goes back to normal for the most inexplicable reasons. It would run smoothly at 60FPS for 90% of the time and randomly dip until I either restarted or hit a trigger that would "release" the game from the binds that tie it down. At one point, the game was chugging for a few seconds at 20FPS and I considered restarting until I turned a quest in and the performance magically shot back up. It was as if the game held the massive weight of that quest on its shoulders and turning it in released that pressure in a cathartic spell.
The game was made with a vision and a lot of ideas and I wish I could recommend this more. Unfortunately, it just did not coalesce well enough
For the positives, the open world is incredibly beautiful and superbly well realised with so much attention to detail and recreates an actual real-world location fairly faithfully. It's fun to walk around and explore Shibuya in all its neon glory and there's a fairly wide variety of locations. The combat is decent and there's some strategy to some of the combat encounters. Each of the ammo types has its own unique utility and you'll find yourself swapping between them fairly frequently. The collectables scattered around the city also offer a ton of flavor with historical facts and glimpses into the deep cultural history of Japan and its relationship with spirits, death and the occult. The game also features some pretty funky, mind-bending sequences that are fun to go through. There's also a skill tree that's tied to exploration in that the more you explore, the more rewards and the better you get which, in theory, seems like a great system that pushes you to explore the city more as you collect floating spirits and save the people trapped in the city.
And as I said, every one of these positives has a negative.
The open world navigation is tedious and clunky. There's a parkour-light system but you're constantly hampered by level geometry and confusing maze-like verticality. There's a power-up that's almost essential if you expect to move around with any fluidity but the artificial limitations imposed on it make it equally annoying to use. There's also a level cap beyond which you cannot unlock new skills which means if you somehow failed to unlock it before you reach level 50, you're permanently gimped. The combat gets super old really fast and most of the encounters end up being very similar very early on. There's a lack of actual enemy variety and you'll end up resorting to the same tired old patterns before long. The ammo mechanic is also fairly annoying in that you need to break certain highlighted items in the world to collect them. This makes certain combat encounters annoying because you run out of an ammo type and you have to try and kill the enemies which get you more or find things to break. The boss fights are incredibly easy and terribly disappointing and barely work as spectacles because, yet again, you're just doing the same thing as you would with regular enemies.The collectables are way too numerous and require quite a bit of hunting on occasion and you'll run out of motivation to get all of them before long. The funky segments are too few and far between and only make you want more of them but the game does not have many to spare and you need to go out of your way and complete many side missions to even see most of them.
The things that push this from a "meh" to an outright "no" are the incredibly bland and lacklustre story that go nowhere and the TERRIBLE performance. The performance dips for no discernible reason at random moments and goes back to normal for the most inexplicable reasons. It would run smoothly at 60FPS for 90% of the time and randomly dip until I either restarted or hit a trigger that would "release" the game from the binds that tie it down. At one point, the game was chugging for a few seconds at 20FPS and I considered restarting until I turned a quest in and the performance magically shot back up. It was as if the game held the massive weight of that quest on its shoulders and turning it in released that pressure in a cathartic spell.
The game was made with a vision and a lot of ideas and I wish I could recommend this more. Unfortunately, it just did not coalesce well enough