labyrinth of galleria is proof that you can absolutely have too much of a good thing, but i also refuse to think less of it or rate it lowerjust because of that.
by the end of the second half i started to be burnt out to the point where i decided it'd be better if i just stopped playing and watched the rest of the story cutscenes which isn't something i've ever really done for a game i loved this much. not to say that the game is bad at all, quite the opposite actually! i loved every second of gameplay even if it was definitely of lower quality once it shifts to procedural generation for the dungeons in the second half, the music was spectacular, and the story and characters are some of my absolute favorites! on top of dealing with heavy topics in a way that feels natural, galleria in general has some of the most (and probably some of the only, to me at least) natural and human portrayals of lgbt characters in any game i think i've ever seen. the fact that the game is explicit about it in all cases but one without being heavy-handed about it means a lot to me. overall i absolutely love this game to death, it's just that i think i have a hard time with such huge time sinks and get stressed when i start spending so much time on any one singleplayer game, and i didn't want to get burnt out on an experience i loved so much. i'd definitely recommend checking this one out for any fans of drpgs, especially if you don't mind the massive commitment some of its later dungeons expect of you, and even if you aren't a fan of drpgs necessarily the story here is amazing and worth experiencing.

labyrinth of galleria is proof that you can absolutely have too much of a good thing, but i also refuse to think less of it or rate it lowerjust because of that.
by the end of the second half i started to be burnt out to the point where i decided it'd be better if i just stopped playing and watched the rest of the story cutscenes which isn't something i've ever really done for a game i loved this much. not to say that the game is bad at all, quite the opposite actually! i loved every second of gameplay even if it was definitely of lower quality once it shifts to procedural generation for the dungeons in the second half, the music was spectacular, and the story and characters are some of my absolute favorites! on top of dealing with heavy topics in a way that feels natural, galleria in general has some of the most (and probably some of the only, to me at least) natural and human portrayals of lgbt characters in any game i think i've ever seen. the fact that the game is explicit about it in all cases but one without being heavy-handed about it means a lot to me. overall i absolutely love this game to death, it's just that i think i have a hard time with such huge time sinks and get stressed when i start spending so much time on any one singleplayer game, and i didn't want to get burnt out on an experience i loved so much. i'd definitely recommend checking this one out for any fans of drpgs, especially if you don't mind the massive commitment some of its later dungeons expect of you, and even if you aren't a fan of drpgs necessarily the story here is amazing and worth experiencing.

Took so long to put this out that the next update is already live, but I was writing this because I really gotta hand it to Mihoyo. Reading back my review for the game upon release I was obviously a hair away from shit talking this thing if I so much as sniffed that it was getting worse. The good news is that - generally speaking - that hasn't happened.

Don't get me wrong, they haven't all been base hits, but they've steadily improved on all the things I liked best about this game upon release. The characters are more interesting than they've ever been, and while I'll still object to the visual design of some of these characters (come on now), they've continually dropped chracters with mechanics that make them genuinely fun to play despite sticking to the two-skills-per-character rule. I have more fun playing my tank than I've had playing most characters in other turn-based games.

I think I feel some obligation to be a little more moderate in my praise because I know plenty of people who will tell you that this is competing with the best games of the year, or that it's "the most generous gacha game", and while I don't think it's quite there yet for me, I can at least understand where a lot of the praise is coming from, because Hoyoverse aren't being lazy with this one. I've been surprised by the amount of times they've dropped a ridiculously high effort cutscene for a quest with virtually no impact on the main story, by the amount of minigames they've added, by the ways they use new enemy mechanics to switch things up, with the fact that the companion quests can tell stories that I found genuinely compelling. There's no "for a gacha game" here, my shock is solely because I recently gave Genshin Impact another spin and I just can't believe this is the same company. A lot of love has gone into this thing and as time goes on I'm only having more fun mixing and matching characters and farming up to improve new ones. The important note here is that I'm the person who will deliberately avoid levelling good characters to be different, so there's a lot of room for people to complain about a stale meta or what-have-you that I'm simply not capable of touching on.

I still think that there's too much to nitpick for this game to become one of the undeniable greats that converts the haters - the fact that there's a gacha here will always work against it, to point out the biggest issue - but I think there are hooks everywhere if you have any interest in finding them. I was unemployed for the past four months and still managed to snag multiple shiny new characters (with no resources saved up) so you shouldn't feel like you're being locked out of something special by keeping the wallet closed.

https://i.imgur.com/yTJ0wkT.png