i wanna give it a 5 because the front half was so fucking good, but i also wanna give it a 1 because the back half was so mindbogglingly bad.
i found it very odd that the game's writing dropped off when the main plot started coming to the fore. legitimately, everything up to that point was golden. toe to tip, the writing was way beyond what AAA RPGs have been shitting out for the last eternity. so why, then, did none of it last through the unraveling of its own story?
as soon as the game starts pushing you more heavily into the main plot, all the intricate character writing seems to fly out the window and the whole party devolves from characters into plot devices. if you asked me what was going on in the last 10 hours of that game, or why any of it even happened, i genuinely could not tell you. i wish i could. it was epilepsy-inducing light shows happening back-to-back in a bloated, wet fart of a boss rush for 3-4 hours only to then turn around and smirk at you like, "wasn't that shit awesome?"
i wanted to love this game very much. the open world stuff was common fare but couched in enough nostalgia and clever/funny bits of writing that i had full intentions to complete all the side content. i could not, in good faith, recommend this game to anyone unless they get it for free or at super discount.
2.5/5. i am absolutely fucking begging people to stop letting tetsuya nomura and kazushige nojima write stories.
i found it very odd that the game's writing dropped off when the main plot started coming to the fore. legitimately, everything up to that point was golden. toe to tip, the writing was way beyond what AAA RPGs have been shitting out for the last eternity. so why, then, did none of it last through the unraveling of its own story?
as soon as the game starts pushing you more heavily into the main plot, all the intricate character writing seems to fly out the window and the whole party devolves from characters into plot devices. if you asked me what was going on in the last 10 hours of that game, or why any of it even happened, i genuinely could not tell you. i wish i could. it was epilepsy-inducing light shows happening back-to-back in a bloated, wet fart of a boss rush for 3-4 hours only to then turn around and smirk at you like, "wasn't that shit awesome?"
i wanted to love this game very much. the open world stuff was common fare but couched in enough nostalgia and clever/funny bits of writing that i had full intentions to complete all the side content. i could not, in good faith, recommend this game to anyone unless they get it for free or at super discount.
2.5/5. i am absolutely fucking begging people to stop letting tetsuya nomura and kazushige nojima write stories.