My first impression was a bit whatever here, I didn't play the demo and only really gave this a shot because the combat looked fun in the trailers and I have a library where I can play games like this for free a couple weeks after launch. I booted into it and wasn't entirely sold. I'm happy to say that I pushed past the initial "tutorial" area and ended up having a pretty solid time!

I'll start with the story because it's what I have the worst opinion of, I thought it sucked! Well, that's not entirely fair, I wasn't even really paying attention for half the time because I was so checked out whenever a cutscene came up. The voice acting (at least english, which I played on) is pretty bad and awkward. Most of all Adam who had the most robotic delivery in a game full of robots. Speaking of Adam, I just did not like him at all. I don't have a ton to say about most characters, because like I said, checked out, but I didn't really like anyone. Eve was fine but ultimately not that interesting, Lily was chill, I liked the little shop robot D1G-g2r though. I'm a sucker for cute lil robot dudes but it's not great that a little shop keeper with a bit part is the only character I really "liked". You also can't skip any cutscenes which really bummed me out. I don't have much else to say on the story, I can't speak on the Nier ripoff comments cause I didn't play Nier but if that's true I don't have very high hopes for my feelings on the Nier story if I ever get around to playing that.

The world and exploration as a whole were pretty solid! I do think visually it's a little bit samey, like the two main open areas are just kinda huge deserts. It did feel pretty satisfying to explore them and the more linear sections, most little paths you see led to a fun little chest or a robot with upgrade materials and it always felt good to find those. There were some little puzzles around the world but none of them too interesting or anything. There was a weird attempt every once in a while to do platforming challenges and it just did not feel built for that at all. The jump feels a bit awkward and grabbing ledges feels incredibly inconsistent and bad. There were little tunnels you'd grind down on your sword and those were pretty fun but that's as far as I wish they took the wacky environmental movement moments. The game looks pretty great, I don't think there's much of a distinct or interesting art style but it's a game that clearly uses the power of modern hardware well and looks pretty solid as far as environments go. Some of the later game areas were genuinely very pretty and nice to look at. Side quests were whatever, pretty generic openish world quests and as someone who didn't like really any characters or the writing here they didn't wow me. The music was pretty great too, lots of solid and beautiful songs! Not entirely my style, and not something I'd like add to a playlist or anything but it was a pretty big standout.

Gameplay is where all of my stars are coming from, I was indifferent towards it near the start and it for sure takes a little too long to start feeling great but once it reaches that point it's a lot of fun! I do wish there were a bit more natural combos maybe that played with timing DMC/GoW style but a lot of the extra mechanics make up for it a good bit. The beta skills are all pretty solid but the Square beta where especially when upgraded had such a really solid weight and feeling to it and I loved it. The burst skills you unlocked were really cool too, and had a ton of style to them. The Circle burst skill was my favorite of those and was great for crowd control. You also get a R3+L3 super mode that's a spoiler but felt really cool! There's also an upgrade you get that turns your drone into a gun, and I wasn't entirely in on it/didn't fully get the purpose for a while but they do these neat survival horror style sections where your blade gets disabled and you can only use the gun and it opened up to how strong it can be. Some of them felt way too situational for bosses, like the huge beam gun which I wanted to utilize in bosses more than I was able to but felt really good shredding smaller enemies. The missiles were my go to for bosses, they absolutely shred shields. All of the ammo felt pretty useful though, especially against normal enemies and drone upgrades felt way more valuable when I got a better grasp of how good the gun was. There also were some combat items which I did end up using a bit more by the end of the game but I just generally didn't care about. I had like 40ish of each one in my stock by the end of the game. That's all the attack aspect of the game, but the thing that really hooked me was the defensive part of combat. I'm someone who loves a really good beefy parry and this games parry feels pretty great. Nothing of this game is very much like Sekiro but the one part that reminded me a lot of that is how much they incentivize parries. It's similar in that, especially for smaller enemies (a bit less so for bosses) if you focus on parries you can stagger and enemy and get a big attack that will kill almost any non boss enemy. The parry itself feels really great and it never got old chaining parries together to wipe out smaller enemies or get a big chunk of damage out of bosses. There's also a blink mechanic where if the enemy does an attack and it flashes blue or pink you dodge towards or away from them depending on the color and it's another layer of depth that fills up attack meters/activates weak points for the gun and it all comes together to feel really fucking good, especially in big boss battles and you hit a ton of parries and hit all of your blinks. The boss battles as a whole were pretty good, fun attacks with lots of chances to do parry combos and such. A lot of pretty cool cinematic flair namely when you beat them they do pretty cool and over the top animations for the killing blows. I do think they were a bit easy/generic early on but the last few especially were really fucking sick. There's one boss right near the end that would react to me spamming certain beta skills and counter them and it was a cool ass moment.

I don't think this is like a crazy mind-blowing experience I'll cherish forever, but I had much more fun than I was expecting to and that's all I can really ask for! It's a bit sad that this game will be mainly known as the game a bunch of insane weirdo dorks whined about for no valid reason (which, to be fair, is funny to make fun of them) when I think it was a solid game that can stand on its own.