Finished today.... I think I should stay away from mainline titles from now on. Because surely their badly paced jrpg nature is not for me.

Gameplay wise it's a huge improvement. Now you have combo attacks, you can move, you can use environmental objects and there is grapple required enemies now. So they solved almost every problem of mine from 7.

For example If you stay in the right position and attack from right point you can send enemy with knockback attack(the ones with arrow pointing where the enemy gonna fly back) at places and if you can knock them to other partners you initiate a combo move and it's mad fun(when the physics doesn't screw up that is). I can even go as far as to say when it works it's the best jrpg gameplay I had played currently. You can get so creative with knocking that it's INSANE.

For example knock an enemy like a bowling ball to other enemies or bounce them like a ball between party members or punch them to walls again and again to stun them to hell. Gameplay choices are almost endless.

Also substories comes back and this time they are not just spam dialogue buttons anymore, some of them include minigames or a bit more interactive now! That's an awesome upgrade. Not just that, fan service inside of them is simply insane and impossible to make you dissappointed.

Also we have new major minigames that is dondoko island and sujimon fights. I haven't played dondoko because I don't care that much about town simulation games but played sujimon hell of a lot and I recommend you because it makes good amount of money when you arrive to it's last point(also you will hecking need lots of money in this game). So, It was fun.

And that's where my praise ends.

I don't want to talk about story nor the boring villains nor the awful... AWFUL PACING. But I will with talk about it briefly as possible. First things first is I can say story itself actually made me miss 7's Arakawa storyline. Because I couldn't care about Kasuga's mom storyline and so all the emotional baggage went to garbage. That means the whole main campaign.

There is nice suprises I am gonna give you that, for example that Yamai dark clothed guy from the trailers was pretty interesting, or new party members really had interesting stories about them. But spending with side characters isn't the main point right?

What is the main emotional core of this story? It's mom I guess... I mean it's suppossed to be I assume? But then why the heck she have just 15-25 minutes in the whole 70 hour GODDAMN MAIN STORY AND I AM EXPECTED TO EMOTIONALLY CONNECT TO HER? I don't know.

Maybe it's Kiryu's story huh?... No. Kiryu is only here to help Kasuga to finish his adventure and support him from the sides with making his own search. He doesn't have emotional connection to anything going on and he is like, I don't care I am deathly cancer anyway, so... I WILL FINISH THIS FOR KASUGA and act pissed of like always. He makes damn good fanservice moments there is no lie for that. Especially last chapters gonna give you a lot with familiar faces. But funny enough, fanservice is still mostly in substories and their time just 5 minutes or close to that, so try to engage as much as you can with the old characters you love in that 5 minutes because it's just that. A substory. Nothing more.

Kiryu have only one objective and that is just helping Kasuga. So he just does that. (Also both of their finale bosses sucks ass and they straight go to my own most boring top 10 yakuza villains list, they are that boring. Maybe they could even rival with y4 villains when it comes to cliche B movie forgettable types who knows)

Also remember I said gameplay is fun? Yeah they mess this as well. With grind of course. What I mean is just like 7, finale part suddenly boosts enemy levels up to ROOF. AND OF COURSE I AM PISSED OFF.

Surely, it looks like like A dragon soft reboot titles isn't for me nor their pacing with spending 3 times longer on side characters and stuff rather than the main story. But it looks like new type of fans having a lot of fun. I see 5/5 everywhere. What can I say, have fun. I am not here to take that. But maybe it's best for me to stop here for like a dragon other than maybe spin off titles.

Anyway that's all I will say. Bon voyage or whatever.