SUMMARY - Worth a shot if it's one of your first few cRPGs. Disappointing writing but many hours of fun battles, though the gameplay isn't perfect.
WRITING - This game's writing puts together unfunny jokes, unlikable quippy characters, a mediocre chuuni JRPG-tier plot, and many shallow storylines together. The writing is a 5/10 at best.
GAMEPLAY - The gameplay is not perfect either. But I can't rate it lower than 4/5 because I was absolutely hooked on this game for 40 hours (to the point of lowering my life standards lol). But it IS the first cRPG I've really played more than an hour of. Anyway, it was fun trying out all of the different spells. Technically speaking it's definitely up there in recent years.
Two of my biggest complaints.
1) Too much shallow content. You just get a few lines per person in these side quests. I don't feel any investment. YOU CAN'T TELL WHICH SIDE QUESTS WILL BE GOOD. Or which people are worth talking to. You can talk to 100 NPCs hoping for something good and you'll get it like 5% of the time. Is it worth investing time in this area? Or this one?
2) Some things weren't obvious enough. An example is when there's some joke or crazy choices you can make - but is the game going to treat it as an innocent joke or will you get screwed over long-term? You have to spam saves.
Now, I'm not a game designer so I don't know how to solve these difficult problems, but they killed the fun like crazy.
There were also lots of small frustrating bugs (probably at least a hundred). At least a few times I had to restart the game or reload from an earlier save (which takes WAY too long) because of these bugs.
Finally I HATE how rigid the system is. It's like those simulators that lack human logic, you know? The things where the game is totally literal whereas an irl DM could feel things out. Anyway one example is perception checks. You don't know how important the perception thing is (sometimes you literally can't proceed without first "perceiving" a button) so you have to go to camp and get some fresh characters to come back and retry the perception. So dumb. Also the whole "guards noticing you doing bad stuff" system kills fun like crazy.
Also being able to speed up combat would be nice.
FINAL THOUGHTS - Honestly a game from the Persona series would be a better investment of my time. The linearity allows the devs to focus better. I don't need a Tech Demo of "freedom", I just want a fun series of experiences. Freedom comes second. And yeah, before you complain that I'm an "anime-biased person", Persona's writing is simply better. They at least spend time on writing the characters. Baldur's Gate 3 suffers so much from "poetry over story" (making things sound all fancy and poetical but it's all nonsensical so it doesn't matter) and characters only have a few lines, it's so boring.
WRITING - This game's writing puts together unfunny jokes, unlikable quippy characters, a mediocre chuuni JRPG-tier plot, and many shallow storylines together. The writing is a 5/10 at best.
GAMEPLAY - The gameplay is not perfect either. But I can't rate it lower than 4/5 because I was absolutely hooked on this game for 40 hours (to the point of lowering my life standards lol). But it IS the first cRPG I've really played more than an hour of. Anyway, it was fun trying out all of the different spells. Technically speaking it's definitely up there in recent years.
Two of my biggest complaints.
1) Too much shallow content. You just get a few lines per person in these side quests. I don't feel any investment. YOU CAN'T TELL WHICH SIDE QUESTS WILL BE GOOD. Or which people are worth talking to. You can talk to 100 NPCs hoping for something good and you'll get it like 5% of the time. Is it worth investing time in this area? Or this one?
2) Some things weren't obvious enough. An example is when there's some joke or crazy choices you can make - but is the game going to treat it as an innocent joke or will you get screwed over long-term? You have to spam saves.
Now, I'm not a game designer so I don't know how to solve these difficult problems, but they killed the fun like crazy.
There were also lots of small frustrating bugs (probably at least a hundred). At least a few times I had to restart the game or reload from an earlier save (which takes WAY too long) because of these bugs.
Finally I HATE how rigid the system is. It's like those simulators that lack human logic, you know? The things where the game is totally literal whereas an irl DM could feel things out. Anyway one example is perception checks. You don't know how important the perception thing is (sometimes you literally can't proceed without first "perceiving" a button) so you have to go to camp and get some fresh characters to come back and retry the perception. So dumb. Also the whole "guards noticing you doing bad stuff" system kills fun like crazy.
Also being able to speed up combat would be nice.
FINAL THOUGHTS - Honestly a game from the Persona series would be a better investment of my time. The linearity allows the devs to focus better. I don't need a Tech Demo of "freedom", I just want a fun series of experiences. Freedom comes second. And yeah, before you complain that I'm an "anime-biased person", Persona's writing is simply better. They at least spend time on writing the characters. Baldur's Gate 3 suffers so much from "poetry over story" (making things sound all fancy and poetical but it's all nonsensical so it doesn't matter) and characters only have a few lines, it's so boring.