This review contains spoilers
While the art direction and the writing it's outstanding, none of the "videogame" elements on it work.
The animations are brilliant, the character design is detailed and the backgrounds are simply gorgeous, specially during the sunsets, where palettes shift to reds.
The story is really interesting, and you care about (most) of the characters, their stories and their relation to the protagonist. It's adult, and doesn't sugarcoat things.
But as a videogame, it's just a list of fetch quests, and the worst type of them. In one particular case, it made me search for three people located obviously in three places, only to find one of them that told me that I needed to go to a fourth place. And traversing is boring as hell, the boat is really slow, making the boat phases dull, and on top of that they are limited by the night time, for no apparent reason other than making your experience more miserable. The light platforming is not good either, it's just a thing they had to put there to extend the duration.
The other elements of the game, mainly the crafting, has no depth at all, and it's just there to again extend the duration of the game by creating more currencies so you are always lacking something, and the minimages get boring after the second try... if this was a 4-8h game that would be forgivable, but being as long as it is, it's a total lack of respect for the player's time.
Had it been a visual novel, for example, I would have rated it highly, although if it had been a visual novel, at least I would have known that I wasn't my cup of tea.
The animations are brilliant, the character design is detailed and the backgrounds are simply gorgeous, specially during the sunsets, where palettes shift to reds.
The story is really interesting, and you care about (most) of the characters, their stories and their relation to the protagonist. It's adult, and doesn't sugarcoat things.
But as a videogame, it's just a list of fetch quests, and the worst type of them. In one particular case, it made me search for three people located obviously in three places, only to find one of them that told me that I needed to go to a fourth place. And traversing is boring as hell, the boat is really slow, making the boat phases dull, and on top of that they are limited by the night time, for no apparent reason other than making your experience more miserable. The light platforming is not good either, it's just a thing they had to put there to extend the duration.
The other elements of the game, mainly the crafting, has no depth at all, and it's just there to again extend the duration of the game by creating more currencies so you are always lacking something, and the minimages get boring after the second try... if this was a 4-8h game that would be forgivable, but being as long as it is, it's a total lack of respect for the player's time.
Had it been a visual novel, for example, I would have rated it highly, although if it had been a visual novel, at least I would have known that I wasn't my cup of tea.