wish i was the kind of person to be able to sink 45 (!) hours into a video game and just review it with something along the lines of "just like persona 5" but i wanna talk about the game ive spent the last month chipping away at god dammit!
tl;dr after the neutral route lock-in it's ehhh and i'm not going to play a game this long more than once. please stop making jrpgs so long
it's okay. certainly not a bad game, but it's really not something that warrants its runtime. when a story-focused game starts climbing into the 40-50 hour territory it really needs to justify that runtime, which, uhh, it kind of doesnt? like okay, there's like 7 or 8 hours of pretty cool stuff right before the alignment lock, and the first few hours after you get to the second area (and what is basically the whole game from then on out) are pretty cool (keeping this vague to avoid spoilers)
if you're like me, and you're the kind of person that will absolutely refuse to play a 50 hour game more than once (even if the new game plus cuts off a lot of the run time), you'll just want to get the "real" ending and be done. it doesn't take long to figure out after googling around that the neutral route is the most "complete" of the endings (since it contains (apparently) most of the stuff from both law and chaos) so naturally that's what i shot for. let's talk about the neutral ending, or rather, the steps needed to get it:
- the window to get neutral is way too narrow, and can very easily be missed even for those intentionally trying to get it
- there's a part where you have to do like, 20 ""optional"" (no longer optional) side quests to progress (and almost definitely way more if you aren't using a guide since the game doesn't tell you which ones)
- basically, it sucks fat nuts
the answer to the first one? use a guide! the second one? use a guide! which kind of is not a good thing, especially considering the fact that the game didn't come with a guide. so unless you're willing to replay the game several times, or spend tens of hours wandering around the overworld doing every single quest, you basically have to look things up on google or ign or whatever, which just sucks a ton since every time you have to go and do this you're pulled out of the experience and you're no longer thinking about the game as a living, breathing world, and rather as a machine where every moral decision has some point value tied to it and your goal is to land in the narrow -8 to +8 range.
this is a huge part of the reason i felt the story fell off really hard at the end, since after doing a specific list of quests for 7 or so hours (and the resulting aftermath of doing that, you'll understand what i mean if you play it) the setting no longer feels like a real place with real people. you no longer care what happens to the inhabitants of the story which is basically a death sentence for a story being "good". the story's certainly not all bad though, the ending 10 hours just left a sour taste in my mouth, even though i got the "true" ending it all just felt so fake i was just glad i was able to stop playing
now here's where i'd talk about the gameplay, but it's really nothing to write home about. getting extra turns by hitting weaknesses is fun but it's by no means a concept exclusive to this game at all. it's very run-of-the mill and so i'm not going to spend much time on it
i think all in all while i have spent a lot of time complaining about this game i still think it's good overall it's just something i don't think i will ever revisit. the quality of the story oscillates a lot from "hey this is actually pretty cool!" to "i kinda just want this to be over" but it never blew me away like i hade hoped it would, but the gameplay is fun enough that it's not really a pain to get through but it's not fun enough that it made me look forward to playing the game a ton, especially as the runtime ran on
edit: forgot a few things, setting is really cool and so is the soundtrack. these two things bring the game up a significant amount for me tbh, if the music sucked ass or it was a typical setting i cant see myself giving this game anywhere above a 5/10
edit 2: ok this didnt deserve a 5/10, ill bump it up to a 6. right where persona 5 is. most of my biggest issues with this were on me for not getting the vibe (coming at this from a lens of "i need to get the most complete ending rather than the one that fits my choices the most"). but also it is still a jrpg with a fairly minimal story thats like 40 hours long. the story that is here is generally good (not the neutral stuff tho lol) but there just isnt enough of it for its runtime for me. music's fuckin good tho!
anyways this is just like persona 5
tl;dr after the neutral route lock-in it's ehhh and i'm not going to play a game this long more than once. please stop making jrpgs so long
it's okay. certainly not a bad game, but it's really not something that warrants its runtime. when a story-focused game starts climbing into the 40-50 hour territory it really needs to justify that runtime, which, uhh, it kind of doesnt? like okay, there's like 7 or 8 hours of pretty cool stuff right before the alignment lock, and the first few hours after you get to the second area (and what is basically the whole game from then on out) are pretty cool (keeping this vague to avoid spoilers)
if you're like me, and you're the kind of person that will absolutely refuse to play a 50 hour game more than once (even if the new game plus cuts off a lot of the run time), you'll just want to get the "real" ending and be done. it doesn't take long to figure out after googling around that the neutral route is the most "complete" of the endings (since it contains (apparently) most of the stuff from both law and chaos) so naturally that's what i shot for. let's talk about the neutral ending, or rather, the steps needed to get it:
- the window to get neutral is way too narrow, and can very easily be missed even for those intentionally trying to get it
- there's a part where you have to do like, 20 ""optional"" (no longer optional) side quests to progress (and almost definitely way more if you aren't using a guide since the game doesn't tell you which ones)
- basically, it sucks fat nuts
the answer to the first one? use a guide! the second one? use a guide! which kind of is not a good thing, especially considering the fact that the game didn't come with a guide. so unless you're willing to replay the game several times, or spend tens of hours wandering around the overworld doing every single quest, you basically have to look things up on google or ign or whatever, which just sucks a ton since every time you have to go and do this you're pulled out of the experience and you're no longer thinking about the game as a living, breathing world, and rather as a machine where every moral decision has some point value tied to it and your goal is to land in the narrow -8 to +8 range.
this is a huge part of the reason i felt the story fell off really hard at the end, since after doing a specific list of quests for 7 or so hours (and the resulting aftermath of doing that, you'll understand what i mean if you play it) the setting no longer feels like a real place with real people. you no longer care what happens to the inhabitants of the story which is basically a death sentence for a story being "good". the story's certainly not all bad though, the ending 10 hours just left a sour taste in my mouth, even though i got the "true" ending it all just felt so fake i was just glad i was able to stop playing
now here's where i'd talk about the gameplay, but it's really nothing to write home about. getting extra turns by hitting weaknesses is fun but it's by no means a concept exclusive to this game at all. it's very run-of-the mill and so i'm not going to spend much time on it
i think all in all while i have spent a lot of time complaining about this game i still think it's good overall it's just something i don't think i will ever revisit. the quality of the story oscillates a lot from "hey this is actually pretty cool!" to "i kinda just want this to be over" but it never blew me away like i hade hoped it would, but the gameplay is fun enough that it's not really a pain to get through but it's not fun enough that it made me look forward to playing the game a ton, especially as the runtime ran on
edit: forgot a few things, setting is really cool and so is the soundtrack. these two things bring the game up a significant amount for me tbh, if the music sucked ass or it was a typical setting i cant see myself giving this game anywhere above a 5/10
edit 2: ok this didnt deserve a 5/10, ill bump it up to a 6. right where persona 5 is. most of my biggest issues with this were on me for not getting the vibe (coming at this from a lens of "i need to get the most complete ending rather than the one that fits my choices the most"). but also it is still a jrpg with a fairly minimal story thats like 40 hours long. the story that is here is generally good (not the neutral stuff tho lol) but there just isnt enough of it for its runtime for me. music's fuckin good tho!
anyways this is just like persona 5