The story has a lot of heart and the setting, music, and 3D environments are wonderful. The character of ZAU is well thought out and the new abilities to traverse the map feel like meaningful upgrades. Having two very distinct fighting styles – a melee and a ranged option you can flip back and forth between – feels great. However, it does fall a little short as a metroidvania, being very linear, the levels don’t reward backtracking , and there’s not much of a point completing the challenges to get passive runes, unless you are just doing it to challenge yourself. The more time you spend in this game, the more you can see where corners are cut and the game feels a little unnecessarily long and repetitive.

You definitely first notice that the enemies don’t have much variety, which did not really bother me, until certain zones where you get locked into long fights with many waves of the same enemies requiring little thought to actually defeat them. There are only about 5 enemy types so once you come up with a strategy for them, you can just do that every time and hope the enemy doesn’t get a lucky hit. The boss fights provided a bit more of a challenge, but some of that challenge was unfortunately being unable to see exactly what is happening on screen due to how many particle effects are flying around.

Another big issue with this game is that it was sometimes unresponsive for me. Pressing buttons didn’t always do what I wanted, the camera would lag behind in a frustrating way, and the detection of something like the arrow swing would sometimes miss entirely. It led to a lot of frustration, particularly in some of the late game challenge sections and chase sequences. I really enjoyed the platforming for about 80% of the game, but I think the polish of the early game abilities is not present for the stuff you do at the end of the game.

The story was well delivered, and though it wasn’t the most unique story, I can appreciate how it was told in a way that reflects the creator’s cultural background. The story had the most thought and clarity in this game, and I think it’s very admirable. I think this team definitely has the ability to keep improving on all aspects and I look forward to seeing what they do next.

If I was ever going to play a mech game, I'm not playing the one by the Souls team, I'm playing the one by the Harvest Moon team!

Mechs in general don't really do much for me, so I was wary that the game might be unapproachable and overcomplicated, but I think this game strikes a pretty good balance for a “casual+” like me. There's also decent mission and landscape variety, and the early missions are fairly short and forgiving. I think using the trigger buttons was a smart way to design the combat of this game, however playing this in handheld mode or with joycons does not feel great. This game feels like it was designed to be sat in front of a screen with a pro controller or with the game’s custom handheld peripheral… not really designed for the vanilla Switch experience.

While this game is generally adequate all around, it struggles to maintain my interest too much or pull me back in after I set it down. The story doesn't have much intrigue. It introduces a ton of characters, so that you can later unlock them as teammates, but as a result you don't really feel connected to any of them. it’s hard to tell what the actual stakes are, and the enemies are undefined AIs without a clear motivation. There are some named enemies but the game has you destroy them at the end of each mission, so it does not feel personal. The progression is also slow and incremental, I don’t feel much different after an hour or two of playing. Overall it’s somewhat disappointing as a RPGish experience, but I’m ok with it being the type of game I can passively absorb over a long period of time, without needing to focus on. This isn’t a game I feel a need to finish or see everything, I can just chip away at if I ever want to jump back into a mech suit.