Played through it last spring and was continually dazzled by how well it pulled off the change to an open world. The scope of the game just keeps getting wider and wider, it's an incredible feeling.
Replaying it full co-op mode with my partner and having someone with you as you push through each dungeon is a very different, much more dynamic experience. I do miss the tightness of the interlocking level design in the Souls games and Bloodborne, but still the series jumps to an open world in a shockingly assured, smooth and fun way.

Having now played this game almost every day for the better part of a month, clocking roughly 60 hours and being not-quite-halfway through the story, some thoughts:

I don't know how much of this analysis was incepted into my head by seeing the thumbnail for a video essay about the problem of sexualization in this game, or from hearing how embarrassing a friend found it to play in front of his girlfriend, or if it all just formed perfectly core-crystalline as soon as I saw Dahlia, but jesus christ the character designs are humiliating. They're tacky, they're ugly and (granted, I'm not the target demo) I don't think they're sexy. They're horny (pej.) in the way that someone who has only heard about sex in anime thinks is horny.

With that out of the way, I cannot tell what I think about this game. As mentioned, I've played it for 60+ regular, leisurely hours almost all of which I've enjoyed, but there are some truly terrible design choices that undermine that enjoyment in a way that's worth emphasizing.
The gacha mechanic is baffling, and profoundly out of place both mechanically and thematically. The mercenary missions seem to exist exclusively as a ballast for the gacha mechanic and feel divorced from everything else in the game. This makes popping into the menu every half-hour (or ten minutes if you're doing Ursula's blade missions) to make some fussy but unimportant decisions about team composition even more of a momentum killer than it might be if there was any sense of urgency to it.

On the positive side, the combat system is as labyrinthine and compelling as people say, feeling pleasantly tricky to maximize (if not optimize). The blade affinity system can be satisfying to fill up, though the number of blades you're invited to do this for makes it feel like busywork. I find the world itself genuinely compelling, with the Titans being reliably strange and interesting to explore (when you're able to hold the idea of each island being a creature rather than dissociating into gamer-brained MMO map mode, which everything in this game desperately tries to make you do).

I will, somehow, keep pushing through this game. I'm hoping the story is at least as interesting as people say. I've always had a soft spot for the overwrought pseudo-religious grandeur of the Xeno-series, and I feel pretty confident there's some of that coming down the pipe.

I don't know how this game manages to generate the aura that it does. It's so initially oppressive and frightening and blossoms so gradually into something manageable that you can't pinpoint when (or how, or if) things have started to fall into place for you.

This is the kind of game that you play in a dream. It's the kind of game that an author writes into a novel, not having a sense of what video games are actually like. It's a frightening doodle in a middle schooler's binder.

I'm afraid of advancing and approaching the future point where I know all of the areas of this game and it has nothing left to surprise me with.

I love it, it scares me.

Some of the most impressively structured storytelling I think I've ever seen. The game does a perfect job of giving you just enough information to feel confident in making the wrong assumptions about where the story is going.

Really enjoyed the RTS portions, too, charmingly arcade-y and frantic without ever feeling especially difficult.

I feel like even the most hyperbolic praise is kind of useless when describing this game. It's special, but in a way that sounds kind of lifeless on paper. Nobody really cares about "revitalizing stale tropes" or "finding genuine novelty through familiar cliches" but when you see just how confidently, stylishly and joyfully this game does it, it really knocks you out. I loved it.

I strongly believe this game to be one of the best things ever. It makes a strong argument for 'things' as a concept, for there to be in this universe something instead of nothing.

I played the alpha of this game and was convinced that it would never come out (sorry for doubting you, Hiro from the NBC television show Heroes) or that when it did it would be unrecognizable. Miraculously, everything that was incredible about the first version remains intact, improved upon and elaborated into an exceptional game.

Echoes of the Eye adds onto it in a way that shouldn't work, but truly, truly does. I had a hard time imagining how it would introduce new mechanics or concepts without undermining the beautiful "farewell" you bid to each of your tools at the end of the base game, but they absolutely did it.

I hope one day to find a game I love as much as I love this one.

I wanted to prove the haters wrong. I wanted to find a beautiful, smart, understated gem at the heart of this thing, but it's just not there.
There are the bones of something special. The sound design on the EInherjar stories is excellent and makes me wish there was either more to them or more of them-- having only four should give the game breathing room to give richer stories to each, but it doesn't seize on that. The side missions feel quaintly irrelevant and small-scale at first but quickly reveal themselves to be anonymous and thematically unfocused. The enemies are punishing (on Hard difficulty) in a way that starts interesting but grates over the course of seeing the same half-dozen enemy types reskinned over and over.
I don't know why I still hold such a blazing torch of reverence for this series (or IP as I guess is more accurate to think of it) but I was really hopeful that there would be something more special than I found here.
How nostalgic, as they say.

While working from home in the Pandemic Winter, every week day for a few months I'd do a level or two of Ring Fit to eat up the time before my lunch break. I don't know whether it was the "at least it's not my stupid job" factor or because I also used that time to catch up on podcasts, but I looked forward to that break each day. I felt good about the exercise, and my body. I felt like a king every time I'd finish up, still wearing my gym shorts, and have a cigarette on the snowy porch.
The game shouldn't work as well as it does, but it's a really driving loop even if a lot of the systems are kind of ultimately inconsequential (though you feel a little bad optimizing yourself out of exercise by building up your character too much). I really enjoyed my time with my cool little workout friend and the dragon that gave her so many headaches.
There are a handful of exercises that feel like they do not work with the ringcon or that you're at risk of hurting yourself if you do them a bit too recklessly, but otherwise I enjoyed the variety a lot.

If your game is going to be that stylish you can't just throw me into four differently coloured deserts! Baby, no! Give me a sexy little jungle! Why not underwater? Please, baby!
Sadly really underwhelmed by the game in the end. Also, once you've got a pretty beefy, buffy team it's hard to find motivation to change things up when you can just Golden Apple your way through so much of the game.
Also, very sad how little you get to hang out with the side characters. They all look so cool, why can't I be their friend until I decide to kill God for them?

Finally wrapped up the game after dropping it earlier this year. I managed to get through the whole thing only restarting once towards the beginning of the game, which made for an interesting experience where I spent its entire twenty-odd hours anticipating needing to do it all over again and ultimately being just fine. The other side effect of that though is that I never got the pay-off of restarting and having all of the skills and banked EXP giving me the power trip of blowing through the once difficult earlier game. In any case!
The game has so much personality. There are so many bizarre design decisions and weird quirks to the game that you need to slowly figure out yourself, and even now I couldn't tell you with certainty what you do and don't lose when you do the different kind of SOLs, but it's so strange and compelling.
The Regent fights at the end are impressively tough, and each time I was convinced that this would be the boss that sent me back to the beginning only to come out ahead. Absolute Defense is a crazy mechanic, but it really does a lot to crank up the tension in the end game.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve picked up this game, convinced that THIS would be the time I finally played it through, got my ending and saw even just one storyline through to a satisfying end. THIS would be the time I’d read every dialog I was presented with, that I’d savour the delicious prose, not skip immediately to the inscrutable rewards and punishments at the end of each passage. Devastatingly, I’ve yet to be right about that even once. I respect the game an awful lot, and admire it’s early-to-the-party cosmic horror sensibility, but between the tedium of starting over (the beginning of every run feels close enough to identical to be boring but too far from identical to be second-nature) and the drudgery of getting a run onto its feet, I don’t think I can bring myself to try to love it again.

I've tried two or three times to love this game. I enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII more than most, and I somehow played all of FFXIII-2 (though couldn't tell you a single detail about it), so I thought that a third and final FFXIII that was also a white-labelled Valkyrie Profile clone would be a real vindication of the time I'd invested into the trilogy. Tragically, I slide right off of it every time.
The mechanics and systems come hard and fast and it creates so much kind of pointless urgency that I feel exhausted by Day Two. So many things to think about but almost no genuinely interesting choices to make.
The thing I find the most frustrating about this (and all of the rest of the grand ticking clock genre) is that they're ultimately solvable. There's a best path to follow. You know this and the game knows this. The game's not interested in telling you what it is, and it offers you too few piece of information to figure it out yourself. This is maybe the hurdle that's too much for me-- I can't stand the introductory part of these games where you need to invest enough time to learn how you should be spending your time. Maybe I'm a coward (or, worse, a gamer) helplessly siren-call driven into the rocks of optimization.
Maybe one day I'll make it through and I'll understand why they dressed up all of the freaks from the previous games in such silly clothes.

It's hard to communicate how good the epiphanies feel that this game creates for you.
There's a queasy feeling you get as more and more words are introduced and you start to see frightening combinations. You start to feel like the correct execution for a level might take ten minutes to set up and that you're going to be banging your head against an overly fussy, fiddly solution. The dazzling, impressive feat that Baba is You accomplishes, though, is that it never (as fas as I've seen) ultimately tips over into testing your patience instead of your ability to problem solve. If it feels like what you're doing to complete a level is a pain or excessive or haphazard, you're probably heading in the wrong direction.
The way it unfurls after you've completed the main game and move into its dizzying end game is impressive, but does have a "guess I'll keep trying to kick that football" shifting goal post quality that's a bit exhausting. I would love to be the kind of person who can simply accept that I've finished the base game and consider myself done with it, but I know I will ultimately need to return and finish the truly demonic puzzles that I'm stuck on.

I played a few days a week for about a month with my partner and our friend while we were all under curfew for Montreal's 2021 COVID Christmas. Just cracked it again to inaugurate a new attempt at rallying friends to game together online.

I'm not sure how they pull it off, but there's something immediately endearing about the dwarves in a way that on paper shouldn't work but in practice is irresistible. I can't think of another game where the stock callouts and shouts have the quality of making you want to immediately repeat them to your teammates.

The classes feel satisfyingly different while still having the same basic experience such that you all have different tools but still feel like you're playing the same game. I'm not sure how fun the experience remains as you start really ramping up the difficulty, but at least at the mid-entry level it's the exact sweet spot of engaging and relaxed enough to feel like you're just hanging out.

Played this a few times online with friends and really liked the vibe. Definitely the closest I've felt to getting really into a tech-tree-climber like this.
I think, realistically, I'd have liked Factorio more because I find the first-person 3D-navigability of the game to be a layer of removal from the actual construction, optimization, engineering thrill of the game. Maybe that friction is pleasurable though, since it makes you engage with the hulking physicality of the engines. That might be something special, or horrifying or sublime about the late-game, but don't see myself personally pushing through long enough to get there.