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.

Affectionately, three-stars. This game was exactly what I wanted it to be. There are a hundred ways it could be better (more impactful job progression, more interesting characters, a hard, committal shove towards being either very silly or very serious) but it really scratched the exact 7/10 shape that had been itching me. I liked Nioh plenty, so returning to its more-is-more loot system wasn't as queasy as I imagine being introduced to it here might be.

That inventory system is indeed unwieldy, but honestly I think that we benefit from the breaks between missions. It's fun-ish managing affinity bonuses, though it takes too long for them to be big enough that it feels satisfying/like you're actually adding the equivalent of cross-job skills or benefits (the character stats remain low in a way that probably points towards some impressive balancing behind the scenes, but for better/worse they sure don't feel that impactful moment to moment).

I really do wish the characters were more developed and that we'd gotten a bit more hanging out with them beyond the half-dozen post-mission stand around and chat opportunities. That said, to do so would be to undermine the game's camp.

It is my firmly held conviction that this game is meant to be played on a PS4 (Vanilla) and that the game needs to crash between two and four times for one to have the true experience.

I like that when you're losing you're only losing for 10 minutes as opposed to the misery of a League game that you lose at minute five and just get dragged miserably through for another 30 minutes.
I don't like that Held Items are gated behind currency, it would be nice to be able to experiment more with builds and loadouts.
The UI navigation is miserable on the Switch, especially selecting Pokemon pre-battle. If this is the best that something with Pokemoney can handle the "click every red notification badge" system, I understand better now why Genshin never actually released on Switch.
Anyways, I think it's a really fun game and that all of its best and worst parts are because of it's League lineage. Can't wait for whatever comes after this genre that isn't auto-battlers.

Started this up on a whim and was shocked by how immediately fun I found it. I'm worried that in the long-term the strategy-heavy nature of the combat will get tiresome (already slowly picking apart a mob of enemies one-by-one isn't that engaging) but am hopeful that with more tools will come deeper or more interesting fights.
I'm trying not to get too hung up on missing skills or sub-optimal item usage or whatever, but knowing that I've already missed a one-time chance to get a skill off a boss (thanks for unequipping my shield skill, item shop!) is painful.
The game's got great style though. That perfect, early-2000's post-Matrix future-grime. I want to say it's a killer aesthetic curveball for the Breath of Fire series, but I'm ultimately not familiar enough with the previous games to know if that's actually the case.

After playing for a couple months around the launch of Forsaken, I was inexplicable pulled back into this game by friends starting to play it during the PSN "Old Expansion is free now" event. There are so many things about the design principles behind this game that I find rank and shallow, but the profound Hangoutibility of it is exceptional. I wish it would get out of your way, shut up and let you have a good time more often.
I really love the MacBook Pro Sci-fi aesthetic of the game, it's chicly annoying menus and fonts, the way the guns feel, the crispness of those numbers as you squeeze them from your enemies. I think I even like the story, and find it implies and suggests a deeper, more interesting pathos than the hammy, bombastic tragedy it parades in front of you. I just wish I could turn off the part of my brain capable of receiving the prompts that there are things I need to do "before time runs out" and the hundred stupid alarms trying to make it seem like I should be rushing.

An impressively somber, melancholy take on the genre. The game unfurls its systems and mechanical depths a bit slowly if you play on the base (easiest?) difficulty and I think it could do well to introduce a bit more friction earlier than it does, maybe even while keeping the drip-feed of mechanics. Importantly, it didn't feel as overwhelming and fussy as something like Civ, which was my fear.

On the lower difficulties a very pleasant, meditative way to lose track of time. I'm curious to go back and see what it's like on the more demanding settings.

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 feel stupid for having been as charmed by the True Route as I was, but I was completely invested. I finished the game finding it to be a super successful and surprising game, then somewhere along the way between there and here I now view that True Ending, too, as a kind of cynical mockery of "the kind of thing a visual novel fan would think is deep". I don't know why I feel that way about it now or what poisoned my mind against the game, but it makes me sad.

Were you laughing at me, my pigeon friends? What do you say about me? Was I mean to you? Were you to me? What do you think of me, deep down? Am I ridiculous? Or sweet? Or decent?

Are we friends? Do you care? Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.

The scene cuts to reveal, at last, the inside of the pigeon friend's diary. We don't see what Amy feared. No evidence of secret resentment, only drawings. Big-petalled childlike flowers.

I played this one much less, but also much more successfully than Sunless Seas. I had one very long, good run that was punctuated by the quiet thought to myself "Oh, I'm actually going to finish this one". Lo an behold, I still did not, but they did a really great job of making this one feel immediately interesting without losing any of the alien feeling of the previous. I still feel ungrateful for not chewing and swishing each pretentious but delectable morsel of prose Failbetter crams into this thing, but I'm hopeful that there's someone out there really slurping it up.

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.

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.

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.

About two weeks in, played my first PVP game yesterday. The game gives me anxiety in a way that is maybe productive for me to wrestle with. Why, for example, am I so worried about being bad at a video game that I played exclusively against bots for two weeks? What should it be revealing to me when I see myself hyper-fixating on reading guides on how to play the game, desperately attempting to parse out customs and best practices to try and better fit into a community that I simultaneously don't want to be a part of. Perhaps if I was less concerned about these questions my Riven would stop getting farmed in top lane.

I do find the actual gameplay very fun. I like clicking, and I think it's impressive how frantic I get when I'm actually trying to nail a combo. I guess I just wish it didn't all feel so impenetrable.

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.