I am a bit conflicted on this game. On one hand, I enjoyed my 40 hours spend with it and I definitely got my money's worth. So it's hard for me not to recommend it on just that basis. But at the same time I see tons of wasted potential with weird design choices and ultimately not that much to actually do, culminating in a game that fundamentally is very solid, but is deeply flawed. And because of this I don't see myself ever coming back to it to grind for the rest of the achievements or to 100% all of it's "content". And I am sure there are some people out there who would not like this game because of those things, so let me talk about them in this review so you can make up your minds. The first big problem this game has is that it pretends (purposefully or not) to have way, and I mean WAY more things to do than it actually does. The game assaults you with lots of characters, stages, multiple game modes, and a massive list of unlockable things and progression systems. But in reality it is all VERY inflated by re-using content over and over. Some examples: -Different stages have next to no differences between one another and no relevant gimmicks to make them stand out or play different - Differences between characters are largely just based on different stats and a couple character specific skills, even the character specific mechanics you unlock as you level them up are the same thing across all character (just repackaged with different visuals and stat variations). But every character plays 99% the same way. - Same skills are repeated multiple times with just their elements or other arbitrary characteristics altered. So the hundreds of skill this game has practically boild down to a few dozen distinctly feeling ones -Different enemies are just reskins that use the same few attack types. If it was just stage enemies I would not even list it as an issue... but it goes for bosses too. You get it, this is the patter through the whole game. Everything is stretched so thin, one unique thing is split into a couple more things that are almost the same, just to make the game feel larger than it is. The first time you open this game you might be overwhelmed by just how much stuff there is in front of you, but as you play it is starts feeling very, very small. Ultimately this isn't really a deal breaker, because the amount of unique things here is... alright, it's not too much but not too little. It just feels cheap and lame, the game would've been much better if it had 25% of the "content", but it all felt more unique. And while this is definitely this game's biggest weakness, it ultimately would not detract from it's replayability if it pulled off it's own satisfying gameplay loop. ... Which is where we arrive at the game's the second big problem: balance. The problem here is twofold, and it compounds on itself: 1. The way this game does it's damage formula is just... bad. The way they made the math work forces you into the exact same build path if you ever want to make a good build, and it's not the first game that made this mistake either. This game has both additive and multiplicative damage multipliers. Meaning, a 50% damage boost can either be a 50% increase to all the damage that you do, or just a +50% bonus added to all the other bonuses you already have. On it's own that is not a problem, many games do this and it works well if it's done properly and the devs make both play nice together. Here unfortunately the developers completely dropped the ball. Long story short: the game features many debuffs that stack multiplicatively with your total damage dealt. That alone is immensely powerful, but then they also made those debuffs multiply on top of EACH OTHER. That's right, we are no longer just multiplying things, we are doing FACTORIALS now!! And the worst part of all of this, this is THE ONLY way to increase your damage like this. There is no other way in the game to scale your damage in such an absurd way, which means that if you ever wish to get a "god run", you need these debuffs, and you need to be able to stack them as best as you can. 2. There is an archetype of damage skill that is just... superior. It's the skills that multiply their damage based on either the number of debuff/status stacks on the enemy, or ones that consume said stacks and multiply their damage. Basically: the skills taht scale their damage based on debuff number one way or another. It's not even funny how much better these skills are than all the others. And it's sad to see, because there are other skills in the game that clearly try to be good damage skills too, scaling of different things or having other gimmicks to raise their damage. But the difference in strength between the good ones and the bad ones are so massive, we are talking multiple zeroes at the end of the number differences, you HAVE to use these skills if you want the best results. And if you add those two problems together, you end up with a game that puts extreme emphasis on skills that either directly apply the debuffs I mentioned earlier or are good at applying them in other ways once you get supporting skills, and then it makes you take the scaling damage skills that scale off either the 3 DOT effects, or the status effects, of which there aren't that many. Suddenly, the hundreds of skills this game has boil down to MAYBE a few dozen actually good ones. And since every character is basically the same and can use the same things, you will end up making the variation of the same build every single time... the only way to enjoy some variety here is to unfortunately play on lower difficulties and intentionally ignore the objectively correct way to build your character. Basically: playing the weak, off-meta build in a hack and slash game. And let's be honest, almost nobody enjoys intentionally gimping themselves in a game like this. So, all of that sounds pretty bad, right? And yeah, it is. And that's why I will probably never come back to it. But that doesn't change the fact that before I arrived at this point, I got 40 hours of good fun out of it and finished the game, and for those 40 hours the problems I mentioned didn't really surface and were not that big of a part of the game. It was really only after I beat the game's final boss for the first time that I started to think "yeah, I think I'm done, there isn't that much here to enjoy afterwards". So, a careful recommendation for people who enjoy this genre of video games.
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