@Shiebs
The demo left me with headaches from the background on Graphics mode and the Performance mode made everyone look like they were smeared with vaseline. That soured me severely in the week heading up to release but I spent about an hour toying with my TV's settings and low and behold, Graphics mode's backgrounds became 'passable'.
So I went in feeling tepid but having set those settings and now having sat down for about 35 hours with it, I'm over the moon. Their ability to adhere to making the open worldness of it feel MEANINGFUL and not just simply checkmarks like Assassin's Creed has become is their greatest strength in this format and it's a dream.
And, as expected, the writing, JP voice acting, drama, action, gameplay, and of course MUSIC are all top-notch. The translation is, unfortunately, mostly subpar and continues to make the characters WAAAY more snarkier than they really are while also removing small nuances/quirks, changing names for what doesn't seem to be any reason (maybe they had names in the original I don't remember, that's entirely possible), and often making explanations far more verbose and complex than they need to be.
You know the 'folios' right? 'Folio' doesn't really mean anything special to a normal English reader, right? There's no reason for it to sound so haughty. And yet the Japanese is simply 'Skill Book'. As in English.
"But Greg, if they say it in English in the JP version, shouldn't it sound exotic in translation?"
Sure....if your average Japanese person doesn't understand the term 'sukiru bukku' means (spoiler: elementary school students know those words). They're not meant to be difficult to understand in JP so why bother calling them something odd in English?
Anyway, sorry, that's just my distaste for fanfic-sounding localization work.