So I finished the game a couple weeks ago (all quests and hunts), and yeah, having let it sit for a while I don't think I can ultimately call it a good game. It's not like I (usually) actively suffered while playing, and the production quality is really high, but I think it ends up boiling down to two major points:
- There is not enough actual game
- The story completely went to crap
If I'm really being honest, this is way more of a slightly-interactive movie than a game. The combat is so basic that yeah, you can do flashy move A instead of flashy move B but in the end there are no choices or strategies to make; every battle plays exactly the same. I tried in earnest to experiment with different Eikons but it has zero impact. Every battle is just mash every cooldown to either wipe the crowd or build toward staggering the enemy, then dodge and do some chip damage until you can repeat it. No party composition, no elemental weaknesses, no decisions about ranged vs. melee combat. No gear decisions that impact combat. Yes, the core combat can be fun, but when it's so basic/stale, it gets boring. I kept waiting for creative or challenging optional bosses but there were literally only two (Atlas and Svarog), and those are only because I was 10-15 levels below them when they unlocked. I don't know what the point is of holding back S-rank hunts that, by the time they unlock, are trivial fights. Not that there were many of them in the first place.
Exploration was so basic and unrewarding. Usually involving combing big samey blobs of map in case there is a random chest there. Which probably contains my 29,3442,807th Bloody Hide and Sharp Fang. Every single interesting landmark is just locked behind some random sidequest so finding it early does nothing. And speaking of quests, man, this game is a perfect example of why it's about quality over quantity. Not in number of quests, but in amount of dialogue. It frankly astonishes me how they can write never-ending conversations between characters about just about nothing to justify me going out and spending 5 seconds killing a random monster. After a certain point I literally just started mashing through quest dialog because it was useless. Obviously I'd give it a chance first, but it usually only takes about 10 second to discern whether it's meaningful character/world building (the blacksmith blues quests etc) or just some filler bullshit. And I don't mind some basic fetch quests here and there; what offends me is having a 20-minute discussion, sometimes sending me around the map to from NPC to NPC for more, each time.
The spectacle of the assault sequences is definitely the best part of the game, and hot take, maybe that should have been the ENTIRE game, lol. But as mentioned by someone else here already, those peak halfway through the story. What remains is just an empty slog of bad writing. REALLY bad writing. If they really wanted to play the Game of Thrones grimdark angle, they at least could have spared me the countless hackneyed clichés and absurdly vacuous speeches repeated ad nauseam for hours and hours. I am used to JRPGs being corny and honestly, I'm fine with it. Hooray the power of friendship, let's stop the big meanie, etc. But the dissonance between the "message" and the overall tone/setting is just too much.
It also doesn't help that the way the story pans out in the final act is actually, not even really jokingly, a bad ripoff of Xenoblade Chronicles 3? I had my issues with that game too, but by golly, if I wanted a pasty-ass self-proclaimed deity to lecture me about Logos, free will, and the power of Origin, that's the game I'd go play. I didn't even care enough by the conclusion to hate the ending, I was just glad it was over. I don't get what they were going for. It feels like such a confused overall experience that ended up failing at both storytelling and general fun. I personally don't see how anyone could rate this highly.
Good music though.