Someone got it for my birthday so I'm playing the heck out of it. Wow this game got the biggest wave of games media racism I've seen since that particular arm of what qualifies as journalism started not being so explicit about its anti-Japanese racism (which absolutely factors into this being developed by a Japanese studio). I barely saw anyone anywhere talk about how it is as a game, it was basically a shell game of rhetorical nonsense about why no one is allowed to just say it's pretty good. Even the best article I ever found about it when it came out was someone who hadn't played very far into it addressing how misplaced all the rhetorical nonsense around its release was. So here I am to say it is a good game and is fun to play. I'm still not very far into it myself but even only getting about as far as that article I mentioned, I'm having a blast.
One of the bigger gameplay things that got marketed pretty heavily was Frey's parkour-style traversal. It's not actually much like parkour at all but it DOES feel really good, like nearly as good as the best Spiderman web-swinging feels in the best Spiderman games. Once you get the hang of how it works and figure out that any interruption of the full-speed animation resets the internal timer on when it consumes a pip of stamina (be it jumping or aiming yourself at a short obstacle to make Frey parkour over it), it becomes functionally endless though unfortunately not limitless due to some world design choices.
The other big part was hey, this game's combat is about using magic! I still only have the initial set of abilities because HOLY SHIT the world is filled with stuff to loot and I can't not loot it all. However even the starting set of abilities you can unlock have a pretty good breadth of stuff to do. Throw rocks and then a bigger rock, throw rocks like a machine gun with a piercing shot at the end of it, throw rocks then form a shield that acts as a shotgun blast when released or hit by a melee attack. That's pretty much the bread and butter and while it sounds lame it FEELS REAL GOOD. I also know you get magic sword stuff later on so I'm really looking forward to prying myself away from combing through the map and getting more magic. You get an amazing crowd control move that roots everything in its aoe as you cast it letting you absolutely demolish them, and basically a turret flower which is good extra damage and annihilates flying enemies (which are somehow even more toxic than the bird enemies in Elden Ring). Your starting big ultimate attack is a little bit like Ripper Blast from Star Ocean 2 if it were magic vines instead of rocks. At first it's not amazing unless you're fighting a lot of stuff at once, but as you upgrade it, you can hold the input to make it do up to two more pulses of damage, each one making it get bigger and hit harder and then it's just good for all occasions. The final hit when fully upgraded even has a really high chance of poisoning enemies that survive. From there it's all about unlocking more stuff, a whip that hits most things close to you and drains health, an explosive mine, all kinds of stuff and that's just the initial ability selection out of apparently like four sets? It even has a similar time-slow effect as FFVII Remake while you're switching your readied spells (which you will probably do a lot, it's easily the most unfortunate combat design consideration).
It's definitely not without SOME things worth criticism though. The world is big and has tons of stuff to fight and loot but the massive majority of it is just crafting resources which doesn't matter basically at all except to increase your inventory capacity as far as I've played yet (which isn't very far at all but hey, 12 solid hours of just running around collecting it because game so fun). It feels very much like Dragon's Dogma all over again, but quite a bit bigger, and an unfortunately more evenly spread range of enemies to fight and less equipment to mess with. There's the occasional Mutant enemy which is essentially a superboss version of one type of enemy or another but they aren't within reason to fight until much later. The best incentive to explore is all the mana spots there are to collect, which are basically how you unlock new magic and stuff; you get SO MUCH MORE of it from exploring than you do from leveling up. And the biggest thing is just how heavily the world was designed around an ability you won't get for I imagine at least a couple hours if you stick to the story. There are walls higher than you can climb and weird pillars of stone all over the place that just about require you to have that ability, and it's a little annoying to not be able to just do the thing. You can sometimes find a couple spots to circumvent it early but it's not easy or really worth the effort. Also the world map while technically completely open is clearly designed in discreet sections that have one or two points of entry/exit each. Good thing part of the lore is that super powerful beings actively shaped the world themselves cuz it sure isn't natural.
Now the most interesting wrinkle. For all the crying about the writing style, it doesn't even actually employ the style everyone criticized it for having as far as I can tell. It was obvious barely anyone was actually sitting down with the game before copy-pasting that garbage everywhere but wow, the ones who did get through the game must have thought it was written too well to criticize it for things it actually does. And the things it does are... not the best! Everyone has already talked about its bad optics at the very start and the voice acting and whatever but once you get past the introduction sequence (where most of the criticism immediately stops because none of the racists were willing to keep the game on for 2 hours and lose their Steam refund window), it does things that matter a lot more to the narrative pretty inadequately! Like hey why is Frey being blamed for people getting killed when EVERYONE WATCHED THE PERSON WHO DID THE KILLING and knows they aren't in their right mind? It's supposed to come across like blind religious zealotry mixed with some apocalyptic desperation fear but the writers just don't get there with it because they spend too little time developing the situation for the player before moving you right along. And what's so incredibly interesting about that failure on the writers' part is that somehow the way it all washes over Frey without her being very phased by it early on actually makes some pretty good sense on closer examination! Like yes the panic of being isekai'd but no one is telling her the situation in any meaningful detail and her first impression of people was getting traumatized by them wanting to execute her for existing or use her because she's not susceptible to the Break. No one would want to stay in that. It's not just a generic refusal of the hero's call, there's a lot more tangled in there and it manages to actually work. There's also a lot worth criticizing about the Tantas and their relationship to the state of the world (at least if the game plays the setup straight until the end) but I don't know exactly how to go about that particular line of critical thought other than, the people who wrote this set up a very cool, very powerful matriarchy just to ruin it for the point in the world which you play through. So that's unfortunate.
One of the bigger gameplay things that got marketed pretty heavily was Frey's parkour-style traversal. It's not actually much like parkour at all but it DOES feel really good, like nearly as good as the best Spiderman web-swinging feels in the best Spiderman games. Once you get the hang of how it works and figure out that any interruption of the full-speed animation resets the internal timer on when it consumes a pip of stamina (be it jumping or aiming yourself at a short obstacle to make Frey parkour over it), it becomes functionally endless though unfortunately not limitless due to some world design choices.
The other big part was hey, this game's combat is about using magic! I still only have the initial set of abilities because HOLY SHIT the world is filled with stuff to loot and I can't not loot it all. However even the starting set of abilities you can unlock have a pretty good breadth of stuff to do. Throw rocks and then a bigger rock, throw rocks like a machine gun with a piercing shot at the end of it, throw rocks then form a shield that acts as a shotgun blast when released or hit by a melee attack. That's pretty much the bread and butter and while it sounds lame it FEELS REAL GOOD. I also know you get magic sword stuff later on so I'm really looking forward to prying myself away from combing through the map and getting more magic. You get an amazing crowd control move that roots everything in its aoe as you cast it letting you absolutely demolish them, and basically a turret flower which is good extra damage and annihilates flying enemies (which are somehow even more toxic than the bird enemies in Elden Ring). Your starting big ultimate attack is a little bit like Ripper Blast from Star Ocean 2 if it were magic vines instead of rocks. At first it's not amazing unless you're fighting a lot of stuff at once, but as you upgrade it, you can hold the input to make it do up to two more pulses of damage, each one making it get bigger and hit harder and then it's just good for all occasions. The final hit when fully upgraded even has a really high chance of poisoning enemies that survive. From there it's all about unlocking more stuff, a whip that hits most things close to you and drains health, an explosive mine, all kinds of stuff and that's just the initial ability selection out of apparently like four sets? It even has a similar time-slow effect as FFVII Remake while you're switching your readied spells (which you will probably do a lot, it's easily the most unfortunate combat design consideration).
It's definitely not without SOME things worth criticism though. The world is big and has tons of stuff to fight and loot but the massive majority of it is just crafting resources which doesn't matter basically at all except to increase your inventory capacity as far as I've played yet (which isn't very far at all but hey, 12 solid hours of just running around collecting it because game so fun). It feels very much like Dragon's Dogma all over again, but quite a bit bigger, and an unfortunately more evenly spread range of enemies to fight and less equipment to mess with. There's the occasional Mutant enemy which is essentially a superboss version of one type of enemy or another but they aren't within reason to fight until much later. The best incentive to explore is all the mana spots there are to collect, which are basically how you unlock new magic and stuff; you get SO MUCH MORE of it from exploring than you do from leveling up. And the biggest thing is just how heavily the world was designed around an ability you won't get for I imagine at least a couple hours if you stick to the story. There are walls higher than you can climb and weird pillars of stone all over the place that just about require you to have that ability, and it's a little annoying to not be able to just do the thing. You can sometimes find a couple spots to circumvent it early but it's not easy or really worth the effort. Also the world map while technically completely open is clearly designed in discreet sections that have one or two points of entry/exit each. Good thing part of the lore is that super powerful beings actively shaped the world themselves cuz it sure isn't natural.
Now the most interesting wrinkle. For all the crying about the writing style, it doesn't even actually employ the style everyone criticized it for having as far as I can tell. It was obvious barely anyone was actually sitting down with the game before copy-pasting that garbage everywhere but wow, the ones who did get through the game must have thought it was written too well to criticize it for things it actually does. And the things it does are... not the best! Everyone has already talked about its bad optics at the very start and the voice acting and whatever but once you get past the introduction sequence (where most of the criticism immediately stops because none of the racists were willing to keep the game on for 2 hours and lose their Steam refund window), it does things that matter a lot more to the narrative pretty inadequately! Like hey why is Frey being blamed for people getting killed when EVERYONE WATCHED THE PERSON WHO DID THE KILLING and knows they aren't in their right mind? It's supposed to come across like blind religious zealotry mixed with some apocalyptic desperation fear but the writers just don't get there with it because they spend too little time developing the situation for the player before moving you right along. And what's so incredibly interesting about that failure on the writers' part is that somehow the way it all washes over Frey without her being very phased by it early on actually makes some pretty good sense on closer examination! Like yes the panic of being isekai'd but no one is telling her the situation in any meaningful detail and her first impression of people was getting traumatized by them wanting to execute her for existing or use her because she's not susceptible to the Break. No one would want to stay in that. It's not just a generic refusal of the hero's call, there's a lot more tangled in there and it manages to actually work. There's also a lot worth criticizing about the Tantas and their relationship to the state of the world (at least if the game plays the setup straight until the end) but I don't know exactly how to go about that particular line of critical thought other than, the people who wrote this set up a very cool, very powerful matriarchy just to ruin it for the point in the world which you play through. So that's unfortunate.
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