I prioritised playing this game because I was told that I would be disappointed, and they were right!

Ok, I have lots of thoughts swarming my head and I'm going to try to unpack them.

Let's start with the good stuff and work my way up.

First, the soundtrack is outstanding. No complaints there. It's easily the best part of the game.

I feel that the voice acting, motion capture/cinematics and art direction are good...? I don't think it's amazing per se and the reason why I say that is that the quality is not consistant throughout the game. There are parts of the game where it can feel cheap but overall it's done well enough. I mean, I get that motion capture and voice acting is difficult to coordinate and outsource so I get that it's difficult to get everything consistant, but if my noodles are undercooked sometimes, I will definitely complain.

I think that the overarching story and message they are trying to tell is good. The concept of how the world works is interesting as well. I think that if someone pitched this to me, I would love to work on it.

Okay. Let's talk about things I don't like.

First: storytelling and pacing.

I actually think Act 1 is done really well. The pacing is good. I liked the dynamics of Gustave, Maelle, Sciel and Lune. I was very interested to see how these guys are going to grow and how they are going to explore this unknown world and deal with the things that are thrown to them.

Then Act 2 came and Gustav died and Verso joins the party. The whole thing felt like violent bait and switch. Verso's existence in the party eliminated all sense of mystery about the journey. This is because he knows everything about this mysterious work, and therefore the party's decision making is mostly delegated to him.

The amount of character development between all party members also came to a standstill with Gustave's death. Gone are the tension between Gustav, Maelle and Lune, with Sciel pacifying them. Here, it's just "we must take revenge for Gustav and more forward", with Verso leading the charge.

To be honest, I could see world where the party members develop despite this, but that's not what the game did. Not much anyway. The whole of Act 2 is just seeking revenge and tunnel visioning into killing the paintress...and that's really it. The 'social links' with the characters mostly reveals their backgrounds, not so much character development...like I feel that Lune, Sciel and Verso are pretty much the same person from the start to the end. This might have attributed to some people thinking that these characters are shallow, which I think is a little harsh but I can see where they are coming from.

There's also lots of faffing in Act 2. There are many times where the developers dangle the idea that we are going to learn some lore, only to take it away before revealing the truth. There are also red herrings, where we think a character is connected to an event or a bigger secret (because the cutscene is overdramatic) but it's actually nothing. For example, Sciel had a dramatic scene with the mask Axon and Lune has one with the dancing Axon; both scenes made it look like they have connections with their respective Axons but actually...they don't.

Going towards Act 3, which I know is the final act, I already know that I'm going to be bombed by a big reveal, because by the end of Act 2, I'm still mostly clueless on what's going on.

And then we come to Act 3 which, sure enough, the developers decided to drop reveal everything. And what a fucking reveal - we are actually living in the matrix and the world is not real.

Now, like I mentioned earlier, I'm okay with everything that's revealed, but the way it was revealed is stupidly jarring. What do you mean that the defeating the Paintress accelerated everyone' death? What do you mean Maelle suddenly remembers who she really is only at this point? Suddenly, in just one opening scene in Act 3, she is a new character. It's as if she ate a character development steroid pill, and her development shoehorned her into a role that opposes the main 'villain'.

If I'm feeling tired and bored by Act 2, in Act 3, my brain checked out.

Yes, the theme and setting is beautiful, but the game has wasted so much of my time just blueballing me at every turn and giving me a surprise climax at an inappropriate timing.

Speaking of wasting my time, we can now talk about the next thing I can't stand: combat, which revolves around parrying.

In general, having a parrying mechanic as the main way your combat works in any PvE genre is insane. Parry is high skill ceiling, which alienates players and promotes elitism amongst your playerbase at best, which I feel is irresponsible. Usually, parry is given as a very very very optional thing you can choose to do (e.g. DMC3's royal guard).

Parry is also problemetic in balance. In this game, it's worse because Parry has so much benefits, which is getting AP, completely nullifying damage (which disregards certain stats), AND if you do a full parry, you get a free counter attack.

The game suggests to dodge instead of parrying to 'get used to the enemy attacks'. Dodge is basically parrying without the counter and get extra AP, but a bigger window. In short, there is no escaping 'press a button at the right time of the enemy attacks' or die.

Dodge is just bad as an alternative. They should have had some kind of mechanism that help players get better. Maybe a defend button where the game will give a visual aid when an attack comes (similar to rhythm games) and if the user 'parry' correctly while in this state, they will take less damage. I think that will make the gameplay more interesting, especially for luminas that require players to manage their health carefully.

There's a way to mitigate this problem though, by designing actual attacks of the enemies. You can theoretically make the parrying experience enjoyable if you design the enemy attacks well. Unfortunately, the design of the enemy attacks range from really fun to downright dogshit unreasonable. Some enemies, you can tell intuitively when their attacks are coming. Others, though, requires you to just memorize the timing and because of that, you will tend to restart once every new enemy encounter. It's has such disrespect for a player's time.

By the way, they also lied that we don't need to parry as much in the normal difficulty. And they also lied that the easy difficulty need to parry a lot less. You still need to parry or you will die.

Next, we talk about the level design. My god, the level design is either bad or dogshit. They look beautiful, yes, but navigating every level is a fucking nightmare. I can't believe it's 2026 and I have to hug walls like a dumb AI to make sure I'm not missing anything and to make sure I'm not completely lost. There is a complete disregard that when you have a chasing 3rd person camera, you have to design the maps differently.

Some levels also makes zero sense in terms of design. For example, at the Reacher, the theme of the level was suggested to be climbing. Then at a certain point, we start flying somewhere. Yes, I understand that at some point while climbing, they talk about flying, but do you really need to fly into a fog and make me lose all sense of scaling a tower? And wait a minute, what you mean Esquie can't fly us all the way up since it's an open air location at the top??

And the world map! Why doesn't the world map have no way to place markers nor have a minimap? Why do I have to spend 2 full seconds transitioning to the map to see where I am and another 2 full seconds transitioning back?

There are many small things as well that I would love to nitpick, like Maelle suddenly saying that she has vertigo in Act 3 AFTER zipping around for the whole game and flying on Esquie since the start of Act 3. There's also a shitty maze somewhere. There are so many small things that were placed in the game that made me wonder... why bother? Pride? Ego? I don't know.

At the end of the day though, I understand why this game is the Game of the Year 2025. I understand why everyone loves the game, and how it generates so much hype. I understand that the combat is very clippable and sharable on social media. I understand that the music is amazing. And I understand that certain scenes look great. And I understand that the setting and theme is so romantic and beautiful that players just forget any frustration they had before (huh, it's like FF8 in this sense).

But to me, the game is 'too much form, too little function'. A Genshin Impact of turn-based RPGs.

This game is 5/10. Would NOT recommend to most RPG genre enjoyers. Just watch a playthrough and save yourself the frustration.