At the beginning of the game, I really had to push myself to keep playing it because there were a lot of annoying aspects in the gameplay. I quickly decided to ignore the side quests altogether, for the better.
These were completely uninteresting and ruined the pace of the story.

I also turned the game to Easy mode, once I realised there wasn't any benefit to play on higher difficulty, as it was just making those already boring fights even longer.

The game really shines with its music & story. The relations between characters are so wholesome, especially Kainé/Emil and Nier/Weiss.

Just a nitpick about the music: "Emil sacrifice" was used way too often, in every sad cutscene. I became really insensitive to it after some point. Apart from that, the OST was amazing!

I got sick of replaying the same storyline over and over to unlock all the different routes.
You need to do the 2nd half of the game 3 times in a row. And having to redo the last dungeon everytime was exhausting.
There was also the fact that you need to get all the weapons to be able to finish route C.
Seems like the developers really wanted to ruin our fun!

Route E was so refreshing because you finally get to see something different, and it was nice to play as Kainé.
The setting obviously was made to look like NieR Automata, and that was so cool to see the characters from Replicant in those familiar environments.
It was definitely one of the best routes, too bad it ended so quickly!

Overall I really enjoyed the game despite the weak gameplay, and I was kinda sad after I finished it because I liked the characters and I was really into the story.

----------Playtime & Completion----------

[Played in early November 2022]
Playtime: 55 hours
I got all the endings (A --> E) but not 100%, since I barely did any sidequest.