On par with Doom 2016 in terms of quality and gameplay, if a bit bloated, but it lacks the great environmental storytelling. I'm well aware most people don't care for story in FPS games. But the environmental storytelling in something like the first Doom, Doom 3 and Doom 2016 adds a great layer of immersion that improves the game.

The "chosen one, God slayer" story this game has is not only written poorly, has no emotional impact and slows down the pace but it actively detracts from the experience. It's downright embarrassing at times how much they try to sell the Doom Slayer as a cool dude everyone is afraid of. The games I mentioned prior make him seem cool without trying hard to, in a very organic way.

Great fun when I played, but the more time passes, the less and less I like the game. It's a visual novel so, obviously, I care about writing most. It's not great. The honeymoon phase being over fully now, the game not having a real story, just a lot of individual stories that mostly end up being unfinished makes me feel like they thought about things happening and were content with superficiality. Stuff happening in the world is just material for characters to talk about. The game is too short and they toss too much under the rug. I like most characters, but I didn't feel most of them were developed satisfyingly enough.

Most of the sexual themed jokes (which are plenty) feel like they're made by a teenager boy who found out lesbians are a thing. And when it's not between women, it's not much better. The writing when it involves anything sexual is very immature 9 times out of 10.

All in all, to end with, it's style over substance. I loved that style when I played, but it has worn out for me and the substance isn't anything special. Feels like it's considered so well written because people who played this probably didn't play any other visual novels.

The only reason I dropped it is because end-game dungeons get really annoying to traverse.

It has the most interesting plot and world out of all the Megaten games I played. Law and Chaos aren't just one dimensional caricatures that have no effect on the world and it's inhabitants. It also has a lot more plot than games in the series released far later. Which I always found odd. The battle system gets repetitive, but you can also easily learn to abuse the speaking mechanic to make enemies leave you so you skip on fights you don't want to have.

The gameplay, especially past the first region, is Breath of the Wild but a lot better. Even if it's a gacha, you're going to have at least one character of every element even if you never pull for anyone. The way they put elemental puzzles and synergy between elements in exploration puts it above Breath of the Wild's puzzles that show you all they have going for them early on.

The combat is infinitely better also. Team building is insanely fun and it's easy to get 4* characters to have a lot of experimentation even without paying for currency.

The only bad thing about this game for me is that the writing kept getting worse and more padded out. It was mostly inoffensive in the first 2 areas, but the third region and the fourth region, the little I played of it, has awful writing and insane amounts of filler. That's literally the only reason I stopped playing. But I'm aware the average player likes having lots of text and they target that audience.

Feels like all the top reviews with under 2 star ratings conveniently ignore how amazing the exploration and gameplay systems are. They put a lot of 60$ RPGs to shame.

I don't know how people here specifically feel about this, but I saw it compared to Rune Factory 3-5 a lot. As if a game with different structure and gameplay loops is objectively worse when it's like comparing oranges with apples. It's another farming-social sim with a focus on dungeons but it plays very differently.

It's really rough, but it has a lot of charm and the "finish dungeons in one go or redo them" design and fields in dungeons being literal "rune factories" so you don't run out of energy and needing to plan around planting and harvesting crops in dungeons to finish them is great.

The only bad thing in this game to me is that farming is too simplistic and the villagers don't have enough unique dialogue. If you liked the newer Rune Factory games, I urge you to give this a go also. As long as you go into it not expecting it to be rune factory 4, it can be a lot of fun.

I didn't finish it, but I came very close to the end. I don't know where all this deep writing people talk of is. If it's somehow all stuck behind the endings, that's bad. What I saw of the writing was very mediocre and didn't lead anywhere. Many characters have no purpose to exist. I also don't buy the "lots of hidden symbolism" thing because it genuinely feels like SH2 fans online thought far deeper than the actual writers did.

And, unlike the first game, it was either great fun or really boring gameplay wise. Has some amazing areas but some which are absolute snoozefests. Not even talking in regards to the horror factor. Many areas just were really bland. The amazing areas make up for it, but I prefer how Silent Hill 1 was more consistent in terms of keeping my attention.

I'm not a fan. The farming, fishing and foraging system are fun. The community center is great fun too. So is the customization. But the huge town, short days and slow walking speed make the social aspect really difficult to engage with. The social aspect is the most important aspect of a farming sim to me.

The villagers in this game are just boring to top it off. They don't hold a candle to something like the villagers in Rune Factory 3-5. Them being more "realistic" NPCs doesn't excuse the fact there's little dialogue and most of it is uninteresting.

The combat and dungeons also are serviceable and nothing more.

I'll assume anyone reading has played/watched the original Steins;Gate. With that being said, this game is a grief and trauma story with a science fiction twist. Which I think is done really well. It's less focused, but because the writing is better, I think it goes to higher highs than the original often. And I find it more interesting than just "time travel story that is really good and has consequence" which the original goes for.

Main characters aren't just fun tropes anymore. The game shifting between perspectives is an amazing addition. The non-canon endings don't just diverge into "For this ending, you partner up with this woman" like in the original. One ending doesn't even have Okabe in it.

If you like the idea of characters sharing grief and trauma and overcoming it together, I highly recommend it. It was a pleasant surprise for me, especially after hearing how "it's worse than the original".

Amazing atmosphere and music. Some of the worst combat I've ever seen. Somehow, you're expected to postpone fun missing all of your attacks for 20 hours and to run at a snail's pace for 30. Even then, the dungeons are fewer in number than the following games and a lot more simplistic.
I also don't buy the "dice roll systems were how it was back then" excuse. I played a few older PC RPGs (including The Elder Scrolls Arena) and somehow the miss rates in those games are less abysmal.
I'm not fond of the "realism" excuse for mediocre quests either. People seem to find a way to turn any criticism for this game into a positive.

I really want to love this game (it has my favorite setting from the series) but I don't like it when I'm expected to go into a game thinking it's going to suck for 20 hours before it gets going. I can finish a game or more in that time and have fun for all 20 hours.

I enjoyed my time with the game and greatly enjoyed the story dungeons and atmosphere, especially with such a fun soundtrack to back it up. The dungeons have a lot of gimmicks that keep things interesting. The issue is that you must read the manual and play a spellcaster or a hybrid. There's a shield spell trick that you must use if you want to have fun with the game. With that, the balancing issues are mostly done with. (I'll explain it at the end for anyone who might be interested)

The actual fighting is just serviceable. The main reason the score isn't higher. You should play this game only if you like first person dungeon crawling. It doesn't have anything in common with Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. I didn't play Daggerfall yet to comment on that.

As for the shield trick, you need to do this. You go to the wizard's store in any town and create a spell that uses up almost all your mana to create a shield. You use it before you go into dungeons and rest in town. Inside dungeons, once the shield breaks, whenever you're in a safe area where you can rest, you use said shield spell again and rest fully. When you can't rest safely, you use weaker shield spells when it breaks or heal spells.