I really tried to give this a chance but I just can't bring myself to continue.

It's very clear to me that Devil May Cry was a big inspiration for the gameplay. Clive's eikons are basically Dante's styles. You can switch whenever and they change parts of your moveset. Unfortunately it just feels really bland to me. It's really hard to explain but I feel like there's very little synergy between different moves, very little reason to mix and match. I feel like I'm just pressing my abilities whenever they come off cooldown with no thought. The game seems to want you to juggle enemies. There are several moves that enable it, but I haven't found a reason to do so at all and actually pulling it off is incredibly finicky. In DMCV the reason why you want to juggle enemies and remain in the air is because you're a lot less likely to get attacked that way. Here it feels like they included juggling because that's what action games do without thinking about how it fits in the flow of combat. A ton of ability upgrades are just "you get to equip this on a different Eikon" and I have no idea why you'd bother. What little synergy is found is usually shared between abilities of the same Eikon. Mind you none of it is broken or feels jank. It all functions very well. I just find it really bland. The most exciting moments are the big setpiece Eikon fights and those have very simplified mechanics to accomodate for the cinematic design.

I probably would have finished it if the story hadn't also been incredibly frustrating. It displays all of Maehiro's bad writing habits. To explain I'm gonna do a slight tangent about FFXIV. FFXIV heavensward start with a high profile assassination that should shake up the political landscape of the entire world and the assassin frames the player, forcing them to go into hiding. Then heavensward's story ends up being about a completely unrelated nation and that whole assassination business gets resolved mostly off screen. Turns out it didn't happen. The status quo is safe. Something very similar happens in XVI. Clive accidentally and unknowingly summoned his Eikon and killed his little brother when he was a teen. The whole event was so traumatizing he locked it away from his memory and spent years looking for the killer. Eventually he comes to the realization that he was in fact the killer. It tries to be a powerful moment but it did nothing to me because I could see the reveal from a mile away. And then NEVERMIND the brother is alive actually. Forget all that pathos, we can't have the main character actually do something bad I guess. I'm also extra frustrated that no one, not even his companion Jill, ever tires to float the idea that maybe it's not his fault a demon took control of his body. I dunno, maybe that's a minor point but it bugs me.

I really do not like stories where magical people are oppressed by non-magical people because I find the power dynamic always feels nonsensical. The game has no black people, zero, not even among random NPCs. It makes the world feel so fake. This was a deliberate choice btw. In an interview, the devs mentioned that because the game is about slavery they didn't want to become problematic by having black people in it (I'm paraphrasing from memory but it was something along those lines). It's such a cowardly attitude. Orc are fine to have though. When the game introduces them, Clive calls them savages or animals and you murder them because they're naturally evil. Meanwhile FFVII remake and rebirth both have a ton of colored people in the world everywhere. It's really not that hard.

I played up to the 2nd visit of the desert area with the extremely generic Mario 64 desert music (btw the music in this game is so boring, I'm genuinely disappointed in Soken, he can and has done so much better). One quest there introduced the idea that goblins are sentient creatures who steal to eat and do not deserve to be hunted. Up until that point, the story portrayed goblins as being vermin to be exterminated with no nuance. Upon this revelation, Clive just goes "that's neat" and moves on with his life with no introspection, no thought towards the hundreds of goblins the game had him kill until that point. Then 20 meters away another quest has you murder goblins who are being pests. The dissonance was so baffling I closed the game and haven't resumed it since. I might still finish it someday because I hear the ending is trash and I'm morbidly curious about it but for now the game is deleted from my console. I'm sure Maehiro will get to direct more games but unless he actually learns how to fuckin tell a story I probably won't be buying.