Those first few hours with the game were magical. Trying your best to find your solution rather than find the solution is such a powerful statement illustrated through gameplay, rather than trying to get that point across through a story where the bad guy loses to the good guy in a really lame and uninspired way. Visually, the game looks spectacular, it's at its best when the sun is going down and the Hylian Shield reflects the light, making the colors just pop. Everything from exploring caves and getting rewarded with useful gear and items, to exploring the sky islands and solving a puzzle in the most unconventional and inappropriate way was nothing short of intentional from the developers, and I absolutely loved that experience, and I appreciate even more that the game doesn't try to do anything more than that, because I saw what they did with the story, unfortunately.

Now allow me to tell you the story of my people during the Poo poo wars a very very long time ago. Like long enough for my stuff to be called ancient.

Never played a game that made me go, "I love fire emblem!" until I played this one. Great map design, unlike 3Houses.
For context on what the story is like, there is a shot in the prologue of the castle below the Somniel that looks like one of the default title screens for an RPGMaker game. Thankfully, character interactions within supports are consistently entertaining, even though they lack the potential to illustrate a legitimate sense of growth through the means of a time skip like they did in 3Houses, that's obviously not what they're going for. I also really liked Mika Pikazo's illustrations for the overall art direction the game has. Just looks gorgeous when viewing in full.

I overheard a battle theme I liked after finishing a mediocre battle. When I went to isolate it from the game and listen to it on my own, I immediately realized how similar it was to Xenoblade Chronicles' main battle theme. No matter how much the character design and music tries to convince you it's Final Fantasy, all of this immediately falls apart the second you open your map and see a secret chest while wearing your Assassin's Creed outfit and go to collect the hidden page while engaging in shitty battles all while the characters repeat the same 3 lines of dialogue despite having some of the most naturalistic animation ever produced. There are no trailing missions though, so I can see why people give this a 3/5.

The combat can be cool but it's often bogged down by the fact that it's Final Fantasy VII: Remake. Do you wanna know how hard I groaned when I saw that the stupid fuckin Harry Potter Dementor's were a metaphor for GAMERS who hate SHITTY video games? Wild and crazy, how you make a statement like that and then your voice direction is, "yeah let's have them do that dumbass anime grunting." Did you know Erica Lindbeck had a voiceline in Persona 5 that, I think they just used that exact voice line Futaba said its, "Not too shabby!" this is what Futaba says in this game when you press up on the left stick to dodge laser's. Barret is cool, he says the, "Rot runs deep in this pizza" which is a reference to the song from the soundtrack called the rotting pizza look it up. The last thing I will add was that when I wanted to buy this game on release, they were sold out and I walked home with a copy of Xenoblade Chronicles for the Wii. The laser inside my Wii doesn't work, so it can't read the disc. They also dropped an enhanced version of the game less than a year later on the PS5 and dropped the normal version on PS+, I didn't even need to pay for it, so worth it. Anyways, remember in Detroit: Become Human where the Androids sat in the back of the bus because it was NOT an allegory for black people. Ok, I got an idea for a boss design, but if it went temporarily invincible because the player didn't do it in the boring way we wanted them to do it? Woah what's that? The shittiest flying up to kill a moving target animation ever?? We gotta lot of Final Fantasy VII to do.

Yes. Definitely. Absolutely.

This game is genius. You feel a great sense of satisfaction from trying out new things and finding out it works. Each new mechanic they teach you, is attached to a card you've used before. So rather than introduce new abilities every level to make it more interesting, that interest is actually garnered when you realize new ways to complete a previous level you already aced; Every level feels meticulously designed to reward you when you actively try to experiment with the tool's you're given.

You find yourself asking questions like, "What if I ran on the water, used a bomb to launch myself over to the next bomb, and using that bomb to launch me to the finish line? "What if I used 2 bombs at once and just launched myself to the finish line." "What if I saved this bomb, bombed it later, and then bombed again, saving more time than the person telling me to play this game." All of this experimentation is done while you're shooting enemy's from across the map, so that you can turn your 8 second PB into an 7.87 second PB.

Now, for the story, just Press F until you think something mildly interesting is going on or you want more context to what is going on. I just don't understand why they felt to obligated to give it anime writing. Think of what a pimp looks like in your head, that's exactly what I mean when I say anime writing.

Machine Girl did really good on this soundtrack. There's a lot to say about how the first 3 songs feel like you're going deeper and deeper underwater until you're touching the bottom of the ocean--taking in the spectacle of each layer. But I'll just leave one comment:
"House of Cards" https://youtu.be/HEAeItQm__Q?t=107
Endlessly falling, you can literally feel the light reflecting off the glass pane windows and right before the song leaves you back at the beginning of the level. Just amazing stuff from Machine Girl, love how developers asked them to take the soundtrack in the direction of one of their best album's, "Infinite Potentiality and Others."

I'd really love to speak on how fucking incredible the map design is for this game. Every corner has another corner until you're an idiot hitting a wall. Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time remembering any of the character's names from the story. But that Entire map going from post-school invasion to the Fairy Forest, was one of the best experiences I've had in a video game. Reaching Shinagawa Pier and meeting a King Frost in a freezer, just freezing a single piece of meat is what I play video games for. The gradually evolving music hits like a truck mid-way when you reach Konan 3rd block. You can actually see this impact the truck left when you look to the left and see a giant crater where a big ass Girimehkala stands. I won't say more, but if you like good gameplay with great level design, this is the game for you.

Ichiban is such a great new main character that they already seem to be throwing away with the 8th game by putting Kiryu on the box art when he fucking died in that one Yakuza game.

Unfortunately, they decided to follow tradition with the inspiration from Dragon Quest by taking the combat system from the series too. And they couldn't even do it well. Despite the enemy variety, it will never reach the wonder of variety that Mother offered; they're trying too hard to make a cohesive design. I should be fighting abstract art, not a very specific list of machinery like a roomba and construction shit. Even if this sounds appealing, the novelty wears thin very quickly the second you are forced to do the dungeon crawling from Yakuza: Like a Dragon. I can appreciate the originality in the mini-game's but I question if it border's on addictive mobile gaming rather than an actual quality mini-game.

Did you know gaming? This is the 2nd Japanese game whose 7th mainline entry also indicated a huge reinvention of the series and also when they decided to fuse the Japanese name and English localized title into the same title. That other game is called Resident Evil: Biohazard 7