The gameplay is serviceable. There gunplay is pretty basic, and most of the puzzles are sliding block puzzles for some reason. Thankfully, it never got annoying, but there's no standout moments.

The story isn't anything special either, but it's told in a fun way. The game revels in the 1930s Louisiana accents in a way I dug. The story regularly breaks from reality transporting the player to different locations at the flip of a switch which reminded me of The Evil Within (a game I love). And of course, the two leads are played by actors I love which is biggest selling point. Because of this, the game kept me hooked while playing my way through both characters' stories. The disappointing part is that both playthroughs are mostly the same: same enemy encounters, same puzzles, and same locations. The dialogue is different keeping true to the characters' personalities and history at least make for fresh interactions with NPCs. It wasn't until Chapter 4 (out of 5) when these characters finally split off onto their own paths.

It's a pretty painless experience. It's just that it doesn't do anything well enough to be good. It's a bit disappointing.

This game comes with all the strengths of the previous games: good ghost stories, fun, likeable cast of characters, striking, creepy art, and good atmosphere created through sound effects, music, writing.

It also improves over the others with better pacing and handling of the Suspense Acts. They come up with an odd RPG-ish solution that gives the player multiple chances to guess the right answer instead of an immediate "Game Over" screen. It cuts the frustration I felt from playing the previous games way down. There are collectibles in the game to help improve the odds and amount of attempts during Suspense Acts. Thankfully they place them along the main path, so I didn't have to search the entire map every chapter. I was able to find most of them without having to resort to a guide.

It's the smoothest, most enjoyable Spirit Hunter game. I've been loving playing this every night, and it's been making time fly by quickly.

It really shows that PlatinumGames worked on this. The boss battles are awesome and full of hype spectacle. For the combat, it looks like they took Xenoblade Chronicle's battle system and made it fully action. It works surprisingly well. At first, I wasn't feeling it that much. The boss battles were always great as I mentioned. During those, the team and I can unleash everything we have creating thrilling highs, but fighting the smaller enemies were either uninterestingly easy or annoying. That was on me though. As I explored my characters abilities more, got a set of arts I felt good about, and got more thoughtful on when and how to use them, the smaller fights got much more satisfying. There was more depth to the game than originally seemed, and I grew to love it.

The story was decent. I wasn't expecting this to be a continuation of an existing story, so I was a bit lost. Also, the hyper cheeriness of the characters was too much for me. The fate episodes helped flesh out some of the characters. The story is standalone at least, so I could eventually get into it. It's big on the power of friendship and redemption which is like plenty of anime stories.

The game isn't the most graphically impressive, but it looks gorgeous because of the art direction. It also runs really smooth. The developers know how to create big moments in and out of cut scenes. I was in awe of what I was seeing often throughout the game.

This is definitely one of the best action RPGs I have played. It's a genre I've never cared for that is now the most exciting genre to me because action game masters like PlatinumGames and Team Ninja have jumped in.