Laughably bad. This is the cream of the crop at how not to do a payoff: the game. The story provided answers and conclusions to the arc that are just unsatisfactory and meaningless. Chief among them being the curse and the retcons that comes with said curse. But then there are also these lovely stumbles such as Crossbell's Liberation being an offscreen event (like it did on Azure so good job at stringing along the crossbell fans who are looking forward to an actual expansion of that ending they saw at Azure, Kondo) character shilling and rising prominence of New Class VII that comes at the expense of the older characters agency (like Juna and SSS or Musse in relation to Olivier and his rivalry with Osborne). Let's not forget to mention how this game renders CS3 pointless courtesy of bringing back everyone who "died" in its ending or handwaving away all the ouroboros actions in the previous game mere experiment that don't mean much in the grandscheme of things. Jaw-dropping levels of fail, this one.

The lore setups are interesting but really, after wasting a whole arc (perhaps even two if you are looking for conclusions for the Crossbell arc too) with meaningless kerfuffle and fumbles, why would you have any excitement for these setups? Nevertheless they did save the story from being a complete waste of time so. Okay.

This game if nothing else, sets a bad precedent on how badly the writers could drop the balls on paying off all the masterful setups they've done in previous games. It certainly gives a strong case for me to just wait out all of the next arc instead of jumping blindly into it in the future. Avoid this one and get a summary if you wanna get into the next game/arc instead