I cannae believe so many folk are treating such an ok game as some big line in the culture war sand. If they took a few minutes away from signing petitions and replying to every Sony tweet with their hashtag, and actually bought the thing they'd see that no amount of skin can save this from being just very fine.

Flat shallow characters, messy predictable story, repetitive combat. This game has it all!

Fights are mostly just waiting for the enemy to do something so you can parry it and do a burst attack. There are combos, but you almost never get to do full ones because the enemy is starting its next swing and your only options are block, parry, or dodge. Good luck with that last one, because the dodge is dogshit. It's supposed to be for moving away from unblockable attacks, but the timing for it just feels off. This is made painfully worse when more than one enemy is targeting you, and your Souls instincts kick in looking for i-frames that aren't there.

Boss fights and music mostly rip though, so it has that going for it.

The characters however are like interacting with cardboard. Everyone is so basic. They're saying words that sound important, but there's so little there beneath it in both the acting or body language. Adam has to be the worst of these. The man feels like a placeholder model and voice through the whole game. It's wild that's he's one of the main cast. They're all desperately trying to get you to care about a story that feels vague, but by accident. Not some kind of "Oh the secrets are being kept from you" thing, but like they forgot to give us necessary info because they know it all since they're the ones making the game. I burst out laughing at the end when some daft stuff happens and a character just goes "What are you talking about?" as this person walks away without saying anything. It's exactly how I felt in the moment.

I'm convinced this whole thing could have worked better as more of a boss rush with bits of story or travel in-between à la Furi. I didn't feel like I was connecting wih the people or what was going on when I was trekking across empty desert doing fetch quests where every one ends with finding a corpse with an attached dying message. It's a poor man's Nier Automata, and that doesn't do it any favours in a world where I've come to resent a game I loved because it's done cross-overs with fucking everything and I'm sick of seeing 2B. THEY MADE ME SICK OF SEEING A NICE BIG ARSE!

Even knowing the ending will not prepare you for it.

What a beautiful game this is, with one of the best, if not the best, turn based combat systems.

I could write more, so much more, about the characters and how much I love them, but I think I'll quote my favs instead:

"There is no need for fear. Kimahri will go with you" (it is very important that Kimahri goes with you, trust me, he's the best).

"You don't have to smile, if it's too tough."

"HAHAHAHAHAHA"