I played about 17 hours, some ways into the second area. I'm disappointed, but I'm not that surprised. I've played enough of these games to know there's a wide gulf between Katsura Hashino's work and everything else. So I wasn't expecting Nocturne, despite how much this game wants to evoke Nocturne.
Much of my time with the game feels like playing a pretty terrible collectathon. A lot of time spent Naruto-running past every demon (because there's hardly been a point in fighting anything unless you're going to recruit it) to find your way to trinkets and quest objectives marked on the map. There's also a weird amount of verticality for a game where the platforming doesn't exactly feel like Mario.
You have not so much an open world here as you do a linear series of very large rooms connected by narrow tunnels. Those rooms are mostly indistinguishable. It's all the same blown-out ruins of Tokyo with the same cars littering the ground everywhere. I hoped the second area would be distinct from the first, which I tired of after a few hours and which lasted ten hours. But the second area looked more or less the same, and now I've been there for several hours and I want to stop.
Since enemies can be avoided, there's little danger outside of occasional forced encounters. These fights can be fine and at least feel tense sometimes, but they go on a bit long and there's not that much depth to fights once you're in them. The depth comes more from creating your team outside of battle. But this game really limits your options there by, for reasons I cannot fathom, making you wait to unlock half your skill slots until later in the game. There's also a fair number of demons with unique skills that make them better than other demons of a comparable level, even early on. I like the idea, but I end up not wanting to use most of the old demons much of the time due to their lack of unique skills.
Anyway, I only felt engaged when I was team-building or in a big fight, and I don't know if it's worth trudging through the rest of the game for that. The exploration, as it were, is very boring and comprises a lot of the content here.
Much of my time with the game feels like playing a pretty terrible collectathon. A lot of time spent Naruto-running past every demon (because there's hardly been a point in fighting anything unless you're going to recruit it) to find your way to trinkets and quest objectives marked on the map. There's also a weird amount of verticality for a game where the platforming doesn't exactly feel like Mario.
You have not so much an open world here as you do a linear series of very large rooms connected by narrow tunnels. Those rooms are mostly indistinguishable. It's all the same blown-out ruins of Tokyo with the same cars littering the ground everywhere. I hoped the second area would be distinct from the first, which I tired of after a few hours and which lasted ten hours. But the second area looked more or less the same, and now I've been there for several hours and I want to stop.
Since enemies can be avoided, there's little danger outside of occasional forced encounters. These fights can be fine and at least feel tense sometimes, but they go on a bit long and there's not that much depth to fights once you're in them. The depth comes more from creating your team outside of battle. But this game really limits your options there by, for reasons I cannot fathom, making you wait to unlock half your skill slots until later in the game. There's also a fair number of demons with unique skills that make them better than other demons of a comparable level, even early on. I like the idea, but I end up not wanting to use most of the old demons much of the time due to their lack of unique skills.
Anyway, I only felt engaged when I was team-building or in a big fight, and I don't know if it's worth trudging through the rest of the game for that. The exploration, as it were, is very boring and comprises a lot of the content here.