I both loved and hated this game.
Loved because this game has such a wide variety of content, lots of fun activities (Karaoke/disco/cabaret-club management, my beloved), and walking through Kamurocho feels really nice. There's a ton of cool characters that you end up liking more and more, and the story is very touching. ( Also kinda fascinated by how they render and model faces)
On the other hand, I'm just very bad at Beat'em up games like that, I struggled against basically every boss and more.
Also it's really a game with a lot of men, made by men, for men, and at times it shows ...

I am a backer from the original crowdfunding back in 2015 ! I loved the demo, but when the game finally came out I never played past the first area somehow ... Finally decided to fully try this a few years later and wow
So yeah, visually it's gorgeous, musically too. Gameplay is very interesting (I played with Mouse+keybord), reminds me a bit of NieR. There's a lot of plateforming/parkour despite the top-down angle, and the areas are very fun to explore (although they tend to be a bit TOO large actually). Big dungeons with great puzzles and mechanics that can get quite hard. Great stuff really !
The story ends up being really good too, despite the SAO vibe haha. I think the game has interesting stuff to say about AI and virtual worlds. And I just love the characters, I don't even really know why but they just feel very human, in their interactions with each others.
It's a very inspiring game for me. They were multipe times where I had to actually stop playing because I couldn't focus because I just kept thinking about how inspiring it was ...

I was very scared of playing this because I knew it has a lot of text and a crazy big skill tree.
First day ingame was horrible, I kept making bad decisions and throws and even got a game-over. Also the game talks about politics in a deep and serious way so I kinda felt like a kid in an adult game haha. I honestly thought I would just abandon it but at the end of the first day there's this discussion you have with Kitsuragi and he's being very nice and comprehensive and it put me in a good mood; So I just decided to go with the fact that I'm playing a pretty bad cop and continue with the game.
In the end I really liked it, beautiful art direction and visuals, I loved discovering more about the world. Tho I still probably didn't really understood all the themes and ideas of this game ...

The more I think about this game, the more I love it and realize how unique it is.
Such an amazing feeling exploring this solar system, contemplating the infinite dark space with the beautiful score playing. So satisfying to unravel the mysteries and to understand what you need to do, especially when you need to be a little bold. There's a big sense of cohesion in this whole game.
The ending is really powerful and you can really feel that you're witnessing something big.
It's not my personnal favorite game of all time, yet I feel like it might the best game ever made, if that makes sense.

As for Echoes of the Eye, while it didn't feel that connected to the rest of the game, and I thought it was way harder both in its puzzles and just mechanically ; I still really enjoyed it, adds an interesting scenario, and the art direction is just fantastic.

Gameplay is good, and character animations are very smooth and polished. I was really not digging the art direction and chara-design at first, but I got used to it, there are a few characters that I find pretty.
Other than that, the story and characters are just very uninteresting to me. I straight-up hate the fact that you're playing as this Divine being, you just can't develop a proper casual relationship with the other characters. I dropped the game because I believe I met all the characters, and with no story to keep me engaged I didn't feel the need to play more after around 18 chapters or something. (Also I decided to play in classic / hard and I guess that's just not for me haha)
It's funny because after playing Three Houses I wanted a story structure more like Awakening : going on an adventure, travelling the world and recruiting new characters on every chapter. But now I realize that the 3H structure makes for deeper bonds between you and the characters.

( Didn't know where to add this but felt the need to mention it : the black girl being called "Misutira" in japanese, really; and the desert kingdom being full of colored NPCs yet amongst the 7 recruitables characters in here, 5 are white. Put a little more effort into this please )