Great game marred by an underwhelming ending. It's not Backbone levels of bad where it'll make you hate every minute you spent playing it, but it's nowhere near the same level of quality as the rest of the game is. Fun narrative game. Could've been among the best, but falls short of meeting expectations.

The game also fails to use non-linear narrative to its fullest. You're actually railroaded into certain events and it's not like 999 where the true ending is locked behind seeing another bad ending. There's only 1 time throughout the entire game where you actually get to choose between branching path A or B. Most of the times, you only got 1 choice.

Is it a good game? ...no. It clearly isn't.
Is it a fun one? Fuck yes.

I can complain about some of the level design, the OST isn't that great, story can be downright gibberish at times, but if anything, this game proves that having a good gameplay loop can be an immense boon. It's not really a Megaman X game, but it's certainly fanservice-y enough for fans to be happy for seeing all the characters from different subseries playable at once. And it's a power fantasy on its own right to play a gacha and be able to just buy whatever the ♥♥♥♥ you want without having to spend real cash for it. Speaking of cash, I would only say that this game is slightly overpriced, but it's definitely worth it on sale at least.

And I hope this becomes a trend. Un-gacha-fy some of these games and release them as an offline package. Games as a service will always eventually die, but this way you can at least preserve some of these for posterity. It was fun playing as Vampire Zero even if it's not something you'd expect to see in a Megaman game. Or maybe precisely because of it.

I have a love/hate relationship with both Fuga games so far. They're great, have undeniable passion put in making it, and can be a masterclass in artistic flair and writing when it want to... It also has an gameplay that overstays its welcome (it's not bad, just a tad unbalanced), can be quite trope-y at times and has some plot twists that actively make the story worse than not having them at all...

Other games I have similar pet peeves with (no pun intended) usually fall into the "underwhelming" category at best, but for some reason I can't outright say the game about Fuga. For me those are great games, even if they don't fully live to their potential.