I genuinely don't think ANYONE was more excited for this game than me, it's been the wallpaper on my Chromebook for 4 entire years now as I wait for the release that I always hoped in my heart would come. So believe me when I say, this hurts me to say probably more than any game I've had a bad experience with. (And yes, I know the game was basically rebuilt from scratch halfway through and had like 0 budget)

This game just...isn't good. It's easy to point to the combat and say it's incredible vapid, boring and grindy, which are all true. But I actually think the visual novel portion is the bigger flaw of this game. It's incredibly weird to go through a choices matter VN where your choices don't matter at all. Raising affinity has no impact on the story since all the deaths in the first playthrough are scripted and forced to trigger. Your morality plays almost next to no role in the story, only determine maybe one death towards the end of the game (possibly 2) and that's about it.

Such beautiful presentation wasted on an incredibly empty and tedious experience that even after waiting 4 years for, I don't even really want to play again. I'm not gonna sit through unskippable dialogue, scenes and battles in a NG+ playthrough when 80% of it will play out the exact same as the playthrough I just did.

This literally breaks my heart to say, but I almost wish the game had just stayed in development hell and been cancelled after all.