I used to be a defender of this game, but finally at age 24, 5 years after the last time i played it, I realize the gameplay sucks. I just really do not think the Focus meter/magic forms/block parrying fits together in this game. You cannot cancel your attack into a block, so parrying sucks to do, plus its just hard to detect enemy attacks. Idk if parrying works in a God of War type game, but only experience is this so. The focus meter gets depleted to 0 once you get hit, which is easy to do cause blocking/parrying sucks, but all the focus meter does is give you magic energy on each hit. That can be good except for some god forsaken reason to collect this energy you need to stand completely still and do a collecting animation mid combat. Why would I want to do that? How does this compliment the action gameplay? You could just make it so you hold a button and you just collect it while playing (OR JUST COLLECT IT AUTOMATICALLY). You can't even go magic form or your focus bar will also drop to 0. I don't really care if it would be overpowered if you could be in magic form while also dropping magic on every hit, cause you have to also somehow not get hit while doing it. All these things could be reshuffled to work together, but they just FUCKING SUCK how they are.

Besides me hating the gameplay now, I do enjoy the world building, and the art direction with it. Very folklore-y. I like the story, and I love Patrick Stewart.

Also, a lot of the UI that pops up feels so much like some cheap ass casual game (Not saying this is a negative, i like it). Like whenever "Puzzle Solved!" pops up, it reminds of a game I have called Faerie Solitaire, shits crazy.