1. Story
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 takes place in the world of Alrest. A massive cloud sea surrounds the Titans, huge creatures that people live on because without them they would fall down into the sea and die. Through this cloud sea, there are people who salvage materials that are in its depths. Our main character, Rex, happens to be one of these salvagers. He lives on a Titan named Gramps, who has raised him for a long time and goes to his normal trading post, Argentum, to sell his haul for the day. However, as you are about to leave, the chairman of the trading post asks you for a special job that needs a salvager. You end up joining an organization, Torna, on their mission to salvage the Aegis blade, Pyra. The world of Alrest has beings called blades which are bonded to drivers. Humans who bond with the blades take various forms from creatures, humans, and animals to use special powers, weapons, and arts. And that is our basic premise. I won't go any further because I do not want to spoil anyone, but the story for this game really takes the time it needs to devote to all the characters, making them all feel very developed throughout the game. I was really surprised by the fact that the entire party, blades and drivers included, got really good amounts of character development. It makes everyone in the party just feel like real friends by the end of the game. The cutscenes have very good animation, especially during fights.


1. [CONT.]
And a lot of the story is voice acted, even the heart to hearts, which are little optional cutscenes that some characters have. I found the story to have a strong start and it just kept getting better with every chapter beaten. The ending was also very emotional, and just made me feel satisfied at the end of a 110-hour journey. The voice acting can be a bit annoying and not the best at times, but by the end I found the actors really improved and they got much better. The story has a lot of interesting concepts and the game's world feels truly lived in. Not only with the main story, but all the side stories through the in-game side quests. Overall, by the end of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 I felt like more than a player, I felt like a true habitant of the world of Alrest, it drew me in that much.


2. Gameplay
The gameplay of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 requires a PHD to truly understand. Like, seriously. There is a lot of depth here, and you have to spend hours to truly understand and grasp it while the game spoon feeds you more systems until eventually about 30 hours in where you finally get access to all the major mechanics. However, EVEN AT THE LAST AREA OF THE GAME, they still manage to throw in another mechanic and tutorial. It was funny so I can’t complain too much. The gameplay in this game is poorly explained to the player, so you should refer to Chuggaconroys' video about it to learn what you really need to do. Sadly, this area of the game is a really slow burn. Now, this game is an open world RPG, and the combat is much different than your typical RPG. There are no battle transitions, no random encounters. Everything you see you can walk up to and battle, or they will to you if they see you depending on what enemy it could be. When in battle, you have 3 party members out at once, and you do auto attacks to build up to your arts which you also have 3 at a time on any given character. However unlike in Xenoblade 1, you cannot move and attack, instead you have to stay still to attack. I feel like this discourages positioning yourself as now you have to stop everything in order to reposition and the run speed is slower as well compared to the first game. This is a minor thing though, and overall, most of the time you do not really need to be in any particular position except for doing bonus damage. Another important aspect to combat is your blades. In this game, you control your driver character, let's say for example Rex. You have a total of 3 blade slots per character, and these are given to you throughout the game. You go into battle with one, lets say Pyra and you build up affinity points to use your blade combos, which are special attacks that combo with your other party members blades.

2. [CONT.]
Over time, the other blades you have will also become available to switch through a cooldown timer. So say you do a fire attack, and you want to use a stage 2 combo attack that is water, you can switch to a water blade to build up affinity to use that stage 2 water attack. Eventually, when you get to a stage 3 attack, it does massive damage and also leaves behind an element orb with the enemy, as well as seals a special effect they can do. Returning from the first game is timed button presses as well as the party gauge, which is built up by using blade combos and by arts that have bonus effects. You can use this to revive fallen party members and once you fill it up all the way, you can do a chain attack. Now, the flow of combat for this game can best be described as, use different blades to get as many different combos as possible that drop different element orbs. Once you get 5 element orbs, use a chain attack to break as many as possible, using the opposite element of said orb, so say there is a fire orb, to break it faster you would use a water attack with a water blade. When you break an orb, you can continue the chain attack and once you break every orb you get a full burst special attack which if you have not already killed the enemy will do such massive damage it will kill it if it is not dead already. It is a system that is a lot more complex than it seems at first, since there are so many different blades to get, so many to mix and combine, and many elements at your disposal to get element orbs from. Once you get into the hang of things though, it really shines through and rewards you for trying different blades, combos, and roles. There are 3 main roles in battle, Attacker, Healer, and Tank, which are all easy to explain. Attacker does most damage, Healer heals everyone, and Tank takes all the damage.
2. [CONT.]
The cool thing here is that any character (except for Tora), can equip any blade with any role assuming they summoned that blade. So, you can make any character any role you want, allowing for a lot of customizability. That being said there are certain roles that some characters certainly exceed in, so you can kind of go either way. For my playthrough, I mainly just used the characters in the way I thought they would best fit. Now, how do you get blades? Well, you get blades by summoning them with core crystals. Enemies, quests, story events, and even some shops can give you these core crystals. They basically serve as a gacha system, with certain odds and common, rare, and legendary blades. There are so many blades in this game that even one playthrough probably will not give you them all, so if you want all of them you will need a new game plus this game. I often liked the surprise of getting a rare blade, but there is a limit to blades you can summon, and this often interrupted when I wanted to mass summon just to get rid of my common crystals. I often had to let go of a blade to summon some more, and I feel the amount of commons you can have should not have been restricted, because it gets annoying fast. Blades and Drivers have their own affinity charts, which are basically skill trees. Through battles, you gain points which can be used to unlock more skills for drivers. However, Blade affinity charts are much bigger in scale and have some easy to very dubious or obtuse methods of unlocking skills.
2. [CONT.]
These charts range from 1-5 levels, and you need to use a blade or obtain another criteria to unlock more trust to unlock the higher tiers of skills. Every blade has a unique affinity chart to them. It gets very daunting very fast if you try to complete all of these. I recommend only doing the most important blades like the story relevant ones instead of trying to do all of them. Adding to this, the game includes numerous sidequests, blade quests (quests involving a blade you have), story quests, and merc missions. Merc missions function as side missions you can send common blades on to gain trust, EXP, money, and further the development level of any town you are in. EXP for all of these side activities is saved and cannot be used to level up until you go to an Inn. Battles give you EXP like normal though. As you can see from this long winded and massive wall of text, this game is so overflowing with content it can be a bit overwhelming. But as long as you take your time with it, learn it, and ease into it, it all comes like second nature soon enough. I can understand if it is not for everyone though, since the gameplay of this game is notably more obtuse and complex than the first game. Refer to Chuggas video or guides online for more details.
I have not mentioned everything but I do not WANT THIS MASSIVE SECTION TO BE ANY LONGER SO LET US MOVE ON TO-
3. Music
THE MUSIC! HOLY SHIT GUYS THIS SOUNDTRACK IS SO GOOD GUYS HOLY SHIT GUYS! Returning from the first game, we have ACE, Yoshinori Mitsuda, Kenji Hiramatsu, and Manami Kiyota. The short version? This games OST is a fucking BANGER! So many good tracks from this OST like Counterattack, Our Holy Land, Incoming, Where we Used to be. This OST has everything from beautiful orchestrated majestic pieces to hard rock battle themes. It is absolutely a delight and I cannot think of a single song I did not like. This is truly one of the strongest OSTS I have heard in a while, and is easily comparable to the first games in so many ways. They really went all out with the OST here. Even if you do not play the game I highly recommend you go out of your way to listen to the OST, it is that good. Overall, it slaps so many knees I would be screaming from pain.
4. Presentation
Now hear me out. This game’s presentation is mixed. On the one hand, it looks good in menus, the art is detailed and nice, and main characters have very expressive and emotional models. However, in motion the performance and resolution of this game are not optimized well for the Switch. The game often frames dips during important moments and even during certain cutscenes, much like SMT V did. Even in busy towns, it also does this. The resolution can dip quite low especially in handheld mode here as well. The audio mixing is also a big problem, as even with audio options the music can either be too loud or quiet, and the voice acting can also be inconsistent with volume as well. Another big presentation problem is the menus. There are many menus, so many menus. Every menu has sub menus and then more menus. I feel they really could have trimmed down the fat here to make it so the menus were much more user friendly and not so annoying, requiring so many button presses and backtracking. I can safely say I spent a lot of my playtime of this game in menus, and it definitely annoyed me at points. It does not completely ruin the experience but it was too much for my liking. Not only this, but map navigation and the map cursor were also quite frustrating at times.
4. [CONT.]
Unlike Xenoblade 1s arrow which pointed all sorts of directions and had a laid-out path for you to follow in Definitive Edition, Xenoblade 2 gives you a marker that ticks down with only an up arrow or down arrow. This gets very very annoying as the environments in this game are so well detailed and have so much verticality that it is hard to pinpoint exactly where you are supposed to go. It does not do a good job of telling you exactly which direction you should be going, which leads to me getting lost quite a bit. Also, if you do not equip certain blades for a blade quest, the marker will not appear at all which is a very strange oddity that the game does not tell you about at all. Despite this, Xenoblade 2s cutscenes have some absolutely fantastic action scenes paired with good voice acting and amazing music to accompany some very emotional moments. The performance, while bad at times cannot overshadow an otherwise well-presented game with emotional characters, sprawling vistas, and music you will never forget even after you finish the game.
5. Conclusion
After my 110 hour journey with this game, rolling the credits felt so satisfying in so many ways. Not only did I experience a wonderful journey with great characters, story, music, gameplay (once you understand it) but I feel like I barely scratched the surface of this game. I am still eager to spend more time in the world of Alrest, to finish some more quests, to get more blades, to tackle the mountain of new games plus content and the DLC. Despite presentation issues, confusing tutorials, weird audio mixing, and annoying menus, I found a game that I was reluctant to end. I still want to go back even now, writing this, and experience it once again with even more to do. And I think that is one of the best hallmarks of a great game. One you want to go back to even after you already spent so much time in it. I truly loved my time with Xenoblade 2. I have to say right here, right now, that it is one of the finest JRPGS on the Switch, and one of Monolith Soft's best games. I am so grateful to it for catapulting the Xenoblade series to a wider audience and giving so many others a similar experience. I highly highly recommend you all give this game a try. Even if you think you might not like, or you did not like the first Xenoblade game, I think you will find something here. With that being said-
FINAL REVIEW SCORE: 8.5/10

1. Story
Once again, I will not go into spoilers here but the story of SMT V is easily the most disappointing aspect of the game. But first, let us get into the main premise. You are a student in modern day Tokyo and go about your daily life at school. One day you are on your way home as there is a safety notice for going outside, and everyone has to go in pairs to avoid possible demon murders, since there have been some. As you try to go home with your partner, your partner wants to investigate a bridge that ends up transporting you and your other school mates to the Netherworld, Da'at. You wander this world with little direction and do not know what is going on in the slightest, but still manage to make your way through before being stopped by DEMONS! WHAT A SURPRISE! You are about to be fucked in the ass by these demons before a BADASS SUPER COOL DEMON CALLED AOGAMI decides to help you out. You two fuse together, do a cute little dance, and become the Nahobino. This is your main form for the entire game as you explore Da'at and explore the many areas it has to offer. This is as far I will go as any thing more here will be spoilers. Now I want to say, at the very beginning I was very invested in this story setup. I love the idea of Nahobino, a fusion between demons and humans, and the ideas the story gave us. I think this story was very much in conflict with itself, between the ideas presented, but the execution of them being very inconsistent and spotty. For example, a lot of the side characters get very little time on screen. They are introduced very fast, not given much time throughout the game to develop and some are just straight up shafted. They have interesting ideas and character arcs I can kind of get from them, but the problem is the game does not give them ample time to properly run with these ideas.

King of Hearts 👑 — 04/21/2022
(CONT.)
And this is a pain because I do really enjoy some of these characters, design wise, personality wise and concept wise but the plot does not do these characters who could be much greater justice. Some events in this story just make little sense, and a lot of times during events playing on screen I felt no urgency, I felt no surprise things just kinda happened and I went "Alright." Bringing in some personal feelings here, I do not really think Nocturnes and Vs story really work for me personally. The story of this game, like Nocturnes is very hands off and focuses more on BIG THEMES rather than the characters embodying those themes. Its more about the ideas and the game tries to leave things up to your interpretation and discretion when it comes to the facts of the story, and the endings you can get throughout the game but I feel it just does not engage me enough to actively want to think about these things. Speaking of endings, there are 4 in this game. The ending that feels the most complete, and the most true of all the endings is the True Neutral ending. This ending has the most story, and explanation for things that happen and has a more definitive ending but the problem is in order to get this ending you have to do a lot of things, certain quests, defeat the super boss. The game also does not telegraph this to you at all, so the only way I knew was because Boss told me, or I would have seen it on the guide. But I needed a guide to get that, I would not have known this game had that otherwise. I feel like the fact the best ending in the game is locked behind a lot of different tasks you must do is kind of annoying and I feel it should have been the normal neutral ending instead, because the neutral ending is very lackluster in comparison. Either way, like I reiterated before this story has great ideas but the problem is they do not go far enough with developing the characters behind the ideas, so it feels literally half baked. (edited)

King of Hearts 👑 — 04/21/2022
2. Gameplay
On the opposite side here, the gameplay in this game does not disappoint. Like most SMT games up until now, the classic press turn battle systems returns here in its full glory. You attack a weakness, you get an extra turn for that character, and if you block an element, your enemy loses two turns, and if you reflect an attack your enemies lose all their turns. But this also applies to your enemies as well, so this game is very challenging and strategic. If that was not enough, this game makes a lot of changes to mainline SMT gameplay as well, some I do not like, some I do. The biggest change here gameplay wise is the open area design of the world traversal. You can run, jump, and attack enemies you can see in the overworld. Unlike SMT IV, this time you can like see the entire demon models on the screen because of the Switch's power and seeing these giant demons running around, a lot of demons in groups together just makes the world come alive. Adding to this, you can fuse, recruit demons just as before. The demon compendium you can summon from as usual, but this game adds the reverse compendium option to fusion which is a VERY, VERY, welcome addition to fusion in this series. Using this allows you to see every single demon possible for fusion in your entire compendium, so its easier than ever to see what you are missing demon wise and fill that shit in. Not only that, but like in SMT IV, you can transfer essences to Nahobino and other demons. These allow you to transfer skills to truly customize your demons move sets and build them to be the best they can possibly be. You can really lose hours just building the best builds here. Sadly, that just is not my style so this feature was not really my thing but it is really beneficial for those who love building demons. You can also change Nahobinos affinities here, so that is a good idea for covering weaknesses when it comes to boss fights. (edited)

King of Hearts 👑 — 04/21/2022
(CONT.)
Element affinity is also back from IV apocalypse, and these boost damage and effects of all types of attacks, from physical to support skills. The last major part of the World of Shadows is Apotheosis. This is like the apps in SMT IV which grant you perks and buffs based on how much glory points you have, which you collect from collecting these little mimans across the map and big glowing crystals too. You can get these miracles by beating these abcesses on the map, which are these mini boss fights that you can fight on the map to clear it up, as they block your map coverage. All these additions help feed the games flow, which is get to a new area, find as many abcesses as you can, beat them, clear up the map, and find as many mimans as you can to get as many glory points to make you stronger. Another welcome change to the gameplay here is the leylines, which are your main hubs for everything you need as a player. You get a save point, a shop, recovery, world of shadows, and can transport to any other leyline you have encountered thus far. These leylines really streamline everything you need in one place, so it is very convenient for players. You also eventually get an item to make this even more convenient which lets you transport yourself back to the last leyline you came back to at any place in the map, which has saved me on many occasions and is just one more way to give as much freedom to the player as possible when exploring these areas. The game flows super well with exploring the world, which helps you get stronger and get buffs, and also rewards you with other items that help you. Its all a good feedback loop the game developers at atlus really really shined with, and I feel the most effort was placed here. Overall, there were a couple of areas that were a pain to explore, but for the most part I enjoyed exploration. With even more fine tuning, this gameplay style has a lot of potential in future games and it especially shined here. (edited)

King of Hearts 👑 — 04/21/2022
(CONT.)
However, compared to the open areas in the game, the 2 dungeons feel rather lackluster in comparison. They were a nice change of pace from the games large areas, but the problem was they were not as tightly designed as previous dungeons in the series. This is one area where the game drops the ball. It is mostly just corridors, with save points, demons, with light small puzzles that are not used in any interesting way. The dungeon is usually over before it has a chance to truly show off those mechanics. It felt like Atlus spent the most time on the large areas, and the dungeons were kind of an afterthought. The aesthetics are very interesting and the dungeons themselves look amazing design wise but the problem is the actual content inside of them was average and I just wanted to get through them to move on with the story. Going back to gameplay for a bit, I talked about some good changes but lets talk about some problems I had. When it comes to battles in SMT, buffs and debuffs and magic are all very important things to have. The problem with SMT V is that it nerfs buffs tremendously from previous games and makes them less useful than before. The buffs now work like persona, where you get single targets beginning of the game, and eventually you get group buffs later on instead of one buff for everyone being able to be stacked 4 times. You can only stack them twice now. I much prefer the way previous games handled buffs and debuffs. In the early game I hardly even used them. Another change I do not like is the fact that in previous SMT games physical attacks used HP. In V they use MP instead. This adds a weird balancing act where demons with high strength need high MP to be able to use a lot of physical skills, and a lot of demons with high strength have low MP compared to demons with more magic points having higher MP. If they wanted to make this change, fine, but there should have been a better balancing of these stats to make MP as one source viable.

King of Hearts 👑 — 04/21/2022
(CONT.)
For more demons. Also, concerning MP, this game has very very high skill costs, even with affinity maxed, even with physical skills and buffs, and throughout the entire game I found myself running out of MP pretty consistently. Even passive skills that restored a little mp for getting a weakness still did not help much in the long run. Even at the super boss of the game, at near max level and with some of the strongest demons of the game, i still ran out of MP and had to use items to restore it mid battle. I really do not like the massive increase in skill cost here because it really makes fights drag on longer. I feel the game wants you to use lots of demons to switch out, but I prefer just sticking with one party and i was able to do this in nocturne but here its much more difficult and not really viable. For reference, in Nocturne using Agi at the beginning of the game only costs you 3 mp. At the beginning of SMT V, it costs 10 mp. It is just too much for me and it really hampered my enjoyment of gameplay at points. Another interesting mechanic SMT V adds is the Magatsuhi gauge, which charges up during a fight in many different ways to allow for all sorts of special skills to be used, from all sorts of demons. Most have their own special one including Nahobino, but the problem here is a lot of them just do not feel as useful as the very first skill you get, which is onimagotoki critical. This allows every single attack you do to be a critical, as long as it isnt blocked. Any physical or magic attack will crit, so I used this for free extra turns. A lot of the other skills as cool as they could be just did not have as good of use as this one did, so I feel they made the first skill you got too good. Maybe in another game with this system, they can make the other options more interesting. Overall, SMT Vs gameplay is very very solid, and I liked a lot about it. With a sequel they can iron out the kinks and make it even better!

King of Hearts 👑 — 04/21/2022
(FIN.)
One more thing, this game has quests similar to IV and IV apocalypse, the main thing here which I like is that unlike IV you get requests straight from demons, so they feel more personal and grounded this time around. Lots of quests give you good rewards, and exp. But a lot of them usually amount to kill this thing, or gather x amount of things. These are fine and are serviceable, but some quests are actually interesting because you can get other quests depending on how you deal with them. For example, there is one quest where Apsaras asks you to kill Leanan Sidhe because she does not agree with her ways, so you can go to her and kill her right then and there or talk to her and reverse the quest, where you can kill Apsaras instead. This leads to an interest dynamic of being able to change certain quest lines and giving more agency to the player which I quite enjoy! More of these quests in future games would be appreciated.
[11:02 AM]
3. Music
Oh MAN THE MUSIC! THIS IS ONE AREA THE GAME ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT DISSAPOINT! THE MUSIC BY RYOTA KOZUKA ABSOLUTELY SELLS THE ATMOSPHERE AND VIBES OF THIS GAME! Everything from the area music, cutscene music, and especially battle themes shine here. Lots of synth, electric guitar, and some odd vibes to the songs give you that distinct SMT feel. Here, they even get funky with lots of different genres of music. They even use disco style for one of the boss themes, and it is one of my favorite songs in the entire game. Not only that, but they even gave side quests their own music! There is so much music in this game its insane. I absolutely love it, and its one of the best aspects of this game!

King of Hearts 👑 — 04/21/2022
4. Presentation
This is another aspect of the game I really enjoyed. Atlus went all out with the presentation here, in their most ambitious game presentation wise to date. The use of unreal engine here really makes the graphics look amazing, the new demons and models look fantastic, the scaling of the demons in the overworld does look fantastic and breathtaking even, at times. They really took it to the next level with this presentation and it was nearly flawless, if only the switch could handle it well...
Well, I did not encounter a ton of technical problems on my playthrough but there were frame drops, during not only running around, saving, transporting around, but also during even cutscenes. These made some scenes lose some impact for me as the inconsistent framerate took me out of the experience at times. But, I am willing to overlook it considering this game is still really impressive despite that, and it being on the switch definitely is not helping. Another aspect I want to mention is battle animations. These are especially fantastic, with not only the demons being more animated than ever with voice acting, and unique special animation attacks, but this basically applies to every demon. There are tons of unique animations for special moves, and even normal moves still have an unrivaled flair to them in this series thus far. My favorite animations in this game though have to be the special Nahobino attacks you get from essences throughout the game. These are my favorite attacks, and just watching them is so damn hype! Atlus spared no expense with the presentation in this game and it really goes to show how well they amazing their games can look and play. SMT V is another addition to the catalogue of fantastic looking ATLUS games. Knowing the future of the unreal engine, I cannot wait to see more projects using this really gorgeous presentation style without the performance problems!
[11:13 AM]
5. Conclusion
In my humble opinion, SMT V is a game that is most thoroughly enjoyed through the gameplay, presentation, and music. The story is a clashing of ideas versus execution of said ideas, and drops the ball when it comes to character development. The gameplay has a lot of positive quality of life improvements but also has detrimental changes that actively hurt my enjoyment of the game. The music was fantastic, and the presentation was massively ambitious. For the most part, SMT V is a shining example of what ATLUS is capable of when they really try their hardest, and the gameplay is what matters most here. They got it right for the most part, and while it is a shame that the story was not as fleshed out as possible, I still enjoyed my experience here. Hopefully in future projects they can take what worked and craft a more intriguing story around it.
FINAL REVIEW SCORE: 7.5/10

DMC 3 REVIEW!

1. Story
Was much, MUCH, more interesting than 1s. This time we had more voice acting, more consistent cutscenes, a simple but entertaining and fun to watch story with hilarious motion capture and dumb jokes by Dante. Vergil is also a very nice addition and Lady is as well, some very cool characters here. Nothing too deep, but still enjoyable and fun and kept me playing.

2. Gameplay
The gameplay has quality of life improvements that I enjoy much more than the previous game, much more. You can now die in the middle of a mission and not have to restart the whole thing which is a godsend. There are more freely controllable camera areas in the game which are nice. You can switch weapons and guns on the fly up to 2 at a time, although I would have liked more, it's a good step in the right direction. Sadly, you cannot switch styles, which work as different move sets for Dante. I ended up mostly sticking to the Trickster style the whole game and used a fair number of weapons. Devil Trigger returns with a badass design by Kaneko who has done a ton of SMT work, however I feel devil trigger in this game isn't as good as it was in the first game. It feels less powerful in both its damage output and its life regen. Either way I am still glad it's here. Now, on to some complaints. I do not like that the fixed camera still is here to some extent, and it often gets in my way personally. Until you unlock the double jump, jumping once and landing can be annoying and you still can't move once you commit to a jump unless you have trickster equipped. If you want the best movement options, you basically need Trickster at most times. I do not like the puzzles either, as they can range from alright to very annoying. I just would rather do combat than puzzles in this game, and this game still holds a bit of that RE DNA with the exploring castle and areas that connect to find items to move on, just is not what I play DMC for, but this is more a personal issue.

3. Music
This is an aspect of the game I enjoyed in small amounts. I did not really hear many tracks that caught my attention as because you are exploring these areas, unless you are in a battle you are not hearing any music. The standout song to me is the title theme but besides that the music was forgettable to negligible and was not my style.

4. Presentation
This is a big boost from the 1st game. More cutscenes, better character models, much better choregraphed action scenes with better voice acting. Everything looks more detailed, and the camera zooms out more than before at certain points. The subtitles are smaller and easier to read now, overall, just better in every way, that's about it here.
5. Conclusion
All in all, DMC 3 Dante's Awakening was a game that did not feel like hell to play and did not make me want to bleach my eye sockets. On most fronts it was a definitive improvement from the first game, and it sets up series staples to be continued on in later entries and further improved. It has a good story with memorable moments and characters, with incentive to keep playing after the credits role. It still shares some similar issues I had previously with the first game, but overall, I enjoyed it more. This was a good game that left me with no particularly strong feelings, but I recommend starting here if you are curious about the DMC series.
FINAL REVIEW SCORE: 7/10