this is probably the most confused i've been about a game so far, about so many of it's aspects, what's its story tried to tell me? how I should even view it's story, it's narrative, how everything about it works?

On one hand i'm given a fantastic visual presentation and unique style that no other game ever had, really good music that just fits brilliantly in every scene. Writing that's so specific yet fascinating with how much it mirrors a real life form of speech a regular person might have with the amount of swears and slurs. And to top off this segment there's genuine peaks of stories like in the entirety of the Parade chapter.

On other i got such an uninteresting first half where I questioned if it's worth going through more of it, often wanting to drop the game for a while. placebo segments that are an absolute drag in their pacing and mindless repetition and every time I had to do them i felt discouraged to boot up the game. There's a lot of characters but it's so hard to keep track of them and remember every single one since you won't know if they will become a major part of the chapter's plot or if they'll be gone forever in the very next scene. It has plathera of moments where I could not understand a single bit of what is even happening as so much of it is presented to the player yet might mean absolutely nothing as you cannot tell if what you're seeing is meant to be a metaphor, forshadowing or just an artistic flair

I genuinely have no idea how I should view this game, this work, this art piece. It's so fascinating and confusing to the point where i'm trying to comprehend so much of it that isn't supposed to even make sense.

And just for that.

I have nothing else but tremendous respect.

I hated my time with this game for like 35 hours
It's filled with so many bad game design decisions, extremely bad pacing at the start after the intro segment and the game absolutely never tells you where to go throught all of it, gears combat is a fucking unfun mess, like half the cast only has 1 moment to shine and never again, disc 2 completely changes the entire gameplay structure to the point it's a visual novel without even the visual part it's just scrolling text, there aren't that many music tracks so you're stuck hearing the same tracks over and over again that have some annoying segments in them.

And even then.
After all of this.
It is still.
The Perfect Work.