It's a testament to how much I enjoyed the music, environments and various elements of the games writing (story, world building and some the characters) that I even bothered to finish this despite chipping away at it for years.

I just found the act of playing it to be repeatedly off putting. Mainly due to the glut of systems that I feel the game does a poor job of explaining to the player or encouraging the use of. That's not even touching on the idea of a gacha system being tied to such a key element of the game's RPG systems and progression.

There's absolutely a lot of interesting systems at play here, particularly in the combat, but the game goes out of it's way to muddy any chance of those system's actually getting a chance to shine. Which is a shame, because I feel like if the UI easier to navigate and more legible and some of the systems were more cleanly explained with stronger onboarding that explained the value of engaging with them, then this would've been an incredible RPG. As it stands though it just feels like a game crumbling under the weight of it's own gameplay ambitions and ideas.

And yet despite all those frustrations, the narrative and elements of the presentation really compelled me to stick with it and finish. There's a lot of really great work done here that makes the game a lot more unique and memorable than it's predecessor. It's just a shame that it felt like the game didn't want me to actually experience that most of the time.