The story is pretty good with interesting themes (not as deep as some fans would lead you to believe though), with a very cool setting and exciting twists, one of which was executed perfectly and recontextualized the whole plot of the game.
The characters are good and interesting even if their backstory is just dumped on the player in an amateurish way. The dialogs are very good in general, and the voice acting is great and especially impressive for the time.
Now for the gameplay... it hasn't aged well at all, with clunky and unintuitive controls, many bad (compared to modern games) bosses, excessive backtracking, and the potential to easily get softlocked as health doesn't refill after death.
However the stealth parts are good as are some bosses, and there are many charming adventure game-like things you have to do to progress. I wasn't really wowed by the meta stuff but it's cool I guess. I am ambivalent on the scene where you have to mash "O" really fast, on the one hand I am not good at tapping at all but on the other hand I can respect how ludonarrative it was.
My suggestions are as follows:
1) Read the manual (the game is old, so it doesn't have a tutorial)
2) Save very often so that you might go back to redo a section if your health is too low, in order to avoid getting softlocked
3) Maybe do those VR missions (I didn't), I heard they help you get familiar with the mechanics
4) If you get stuck in a boss fight call the various characters using the Codec, they offer tips (or google them I guess). Doing this wasn't very intuitive to me for whatever reason
5) If you just want to see the story, there is absolutely no shame in playing on Easy, especially given that it is the only difficulty in the original Japanese release (I might have enjoyed the game more if I played on Easy instead of Normal)
The characters are good and interesting even if their backstory is just dumped on the player in an amateurish way. The dialogs are very good in general, and the voice acting is great and especially impressive for the time.
Now for the gameplay... it hasn't aged well at all, with clunky and unintuitive controls, many bad (compared to modern games) bosses, excessive backtracking, and the potential to easily get softlocked as health doesn't refill after death.
However the stealth parts are good as are some bosses, and there are many charming adventure game-like things you have to do to progress. I wasn't really wowed by the meta stuff but it's cool I guess. I am ambivalent on the scene where you have to mash "O" really fast, on the one hand I am not good at tapping at all but on the other hand I can respect how ludonarrative it was.
My suggestions are as follows:
1) Read the manual (the game is old, so it doesn't have a tutorial)
2) Save very often so that you might go back to redo a section if your health is too low, in order to avoid getting softlocked
3) Maybe do those VR missions (I didn't), I heard they help you get familiar with the mechanics
4) If you get stuck in a boss fight call the various characters using the Codec, they offer tips (or google them I guess). Doing this wasn't very intuitive to me for whatever reason
5) If you just want to see the story, there is absolutely no shame in playing on Easy, especially given that it is the only difficulty in the original Japanese release (I might have enjoyed the game more if I played on Easy instead of Normal)