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 combat is amazing and I would love if it was used in a conventional 2D platformer, but I don't really like the game built around it.

The difficulty isn't really "spread" around the game, everything except the last boss and maybe the last area is easy, so you just waste 30 mins to reach the last boss again for another attempt (it seems a training room exists, but I lost interest by then). It just doesn't have the right distribution of tension for a roguelike I guess.

I also didn't like the aesthetics in general. The levels are fine, but the character and enemy designs as well as the music are very mid.

The shooting is better than the original with cooler and more fun weapons, as well as an improved camera and strafing. It also retains the strategic weapon choice aspect of the first game and that's great. Of course the evolving weapon system is really cool as well.

The checkpoints got better compared to the first game, bolts and ways to get them are more plentiful. The health system is also more lenient which is good.

But that's just about it for the improvements. The story and humor are worse than the first one, and the planets are less memorable. There is also less emphasis on platforming in favor of more shooting segments which I didn't like.

The fun parts of the game (shooting, platforming) are constantly being interrupted by annoying minigames. Seriously, almost all of them are bad. The space fights, the levitator, the glider, the infiltrator, the electrolyzer - all shit.

The game becomes much more annoying after Boldan with very spongy enemies, I recommend the Meteor Gun + Lock-On mod combo, the shield and the Heavy Bouncer to make it tolerable (I sadly tried the shield way too late but it helped).

Also, there are many sections with seemingly impossibly hard enemies or constantly respawning enemies. I recommend that you treat the game as a speed-run and just skip past the enemies, most of the time it just works.

The game has a lot of "that part"s like the Snivelak boss, or Grelbin as a whole, or the respawning enemies on Damosel etc etc. People say that the original is unfair but this was worse. I know the game had a troubled and short development period so I can't be too hard on them for those though.

That might be a skill issue but I think the high bolt prices on the weapons and the upgrade grind discourage me from experimenting as much as I would have wanted, so I didn't realize just how useful some weapons are before I stumble upon that info on the internet.

I might sound overly harsh on this game, but in the end the great core gameplay is still there, and for every downgrade there was an upgrade so the score is just a bit lower than that of the original.

3D Mega Man X good.

The platforming is very fun, the weapons are varied and fun to use, and needing to switch weapons depending on the situation makes for good gameplay. Also, the levels themselves are very well designed with shortcuts that take you to the start of the level so that you won't need to waste time backtracking.

The visuals, soundtrack and humor are great, and the story is a good kids movie plot.

For the negatives, it has some issues due to being old. It doesn't have as many checkpoints as it should have, especially in the late game. The camera is not very good, making the combat harder than it should have been.

Finally, I didn't like most of the mandatory minigame sections, with the turret parts being the worse. I liked the spaceship parts though, once I figured how to shoot repeatedly.

I thought the story was a trainwreck that failed to resolve in a satisfying manner most of the loose ends that came before, but it had some good parts (Garlemald and Elpis if you ignore how it integrates with the rest), and the character moments for the Scions were on point and maybe the most emotional in the whole game.

The pandering through Marvel-esque "everyone is here" moments and focusing on popular characters from past expansions who didn't really have any reason to be in the story anymore really soured the whole thing.

The "meaning of life" theme is overdone in anime-adjacent media and is much less interesting than the themes of the previous expansions (anti-colonialism, class struggle, national propaganda, the role of organized religion in placating the masses etc), and I didn't think it was that well executed either. If you want to play a game that does it very well just play Persona 3 and spare yourself the trouble.

However the dungeons were the best yet with interesting mechanics and insane setpieces, and also the music was on point as always, so it wasn't all bad. I wouldn't continue with the next expansion unless it brought some serious changes to the 6 empty maps with aether currents formula, it got really tiresome after all those expansions.

I only just finished the MSQ so the endgame doesn't factor into my opinion, but from what I gather it isn't very good either.

5.0 is the peak of the game and a really good self-contained story (what wouldn't I give for it to be a single player JRPG on its own).

The 5.1-5.3 patches were good but a bit too fanservicy for my taste, but cool stuff anyways. Patches 5.4-5.5 had some cool/cute moments but the villains were the worse yet so I wasn't very engaged (I hope this isn't a bad omen for Endwalker).

Tears of Werlyt was great and probably the best side story in the game. Eden had interesting lore reveals but I think didn't need to exist as it undermined the whole post climate change world thing the narrative had during the 5.0 MSQ.

The quest structure improved massively but the exploration and combat are still very middling compared to other MMOs (like GW2). I hoped that the instanced content would be more challenging / interesting than ARR's but that didn't happen at least for the "normal" difficulty. I effectively enjoy this game as a visual novel in most cases. The music and aesthetics are as great as always.

The 3.0 plot was pretty good and better than ARR's even if it was another idealistic depiction of war that applied the "revenge cycle" concept to entire nations instead of offering a more materialist perspective, and featuring some shoddy writing at times.

I didn't appreciate the cowardly way the Uldah plotline was handled at all. Also, I don't do the yellow marker side quests, so I felt the game spent more time "telling" than "showing" the fucked up nature of the feudal theocratic Ishgardian society.

I really liked the middle part of the story, it had a great adventure feel to it and I grew to care about the "party members. The final act was also good and pretty hype.

I also thought that it was still pretty dry on character moments but it was better than ARR on that front as well. The worldbuilding was great though, filling gaps introduced in ARR in very interesting ways and I want to see more (that also applies to the 3.X patches).

I thought that the story improved a lot in the 3.X patches. The resolution of the whole Ishgard plotline in 3.1-3.3 was great and made me forget my grievances with it, probably the peak of the game so far.

Some parts of the 3.4 story were really good and emotional, and even if the patch antagonists and their dilemma fell a bit flat for me, the resolution of their story was satisfying.

The 3.5 patch was a banger transition to the next expansion which caught me offguard and I am very hyped about it (I am fully prepared to be disappointed given Stormblood's rating).

I love how the characters started behaving like human beings with emotions and conflicts after 3.1 and I actually started to care about them a lot more (previously I only cared about Alphinaud). The improved voice acting helped here as well.

8.5/10 for the total experience

The puzzles+OST are good but I am not patient or observant enough (I am diagnosed with ADHD lmao), for the secret hunting so I didn't enjoy that aspect and had to look up things which soured the experience for me. I didn't enjoy the repetitive nature of the game either.

I liked the story in NG, NG+, NG++, but the true ending raises more questions than answers, and the story in general didn't feel very integrated with the gameplay depending on how you played, whereas ZeroRanger did that perfectly.

In my opinion, the bullshit parts of ZeroRanger (like the save deleting at the end) are amplified in this game. Keep your save backed up at all times, just in case a mistake sets your progress back by a lot. Also note down things and take screenshots.

It's probably a 10/10 for the very niche group of people that:
1) enjoy puzzles
2) aren't impulsive and/or inattentive
3) are very good at thinking out of the box
4) can tolerate or even like repeating the same levels
5) enjoy anime tropes

But anyone else is probably going to have a very mixed experience with some high highs and some miserable lows

EDIT: Raised the score bc I can't get it out of my head

The combat was cool and unique, and I got addicted to the feel of always getting stronger through the multiple progression systems. I also liked that regular enemies could be just as challenging as bosses, maybe even more. The Karon skills were cool and varied, as were the possession skills, but I got into my usual complacent gamer mode and didn't use most of them.

The music was generally good and used well even if it was comprised of random doujin tracks (props to him for using Vocaloid tracks). Because he used a lot of tracks from each composer, the soundtrack had a strange consistency to it so that was nice. Some tracks stood out in a bad way but I got used to them (WHERE ARE YOU GOING?!).

The main story was an insane wild ride that reads like a shitpost if you try to describe it to someone. I like that KEIZO used all the KINOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO tropes together and somehow made them stick. Despite the amateurish character writing the game had a ton of legit emotional moments. The setting was also very creative and literally built for me. I don't know if it is the anime brainrot, but I found the fanservice comedy in this game funny instead of cringe.

As other posters have mentioned the postgame is worse than the main game in every aspect. You hardly visit any new areas or find new equipment, and the additional progressive system didn't interest me much. Also, you become very overpowered so none of the bosses pose a challenge (tbh I played on Normal, but I found some main story bosses hard, especially near the end), which was disappointing because you just kill stuff mindlessly for the last 20 hours of the game.

The postgame story had some great moments, but it also was unnecessary and I think it made the game's story worse as a whole by making it unnecessarily convoluted and completely breaking the time travel logic of the setting. I would have preferred if its good aspects were just integrated into the much more poignant main game.

The game has some bullshit puzzles and obstacles, the weight check in Chapter 6 made me suffer, but they are not that common. Each chapter feautres a point of no return at the start, so one must keep a ton of save slots to be safe. Also a lot of necessary items like the crossbow or crafting recipe books are rewards in the optional arena, so you have to do it between the chapters (it is pretty fun, but there is no indication you have to).

I don't know if this was a great or even good game, because it is very flawed in most aspects, but it does some things no other game I have played did, and is generally very creative and soulful, so I had a blast with it. That's what you get when the game is made by one person, and I'm happy to have experienced it.

I think it also made me more optimistic for the coming era of games with AI generated assets, given that even if much of the music, sound effects, and art weren't made for this game in particular, KEIZO still managed to show his vision by combining them. I hope that the AI revolution will enable more people to create the unfiltered autism games they always wanted to.