Played ten hours and got the idea, then played twenty more out of inertia. It's shocking to me just how shallow the themes are here for a hundred-hour game, and how poorly the core overlapping mechanics of the social sim and dungeon-crawling halves of the game loop are used to explore ideas of abuse of power, personal redemption, social marginalization, etc. Don't get me wrong--both the school parts and the palace parts are really effective explorations of min-maxing limited resources in their own way (although the rewards for progressing social links honestly kind of suck--all the stories are super vapid and the characters remain one-note throughout) but that compulsion to extract value from the game as efficiently as possible is never tied directly to the abuses of power rampant throughout the plot. The coding of each palace after a deadly sin, the allusions to historical thieves and rebels, all of these things are cool, but there's zero substance to any of it. People with power are propped up by societal institutions and never face repercussions for their crimes against vulnerable people? Even the worst people can be redeemed through penitence and ego death? You're telling me this for the first time. The many variations on a theme do nothing to deepen the player’s understanding of how or why society is structured, or justify the gameplay literally at all. It’s like if psychoanalysis was stupid. Oh wait–


And don't even get me started on the pedophile route.