This isn't really a game I feel like I should have enjoyed as much as I ended up enjoying it, but even though so much of the gameplay is just okay/mediocre I couldn't help but enjoy my time here.

Gameplay out of the way immediately, it's very passable! I was never particularly frustrated or annoyed but in general the world is very barren (it is a giant desert after all) and the quests and especially side content never really go beyond average. I do think most of the vehicles are pretty fun to control, especially the tank, the motorbike, and the melee robot! It can feel a bit repetitive though, because there aren't really interesting puzzles or level designs usually it's just a lot of open areas or samey factory or ruins locations with the same gunplay throughout the entire experience. It's pretty fun gunplay, and you can change weapons around to slightly mix it up but ultimately you're shooting rockets and machine guns endlessly. Not even the bosses really add much of an interesting element here, they're visually pretty cool and have a lot more health and some wacky attacks but it doesn't really ultimately mix up what you're doing enough to feel all that different. You can also play as Beelzebub on foot, and he has his own set of attacks and powers that to be fair are a bit more fun than I expected it to be with the big focus on vehicles. You get some cool looking super attacks and there's a pretty simple but satisfying combo system with him but you only ever really fight with fists when forced to and boss patterns aren't interesting enough to feel like it's much more than mashing buttons until the health goes down. Beelzebub likes to repeat "Eh, at least that was kind of fun." whenever you finish a fight and that kind of (unfortunately) perfectly encapsulates the gameplay as a whole.

Graphically the game looks pretty solid! It's obviously very samey, even interiors which could have been where the creative juices flowed kind of just fit into the factory or ruin molds I mentioned earlier. The vast ocean of sand is pretty though and it does make moments in the story where you find Not Sand pretty striking and genuinely pretty cool. The sound effects and voice acting was all around solid as well, the music was okay but nothing to write home about IMO and nothing really stuck with me. Production values aren't amazing, cutscenes are a little awkwardly paced, especially with no "auto" option to progress the dialogue itself, you have to press A to move onto the next line for most of it (or wait like 10 real life seconds for it to go on its own which no one will do obviously lol) aside from the big pre-rendered cutscenes. To the game's credit, those pre-rendered cutscenes are a joy! They look great and have a ton of spectacle and actually progress dialogue normally.

Where this game (and, I'm assuming the manga and series if this is anything to go by) truly shines is in its characters! I really liked Beelzebub, Akira Toriyama is great at making a silly dude full of whimsy and adventure in his heart and Beelzebub is a great example. I really liked his bit where he'd brag about how evil and dangerous he was and then describe an innocent little prank a kid would pull it was always charming and funny. The whole main crew was a ton of fun and played off each other really well. There are a few repeated conversations when driving around that got a bit annoying but generally I just liked seeing Beelzebub, Thief, Rao, and Ann interact. Even the side characters were pretty compelling and had pretty satisfying arcs, General Are especially stands out in that regard. I wasn't too big on the villain for the most part but they do make him annoying and whiny enough to get me invested in kicking his ass. The story as a whole is pretty solid, some of the ways it tries to force conflict with demons and humans is a bit awkward and stupid, namely the big reveal with Ann and how people react to it. A lot of that is just how the game presents the story IMO, but for the most part it's a fun journey with a ton of really cool and likable characters! I will say the way they go about telling story can be a bit exhausting, they stop you from actively playing/moving around a LOT just for little pointless conversations which I get the gameplay isn't all that special but it's not even like great character moments or anything a lot of the time and it's a bit annoying walking 10 feet away and being stopped to hear a third pointless conversation. Thankfully you can skip through some of the more nothing conversations pretty quick but I wish sometimes they'd just keep a continuous cutscene or cut some bits out entirely for a better flow.

I think part of my enjoyment despite a lot of my gripes and perceived flaws is a general love of Dragon Ball and seeing so many Toriyama-isms like using capsules for the vehicles or straight up using Dragon Ball character designs like Lucifer, and the Pirate Robots being here as enemies always puts a smile on my face. Sand Land has shown me that my love of Dragon Ball isn't as nostalgic as I may believe it is sometimes, and I think I just like a lot of what Toriyama does with characters and their designs and telling a pretty simple but fun story. I do think there's probably a bigger emotional connection and feeling here after Toriyama's passing being as recent as it is and that is affecting me but ultimately I came out of this with a love for a new little series and that's always a nice feeling. Thank you for another banger Akira Toriyama, you will be very missed. :)

My first impression was a bit whatever here, I didn't play the demo and only really gave this a shot because the combat looked fun in the trailers and I have a library where I can play games like this for free a couple weeks after launch. I booted into it and wasn't entirely sold. I'm happy to say that I pushed past the initial "tutorial" area and ended up having a pretty solid time!

I'll start with the story because it's what I have the worst opinion of, I thought it sucked! Well, that's not entirely fair, I wasn't even really paying attention for half the time because I was so checked out whenever a cutscene came up. The voice acting (at least english, which I played on) is pretty bad and awkward. Most of all Adam who had the most robotic delivery in a game full of robots. Speaking of Adam, I just did not like him at all. I don't have a ton to say about most characters, because like I said, checked out, but I didn't really like anyone. Eve was fine but ultimately not that interesting, Lily was chill, I liked the little shop robot D1G-g2r though. I'm a sucker for cute lil robot dudes but it's not great that a little shop keeper with a bit part is the only character I really "liked". You also can't skip any cutscenes which really bummed me out. I don't have much else to say on the story, I can't speak on the Nier ripoff comments cause I didn't play Nier but if that's true I don't have very high hopes for my feelings on the Nier story if I ever get around to playing that.

The world and exploration as a whole were pretty solid! I do think visually it's a little bit samey, like the two main open areas are just kinda huge deserts. It did feel pretty satisfying to explore them and the more linear sections, most little paths you see led to a fun little chest or a robot with upgrade materials and it always felt good to find those. There were some little puzzles around the world but none of them too interesting or anything. There was a weird attempt every once in a while to do platforming challenges and it just did not feel built for that at all. The jump feels a bit awkward and grabbing ledges feels incredibly inconsistent and bad. There were little tunnels you'd grind down on your sword and those were pretty fun but that's as far as I wish they took the wacky environmental movement moments. The game looks pretty great, I don't think there's much of a distinct or interesting art style but it's a game that clearly uses the power of modern hardware well and looks pretty solid as far as environments go. Some of the later game areas were genuinely very pretty and nice to look at. Side quests were whatever, pretty generic openish world quests and as someone who didn't like really any characters or the writing here they didn't wow me. The music was pretty great too, lots of solid and beautiful songs! Not entirely my style, and not something I'd like add to a playlist or anything but it was a pretty big standout.

Gameplay is where all of my stars are coming from, I was indifferent towards it near the start and it for sure takes a little too long to start feeling great but once it reaches that point it's a lot of fun! I do wish there were a bit more natural combos maybe that played with timing DMC/GoW style but a lot of the extra mechanics make up for it a good bit. The beta skills are all pretty solid but the Square beta where especially when upgraded had such a really solid weight and feeling to it and I loved it. The burst skills you unlocked were really cool too, and had a ton of style to them. The Circle burst skill was my favorite of those and was great for crowd control. You also get a R3+L3 super mode that's a spoiler but felt really cool! There's also an upgrade you get that turns your drone into a gun, and I wasn't entirely in on it/didn't fully get the purpose for a while but they do these neat survival horror style sections where your blade gets disabled and you can only use the gun and it opened up to how strong it can be. Some of them felt way too situational for bosses, like the huge beam gun which I wanted to utilize in bosses more than I was able to but felt really good shredding smaller enemies. The missiles were my go to for bosses, they absolutely shred shields. All of the ammo felt pretty useful though, especially against normal enemies and drone upgrades felt way more valuable when I got a better grasp of how good the gun was. There also were some combat items which I did end up using a bit more by the end of the game but I just generally didn't care about. I had like 40ish of each one in my stock by the end of the game. That's all the attack aspect of the game, but the thing that really hooked me was the defensive part of combat. I'm someone who loves a really good beefy parry and this games parry feels pretty great. Nothing of this game is very much like Sekiro but the one part that reminded me a lot of that is how much they incentivize parries. It's similar in that, especially for smaller enemies (a bit less so for bosses) if you focus on parries you can stagger and enemy and get a big attack that will kill almost any non boss enemy. The parry itself feels really great and it never got old chaining parries together to wipe out smaller enemies or get a big chunk of damage out of bosses. There's also a blink mechanic where if the enemy does an attack and it flashes blue or pink you dodge towards or away from them depending on the color and it's another layer of depth that fills up attack meters/activates weak points for the gun and it all comes together to feel really fucking good, especially in big boss battles and you hit a ton of parries and hit all of your blinks. The boss battles as a whole were pretty good, fun attacks with lots of chances to do parry combos and such. A lot of pretty cool cinematic flair namely when you beat them they do pretty cool and over the top animations for the killing blows. I do think they were a bit easy/generic early on but the last few especially were really fucking sick. There's one boss right near the end that would react to me spamming certain beta skills and counter them and it was a cool ass moment.

I don't think this is like a crazy mind-blowing experience I'll cherish forever, but I had much more fun than I was expecting to and that's all I can really ask for! It's a bit sad that this game will be mainly known as the game a bunch of insane weirdo dorks whined about for no valid reason (which, to be fair, is funny to make fun of them) when I think it was a solid game that can stand on its own.