So this is EASILY the best NMH game. Its aesthetic alone immediately made me fall in love with it, the presentation just screams passion and soul in every single facet of the game. It genuinely feels like a once in a lifetime experience with how many talented creators collaborated to make this happen, there are SO many assets by such a diverse range of people, from the art, the huge fucking ost, and even the menus. The gameplay is phenomenal, it feels so good combo skill chips together with your different attack methods and the game rewards you by playing cleverly, especially during bosses where you can use skillchips to abuse their moves against themselves. The bosses in general are just so tightly designed, for the most part, and the cutscenes/dialogue that come with them are as always fun as hell. The reason I say for the most part is because the quality of the bosses starts going on a decline after Rank 5, with Rank 2 being NMH2 tier awful in the way that it lets you just kill it in one combo without retaliating once (on Hard).

The story is... okay! The characters are all entertaining, but not much happens that you wouldn't expect, and probably most of the cutscene dialogue is there for flavor rather than to establish anything substantial. There are a few chekhov's guns and some interesting stuff gets swept under the rug entirely. I don't think this is too big of a flaw since its carried so hard by how charming the characters are, but it is a step down from the thematic complexity of TSA and probably NMH1 as well in ways. They especially really missed the ball with the ADV format content, which appears a few times in the main story (which totals to probably 5 minutes), and in 3 sidequests which tell well written but short stories unrelated to the plot. There's just so much room there they could have used for expanding alien backstories, adding light hearted interactions between Travis and his friends, and spicing up the town with more sidequests, but sadly its very minimal.

Regardless of my issues the game was fucking awesome and towers above the rest of the series, I soyed out like 20 seperate times and I still have so much content to do in postgame and NG+, including the entire crafting system that i barely touched. its good play it.
also stan midori and kamui

EDIT: 2 days after beating it, I've been thinking about and discussing the game a lot and I think a lot of my issues with the plot are probably intentional and the game might be a lot more thematically dense than I thought at first. Gonna replay it with a new outlook after I let it sit a while longer and make another review probably