The feel of combat is incredibly polished, the cutscenes are immaculately produced, and the music is suitably emotional or heart-pounding when it needs to be.

As for the narrative... up through the Bahamut fight it's generally good, although not exactly what I was expecting. After that, you spend hours doing tedious crap only tangentially related to the main story, and then it turns into a bad shonen anime and stays that way until the end.

Also, it's a good thing that the combat is so good because it's the only meaningful gameplay system across dozens of hours. Not even a hint of dungeon-crawling with exploration/puzzle-solving, or anything else really.

Game has the BIGGEST most HYPE moments of any game I have ever experienced while simultaneously having some of the LOWEST most BORING stalls to a game I've ever experienced. If you love Final Fantasy in any way I would still check it out as the moments that are good in this game are SO WORTH IT. The music is obviously a significant highpoint, I don't know how much I can really say that you haven't heard or read in other reviews praising Soken. Yes it's that good. If you mainline this story and don't worry yourself with side content or any of the slower moments of the game I can see this ranking very high for me personally but as a whole just not really there unfortunately.

Cidolfus Telamon is my GOAT.

The highest highs and the lowest lows I've ever seen in a game. The action sequences/Eikon fights are absurd, high-flying, incredible fun (albeit a little bit easy). The base combat is great and the occasional unlocking of new ability sets keeps it fresh enough.

How anybody play-tested this and thought the quest design was okay is absolutely beyond imagination. Nearly every single side quest is absolute meaningless drudgery. Even the main quest is filled with donkey-work. There are an endless number of fetch quests and "talk to 3 people" interrogative quests and lots of back-and-forth chatter for no real reward. Clive, who is stronger than a god for much of this game, is literally sent out on quests to pick flowers multiple times. It completely demolishes the pace of the game and soils most positive memories I have of it.

Remarkably more engaging than the first game. Kinda overstays its welcome after a certain point, but I anticipated that simply from it being a Ubisoft game. For how much I complained about "binary stealth" in my review of the previous game, I was elated to find that you can simply walk along with a crowd to blend in. It's so seamless, and it enabled one of the funnier moments of my playthrough: casually walking into the audience of my target and firing a bullet into him at close range. They never saw it coming.

The story actually left an impact on me this time, but probably for all the wrong reasons. Being a pseudo-historical recreation of sorts, there are murals hidden on major landmarks that serve as glitches in the Animus. Locating these prompts you with a puzzle to solve that unlocks a piece of "the truth". All these puzzles are a bunch of fictional nonsense, tying the conflict between templars and assassins to non-fictional figures and events throughout history. It's fuckin' silly, but it delivers on expanding the conflict that was merely alluded to in AC1: The conflict between the templars and assassins never ended, and it continues in present day.

I must be getting soft. Never would've imagined that I would be enjoying Ubislop, but here we are. That being said, I am not playing another one of these games for at least a couple of months, "Ezio Trilogy" be damned.