Very fun, and definitely a step up from Breath of the Wild, in my opinion. Unfortunately, I had the same issue with this one that I had with its predecessor where I just get insanely bored of the gameplay loop. The open world is vast and interactive thanks to the new powers, but many areas still seemed bare and the addition of two entirely new realms in the sky and underground didn’t do much to alleviate that. Coupled with the still lackluster enemy variety, simple combat, and unintuitive item menus, I ran out of steam with this one fairly quickly.

I’m sure I’ll return to this at some point or another, but for now I’ve definitely had my fill.

The developers do an outstanding job at building a captivating environment, the plot details and circumstances just ambiguous enough to keep you going along. Unfortunately, the environment and storytelling are the only aspects of the game I actually enjoyed.

The inventory management aspect of the game really did ruin the experience for me. While understandably being an homage to classic survival horror games, this is probably the most annoyingly restricted inventory I've ever encountered in a game. Having to constantly backtrack to deposit or retrieve items from the storage boxes ruined immersion, pacing, and just became an overall chore.

I think the early Final Fantasy games might just not be for me and that's okay!

I definitely liked it more than FF7. Some of the characters are really interesting (mostly Vivi, but I liked Freya before the plot forgot about her) and the art style is super cozy, but beyond that everything just seems really generic and contrived. Sub-plots are picked up and then dropped without warning to the point where I had no idea what I was actually even doing.

The battle system is so boring. ATB is awful, Trance is awful, the loading screens before battles are awful; combat was just genuinely unenjoyable as a whole. I slogged through it for the narrative, but even that reached a point where it just became stale for me.

Maybe one day I'll eventually find a mainline Final Fantasy game that I like as much as FF14.

I don't really know how to feel about the game. I finally finished on my third attempt at the game. The combat is shallow and boring (the reason I quit the first time), the world is hyper-quirky to a fault (the reason I quit the second time), but I still managed to enjoy my time playing... for the most part.

The Otherworld segments are long-winded and filled with unnecessary padding. The game could have benefitted from being A LOT shorter. The combat system is dull at best and incredibly frustrating at worst. The saving grace here is the story and the characters. The main four are very cute and the emotional setup in both the Otherworld and Faraway Town was very good. I cared about them, I cared about their fraught real-world connections, and I suffered the actual gameplay to see their stories through.

Then the game completely lost me in the last hour or so. The "horror" segments were always more silly than anything, but the finale cranked it up to just total edge-lord, shock value bullshit. The big reveal isn't just unrealistic, it plays like something straight out of the mind of a 13-year-old Wattpad trauma porn writer. It completely ruined the entire game for me to the point I now regret having put any amount of time into it.

(On top of that, the creator of the game is apparently a sweatshop-running pedophile, so it doesn't feel great knowing I put money in her pockets, but whatever!)

Overall, a mediocre game brought to an even worse level by a stupid plot twist and awful characterization.