Genuinely disappointing. A step back in pretty much every area compared to the excellent third game. The new limited scenery destruction is good but only seemingly in a limited number of levels. I only ended up enjoying using one character, and others like Jinbei and Nami who I enjoyed in 3 felt extremely weak in comparison. It feels like these licensed Musou games are working the opposite way to how I expected; usually the sequels improve things after a shaky first game. This was a massive regression, and yet Persona 5 Scramble is excellent (albeit extremely long!)
I'm also going to take out my frustration on the embarrassingly poor translation here - the reason why I've knocked this down to a 1. It's absolutely full of errors and was seemingly translated by a disparate group of first-year students, judging by the basic grammar errors and mistranslated dialogue. I was spotting a translation error pretty much once every few minutes in the back half, ranging from getting the subject and the object of a sentence mixed up, botched idioms, just plain not understanding the meaning of words, reversing the meaning of words and even leaving a Japanese in-universe term untranslated right in the ending cutscene. It genuinely reminds me of the dreadful stuff I used to turn in when I was doing my first classes in translation - and then I had the excuse that prose is usually written in longer form. The producer responsible for this should be ashamed. The original writing isn't exactly amazing in the first place, with the plot culminating in a literal fan fiction episode at the end, but if it's for something which people will pay money for then you should take some pride in what you do.
I bought this on PC and didn't have access to the original Japanese text because they didn't feel like putting it in (likely because it cost half as much as the PS4 version on PSN) but I genuinely feel that the shoddy translation detracted enough from the experience that I should have put in the extra money and dealt with the inevitable PS4 technical issues. Next time I'll just buy it on console - second hand of course.
I'm also going to take out my frustration on the embarrassingly poor translation here - the reason why I've knocked this down to a 1. It's absolutely full of errors and was seemingly translated by a disparate group of first-year students, judging by the basic grammar errors and mistranslated dialogue. I was spotting a translation error pretty much once every few minutes in the back half, ranging from getting the subject and the object of a sentence mixed up, botched idioms, just plain not understanding the meaning of words, reversing the meaning of words and even leaving a Japanese in-universe term untranslated right in the ending cutscene. It genuinely reminds me of the dreadful stuff I used to turn in when I was doing my first classes in translation - and then I had the excuse that prose is usually written in longer form. The producer responsible for this should be ashamed. The original writing isn't exactly amazing in the first place, with the plot culminating in a literal fan fiction episode at the end, but if it's for something which people will pay money for then you should take some pride in what you do.
I bought this on PC and didn't have access to the original Japanese text because they didn't feel like putting it in (likely because it cost half as much as the PS4 version on PSN) but I genuinely feel that the shoddy translation detracted enough from the experience that I should have put in the extra money and dealt with the inevitable PS4 technical issues. Next time I'll just buy it on console - second hand of course.