this game is a lot smarter than a lot of people will ultimately give it credit for. it's a perfect anniversary game, a metatextual remake of the original final fantasy in the general shape of a 'soulslike' (though it's much easier than any souls game ive played past the first boss). its an anti-jrpg masquerading as a straight jrpg, looping around to being a straight jrpg masquerading as an anti-jrpg, a polemic of jrpgs, and a polemic of polemics of jrpgs (particularly obvious in the character writing, and when i say jrpg here im mostly referring to the narrative and stylistic conventions of the form rather than their ludoexpression which this game doesnt really touch upon being a straightforward action game). there's layers. it's sadly buried under a very poor first impression narratively speaking, which might put some (many) people in the position of "this game is sincerely incompetent and is funny because of it", and i think that's a shame, almost every scene thats been mocked on twitter has been intentionally constructed to be puzzling and off-sounding, to tick one off into thinking deeper as to the whys, and others (the so-called limp bizkit scene) are genuine attempts at humour. so while i think the game's poor initial impressions do not help, it will be eyebrow raising to me if someone plays through this whole thing and doesn't realise the game and the developers are in on the 'trick' (it's not purely a joke). very wonderful game.