This game is a cheap knockoff of better games.
The gameplay is very shallow. It's filled with underused unfinished systems. At the start of the game, it introduces a repair cost mechanic. You have to not take more damage than you can afford to repair. Then the game never actually implements it. You can die and it will not charge you anything ever. And yet after EVERY level it has a spotThis game is a cheap knockoff of better games.
The gameplay is very shallow. It's filled with underused unfinished systems. At the start of the game, it introduces a repair cost mechanic. You have to not take more damage than you can afford to repair. Then the game never actually implements it. You can die and it will not charge you anything ever. And yet after EVERY level it has a spot for it like it should be subtracting it.
When your arsenal gets destroyed you can run around on the field as a human. You lose almost all mobility. As far as I could tell there was no way to fix your arsenal or steal another. You usually cannot survive or finish the objective as a human so you might as well just restart. It's an unfinished feature that they should have cut.
And that leads us to the skill tree. Half of the skills are Human upgrades, and you HAVE to buy some of them to get to the Arsenal upgrades. And if you decide you want to change your build there is no way to reset your skill tree. The upgrades also irreversibly change your character appearance, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but you cannot preview it or reset it.
Then there is the shop. The only thing you can buy from the shop is processors. There are tabs for everything else, but there is nothing in them. As far as I could tell the only way to make things appear in the shop is to use a different menu to "Develop new weapons and armor". You give it money and an ingredient item, and it just disappears. You have no way to tell what is being developed or how long it will take. For me it just took one mission then it told me I got new items. Then those things that I already got from crafting showed up in the shop. There's no reason I would ever actually buy them again so what is the point?
And as for upgrading, the difference in stats is so slight that I didn't even bother. Because once you have two swords, there isn't much reason to use anything else. It is the only viable solution to defeating Arsenals, especially in certain unbalanced missions.
Lastly for the gameplay, we have the Missions themselves. So many of the story missions feel the exact same with so little stakes. You go somewhere and are given an arbitrary task. Investigate this, defeat all the enemies, protect a train etc. Then you take five steps and are interrupted by stupid dialogue spam warning you of approaching arsenals. Then you see a cutscene where enemy arsenals show up. Then you fight the enemy arsenals that are fighting you for no reason or because they won't just tell you why they're there. And it becomes so tedious and annoying because of the bad writing.
Now we move onto the writing. The writing is awful. You as the player are totally disconnected from everything happening because you don't belong to a faction, and they don't give you time to get to know any of the characters because they swap characters every mission. At some point, you fight literally everyone which makes you care about them even less because nobody can be trusted.
As for the main plot, nothing happens for FOUR chapters. They keep telling you how stuff is about to go down and nothing does. All they do is talk and talk and yet they say nothing. I skipped hundreds of dialogue boxes and missed NOTHING. Then later in the game they just exposition dump all of the important lore and story details. The characters do not act at all as you would expect with such a reveal. And then they all pretend like they're your friend as you march to go defeat the villain.
Then they pretend the entire game was about the "power of friendship". They didn't do an ounce of work to earn it. you are friends with NOBODY the entire game. You don't even have a presence in the story most of the time. They straight up cut you out of the game for most cutscenes. And then they want to pretend like friendship is what saved the day. The writing is beyond awful. Go play Persona 3-5 instead if you want an actually good "Power of Friendship" story.… Expand
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