I've been sour on the game for a while but chapter 5 was especially bad, so I'm leaving a review. I could write something more lengthy, but the problems boil down to the non-existent story and weak gameplay, so I will focus on those.
The game sets off the premise that our protagonists are the chosen heroes of light, and they must plug up dark fountains in the fantasy world because... reasons. Well, because a prophecy said so, but we don't get to read what that prophecy says, and the characters avoid talking about it like it's the plague, so it might as well not matter. Every chapter a new portal to the monster world opens up from the real world, and with it a new fountain that needs to be plugged, so our protagonist and his dinosaur friend dive in and meet some kooky new NPCs, get taken through some silly hijinks, and then you fight them at the end and plug up the fountain. Rinse and repeat, and that's the story of the game, which is not much of a story at all. There's certainly scenes where the characters stop and talk, but 99% of the time nothing new is achieved. They just say some dramatic words or rehash a conversation that's already happened before, and then move on. The conversations feel trite and lacking in candidness. The game often teases that certain scenes with odd atmosphere might hide some juicy reveals, but there have been exactly 0 juicy reveals so far. It feels like it wants to lure you in with a dramatic, mysterious story, but there's none of the story structure or reveals to make that work, and it just keeps dangling the carrot over your face, using spooky text animations and dramatic sprites to trick you into thinking it's telling an engaging story without doing the legwork to make it so. The closest thing to plot progression is the dinosaur friend falling in love, and that does not have enough depth to warrant the runtime.
Gameplay-wise, it's fairly similar to the first game, but more rote, and with more problems. A big thing about Undertale was playing it normally and then finding out that the game had these secret pacifist and genocide paths where if you spared / killed all enemies, you would get a unique route. Having played Undertale first, it's impossible to play this game and not try to go for the pacifist route right off the bat. However, if you do so, you will find a mechanically really dry and repetitive system. Every round you select Act, select whatever unique option is there, then do it again for the second party member, then again for the third party member, repeat that a few times until the enemy turns blue, and then spare them. Every battle in the game will play out the exact same. This was already not an exciting gameplay loop in Undertale, if we're to be honest, but it's made worse by the fact that there's 2 more party members here, so it's more repetitive. It reminds me of when Persona 5 added more elements but didn't fundamentally change the gameplay, so it just lengthened the mechanical process of trying every element to find each enemy's weakness, making combat more dull.
Another big problem I have with the gameplay is with the cadence of the shmup sections. I find that they are both too short and too hard as to be satisfying. As a rare human who actually plays and enjoys shmups, the patterns in this game often feel really unsatisfying. It's not that they're not creative or challenging, but that the game doesn't have nearly enough of a difficulty ramp up for how nasty some of the patterns are, and the fact those sections are so short makes it so it's hard to practice and get better at them. What almost always ends up happening is you get lucky or cheese the sections just enough to get through them, instead of feeling like you mastered them. I think the game should have toned down the difficulty and upped the length of a lot of the patterns, making sure the player is demonstrating mastery over the challenges before throwing them onto the next one. Also, some patterns are just too hairy and add to this sense of skewed difficulty. Chapter 5 in particular is really bad about this, with lots of patterns having awful visibility and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hitboxes, and the final boss in this chapter is easily the most unfun in the whole series.
The only part of the game that shines is the secret boss battles, where it tucks away the most interesting gameplay. It manages to recapture some of that Sans fight magic, with involved gauntlets that are fun to beat. It sucks that you will probably have to use a guide to find this content, and you still have to tediously replay most of the chapters to get to it, but if there's any good reason to play this game, it's that.
Before signing off, I'd be remiss not to mention the writing problems. The game is absolutely littered with typos and bad grammar. Almost every sentence has wrong punctuation or capitalization, and it's stunning that it goes through so many people and still makes it out to the public like this. Note, I'm not talking about characters that talk with deliberate speech affectations, like Sans always talking in lowercase, or some characters that intentionally misspell words. I'm talking about the stuff that's meant to be correct and it's not. I've reported some of these errors before and nothing got addressed. For a story focused game, it's disappointing how little they seem to care about the quality of the writing.
