So I've put about 250-300 hours of this game onto the Switch and about 70 hours on PC, I really do love this game. The gameplay is great with a vast variety of different playstyles to choose from based off of your choice of class and weapon type and all of them are fun to play. The art style that is very reminiscent of Mega Man Zero, a franchise of games Inti Creates had previously helped make that this game is a spiritual successor of, and it looks very nice! Boss fights (for the most part) are fun and challenging. However, there is one thing that, after all of this game time sunk into it, made me quit playing: the GRIND. Now if you're just wanting to beat the base game, that doesn't take too long at all and you should be able to play and get through just fine without any issues. However, if you're like me and you see all the different level variants for each stage and want to complete them all, good luck. Once you get to the higher levels (around 55-65 or so), your experience gain to level up ratio falls from being able to reliably level up every few levels or so to having to grind like 10-20 (maybe even more depending on the stages you're grinding on) or more runs of a stage just to get a single level up. Level ups themselves don't necessarily grant you much in stats, what does is your weapons and armor. However, you need higher levels to equip weapons and armor properly (you can equip weapons at a lower level than required, but at the cost of a massive penalty to your attack, so you may as well just wait until the appropriate level; you can't even equip armor at all if you aren't the right level). Now some of the easier levels you can do underleveled, but there are certain bosses that are already hard enough matching their level, much less attempting to fight them underleveled. I even ran an experiment where I took my Lv80 Empress, who was barely getting any experience from Lv80 stages, and successfully ran a Lv90 stage on one of the easier levels and my EXP gain was barely any better than before. Plus the amount of money and upgrade cubes needed for fully upgraded +3 weapons is insane. Getting to +2 isn't actually that hard, but the jump to +3 and the grind needed for the materials is rough. Also you might as well not even bother trying to get to intentionally get the rare drop weapons from some of the higher level stages, they almost never show and I only got maybe 1 or 2 of them by pure coincidence and they probably won't be as good as your current weapons until you get to a point where you can grind materials for special upgrades that you can't obtain until you have access to Lv100+ quests. I had the motivation to at least beat the base game with every character/weapon combo back on my Switch, but I didn't really have the motivation this time around to do the same again despite how much I love this game. On one hand, it plays great and is a ton of fun, but I know that I won't be able to 100% complete every level quest in the game with even one character, much less all of them, without an absolutely insane level grind. I have 70 hours on this game on Steam and I have a Lv80 broadsword Empress and Lv50 shortsword Empress and there are 10 different class/weapon combos in this game. As much as I desire to want to 100% this game, the time sink to try to do so even with one character combo, much less all of them, would run deeper than the Mariana Trench and I just don't think it's quite worth all of that time it would take. Even though I think some of the RPG elements were introduced decently well into this, the insane grind element within this game in the post-game that stems from some of the RPG elements ruin the post-game and any chance any reasonable person would have to 100% this. I would encourage people to play the base game, it's a blast. But it is not worth the time and effort necessary to try and clear the post-game.
