I would want to have this be a "Middle" not a yes, not a no, but since I can't choose a "mid thumb", so it's a no.
Too Long, Won't Read:
Mech fighting gameplay is hack and slash, easy, non-challenging, arcadey. Customization is all right. Finetuning and skills is indepth and interesting. I think it's fun in a campy anime way. I like it when I'm not playing a tryhard game.
Overall story, graphics, art design, music, serviceable.
Particular dialogue, story gameplay/interaction/fetchquests, not fun, boring, cringe worthy, enough to make me stop playing and write a big review.
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When it comes to the actual gameplay; fighting robot monsters, and finetuning your giant robot with different weapons, mods, the skill/leveling grid/system, pilot skills. That's all fine and dandy, in depth, a little overwhelming when you first look at it, that's fine. That's what I'm here for. There's even a bit of an annoying grind for RNG for drops of different quality, but it's good enough to keep you wanting more. The combat's straight forward and simple, mostly hack n slash, some shooting, they try to go in depth with crazy special moves, parrying, whatever. It's not really that crazy at all.
Aesthetically, to be honest, I don't really like any of the mech designs. I'm more of a Armored Core or Steel Battalion kind of aesthetic enjoyer, I'm not actually much into Gundam designs, or these. But the graphics and overall art design and music are all serviceable. Some of the music is actually pretty good.
Let's get to what's killing the game for me. The story gameplay. You got to run around town doing fetchquest dialogue stuff. The 2d/3d run around town gameplay is serviceable, somewhat unique looking, it's fine. I am intrigued in the overall story and premise. But some of the more personal stuff between characters is killing me. There's too many characters. I don't care anymore. I am here to fight giant monster machines to save humanity. The story makes me think of, if it was a 3 hour movie, could this have been cut down to 1.5 hrs? I understand the point of videogame stories is to make them interactable, but this is just me running to a place, watching a (skippable thank god) cutscene, and mashing the accept button to run to the next place to skip another cut scene if I get bored. I'm not trying to say artists can't do their thing, and I'm sure this game is just fine for some people.
An example of a mecha game with limited cut scenes and maximized fighting? Armored Core 6. You don't even see anyone between missions. You get a little exposition, sometimes you get yelled at in-mission, but you keep fighting and in your down time it's just for shopping and mech customization.
I had to put Megaton Musashi on pause to write this review because I feel like I'm now playing a dating simulator running around town with an alien girl warming her up to how great humanity is, watching movies with her, and it doesn't help there is a lot of "modern dialogue" further destroying immersion. Words like "Boomer" come up as an example and it's incredibly jarring since it's 100% a word that is very specific to a particular era of memeable culture, and not really something I could see being used in a strange scifi universe where 99.99% of humanity was killed overnight by alien invaders.
The game doesn't take itself too seriously, which can work, as it's incredibly exaggerated and bombastic, but there are also other words that are not translated appropriately. That's right; if you understand Japanese; all the characters are speaking Japanese. But the English subtitles are sometimes mostly on-par, and sometimes strangely incorrect, or blatantly incorrect.
I'm gonna post this dumb review, grab a lunch, and hope I can stomach through some more of the mostly cringe, but sometimes actually interesting story, and hope I can get back into a mission.
