AAA RPG slop
It's clear every dungeon, every character, every story, every EVERYTHING, follows a basic checklist devoid of passion and exist out of necessity. As linear as final fantasy 13. Maps are a stick with 1-foot branches with a chest on it. Characters have literally nothing to do with eachother except shoehorned duo chats that do nothing to flesh out relationships, dark pasts, or anything interesting. Again like the first game, the party has absolutely nothing to do with eachother and party for absolutely no reason. The story doesn't tie them together. You're walking around with a bunch of useless mimes. No grand narrative, no characters building relationships, no shared goals to aid character progression. You can also tell exactly what will happen every chapter. You know this next dungeon, you will fight x character, because of course you will. You know your characters most grand goals (their 1 single trope of a goal) the first 10 minutes of their story. It's pathetic how formulaic this entire game is.
- Storytelling: garbage. A third grader could come up with these stories. Characters will do unbelievable braindead things as an excuse for the story. Yes, a reasonable person would definitely walk past a suffering slave saying "i promise to help you, later, after I go through this place, cya. Oh whoops, when I got back she has been killed or captured, derp". Otherwise, each story takes a single cliche and makes it their entire thing, making them bland as you can imagine. Storytelling hasn't been more boring since dragon quest 1.
- Exploration: garbage. The game is a straight line, pretending to be open because you choose the order of characters you play.
- Rewards for exploration: garbage.
- Battle system: okay. It's the only decent thing about the game, yet still becomes very tedious and formulaic. No player expression, just do the exact obvious formula of buffs and debuffs, then hit the enemy hard. Repeat.
- Environment: garbage. Every cave looks 90% the same, every town looks 90% the same. There are no interesting reasons for a town to exist, no awesome landmarks.
- Directing: garbage. They completely refuse to make any unique animations to bring scenes to life. You are basically looking at characters standing like chess pieces, with a very rare dagger stab or something which looks like it took someone 2 minutes to animate. It looks like crap. SNES final fantasies managed to be more meaningfully animated than this, wtf?
- Secrets: garbage. You can see almost all secret chests, which when you see them, just walk around the wall. This is as creative as they get.
- Music: ok, sometimes good, but not memorable and works more like background noise.
- RPG character customization: severely limited and boring. A couple characters have a bit more options but is a pain to keep up with, especially because when you choose their skills the game doesn't think it should tell you anything other than its name which is ludicrously stupid.
It's ok at best. It's sad this is what square enix is doing these days. A group with such a legacy can do better. But they won't, because this sells. There are way more problems than this. I should have learned my lesson from the first game, as they fixed maybe literally nothing about the first. The problems were so obvious I somehow believed even this washed piece of crap company would handle them.
You suck, square. How long can you live off the past's actual high quality products? You're a joke.
