A game that by the end of it gets so difficult, I'm not sure if anyone can be "good" at the final boss.
To start off, this is less of a rhythm game than it might seem at first. There is definitely a strong rhythm component as all battles are to the beat that changes depending on the music, which depends on the enemy; however there is a lot of randomness to which button you need to press at any given time, meaning that even if there are charts present they're not really learnable in the traditional sense. This does turn up the difficulty, as every battle is essentially a sightread, and the further you go in the less time you have to react to the notes.
In short, it's more of a reflex game set to the rhythm. And it looks great.
Now the way you interact with battles is via a dungeon crawling wrap where you try and find the exit as you stumble into new enemies, which give you new loot to change up your loadout. True to the steam page, the gear you get is feasible even long after the level you get it, since its stats that change not the general power level. And I'm pretty sure I only managed to defeat the final boss thanks to a vitality chestplate that was amongst the earliest loot I got. But with such variation comes a lot of unexplained confusion.
I have no idea what half of the stats do. I vaguely comprehend that power level is how hard you hit, and that melee/ranged/magic powers, as well as slow/fast notes powers correspond to enemy weaknesses. Not quite sure how since it's hard to test different loadouts to compare the damage, but I vaguely understand it. But then there are the other effects: Vitality, Tank, Reflex, Fast. I think the first two correspond to health (how much you gain/lose) but no clue about the other two, or any more that might be on equipment I didn't use. There is a strong lack of explanation, and there isn't that much point in changing your loadout until freemode comes around. You don't know which enemy you're gonna face, so tinkering with your loadout only makes sense at the boss, and only once you fought it once and died. (and as a side-note, I only got 1/10 of the unique equipments that are meant to be dropped by bosses, though not sure if due to bad luck or low droprates)
And while on the topic of negative stuff, there have been a few softlocks where battle summary wouldn't appear after a won battle, or I couldn't move anywhere but up after dying to a boss. A bit annoying, but the game autosaves very frequently, so it was not a massive roadblock
Finally, the mechanics. Each boss introduces a new mechanic, which then gets used by all enemies in future levels. With the exception of the first boss, whose mechanic stays unique, and last boss, who doesn't have enemies after it. Due to that last one in particular I would've probably preferred if the mechanics were introduced at the start of a zone, and then the bosses were a final challenge, but that's just a matter of preference. What is important though, is that this causes a steady ramp up of difficulty, meaning that even when the input simplifies the game does not.
TL;DR is that this is a rhythm reflex title with a constantly increasing difficulty. It has some bugs and design flaws, but the gameplay is solid if you can keep up with the notes
