I liked it overall, as expected from last month's first impression.

The boss fights were really engaging and challenging. The combat had the right kind of dynamics for my tastes, with a good grade of mobility and a nice balance among parries, pulls, dodges and attacks. I liked the setting and the story too, even if it was a bit opaque in some of its parts.

What I liked the most, though, was how they built the NG+ cycle. Bosses get new attacks and mechanics there, and that makes the fights even more of a challenge.

What I didn’t like was the map design (a bit too linear despite the appearance), fast travel being barred behind some almost end-game boss (backtracking is tedious without it), and the fact that some weapons aren’t really feasible to use in some fast paced fights (sort of a problem if you invest in those ones).

The gameplay felt repetitive in the 2nd chapter already.

There wasn't anything interesting or original in the level design or the fights in general.

There are too many cutscenes that interrupt the flow of the game in my opinion, and the fact that most of them are still-images with voice overs makes things even worse. I won’t even comment on the story and all its nonsense or the character design in general.

So let’s just say I didn’t particularly like this game and that’s it.

I had already played the whole game during early access and I liked it, despite the fact that I usually avoid survival games with crafting like the plague. It took me about 70 hours to go through the whole content with default settings at the time.

The whole crafting-boss hunting-upgrading loop the game is based upon is well built and balanced.

The map is not too big, but wide enough to create immersion, plus the graphics are unexpectedly pleasant to look at from the default top-down distance.

The game has recently come out of early access; they added new bosses, a new area, new end-game content and Steam achievements on top of that. So I decided to play it again. The thing is, I didn’t want to invest all those hours a second time. So let’s say I cheated? Well, no, but sort of, I mean, I heavily customized the server settings you can meddle with at the start when creating a new game. That means: no teleport limitations, max crafting rate, max drop rate, max material stacks, min material requirements for crafting, just 6 hours of light a day, max HP and Attack Power. Let’s say it’s not how it is meant to be played, but basically I removed useless waiting times and transformed the game into a sort of pure boss hunt game with fast upgrades in between bosses (it took me less than 20h playing this way). Playing on brutal difficulty and solo counterbalanced the fact that I pumped up my stats, just a bit that is. I still had more of a challenge the 1st time. Some of the bosses still posed a challenge though, but only a handful took me more than one attempt, so I guess I overdid a bit with the tweaking. Still, I had fun and I don’t feel particularly guilty for playing and getting the rarest achievements this way (a lot, and I mean A LOT, of people complain that the game is too hard and unfair on brutal difficulty).

Btw I loved the Castlevania crossover, I think it’s a perfect match.

It was about time I played this game.

I love how the co-op is the cornerstone of the whole game. The puzzles luckily weren’t too hard. My gf got a bit anxious when monsters started to appear (lol). Still, we had fun and we will probably try out the other games in the series.

A bit disappointed about the possible endings though. And well, maybe a bit short, but still a good experience.

I’m still playing it, but I’m not liking the game so far.

I don’t consider myself a fan of the yakuza series, but I’ve played a few of them (0, kiwami 1, kiwami 2, 3, in that order), and I quite liked them, even if following a downward trend.

I didn’t know much about this game, apart from the fact that it had an outstanding positive score on steam (94% positive reviews), so there was a certain grade of expectation. Well, let’s just say I’m quite disappointed and baffled by that score. I don’t understand where it comes from.

I mean, okay, we have the usual yakuza style story progression, the usual humor, the usual plethora of side quests and minigames to distract yourself with. There’s nothing really missing there. Furthermore I can honestly say that I liked the story and character design more than most of the previous games, but the gameplay, specifically the combat part of it, that’s what is really ruining everything for me. And mind you, it’s not because it’s a turn based jrpg now. The problem is its balance. How can the fights be balanced so poorly, I wonder. They’re either too easy, meaning you can simply set “auto-attack” without even needing to look at the screen, or you face enemies with like 10x, 20x or even 30x the normal HP and 10x the usual attack damage and waste 15-20 mins per fight chipping their HP away with the risk of dying and repeating the whole fight from the start. Sort of an artificial difficulty spike impossible not to see and that I found badly designed to the point of it being frustrating.

The other aspect that I didn’t like, which is exacerbated by the previous one, is the amount of grind required to just level up or gather rare materials. It’s extremely slow and you can hardly feel any sense of progression while you do it. All things are made worse by the fact that you’re supposed to level up different classes for each of the characters if you want to make them effectively stronger.

Basically it seems like they completely missed the middle way that makes jrpg fights interesting or fun, and leveling up a thing you actually want to do.

If I hadn’t won it on SG and didn’t feel obliged to beat at least the main story at this point, I would have already dropped it, honestly. And that's something, considering it's hard for me to drop a game, even when I don't like it.

I’m playing it co-op with my gf.

We’re having fun. We really like the setting and the world design in general so far (she’s kinda obsessed with the glowing red mushrooms lol). We like the chosen palette of colors. Even the lore is interesting enough if you take your time to read through all the logs scattered here and there (even though it would have been better if they had left a couple of pages that you would find more often rather than ten or more pages all at once in one spot).

The only things I’d wish were different are the fact that rolling (dodging) doesn’t interrupt the shooting animation, which, if it were possible, would allow more dynamic encounters, and the fact that if you’re not the host of the game you can’t see the updated map (meaning you see part of the maps you’ve already explored in previous sessions as unexplored/completely black). It can make it hard to orient yourself if you don’t have an especially good memory. Finally, enemies spawning behind you and the absence of a clear visual/auditory cue when they hit you can really be a pain.

Still, we’re progressing slow and steady and we’ll keep playing for sure.