i had high hopes for this one & went into it fairly curious & excited, but by the end i was dreading every session. i have to wonder if i had just waited a year or two for discussions to completely die down, if i wouldn't have felt more favorable towards this game ... i am easily swayed by the zeitgeist & like to wait to play things for this reason, but ... a part of me thinks i just wasn't the right audience for this one.

( this game has a plot twist in it, which i will mention. if you'd rather not get spoiled, come back later. )

first, things i like. what drew me into the game in the first place was how the character system instantly read as one you could exploit -- heavily at that -- and i love the feeling of thinking i'm doing something mechanically nasty when i play an rpg. particularly as you get further into the game & gain the ability to freely respec both abilities & stat points, you can functionally hone your team(s) around singular strategies, which obliterate bosses & basic mob encounters & leaves you full of mischevious glee. that's fun! and it's fun that there are many, many different options for how you go about doing this. it means if you get bored of a single strategy, you can respect everyone & experiment with another, keeping gameplay engaging. i sincerely appreciate that.

i also like the environment designs. they're very imaginative, colorful, and distinct, and for a world whose driving design force is literally "art", you can kind of just do whatever & have it thematically mesh -- this goes for the enemy designs as well. it's sort of a cop-out, but it also doesn't bother me too much here.
tangentially, the music also follows this trend: while i like that this game actually has a consistent background ost, i felt like genres went all over the place. this oddly felt distracting to me, whereas the enemy & environment art did not. however, i'd rather have a game with music in it that feels kind of meandering as a whole, than have a game where they only insist on Cinematic Scores that play sporadically. i'm a bgm fella! i love my tunes!!

the final thing i want to mention, is that i like that they listed their outsourcers by name in the credits. which is not related at all to the overall gameplay experience, but shows good spirit & values on the core team's part that i respect. and because i am petty, such things do influence my final feelings on a work once i'm done.

but now. my problems. i'll start by saying i think my issues with this game are ones of personal aesthetic & methodology -- i wouldn't really recommend the developers change anything based on my critiques, since this is the story they wanted to tell as they wanted to tell it. but i just could not get into it. it's been difficult for me to articulate exactly what i butted heads with here, but i'll do my best ...

the plot itself is good. it's a small story about the grief of losing a loved one, and how that grief ends up nearly tearing a family apart. i like that it's messy & that the feelings characters feel are sincere & nuanced. what i don't like, is how painfully long the story drags on for, how many melodramatic moments they throw in that felt misplaced, lamely resolved plot points, and how badly & desperately this video game wishes it was a movie.

1) the length. to me, the first third of this game needed to be half as long as it was. it isn't about the actual plot at all & just serves as a fuck-you red-herring for the player. i understand the point was to convince you that this world was just as real as the one outside, to make that final decision at the end of the game hold weight, but i just ... as soon as the twist drops, it made basically everything that had been happening feel pointless to me. it doesn't help that they telegraph the twist so loudly for the majority of act 1 either; it made getting to the point where they actually address it feel like such a damn slog.
starting the act ( 2? idr ) post-super-gommage pulled me back in & had me curious where they were going, but that eventually subsided & turned back into a drag for me. it just felt like they lingered so much on things ... which, given the themes of the game, i suppose is fine. it's just as a player who is not experiencing those emotions & specific life events, i found how they presented all these things difficult to empathize with ... which made immersing into the story difficult ... if that makes sense.

2) the melodrama. it kind of feels dismissive saying this about a game that tells such a sensitive story, but ... i don't know. i really do not engage with this kind of storytelling. there are so many moments where scenes are drawn out to be moody & artistic & build drama, but they happen with such frequency that i quickly ended up not caring. they felt like cheap pulls to get a rise out of you, but ended up falling flat without both better context surrounding the scene, and without letting characters ... be characters. they often felt like actors rather than people, which took me out of any given moment in an instant.
some of these long, drawn out moments work, of course. but a lot of them felt just ... unnecessary. i'd really rather just have the characters live through the moments as they would naturally, and have me have to reckon with these choices on my own terms, than have the director whip up a proverbial storm attempting to force The Tone & overbaking an emotional moment til it's burnt to a crisp.
but perhaps the main issue here is ... the tone of the rest of the game? if the game itself was more melancholic or symbolic, these moments of highlighted symbolism wouldn't feel so out of place i guess. i'm not sure ... but i really found these types of scenes to be grating here.

3) plot point resolution. in a game that is so heavily focused on story & character, i feel like wrapping up arcs big & small needs to feel good. this ties into my second critique i think, but many resolutions felt either so minimal that they may as well have not have happened, or so overdramatic that i couldn't even involve myself in them in the first place.
gustave's death, for example, was so quickly brushed aside as he was instantly replaced by verso. even much later when you visit a little plot to bury his arm, that moment felt ... like ... i don't know. like simultaneously nothing was happening, and too much was happening. these people were mourning him without really being able to spend much time with him on screen -- so their eulogies didn't really hit very sincerely to me, as the person experiencing the story. maelle's is the only one that felt like something because we saw them spend time together, but that is completely sidelined by the second act & onward anyway ... so ... like ... why? what was the point of this plot? why include it? because maelle can't let things go? then why didn't she bring him back as she brought back the others, once her power awoke? gustave just felt like a meta inclusion to gotcha the player that ultimately didn't even feel like a gotcha, because. like i said. he was immediately replaced with a guy who looks very much like him & plays similarly to him. so everyone bringing him up offhandedly now & then just felt so strange, like we were amounting to something but never did.
kind of in general, i feel like things just get hyped up too much, so when we go & experience conclusions to subplots & character arcs, they end up feeling like ... nothing. there were definitely excellent moments -- the majority of which occurred in the camp cutscenes -- but like ... so much stuff just had me rolling my eyes, or being like, "that's it?" i guess it isn't a bad thing to leave people wanting more, but it is a video game about catharsis & moving on, so ... i don't know.

4) movie game. this is probably the main reason why i struggled so hard to immerse myself into this game. all the points above where i'm struggling to really understand why the hell i didn't end up liking characters or plot points or cutscenes or whatever, they're all because this game wants to be a movie. and i didn't want that. i wanted a video game!
by "this game wants to be a movie", i'm talking about the aspect ratios, the overly dramatic cinematography & the cheap emotional resolutions, the hyper naturalistic acting -- which all felt in conflict in one way or another with the gameplay. gameplay is simple, but very, very video gamey. it's so painfully referential & simple that i almost thought the plot was mounting to some sort of observation about Games As Art ( which it wasn't -- nbd ) but it stands in such weird contrast to the movie scenes. characters quip in battle & in the field, they have awkwardly acted conversations in camp & with npcs, they interact with the world in really empty & clunky ways ... but then in the cutscenes, they're beautifully realized, serious movie characters. oh my god. i feel like i'm complaining about literally nothing right now, but i just ... i don't know!!! the way this game carried itself was so irritating to me! it's not like video games can't have artistic cutscenes inspired by cinema, but it's just like ... the contrast man ... it made me crazy ...
i wish they pushed more in one direction or another. beefed up gameplay at the expense of some of these cutscenes, or really slimmed down gameplay so they could even better articulate the story they wanted to tell through visuals. as it stands, it feels like they had their hands in a bunch of different pies and, to give them credit, they did make it work ... but not in a way i enjoyed.

5) secret fifth point: the parry system. just really quick. i love that the game is balanced around the parry system ( enemies deal high damage, you don't have terribly big health pools comparatively, so dodging / parrying is important for survival ) but oh my goodness, they just kept adding more & more parrying mechanics that just felt so stupid. i don't need a million little buttons to hit, okay? i'm not 10 years old & need constant input. i'm playing an rpg, i like building the characters & seeing those builds execute & adapting to difficult fights as they come. you don't have to engage with the system if you want, i suppose, but like i said, the game is balanced around you partaking ... and when the camera starts swinging around to weird angles & obscuring enemies visually, actually timing parries correctly to surive & be able to play the damn game became a chore, rather than something exciting & rewarding. i feel like they needed to better tune the parries, so that it actually felt like i knew when i needed to dodge & had an appropriate window to do so ... rather than having to just tank damage because the camera is so bad & the enemy attacks were made specifically to not be predictable on first encounter ...
the thing about dodging & parrying is that, in an action game, you have control of the camera & full movement of your character. that means abilities like a dodge are intuitive & work well with your character who moves in full 3D space. putting these things in a turn-based rpg almost reads to me like you have lacking confidence that your gameplay system is interesting on its own. like i said, i like that they integrated it into the numbers side of things here ... but i think it needed work, and i think difficulty could have been introduced in more interesting ways than tighter dodge windows.

this is genuinely one of the hardest reviews i've had to write. the entire time i was making my way through this game, i was of two very loud, opposing minds. and even after writing this, i feel like i've said nothing & explained nothing about my feelings towards this game.
i think what happened here is that i wanted this to be something it wasn't, and while the things i liked about it kept me in, the things i didn't like grew REALLY grating, which simultaneously pushed me out. i left the experience feeling nothing.

... i'm not sure how to conclude this ... i guess i'll just move on & come back later if my mind ever settles on the matter.