Recent reviews by 2bitowl

Genuinely cannot recommend this. Whatever anyone says, this is not an proper MMORPG, this is just an Gacha cosplaying as a MMO.

> Auto Combat... Like why?
> Menu within menu within menu within menu. Menu-ception the game. Actually.
> All the content is time-gated (what lunatic thought this was a good idea...?).
> Cosmetics are stuck behind Gacha or the very low, very common, chest Gem (you know, the Genshin world chests) and requires an absurd amount of grinding.
> There's about 5-6 different currencies and you barely get any from any type of content.
> Notifications for certain things, like gear, is barely working. Sometimes it'll tell you, most of the time it won't so you better stare at the Item tab to see what exactly you get.
> Even on EU servers you'll have a ping of 100+, which is ridiculous. Edit: Apparently there's no EU server.. makes sense.
> Achievements are glitched so you won't have to do 800 chest openings or however many for those, they'll just automatically unlock.
> Combat, so far (Lv 21), is pretty dull and doesn't change, but you're also time-gated so you can't really progress any further than grinding the same single dungeon for gear... which is getting stale already.
> Team & Friend Chat acts like a BiliBili stream (not a joke), the text will randomly pop up on your screen and slowly glide across.
> The "notification" bar, or whatever you want to call it, is tiny and you'll barely notice if you get any messages.

Will update when I can think of more issues, but after 9 hrs of playtime, yeah, no. I would not recommend this sad garbage to anyone.

I've been a fan of Monster Hunter for a long time & games in similar vein as the series. But my patience with this game has run completely dry. I love the gameplay of this game. I genuinely love the monster designs. But I am so confused and so sick and tired of each and every update graphically just breaking this game.

My PC specs aren't the best, but I've done a lot of testing and tweaked so many settings and even gone beyond that and enabled Frame Gen to have a stable experience with this game. I had a really nice mix of High & Medium settings, comfortably using up like 4-5 VRAM but ever since the Spring event ended my experience has only gotten worse and worse. Performance tanked during boot & entering any map. AT Rey Dau update did the same but even worse. And now we have TU2, where, unless I turn all my settings to Low the game is just barely surviving.

I no longer recommend nor support this game until it's entirely fixed, which in my opinion, is never happening. Good day.

Persona lite, is probably the best way I'd describe this game. Most Persona-esque mechanics have been quite toned down. While the Calendar and Social stats still exist, the Social stats have been toned down with how much time you need to invest in them and the days to finish each section is varying and quite forgiving. Dealing with your companions as well is just way easier here. You can easily max your companions quest in one playthrough, meanwhile you'd maybe struggle and miss 1 or 2 during a regular Persona playthrough unless you knew what you were doing or following a guide of some kind. These aren't bad things in fact it felt really refreshing not to have to spend so much time dealing with these mechanics.

Companions. While I enjoyed their company (especially you Neuras) you've most likely experienced them in some aspect or another in previous games. Basically typical Persona companions.

I enjoyed the story for what it was. Me and a friend were playing through the game and we pretty much called out the story beats easily. It's not the greatest story, but it's also not bad. I enjoyed it for what it was.

Now the big thing: Combat. The combat definitely felt alright. There's no "grind this enemy to become super over-leveled" or "create this build to rampage through every fight" like in the Persona games' Fusion mechanic. Everyone gets the same Archtypes and everyone can gain all the skills (if you're willing to invest the time to grind for the MAG). This definitely keeps the combat fresh as you'll always hit a wall at some point nudging you into changing your build to overcome it, this definitely matters much less later in the game but it's a thing for a majority of the game until you've hit that point. It felt refreshing having to actually adjust my builds for monsters and bosses for a change. My biggest nitpick though has to be the EXP. Why does it have to be so low? Even with all of the EXP items/passives you can gain (which is very few), it's so low and it just dips the higher you level. It never really recovers either until the monster levels are higher than yours by quite a bit and that won't last for long.

Soundtrack and Art Style, well, I definitely expected more from the soundtrack.. like it felt like the same 4-5 tracks were on a loop (probably were...) but the art style is just so cool. Just wish the textures weren't stuck in Switch quality.

All in all, I definitely enjoyed my time. The game felt quite refreshing compared to previous Persona games and I would definitely recommend this, maybe not full price but definitely if it was discounted.

TL;DR: Mid game, feels like a graphical updated DA2, combat was fun but janky and the game grew on me. Story and writing is definitely not good. I got over the art style but not the Qunari. Would I recommend it? As of this moment, no, especially not for full price.

Edit: 106 hrs later and I finally beat the game, my opinion of this game honestly haven't changed. I do feel cheated when it comes to romance. Didn't in particular have an issue with the ending, True or Secret ending tho is another matter (it's definitely upsetting and frustrating). And I honestly saw the twist a mile away.

I've sunk 77 hrs into this game so far (not done yet, been side questing a lot) and it really has grown on me a lot since it released and I got my hands on it. A lot of my early opinions of this game were based on reviews from multiple sources and seeing how they were censoring bad reviews early on.

So here's how it is for me. It's not a bad game, it's not a perfect game, it's a flawed game. The combat very much is close to something like modern God of War but it has issues. There are moments where things just don't work, like parrying or dodging (Fade Reflex from Mage is an ability I've never gotten to work). Sometimes abilities will just fly straight into the ground and miss ALL enemies even though it's supposed to homing on to them (example would be the flying ice bird or whatever it is when you're trying to spec into Evoker, majority of the time it just flew straight into the ground and not at enemies, same issue with Chain Lightning). You'll get stuck on terrain a lot which is incredibly annoying especially when you're trying to dodge and the hit boxes from some boss attacks are just way too sensitive.

In terms of story. It basically feels like you're being treated like a small child at times, like there's no trust from the developers that you would understand basic human interaction or a bit more complex interactions. This is easiest seen during companion conversations where all of them, including yourself, are treated like little kids. My personal example that I discussed with a friend would be Lucanis suddenly having feelings for Neve and how it's treated like he's a little kid with a crush, not in a way an adult would react or process things. And as everyone knows, the biggest offender is Taash, and sadly it's almost everything she does. It's forced and done in a really, really, really bad way. Taash honestly deserved a better writer and more respect, she was done incredibly dirty. That is not to say that the story did not have any high points, because it sure did. So far, anything Warden related, amazing. Had me hyped as hell running through that castle, my personal high point. But a majority of the game is just not up to that standard. All in all, I would've loved to be shown more of Varric recruiting Rook and some of those early adventures rather than just being dropped in or if they just made Dragon Age: Inquisition 2 and you continued as the Inquisitor.

Maps and areas, honestly, they weren't as bad as described by some reviewers, at least not for me. But a major chunk of it definitely felt like I was back in DA2's design where you're exploring the same areas over and over again. For me that is fine, I personally loved DA2 (I'm probably in the minority, especially since it's my favorite out of all 4), but I can see where and when it would get repetitive and annoying. There's not that much variety and it doesn't help that certain areas get locked away (one time dungeons).

For the art style, it definitely grew on me and so I had a very easy time to adjust and grow to like it. Qunari sucks though, would've loved if they either brought back DA2's Qunari or kept Inquisition's.