Pro's

This game has some stunning visuals, gorgeous music and a creative story that will most probably have you in tears at some points. The world seems alive and living with the npc's having dialog that advances as the story does, you feel like the people change and grow as the story does. I got 24 hours playtime, going at a decent rate but exploring all the areas, chatting to all the people and doing as much side content as I could. I also made sure to kill all the monsters in the dungeons. The battle animations were superb, whilst in the dungeon I was subjected to all sorts of eye popping colours and visuals and it was amazing!!

Cons

The story suffers from some pacing issues and the fighting does get really repetitive (which I am told can be expected from this type of game). We unlock 10 deamons as we progress thru the game but realistically we will only really be able to play with 3 of them as it is super grindy on how they lvl up, for example... the deamons learn skills with special stones that drop from monsters but the deamons must perform a certain amount of actions (player button presses) and an invisible timer counts. Once that timer reaches the threshold then the stone drops. My play through, getting to lvl 63 and killing every single monster in all the dungeons allowed me to fully unlock 2 deamons and 3/4 of another. (imho, this is pretty bad). Although the battle is visually appealing after a while it becomes monotonous as we are performing the same combat moves over and over and although at first glance the dungeons look cool and fresh, the become all the same. < go here, follow path, kill things, reach end and so on... over and over > The crafting selection seemed to be rng based as well as you could only craft 3 things at a time, the items themselves would be completely random and would only change if you killed 100 monsters.

I pre-ordered this game and the axe we were given was not special as it was simply an in game dungeon drop but thankfully we got it at a reduced price.

tldr, I am glad I played since the story was amazing, the visuals stunning and the music pretty moving but I am also glad it is over as the combat got grrr!