Three hours in and it's pretty good but nothing I'd call excellent.
Gotta get the first out of the way though... so far bug free despite purchasing on release. I'm kinda sad that this needs to be said at all but overall it runs smooth and plays really well with a controller and it has no revolutionary graphics but it looks quite good and definitely feels at least AA quality, more Greedfall than Witcher for example.
The UI feels very similar to Witcher 3 of all things (I think the font is the same) and similarly with the floating head white text but it's clean and readible.
The actual game structure so far seems VERY linear, which isn't in and of itself a bad thing but this isn't a sprawling open world RPG. It honestly is the closest to a typical follow-the-plot FF style linear RPG I've played in a long, long while. The environments are essentially just corridors with some notches to them with occasional treasure chests, there's also some white-chalk labeled rockclimbing that seems to pop up in every single one of these 3d games.
The story seems interesting so far but seems slow. The MC and his sister have good chemistry and it feels suitibly small scale at the beginning with a good plot hook. It does have long dialogue sequences that you can't really fast forward through; there's a skip button that skips the ENTIRE dialogue but no "advance to the next text box" option that most of these games have. Everything's fully voiced so far though. It's interesting but it's not revolutionary or anything like that, alot of standing shot/counter shot style scenes with a few pieces of panache mixed in. The MC kinda seems boring so far but unoffensive.
Combat so far seems pretty weak though. It's very spammy and everything is tied to a stamina like bar but even straight out of the gate you get a lot of combat options though it seems to more or less encourage you to use everything off cooldown. There's also an interesting pokemon-like mechanic where if you weaken and enemy you can try to capture it for extra rewards with your magic macguffin; the game does a really poor job of explaining this and I didn't even notice until I randomly saw it occur spontaneously in gameplay. Game desperately needs a button to tell your AI companions to just back off though cause they'll kill the people you're trying to capture. Battle is a pretty simplistic hack/slash style game w/ a stamina bar nothing as complex as Souls-games again probably about as complicated as something like Greedfall. You can swap between different stances that all just seems to change your Heavy attack while your Light attack remains default. No combo system or anything like that, optimal strategy just seems to be recharge stamina, spam heavy, use your magic abilities off cooldown.
Not much in terms of customization though. Leveling up is JRPG style with just raw stats, there's equipment but the numbers are very small so it doesn't really feel that impactful. There's apparently an item mixing system but so far it seems awfully random. 3 hours in and although the game tells me there are side quests the only side-quests I've seen are tied to one minigame, I presume the game may open up a bit more though on the other hand I haven't had to do any fetch 3 goblin skin quests so it's not too bad.
Overall I'm mostly playing to see where the story goes and the novelty of a big budget Taiwanese developed game.
