ButterBallin

Lets get the bad out of the way first. The first act or "Phase" is slow and there are plenty of typos in this game. NPC models are reused and not recolored and there are some odd animation gripes. The hair on characters turn with the head but not past the shoulders and also defies gravity should they lean. Character emotes during conversations are jumpy often and sometimes skip about when going to the next line of dialogue even if you wait for one to finish. It's one thing to not change costumes if that is the player's choice but to not have the feature from the get go because of how a boss worked (and couldn't in localization) is a misstep and the feature can just be added in despite that surely. Also the intro that gives narration to events prior to the story is overpowered and lost to the game's music. It's subtitled but still a problem and it happens often throughout the game during character dialogue, at least early on. Now the mixed and lets start with the amount of fan service. It will make clear very early on it isn't afraid of showing skin on the female characters and if that bugs you then you are in for a rough ride at times. During the mechanic called "Purification Ceremony" the pairs of characters the player controls can talk to one another one on one, and these chats are plentiful but a fair few are mundane. The difficulty is either lacking as it is on Normal or on higher difficulties will force the player to not only use items and not hoard them like we do but to get familiar with the battle system and what it doesn't tell you, and to also get into synthesizing items and those are time sinks that must be done to get the best of a total of 5 endings. There is also the matter of this game not only piecing together the previous game's events enough to get an idea of what the hell is going on exactly but also continue it and it will be awhile before you get a solid grasp of it's story. How the story is told will also turn off a few players if they think it's something it isn't (like a dating sim or other similar accusations of that nature) and how meta it gets and stays. The 4th wall isn't surviving this one and if you don't like the humor that comes with it **** then you probably won't appreciate it getting nuked from obit in this title Now the good and what better place to start than the story itself. Once you get a grasp on the story and see it for the survival struggle that it is it will probably grip you from there. The character development is done well enough outside the "Genometrics" mechanic but much more so through it and the conversations during the Purification Ceremonies and even a few during the item synthesizing. The conflicts the characters deal with are multi layered and not just external. The factions in the game have their reasons for their beliefs. Do you conquer a threat or try to work with it? That concept is explored early on. The combat is refreshing in form and fun in function. The turn based formula is refined and it is now a countdown on the turn limit you have to wipe the area of a set number of random encounters tossed at you all at once. The music is fantastic on the whole and you will be more than happy with what's played and sung.