i'm at the "final boss" of galleria after 80 hours and I'm convinced this game is a "how did this game get released" sort of game, not in the "game that is only for sickos" or "did you test this" way but in the "the vision of this game does not make considerations for what a Normal game is" way
light mechanical spoilers for galleria's progression
so I've spent like 5 hours reinventing my entire team to fight the final boss, which is a comical, nine-target hell cloud of a difficulty spike over the pre-final-boss that immediately precedes it. it demands either a REALLY good team and for you to have done all the pointless fetch quests, or a team that actively breaks the mechanics of the game (stunlock, debufflock, Just Dodge Everything, etc)
and I'm just thinking about how this game does not give you the concessions of "here is an acceptable ending, but if you want the good stuff you have to put in the postgame elbow grease". you are blocked at a bad end of PART 1 where the world explodes and everyone dies if you did not 100% the game up until then, and an average numbers fan like me will get bricked 40 hours later between phases of the final boss, which has Invulnerability Except to Specific Story Items (which wasn't even telegraphed to me until I went to gamefaqs). there's no offramp here!
to be honest, I was ready to throw up my hands and be like "ok, that's close enough, let's watch the ending on youtube" until I checked a blogpost with moderate mechanical spoilers, moreso than this post, and saw the sheer ambition of the postgame dungeon and
honestly it broke me, but backwards. it's such a tall order, such a sentence to oblivion that I have to experience it. maybe not all the way, but I have to start it. I have to see what was cooking in the kitchen. I have to discover the difference between what is apparently called the "True Ending" (which I guess isn't!) and the "Grand Finale".
the game has always been clearly inscrutable mechanically, with more interlocking combat and ability systems than you can even remember exist (even with gamefaqs telling you "give your puppets a lucky number of 71 it'll help you later"), but at some point the assumption that "there's a lot of stuff for minmaxers but as long as you kinda make a fair swing at it you'll be fine" (in the veins of the similar brainspace Disgaea) became a lie, and I think that blogpost really hits upon the essence of the game
it's really a "they don't make them like this" sort of game. are there reasons they don't? probably! everything is a little fucked up in Galleria, from how a million banger character designs get introduced and kind of crumpled up and tossed away when you're not looking, to how the game serves you tutorials as optional dungeon flavor in the 30th hour, to how reincarnation - which is mandatory to beat the game - is kind of introduced silently in hour 50, to how characters just do terrible and bad things and sometimes it's explained and sometimes it's not.
it's not a totally opaque game meticulously made for freaks (positive) that scares me the way, say, a dwarf fortress is, but instead something more messy and contradictory and defying recommendation. it's full of maps where you will open a door and fall into a hole, bosses that are just enemy sprites and with 10x the stats, awful Yep I'm Playing an Anime Game content about emotional and sexual abuse and creepy old guys, and, for the second game in a row, a useless gravity inversion mechanic in a lategame dungeon that exists only to make you disoriented
(I should note that this dungeon cannot be completed until you find all 5 points on the map where your character says "I'm so fucking lost". the dungeon is a Teleport Hell map and the teleports are non-symmetrical. sometimes you have to break open a hole in a wall and jump over another wall and you can't really tell because you don't usually jump over solid walls in maps, and the entire visual aesthetic of the place is confusing space debris)
I don't even know if I'd recommend Galleria to MYSELF but I gotta say this is a Game and also that the two core gay ships of the game are super messy and also very good
(EDIT: if this post made you think "this game is fucked up I gotta play it" let me impress on you very clearly that this game does not fuck around when it comes to adding sexual abuse to the plot, from at least like, three different anime levels [creepy old men, assault used as battle stakes, sex as a product of emotional abuse], and you gotta be okay with reading through that and it's totally reasonable if you're not. also there is a cg of a character hanging themselves. there's parental emotional abuse and domestic violence used as character development. half of a primary gay ship in galleria [yes there are multiple] has had an uncountable amount of straight sex that i would not really call consensual. like a third of these warnings appear to be in this game for no reason other than the edge and another third are in the game to give very kind of like stereotypical backstories to certain characters. also it's a dungeon crawler so there are enemies with titties and enemies that look like dicks but that's like, normal by now.)
(EDIT 2: Also I should stress that I love Nachi)