Man, what happened here? I tried hard to like this, but every angle of it is perfectly positioned to ricochet my interest away. My background is in Nocturne, so I was excited to have tough challenges to really test my team-building mettle—but instead I'm finding fights that are next to impossible unless I'm within a few levels of the boss, and easy to beat with minimal planning once I am. I kept going back to the Jatayu fight with new clever strategies and just kept getting wiped by sheer DPS and resource exhaustion.
The demon breeding is also majorly de-emphasized. Essences make it vastly less relevant to try to keep around useful moves in breedable demons, while unique skills that don't breed true add nothing where they could have incentivized particular routes through the breeding tree.
The lack of randoms ruins the logic of a dungeon delve, and the the plot (at least of the Canon mode) isn't much to write home about either. I've heard all of these were substantially worse in the base game, which I never played hoping this one would fix most of its issues, but they're still here in force. This just makes me want to go back and play Nocturne again forever.
The one thing I will say for this, and the reason I'm not rating it lower than this: the writing (and localization) is fantastic. Incidental demon dialog is the only part of this game that's consistently delightful, and I wish I were more interested in the rest of it so I'd get to see more of that.
Reviewed on Sep 02, 2024
