I'm kinda busy so I'll just chime in and say the game is fantastic.
I'm a huge fan of the manga and after an hour of play right now I'm almost crying in joy. The game is nearly perfect fundamentaly.
+Sword physics are incredible. The way you recover from fast motion in 1 direction, or drag your sword in a backwards strafe if you try to move away from where you just swung is awesome. Also after you attack if you just hold the analogue in the direction you want to move you get a 2nd swing of Gatts pulling the sword over to that direction.
+The way the enemies get cut into pieces is really awesome and when you do a slash usually the enemy will split in half at the correct angle or lose some body parts.
+The music is GOOD. I was kinda sad that Hirasawa was only doing the OP/ED, but the music is top-notch. I wonder whose scoring it.
+Art direction is great. The actual graphics might not be revolutionary but the way the visuals are presented make it look great. Blood and snow stick on your sword nicely too.
+Tons of attack animations. When fighting enemies you can hit triangle after the brand flashes over your life and you'll rush foward. If you touch an enemy you do a special attack animation. I think there's 2 for each enemy and some of them are just badass. For instance there's a dog like enemy in the 1st level and if you do your special you grab it by it's hind legs and flip it in the air with 1 hand and then slice it in half while airborne O_O
+Going from that the boss animations are even better. You get awesome letterboxed well choreographed action scenes everytime you counter or your enemy does or both of your weapons hit. You even can change the scenes during some. For instance when my weapon hit the first boss's weapon I had to keep tapping square or I could hit triangle for the cannon. I hit triangle and all I gotta say, is that it was one of the coolest OMG scenes I'd seen in a game ^__^.
+Good amount of moves. Regular swinging of the sword is perfect with the physics and then you have the charge triangle attack. You also have the R1 strafing and attacks, and your special triangle attack, and your sub-weapons, and your dashing + dash attack, and your companions.
+Just hearing all the voice actors back in their roles doing the manga scenes is nice
Only drawbacks that exist so far:
--Loading between save screen and area is about a min or so long. Same with between areas. But luckily areas are pretty big.
--When you call a partner in the game freezes and loads for 2-3 secs.
I think the 28/40 in Famitsu was due to the loading and the fact that the enemies always respawn (which is good because they give you exp so you can level up stats and weapons at save points).
So far gameplay-wise, visually, and audiobly this game destroys the DC version. I'm extremely happy with the game and can't wait to get some more time in.
