Finished the main quest, not endgame stuff. Definitely a super cool ending.
Story: I loved the game, but I don't think it's perfect. Felt like I was playing the fantasy version of Lost. I've never played a game with such a lack of story for 99.9% of the game. Up until literally the very, very end there was literally nothing of substance happening really. They have 1 fantastic cutscene at the beginning and that was really it. They set up the whole intro getting to know all the teammates, their hopes and fears, their preparation, the town hoping for their success, then they land on the beach in Normandy and get annihilated. It's effective and an amazing intro. Pretty much everything after that was just vague mystery box crap. No answers on anything substantial, no story revelations. Just the usual JJ Abrams special. What are the mysterious islanders doing on Lost? Find out next week, maybe, but probably not. Over and over. And don't get me wrong, I actually loved Lost for most of it. It truly is a great show at building up the mystery, reveling in the suspense and intrigue, and stringing you along the way. This game wasn't quite as good at that, but I was still wondering what the mysterious number is and what the hell is going on. When I landed at the monolith I was pretty excited to see the giant paintress and wondering what was up. Then the monolith was just a lot of nothing. Just recycled areas from the rest of the game with a few new enemies. The paintress boss fight wasn't that great, and wasn't as insanely cool as the Arkhon of Wonder. I was at this point feeling pretty let down with the paintress who just seemed like a dementia patient run amok. The whole damn world is ruined over one family squabble? Lame. Felt like Lost in the final season falling apart. Great casting, great characters, great moment to moment acting, but overall story shitting the bed.
Then they got to the epilogue ending. It's like JJ Abrams mystery box, but for the first time they actually had a mystery in the damn box. So that was super cool and really salvaged the entire game for me. It's a bit nonsensical, but it's fun. Hints at larger mysteries, gives you some answers, gives you new powers and character moments, and then lets you loose for the endgame. Really, really cool. The only game that I've ever played that crammed 99.9% of its story in the very end like this was Dragon's Dogma 1. So, risky move but they managed to pull it off.
As for the big end game revelations, it's super neat but I'm not 100% sure it'll be enough to carry it through for a sequel. I kind of expect part 2 will be like The Matrix 2. We'll see. I'm down for playing it.
Gameplay: Mostly awesome, pretty fun fights for the most part. By the time I got to the paintress, I felt like I was just playing Space Channel 5 dance duels though. There is some RPG stuff there. You set up your combos, heal, etc. But for the most part, you're just watching the enemies do the most exaggerated delay off-beat attacks just to mess with you and then dancing to the beat. Luckily, I loved Space Channel 5. But I was practically saying to myself "up, down, up, down, chu, chu, chu" during the bosses at times.
I think the leveling up system is a bit of a mess and really doesn't make much sense to me. I had Maelle at the end of the game with the most maxed out Defense of anyone in my team, and she had 3 points in Defense. Why even bother having attribute points? Literally just equip whatever weapon, and only put points in the ones that give you the letter bonus and you just get everything. They could have just deleted attribute points and it wouldn't have made much difference. I also thought it was a huge bummer to limit the characters to only 6 equipped skills. I had core skills that I used throughout the game to set up my combos or give critical utility like raises or shields and so I honestly didn't even bother equipping or trying like 60% of the skills. I also felt the menu design for the Pictos and Lumina was cumbersome and poorly designed. It's not easy to tell which ones you learned and which ones are just equipped, and swapping those out for each character is just redundant when they all have similar attributes anyway. By the end I equipped whatever I wanted, but just the actual menu design and tinkering with it wasn't as fun as it could have been if it was designed better. I didn't bother with 99% of the weapons either and that's really the only gear in the game. There's really not any reason to ever switch weapons. Also no real economy, no real item management. For the most part it's a rhythm action game and barely an RPG, but it's still fun. Level design is pretty minimal and not great either. Small levels with no map and no significant exploration.
The minigames were actually great though and I appreciated that.
Art design and Music: Mostly phenomenal. I thought the music didn't have any true standout tracks for me, and it kind of had the faint feeling of being a NieR ripoff, but its well done, good recording for the most part and it's a huge OST. Art design feels a little samey at times in the levels, but mostly is phenomenal. Great cutscenes, really creative designs, and a few truly brilliant artistic moments like the world map, the Arkon of Wonder, Visages stage, etc.
I'm landing on a 9/10. I was thinking I'd go with an 8.5, until I got that great epilogue ending. Then I thought maybe a 9.5 or 10. But writing this up, I had enough complaints to drop it to a 9. It's still one of my favorite turn based RPGs ever, and a fantastic game. Going to take a break as I feel ready to move on to something else, but I'll come back in a bit to try the endgame stuff. Not going to be a surprise at all to see this sweep GOTY for most people I'm sure. It's fantastic, and I definitely enjoyed most of it.