At this point, I've put a fair amount of time into Valhalla Knights 3. It's got a laundry list of issues, a couple major, but overall it's a fun grind if you like to just mindlessly kill stuff and get more and more powerful.
best feature ---
You control a team of 7 (and can flip between them). Each character can have a primary class and two subclasses (primary determines stats, but you can set up your active skills from any you've earned from all 3. Every time you level in any class you get a stat point, and these are 'universal'... so even if switch to a new class at level 1, you might have a huge +99 boost to str or vitality or whatever from leveling other classes. all 7 are active on the battlefield and if you have their personalities set up right generally seem to do a good job and help far more than they hurt. there are a ton of classes, and you can easily change between them for a small fee (pocket change, really). Most of my characters are somewhere between level 10-20 in all classes i have available just for the universal stat boosts that gives my characters.
This is by far the best thing about the game. Maybe even it's only good thing... but it's good enough that it keeps me coming back, switching around classes, leveling everyone... even if my mage+priest+shaman has no interest in melee, it's still fun quickly levelling up fighter/soldier/ninja to level 15 or so for those bonus 45 stat points.
bad stuff --
everything else, pretty much.
fetchity fetch mcfetcherson. kill 30. find 20. on and on. some of these are mildly addictive, but in general it's pain.
[intentionally] goofy characters and plot.
combat is pretty clunky but gets the job done one you've adjusted to it.
biggest crime
distance is painful. the world map, dungeon maps, and everything else are too big and take far too long to navigate. it's a crime against my time, really.
goofy stuff -
the clerk business is way over exaggerated imo. in fact, there are better, cheaper stores easily available that allow you to completely skip this mechanic if you want. and if you do try it, it's just your standard rubadubdub the picture til you find out the clerk has a sensitive knee or something. it's just a boring minigame, and i have just as hard a time imagining people 'enjoy' this as I do imagining other people get 'offended' by it. it's right up there with those pens you can buy at crap stores that 'strip' when you turn them upside down -- not really good for anything, but not worth boycotting over either.
verdict -- there are a lot of better games out there, and this can be safely skipped... unless you just sort of want a game that will give you endless hours of mindless grinding as you level up your squad. i think it's actually pretty good at that.
I still need to get through Grim Fandango, definitely recommend a walkthrough. I even tried just taking the tiniest hint of one and immediately got stuck afterward. Kind of tempted to just straight up read exactly what to do instead of waiting to get stuck.
I wouldn't even mind the controls at all if there weren't so much "oops guess this isn't where I need to be after all"
don't do it to yourself. grim fandango is from a time when we spent time solving puzzles, no easy guides a click away. and yes, sometimes this meant you banged your head against your desk, stumped, or even took a break and slept on it. but the end result? glorious.
then again, i suppose we no longer have attention spans. so whatever.
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