The combat in this game, Jesus.
They basically looked at what Platinum did with their melee combat games and dodge mechanic, added tag elements, character switching in real time back and forth, all out attacks with insane looking ultimates and as a cherry on top, warped it all up into state of the art animations, excellent responsiveness and extremely satisfying visual and tactile feedback. I FUCKIN' LOVE IT! I mean, yeah, you've got like 3 moves (incl. Ultimate), but everything I just mentioned above kinda makes it relevant. Maybe there'll be more with W-Engine upgrades (it's kinda hard to tell cuz they're locked and there's no info on what they do) and there's 9 skill upgrades which are locked behind level 15, so there's that as well. But there's many characters with unique playstyles and you can combine their moves with moves of other chracters into chain attacks, all out attacks and ultimates.
And there's so much you can do....
Okay, so let me explain how the game works, cuz it looks like not a lot of people get it and can't tell by watching videos just what kind of game it is.
So, it's basically Persona where you have your character living a double life, except you're not a student who needs to study in school and participate in school activities, you're running and managing a video renting store (which provides income for you know what) and at the same time providing support for various groups with your hacking skills both in and outside of operations / mission (sometimes you can switch to a bangboo and help agents during fights). Also and unlike in Persona, you don't need to explore dozens of randomly generated levels, engage in dozens of fights, catch personas / demons, look for treasure etc. (which can take up to 1,5-2 hours with all the dialogues, cut-scenes etc.), here you have 3 types of missions - Story, exploration and combat. The first one is self explanatory - heavily story/narrative-driven, lots of cutscenes (the mix of visual novel-like, realtime, conversations), the combat one is also pretty self explanatory - someone asks you to do something and it involves fighting enemies, exploration one is for the most part combat free, you're just exploring the net via real time signal searches through a mini=game where you move through television screens, solve pretty easy puzzles (move crates to activate switches etc.) find / unlock some rewards etc. and story missions also have this.
I think it's a brilliant idea and much less time consuming overall, there's literally zero grind for resources, healing items (there's safe zones on the path which restore your health - I'm playing on the challenging difficulty), participate in needless fights which can become repetitive cuz you're doing the same shit over and over for way to many times cuz you need to level up and all that. None of the JRPG grind and complicated systems are in this game and it's super refreshing to see and experience. So what are you doing then if you don't need to grind, fight a lot and shit? Well, as you can guess since it's a gacha game too, you unlock characters, level them up and their gear and there's a shit ton you can do with that. Like, you can level up character, you can level up their individual skiils, you can equip W-Engines which various effects and of different rarities, you can upgrade them, you can add different modules to them, you can add other shit to them outside of W-Engine upgrades, you can unlock passive skills and buffs if you got a duplicate of a character durign channel searches, you can scrap W-Engines for parts and upgrade your A-S rank ones, you can check your phone for news and stuff and see what's going in on in the world, participate in comments to these news (not all, but still), there's an arcade with various games you can play and they have their own achievements and rewards, there's like miltiple battle pass-like things which rewards you for this and that to help you in search of better W-Engines, unlocking characters, upgrading stuff and all that and that's just on one fuckin' prologue area! You'll be unlockin' shit left and right by just playing a story-driven single player game which is really fuckin' good. Did I menton already that unique W-Engines also have a-fuckin'-mazing animations (you can clearly match them with various characters which is cool as well), as well as characters have changing poses for different screens on real time as you switch? You can move to various districts via metro stations just like in Persona games, but there's a lot more locations and most of them are locked and will be unlocked the more you progress through the story. There's also character specific missions which I'm yet to even start and see what they are.
FUCK! And that's just one area you start the game in with a bunch of shit locked and waiting to be discovered and unlocked by you playing and progressing through the game normally. There's shops of course where you can spend real money but why the fuck should you, it's pointless!
There's literally no point in spending real money, cuz from the looks of it, you can't get S rank of A rank characters, you can get A-S rank ones by just playing the game (which is again - single player heavy story/narrative driven) normally. I honestly don't know what they're expecting from the game, where there's a shop, but literally nothing in the game which could force people to spend real money on anything. Like, I've so much stuff and money, that I can upgrade all characters and W-Engines to level 10 which I haven't even unlocked yet, and the rest of the stuff is not even available yet at such quantity cuz I'm only at chapter one story-wise.
So, yeah, it's not your typical gacha game and even though it has gacha elements, it's much more than that, it's more like Persona-lite mixed with Astral Chain without grind and only the fun stuff and I LOVE IT. What an effin' surprize, cuz I haven't even expected much from this game and for it to be this good, so well and lovingly crafted as a single player game is even more unexpected to see. It'll definitely be on my Top 5 of this year, easily. Such a shame it's not available on Steam but you can directly download HoYo launcher and don't have to deal with EGS which is a plus.
And it looks very good with stylized 3D visuals and exellent animations during cutscenes (faces, emotions, eyes, everything!). You can use camera to make photos as well, though I wish for the Photo Mode to capture some cool shots during combat, but oh well, maybe they'll add it later.
Anyway, if you even remotely interested in the game by watching official videos, if you like the artstyle, characters and all that, don't listen to haters and just fuckin' play the game, it will surprise you. The thing is though, with so many games to play now (not to mention backlogs), it won't be so easy to dedicate a lot of time to just one game, but just give this one a chance and don't dismiss it, it's not your regular 195871987156918356 gacha game with predatory GaaS stores and micros, it's much more than that and it's free, unlike $70 ATLUS games (I'm looking at you P3R) which aren't even new and have predatory DLC practices and just their regular thing - releasing complete edition later at the same price with everything included.
