An Honest Review After 400 Hours of Playtime
The game has barely improved at all, and now they’re taking story content straight from the anime and recreating it almost exactly as-is. I’m playing an open-world game, not watching a fucking anime recap. If I wanted to watch these scenes, I’d just watch the anime myself.
And the execution is fucking awful. The facial expressions and emotional acting are lifeless, the animation is mediocre, the music is poorly chosen, and the direction is just terrible. The music doesn’t even fit the scenes properly. What the fuck were they thinking?
Even the combat still feels terrible. There’s no smoothness, no satisfying flow, and barely any sense of impact or responsiveness. There’s practically nothing to the combat besides fucking spamming Q and E. That’s the entire combat loop. No depth, no satisfying flow, no meaningful skill expression — just fucking Q and E over and over again. For an action-focused open-world RPG, the combat should be one of the strongest parts of the game, but instead it feels clunky and unsatisfying to play.
Even one of the most important aspects of an anime game — character presentation — fails to make the characters interesting or memorable. The combat animations are mediocre, and the skill effects are just as bad. Most of the VFX in the game right now are flashy for the sake of being flashy, but they don’t actually look beautiful or impactful. Seriously, does this team have no prior experience making games with impressive character animations or visually appealing skill effects?
I play this game because it’s supposed to be an open-world game. I want to walk around, explore, and enjoy a beautiful world. Instead, the graphics are underwhelming, the world lacks environmental density, and there’s barely any sense of physical interaction.
There’s an entire fucking ocean in this game, yet there are no waves. And the worst part is the trees and foliage. They don’t even properly react to the wind or move naturally. And that stupid falling-leaf effect? Just turn the camera slightly to the side and the effect can suddenly disappear. Don’t fucking use “cross-platform” as an excuse for this shit.
The graphics, environmental density, and overall world-building need a serious upgrade to make the game actually feel like a proper open-world title.
Do they seriously not realize how heavily the game was criticized and compared to other games for its graphics when it launched? Where the fuck are they putting their resources?
Are they just throwing everything into bug fixes and pumping out content? They can’t even fix the fucking bugs. Every update introduces new bugs, and the same old ones just keep sticking around. The screen-lock bug that happens when fighting Banakro still hasn’t been fixed either. That bug has been around for three fucking patches now.
The game has been out for 6 months, and it feels like almost nothing has actually improved.
Even Wuthering Waves 1.0, which was notorious for its poor optimization, still looked way better than this. Its graphics were better, its character animation was better, its VFX were better, and the world itself felt more visually alive.
This game is honestly the perfect example of “quantity over quality.” They keep adding things without actually improving the quality of the game, yet there isn’t even that much meaningful content to begin with. The open world itself is poorly designed and feels empty, while the overall quality, polish, and attention to detail are still severely lacking.
Is this really the quality of a game that became their second-highest-grossing title? What a fucking state.
At this point, what the fuck is Netmarble even doing?