izigame.me

Just finished the game maybe a hour or two ago and unlocked the harder difficulty with new gear and felt zero desire to do it. The game is nice for a 40-60 hour playthrough, but maybe wait for a 25-50% sale and patches. Of course it is more enjoyable if you have knowledge on the Bakumatsu Period of Japan.
Just as a heads up I have all 3 of the maps at 80ish% and did the Pro-Shogunate """Path"""

This game feels like they threw away everything that worked and replaced it with gimmicks from more popular series.
Stances with clear roles and abilities that you would naturally learn to use against certain enemies? How about we just do some rock-paper-scissors and then give half the weapons no style choices to choose between?
Some people hated all the gear and loot in Nioh? How about we keep the loot but make all of the set bonuses small and boring, so the people that hate loot aren't happy and the people who like making builds aren't happy.
Parryslop is popular now, so how about we make countersparking super rewarding then just make all the enemies delay half their attacks and lunge 30m across a room? Also we are making all of your stances have different parry timings and rock-paper-scissors gimps your parry window because fuck you. (Yes I know you can dodge and block, but half the skills and stats are based on making countersparking super-rewarding.)
People gave us shit for our level design, so we just made a Ubisoft open world. Oh shit we still have to make story missions you say? Fine but they are 5-10 minutes long and super repetitive with the exact same "Kill 3 tough boys" side objective, aside from the like 3 missions where you have to find some dudes and pat their shoulder as well.
The story is... odd... on one hand it is enjoyable if you at least have a cursory understanding of the Bakumastsu Period, but on the other, the way it is told is horrendous. They felt compelled to not let the player change history (Let's ignore them have some people live for some reason, the game still treats the history as if they died still.) But they then decided to give the player the false pretence that they could choose a side and make a difference. I did Pro-Shogunate which basically just means every few missions I get to betray the Pro-Shogunate people and help the Anti's because Ryoma realises that helping the Shogunate means he might have to kill his old comrades... yes buddy, that should be the first thing you realise when you start working for the people you were originally against. Most missions ended with me beating a named historic person half to death with my katana, only for them to stand up and leave, with me then working for them as if nothing happened 30 minutes later.
****Spoilers****
I shit you not, the final real mission is you murder hoboing your way through a military base and then fighting the commander so you can hand the commander your factions surrender letter basically. "Sorry about killing 20 of your dudes bro! We surrender btw, no hard feelings. Please forget that I have switched sides for and against you like 4 times at this point."
The Blade Twin story is... something, that is all it deserves to have had said about it.
****Spoilers over****
Won't go too in-depth with the combat, but when you get the hang of it it's enjoyable but leaves you feeling like the Dev's spent more time trying to fight the player then trying to make it enjoyable, it's hard to describe, but playing the Dojo against certain bosses is an exercise in masochism. The combat seems at odds with Openworld game design, where in Openworld games you are generally turning your brain off and checking off tasks on a list to pass the time, whereas the combat wants you to be completely dialed in since if you screw up one parry or swing one too many times you just get your ass beat and have to watch helplessly as you lose half your hp.

The graphics are mostly ok, but with heavy swings depending on lighting and location. I think one of the biggest problems is how barren the cities are, the streets are super wide with tons of houses but a lot of them have noone on them which quickly takes you out of the game and losing your immersion. Other problems with the graphics seem mostly to be optimization/port problems (Bad LoD, bad texture streaming, ect.) which will hopefully be fixed with patches given time.

The Character Creation and fashion is very nice, besides Males being mostly forced to have a certain level of "ruggedness" to their skin textures, that might be fixable with deeper understanding of CharacterCreatorfu. Some color options are lacking or just missing in the fashion, so if you wanted a certain color, you might just be shit out of luck, since most clothing pieces only have 1-2 recolors that might have some pattern on them you don't like.

Very meandering review with a lot bad said, but I still mostly enjoyed my time with the game. Most of the games problems seem to derive from a lack of focus to me, a lot of contradictory design decisions made.