I like my animu weeb BS. And seeing some gameplay for this, clearly I was in for all sorts of animu BS. I skipped the demo but watched a few people play it, it looked fine. So I picked it up!

I also didn’t really try watching the anime… I figure that, since I’m playing the game, there’s no reason to watch the anime. Watched a few seconds and figured I wasn’t getting anything from it that I didn’t get from the game already.

Anyways, let’s see if it’s good!

Developer: Bandai Namco Games
Publisher: Bandai Namco Games
Release date: June 25th 2021
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbone, PS5, Xbox X/S
Genre: Action RPG

So this game takes place in a semi-futuristic cyberpunk-ish almost semi-post-apocalyptic world (sounds weird to say but yeah, there’s a bit of everything in here), where most people (but not all) have superpowers. There’s a thing in the sky called the extinction belt, where monsters called Others pop out of from time to time, and the local military has squads of strong super-powered people who fight these creatures to protect civilians. You play as either Yuito or Kasane, 2 newbies in the OSF who join into separate squads to fight the things. I played Kasane’s story, though partway through the game both stories join up, so I figure you get pretty much the same story for each character, though obviously some scenes give you a pretty different perspective of some of the events. After an accident happens during a mission, Kasane’s sister (Naomi) is transformed into an Other, but gets transported away. Kasane spends much of the plot finding where she is and trying to save her from that transformation and stuff. But that part… isn’t really important. Because there’s time travel that needs to be done. But that’s not important, because the world is gonna be destroyed if you don’t kill Yuito. But that’s not important because brains. But that’s not important, because now we gotta talk about the Designed Children in Togetsu. But that’s not important because the Moon is a thing now. But that’s not important because something about the Others. But that’s not important because of Karen doing weird stuff. But wait that doesn’t matter let’s go destroy BABE. And so on.

This plot keeps going all over the place all the time. Characters change their minds for fairly-unexplained reasons. Eventually all the weird disparate plot elements come together and it mostly makes sense (though there’s still some elements that are just left for maybe a sequel? Scarlet Nexus… IN SPACE!), but it definitely has issues. One of them is time travel… it’s hard to have time travel in a story and have it not break the universe… this one doesn’t work that well. The other is that there’s some weird plot holes, events that just shouldn’t happen based on what we know. MAYBE some of it is explained if you play Yuito’s story, but I doubt it considering what we’re shown. Also some characters just completely disappear from the plot for no reason, 2 pretty noticeable characters don’t die or anything, they just… randomly stop appearing in the story entirely after leaving from a specific scene. Weird. So the story mostly follows once it decides to stop messing around and focus on something, and I’m sure some people might even like some of the characters, but there’s definitely some writing issues here. Also a quick mention that the localization is crap and there’s a ton of grammar and spelling mistakes. Why can’t people just… you know… translate the japanese without changing the meaning (which I can tell because, you know, there’s voice acting in japanese that’s different from the english text all over the place), and use spell check? Someone else’s art isn’t something for you to “express yourself” within. Do that on your own time.

So this is an action RPG. The game progression is extremely straightforward. You can actually fast-travel to any area you’ve gone through already, most of the time (sometimes it’s restricted). You can go back and fight things if you want, though generally there’s not much reason to do this (more on that later), and mainly you’ll have one area you’re supposed to be in and trying to get, fairly linearly, to the end of that area. In-between story chapters, you get a “calm down” moment. You get to give gifts to members in your platoon, have “bond episodes” which is side cutscenes where your main character interacts with the other characters and becomes friends with them or whatever. You CAN absolutely skip this whole element, however you probably shouldn’t because it does make you stronger, as higher bond levels powers up things related to that character’s powers (more on that later). So that’s the basic progression. Linear story segment, break, rinse and repeat until you beat the final boss.

In-between story segments (or during them) you can do sidequests. Areas with NPCs (towns and a restaurant, pretty much) sometimes have NPCs that will give you quests. Those are generally “kill X type of enemy with X type of attack”. You don’t need to go back to the NPC when you do these, just click a thing in the pause menu and you get your reward. The rewards TEND to suck balls, so it’s not really worth doing any of the quests. That’s pretty much the only “between chapters” thing you can do, unless you just want to go back to old areas to grind I guess… which you never need to do because the game is quite easy.

So combat… there’s a bit to go over I guess. I don’t know how Yuito’s normal attacks work, so I can only talk about Kasane. You only ever control the character you chose. You get a party of characters, but they can only follow you and they hardly do anything on their own. This is fully a one-man show as far as combat goes. You do select 2 characters in your active party, but every character you have available will help you in different ways as well. You have a main attack combo which has 3 hits. In Kasane’s case she uses her psychokinesis to control knives. You have a strong attack, in Kasane’s case it’s a backstep where she throw her knives forward, pretty useful (and this attack increases your power meter a lot). You also have a launcher to do some air comboing… which I mostly forgot about for most of the game. And your main way to deal damage (and this goes for Yuito as well) is to use psychokinesis to grab objects in the environment and throw them at enemies. This takes a meter which starts out a bit limited but you can make it bigger. Other than these, you can jump and dash. A perfectly-timed dash slows things down for a second, letting you do a counter or allowing you to grab the projectile being shot at you and send it back. Enemies can be defeated in 2 ways: first is to get the HP to 0, simple enough. To other is to reduce the meter that’s under the HP, which can be done with any attack but psychokinesis attacks are most effective for that. Once that meter is down to zero you can brain crush the enemy, killing them regardless of their HP. Most bosses require you to brain crush them to finish them off (or go to their next phase).

But there’s more! There’s a system called SAS, which is something that connects power users in the same squad with each other. This is largely for communication, but in this case it allows you to combine your powers with other people’s in your squad. For example, if you have Shiden in your current squad, you can power up your moves with his electrokinesis so you can stun enemies that are wet and it powers up your strong attack. At first you can only use one other character’s power at once, but eventually you can do up to 4. Some of them combine very well. I found that focusing on duplication (makes clones of you so you attack more, and also it clones objects you throw for extra damage), electrokinesis (for stuns and a better strong attack). sclerokinesis (makes you invincible) and hypervelocity (slows down enemies a lot) was very effective. Most other powers are pretty situational (and combining with Yuito’s Psychokinesis gives you a very strong attack). Like, invisibility is useless except against enemies that hide if they see you. Clairvoyance is only really useful against enemies that become invisible. Teleporting… I’m sure it’s useful… These abilities only last a bit of time each, some more than others (because obviously having invincibility last as long as electrokinesis would be a bit broken). There’s a meter per power so you can switch them around pretty quickly as needed.

Oh and there’s 2 super meters. One is called Brain Drive, it’s a meter that, when it’s full, activates automatically and makes you a bit stronger for a little while. It’s a bit ass because it would be great to be able to control when this happens, but you can’t. Then there’s the Brain Field, which is a super powered-up state where you throw things much faster, use a big pillar to attack instead of your knives and have a big strong attack (but if you let the timer go down to zero I assume it kills you so you need to make sure you’re able to cancel out of it before that runs out). It’s useful, but at first you’re not invincible in this mode so you still gotta be careful.

Increasing your bonds with characters, other than doing minor upgrades to the SAS power-ups, also gives you access to 2 moves: Assault Visions and Combo Visions. Assault Visions has the character react to something in battle and launch their own strong attack. Like if an enemy gets oily, Hanabi might get a prompt to do a strong fire attack. So these are pretty situational but very much useful to have. The character doesn’t even need to be in your active party of 3, they will still do Assault Visions (and Combo Visions). Combo Visions are attacks that use up 60% of a character’s SAS meter. I’ll be honest, for most of the game I forgot these were a thing they could do. They might be a good option. I wouldn’t know, I beat the game pretty easily while almost never using these.

So that’s combat. A lot of properly-timed dodges and combining powers to hit things a lot. It’s fairly simple but it’s fun. I will say it’s pretty easy though. I’ve seen some people talking about how it’s easy to get over-leveled but… I dunno, I was always lower level than enemies (the final boss was 10 levels above me). Only one boss game me any trouble (and it wasn’t the final boss). I almost never died. Also, speaking of dying, there’s a weird system in this regard. Basically, when you die, you have a chance that maybe one of your active teammates will revive you. This has nothing to do with their positioning, it’s just… you’re dead, maybe you’ll revive. Very strange.

You do have a skill tree you can upgrade. You get points when leveling up, which you use in this brain map. There’s a few categories, you can get into from the middle, though by the end of the game you will have most of the map filled anyways. The upgrades on the brain map can be anything from extra melee attacks to air dashing to stat boosts to making you invincible during brain field to getting extra slots for plug-ins. Pretty useful stuff. You can also upgrade equipment for your characters. There’s weapons and plug-ins to buy, and the shop also has an exchange menu where you can take things dropped by enemies/found in the environment to get other objects. Like the better weapons are here (they required the weapon before them to get built).

And honestly that’s about it. It’s a pretty straightforward game. Might not sound like it, but the combat is very simple, and everything else barely has depth at all.

I will note… I feel like the character designs were taken straight out of a modern Fire Emblem game. Put almost any of these characters in the school uniforms from Three Houses and you’d have no idea they’re from different games. Also… this game does cutscenes in a weird “here’s still images using 3D models from the game” instead of animating them, but sometimes it does animate them in the weirdest moments. Probably a cost-saving measure, but it’s a bit weird when the game kinda randomly switches between animated and not animated and some of the animated sequences feel like they didn’t need to be animated and would’ve worked just fine with the still images.

Overall

This game was okay. The combat is fun but some enemies are just a bit too bullet-spongy. I feel it’s a bit too simple too but there’s some options I’ve basically never used… not like I needed Combo Visions. Simplistic combat but still pretty fun. There’s not much to do outside of the combat, the quests kinda suck because the rewards are ass (though I will say I haven’t tried the post-game quests, maybe those are better but… why even do them?). And there’s new game plus if you want to do a second playthrough for Yuito’s part of the story where I guess you learn a bit more about the moon and a bit less about time travel.

The story goes in a few too many directions before finally deciding to quiet down and focus on one thing and there’s a few issues in the writing, but overall it’s… fine. Not the best thing you’ll ever experience story-wise, I’m sure there’s a few plot holes I didn’t notice but I found a few. Probably not worth watching the animu.

I feel like I can only recommend this one after it has gotten a price drop or 2. It’s good but not mindblowing.