duskmare0000

Played about 5 hours so far and it seems... Bad. Absolutely loved the first and second games (and some of the ones in between). The second was my favourite because it took the first game's systems and added to/refined them by making the controls more responsive and adding in drive forms. The third game... Just seems like it was made by a different development team all together. A much worse development team... Instead of the focus being on gameplay and story the focus was clearly on 'graphics' and plugging Disney as hard as possible. I have graphics in inverted commas there because while the game does look great it runs pretty badly. Constantly getting frame drops and stuttering. Besides that there's just poor design choices in it. Like, for enemy water attacks they use the normal water graphics. You know, the ones that look like real water. Meaning they're really hard to see because they're see-through. Honestly, visually it's a bit of a mess. Each individual thing on the screen looks great alone but as a whole it just looks like a brightly coloured mess. The writing died hard. Any sort of meaningful communicaiton from the last games has been replaced by "What!?" "We have to do the thing" and "[Pun]". All in terrible voice acting that sounds really really stiff and awkward. Just in the first world alone, Meg doesn't have any of the sassy sarcasm or cheeky tone she does in the movies. The writers didn't even try because it's all come out as super positive 'kid friendly' generic rubbish (read as "for people dumber than rocks" because they've vastly underestimated the intelligence of children here). What really stuck out to me is that they obviously couldn't find a voice actor for Phil. In the last 2 games he's the one that talks to you most in the Colosseum. In this one he appears in a cut-scene and just sits there making no sound. It's exceptionally awkward. As for gameplay, I have no idea why people are saying that it's too easy on Critical mode. I started on Critical mode and pretty much every enemy, barring classic shadows and soldiers, has managed to stun-lock me and kill me in 1-2 hits. Maybe I chose the wrong options at the start and ended up with the least possible health and defence or something but I certainly am not finding it easy. Honestly, wish there was a way to lower the difficulty. That aside, the combat looks good but plays badly. It's got all the same camera issues of the first 2 games. Those being that it doesn't face the enemies for a lot of the time and you'll get stabbed in the back pretty often. As I mentioned, some enemy attacks are hard to see amid the very pretty scenery or variety of other effects being sprayed across the screen. As many people have said, there is a lot of just mashing the attack button. Magic doesn't do much damage in this game so it's not really worth using. The RPG elements have gone a bit... strange. Your ability list is already full when you start the game. It makes it unnecessarily confusing and cluttered when most of the abilities are quality of life (like Scan) or just your basic move-set, like being able to continue a combo after missing or being able to counter-attack after a block (which didn't work most of the time anyway...). There's a heck of a lot of new 'systems'. The attractions system, the forms system, the grand magic system, the trinity system and the lock-whatever system. All they really amount to though is "press Y for a powerful attack/ invincibility" (Xbox controls), except the lock one which is "Hold RB for a powerful attack". I've run out of space. Summary: game is bad.