Genei Ibunroku thoughts

Thought I'd just throw them in a pastebin instead of clogging all of your feeds with tons of small things.

The good:
- Stunning enemies in dungeons before engaging them. Seriously, this is the single best idea I've ever seen. It takes all the coolness of having enemies you can dodge, while giving you a way around them if you play it well. Even better, enemies will juke your sword slashes, so you need to time your hits really well.
- Music is absolutely incredible. Easily one of the best sounding games I've played.
- Combat is really dynamic and has lots of little things. Definitely a lot to work with here. Different enemies take different strats, are strong and weak against different things etc. Have yet to really break the system, which I was worried about with Session attacks.
- Graphics look really good. It's as if somebody took a PS2 Megaten or Persona and smoothed everything out. It's not amazing, but it does the job very well. There's also subtle CGI in the animated scenes, which makes the transition less jarring.
- Pace seems pretty solid. 5 hours in, I'm through the tutorial dungeon (which happened almost immediately - no 30-45 minutes of setup/exposition before letting you get your feet wet) and the E3 106 building.
- Enemy design looks good. No palate swaps through first two dungeons, but this is subject to change. Different defenses and abilities.

Can't judge
- Story. I can't tell if it'll be any good, since my ability to translate is only slightly better than a wikipedia summary. I can translate tidbits and generally know what's going on, but most nuance and character bits are going to be lost on me.
- Weapons. You have 2 pieces of gear, a weapon and an accessory. Very streamlined, especially given how you get weapons.
- Skill system basically combines FF9 and SMT4
- Enemy session attacks. Basically prevent it from being as one sided as it looks in previews, but I had the second boss do basically twice Tsubasa's HP on the second turn. It's going to be where the difficulty comes from - Enemies usually have similar groupings, so if one can session you, usually multiple can.

The bad
- Random level ups. One of the bigger Fire Emblem constants made its way over, I think... I think. And it's really scary. I've had level ups where the MC got 30 HP, others where they got no strength followed by 4 on the next level up. It might hurt more at high level than low level.
- Early DLC. Hot Springs DLC is already out, I'm pretty sure... Frustrating.


Overall, I'm really enjoying it. Excited to keep playing and to eventually play the game in English.