[BotageL]

This game is really bizarre. Combat is still kind of confusing and arbitrary -- some enemies clearly have a "puzzle" solution to damage to them, like the big armored shell monsters, but with my available skill/equipment sets, it's extremely difficult to actually trigger said solutions. And because Lightning is unable to run in combat except when moving in to do a melee attack, like an even more sluggish version of Semi-Auto Tales circa Phantasia, dealing with multiple foes at once is basically a nightmare. And the plot feels like an excuse more than anything. Lightning's moping about how since she became a literal tool of the gods, she can't feel anything anymore, even though her apparently no-longer-emotionally-charged desires drive her actions, strikes me as an admission that they've completely, utterly failed to give Lightning a personality in prior installments. And for all the talk about how the citizens of the world have lived for 500 years in a world with no birth, no aging, and exclusively violent and/or illness-related deaths, there's very little attempt to actually demonstrate that in the way characters behave, especially children. And I need to stop started every other sentence in this paragraph with "and."

Somehow, it's... kinda compelling, anyway? Probably because it's a complete mess? Does that make any sense?
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