Ha, always a fun reaction to get. It's like the flipside to that "i don't like thing" comic strip.

*man shouts at sky* "I don't like thing." *demon ascends from the Earth* "Well then you obviously have bad taste and are a horrible human being." *angel descends from the sky and hands the demon a note* "Okay."

Route A hooked me with the amusement park, and then unhooked me with having a terrible and unsatisfactory ending, then Route B hooked me by opening with a fairly unique and cool take on the story and then Route B unhooked me by being a bullshit slog, and then Route C hooked me by completely upending my understanding of the world and characters and then it unhooked me by completely throwing all of its philosophical questions to the wayside.

This game was really a rollercoaster for me, and I think that if you're intrigued by the premise you should see it through, but it just never quite landed with me the way it seems to have with a lot of critics.

Perhaps some of the worst combat Platinum has ever done. Better than Legend of Korra, but not by much. I blame most of this on the game trying to attempt to be some sort of pseudo-RPG, which it clearly fails at. All the health values are out of whack, the balancing makes zero sense a lot of the time. I would say ignore the side quests if the game is failing to hook you this early on, because they just increase the chances of you putting the game down and not coming back. Route B is a horrific slog of a chapter, reminded me a lot of the back half of DMC4. It definitely does some really interesting things story wise that only could be done if this was a video game, but nothing so incredibly overblown like people claim. A lot of it comes off like philosophy 101 and kinda meanders around. Also, this game has one ending, not 20+ or whatever. There's ending E, and then there's all the other bullshit.

More power to the folks that enjoyed it and clearly have a reverence for it. There's something clearly special about it to a lot of people, but it let me down tremendously. To me this game is like 30 hours of bad character action combat with entry level philosophy and story that takes way too long to pay off. But hey, it did give birth to one of the most highly detailed asses the video game industry has ever witnessed. Seriously, that thing has more polygons than entire games from the PS1 era.

Could not agree more, I was quite talked up about the 'legend' behind the earlier games and the partnership with Platinum basically had me on board since day of announcement. Then the closer and closer it got to release the less compelling the game seemed. The demo then released and did little to help. After completing the released game as well as completing 80% of the side content I can say what you wrote here is why its one of the most disappointing games I've ever played. It's up there with Hitman Absolution and Splinter Cell Conviction for me.

I will say though, at least DMC4's back half had Dantes amazing combat mechanics to play with.