Finally finished the game, despite after a certain point about 40 hours in I originally felt fed up with the game and almost dropped it for good. Getting Morag and having another permanent character that I could bond blades with made a world of difference after being stuck with Tora for so long. Took about 80 hours total, and while I definitely don't regret pushing through the bits I didn't like to getting hooked, this isn't really something that I'd consider GOAT status like some others, mainly because a lot of the mechanics really didn't gel with me (auto attack being a thing that I can't stand under any circumstance, but also the blade pulling, poor UI, wonky-ness of enemy aggro, etc). I do plan on still playing for a while longer though, for some reason filling out affinity charts is oddly compelling (some of them, at least...).
On the story/character side of things, I liked most of the main characters, but they definitely could have used a bit more fleshing out. The fact that a lot of the side quest dialogue just had canned lines from characters really didn't help at all, and while heart to hearts helped a bit it feels like there weren't nearly enough of them. Tbh, I feel like this (and more games in general) should just rip off the skits from Tales games, they go a long way towards fleshing people out, and are probably the main reason why I've always loved most of the casts from those games (hell, I can actually remember all of the characters from pretty much every game, including the ones I haven't played because they were never localized, whereas I had to Google Patroka because I already forgot her name lol). I didn't find Torna particularly compelling either, they really piled on the tragic flashbacks with them a bit too much, and the fact that some of them got these scenes in the same event where they died was pretty awful... They were also the absolute weakest part of the dub, Patroka being especially bad, like her actress was given zero direction for any of her lines. I also found it kind of strange how in the end Malos was the final boss, despite most of the time, especially the beginning, he felt like he was Jin's sidekick, and there was such a huge focus on Jin/Rex near the end whereas for Malos it was like "Oh yeah he's an Aegis, too."
I did however, manage to sort of catch on how this game is connected to the first when you hear Shulk's line near the end, despite not having even played it. That was one of the few "OH SHIT" moments in the game for me.
Still, in spite of all that, the world design was so damn good, and I think if Monolithsoft's next work is more of a straightforward action RPG with a world like this, I'll be all over that shit day one.
