There's honestly a lot to like about this game. The art direction is fun, the soundtrack is energetic and gets you pumped, there are fun characters, and Death feels good to control.

However...

The game is tedious. Extremely tedious. The motto of every dungeon is "if it's worth doing once it's worth doing thrice." Progress in this game goes at a snail's pace, so you never feel like you're ever accomplishing anything. In short, this game is padded to hell.

Speaking of padding, the "open world" in this game serves only to be that same padding. I cannot fathom any reason this game is "open world." There's nothing to explore or find outside of a few token collectables. In practice the "open world" just means it costs you a boring horse ride from point A to point B to get anything done. You'll never find anything interesting off the broken path that you aren't meant to come do at some point in the future anyway.

The worst offender however is the enemy design. 10 hours in and I've encountered a grand total of three enemy types- small mooks, big mooks, and ranged mooks. That's it. Oh sure, they may have different skins and models, but they all do the same thing. There's never any interesting enemy designs to challenge you or change the flow of combat. You approach every encounter the exact same way- just charge in and attack.

I tried a decade ago to beat the original version, and couldn't. I tried to give it a second chance now, and it was just as bad as before. This is a tedious game and I cannot recommend you play it.

[h1]A Beautiful World with a Tedious Design[/h1] There's honestly a lot to like about this game. The art direction is fun, the soundtrack is energetic and gets you pumped, there are fun characters, and Death feels good to control. However... The game is tedious. Extremely tedious. The motto of every dungeon is "if it's worth doing once it's worth doing thrice." Progress in this game goes at a snail's pace, so you never feel like you're ever accomplishing anything. In short, this game is padded to hell. Speaking of padding, the "open world" in this game serves only to be that same padding. I cannot fathom any reason this game is "open world." There's nothing to explore or find outside of a few token collectables. In practice the "open world" just means it costs you a boring horse ride from point A to point B to get anything done. You'll never find anything interesting off the broken path that you aren't meant to come do at some point in the future anyway. The worst offender however is the enemy design. 10 hours in and I've encountered a grand total of three enemy types- small mooks, big mooks, and ranged mooks. That's it. Oh sure, they may have different skins and models, but they all do the same thing. There's never any interesting enemy designs to challenge you or change the flow of combat. You approach every encounter the exact same way- just charge in and attack. I tried a decade ago to beat the original version, and couldn't. I tried to give it a second chance now, and it was just as bad as before. This is a tedious game and I cannot recommend you play it.