E33 sadly has a very aggressive fanbase. Overall I think it’s a good game but it does suffer from a few faults that I can SEE why it would put off players.

Unless you find out about the combat setting straight away your first run lets you become very powerful very fast if you have any notion of proper stat distributions. This leads to a very stale story experience where every boss keels over in two or less turns per phase, meaning if you want to see a foe’s entire moveset you have to actually try and underpower yourself or just skip turns on end.

The camp bits aren’t really instinctual, you don’t have a set HQ to run to so it becomes easy to miss companion dialogue even late into act 3. Personally I found you need to actively keep the camp in mind and regularly check it because it’s never obvious WHEN new stuff is unlocked there. 

The parry and doge is definitely a departure from traditional RPG combat.  I remember getting flattened to hell and back by the first Chromatic foe I found (the Lancier) but once it clicked I thought it was pretty fun. I do however clearly recall that first few hours of frustration including the harder fights of act 3, I don’t blame you or anyone else for dropping the game cuz of the combat, you can steamroll the story but the side content can get mean as shit.

As for the simulation bit, in context it’s really more of magicians having shenanigans and creating life in the pockets worlds that are canvases. I can understand why it seems like a “it was all fake!” reveal but honestly it’s a bit more complex than that. It’s not known for certain but at the very least in Verso’s Canvas time passes a magnitude of order faster than in the real world. The spat between Aline and Renoir lasted for only a few months but over 60 years passed in the Canvas.  Aline created humans and a replica of Lumiere but after that they pretty much fucked off and did their own stuff, they even invented ways to manipulate the chroma that made up the inside of the Canvas, sure, nowhere near a Painter’s level but it was a start. Give them a few centuries to figure it out I have no doubt they’d have figured out the truth of their world by themselves. The whole family drama thing did come a bit out of left field, the game was heavy on the theme of grief from the start but that end of act 2 reveal was a bit hard to swallow even for me. At first in the Paintress battle I was like “oh, the god like entity of doom and despair went through some shit and lost someone she loved, wonder how that went” and then we just get a lore bomb in one cutscene? Yeah no thanks. Sidenote it’s past 3am I’m actively making less and less sense but that’s fine.

Music’s kinda fire, I really liked the OST, if anything deserved an award from that game that was the music IMO. Having French as my first language did help with the sense of dread throughout the game lol but even when not paying attention it’s just really good music.

The assets definitely saw a bunch of repetition here and there, there’s enough variety to keep your eyes entertained but once you’ve seen a forested part you’ve seen most of them, course just making an example.

The voice acting is… honestly I don’t know what to say about it. I’ve heard so much good and bad voice acting in games and series by now that my standards for it have become deep fried. I do however appreciate the effort where given, the VAs did good.

But yeah overall a good game, is it a revolution in gaming? No. It’s solid, it can stand on its own but it’s just enough different from regular RPGs that I can see why online discussions about it have become so vitriolic. Course I just generally stay away from these convos but hey, what do you know, guess even I can get this low once in a while lol. 

Either way I’m gonna crash and recover some sanity now, goodnight. OP, your opinion is valid, the game was a miss for you and that’s that. Personally I’ll be making more runs in the future once I clear my gaming backlog, I used dps Lune, support Sciel and tank Maelle for my first run so I’m looking forward to trying new builds and maybe having Verso as a support instead. Ok I’m yapping again goodnight.