Clearing quests grants access to more party members.
After clearing a certain quest, you’re able to freely re-customize your avatar. You can even change genders, perfect for moody people who think “I don’t want to look like an old man again today.”
We left NLA and walked from one end of the continent to the other, and there really were no load times. I was surprised that the game didn’t run choppily due to the disc seeks.
However, there are three points where there are some small loading: when you go in and out of the BLADE Home, use skip travel, or view cutscenes.
And since this preview version is disc-only, the textures and character assets would sometimes take several seconds to load in when we’d drive around with the Doll at high speeds, or immediately after those load points. I’m interested in seeing to what extent the ‘load time reduction data packs’/digital version can reduce this delay.
Rock faces and lakes are usually impassable boundaries in games, but if you try hard enough you can continue past them in this game. You can jump up some rocky platforms to scale cliffs, or stealthily swim[by sea] around tough enemies guarding the entrances to continents, which make finding paths through the world very fun.
The direct path isn’t the only path. If you try going down a path that made you think “maybe I can get there from here,” you’ll find that you will in fact be able to. This kind of accommodating map design is just what you’d expect from Nintendo and Monolith Soft.
No matter what height you jump from in this game, you won’t take any damage. You can jump all the way down from the top of the Upper Strata in the BLADE Area to the Lower Strata. And the game won’t have to stop and load at all, totally seamless!
If you don’t plan out your strategy and manage your arts and equipment, the bosses are quite difficult, even for people who are experienced with RPGs.
But don’t worry, it’s still a Nintendo game. They allow you to lower the difficulty on a boss if you lose to it several times. There’s no penalties for lowering the difficulty, so people who don’t play RPGs often can still enjoy the story.
When you defeat native creatures, they’ll drop equipment that was used by members of BLADE they defeated/killed. Drops obtained from enemies have different abilities and affixes attached to them, some even have unexpected ones! Searching for equipment with amazing abilities by killing enemies can give it a bit of a [loot-focused game] feel.
You don’t get money for buying equipment from killing monsters. You can sell the materials you get from them, but that doesn’t net you much cash. So, how do you get money on Mira? The Frontier Net, of course. It’s not just for gathering info on the planet. The person who placed the probe receives payments regularly(fixed intervals), from the citizens of NLA who pay a fee to view images and information recorded by the probes. The more Data Probes you set, the more money you make.
The moneymaking occurs in real time, so you’ll make a lot if you just leave the game there and space out!
There are tons of Doll weapons and armor as well, that you can freely customize.
Dolls turn into vehicles when dashing. The frame series don’t just differ in vehicle design, their handling and engine sounds change as well.
I played this review copy for much more than 100 hours, but there was still so much left to see in the game. There were many things we were unable to fit into this review, so we hope you play it yourself to experience all of its limitless fun!
Full review at
https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1tfO-elYLCSqnqk81vvPcXPGaMEG7o8qZIg8w-JVpZO0/pub
