Honestly, after my first playthrough on casual even the first batch already felt insane, I gave up on them pretty quickly. Thankfully there's no story content locked behind any of it, not even flavor text or anything, so it's not like you're missing out if you don't feel like going for it. After my second playthrough the gameplay really started to flow and I got through all of the post-game, they can be some pretty satisfying challenges to complete.

Also, personally I think File 6 is the high point of the game. That chapter just adds so much to the worldbuilding and makes this game so much more than it otherwise is. Sector V shows a completely different side of the game's world, which otherwise feels pretty generic, and Kyle steals the show. The chapter's pretty long and drawn out, yeah, but I feel it remains interesting throughout and is paced amazingly well in how it builds up to its insane ending.

I'm not sure I'd say it's my favorite chapter, because the last one is breathtaking, but I do feel like it's the one that adds the most to the game. As in, if you were to remove any chapter from Astral Chain, File 6 is the one where it'd impact the game most negatively.

Ah, so File 11 is the finale of the story, got it. I just finished 10 so I'll get stuck into 11 tonight.

I actually quite enjoyed File 6 as mzuzek says the worldbuilding, but also for that chase through the raging storm at the end with the awesome music, using your legion to tap into the security cameras and feed them into your Iris so you can track your suspect through the chaos.

My favourite so far was probably 9 though, for how epic it was. Trying out the newly acquired Axe legion, the fights with Jena, the motorbike sequence,

all great.

Yeah I thought it was cool too until I decided I wanted to get S+ rank in everything.

Never try to get S+ rank in everything.

I'm playing on casual so I don't even get rankings, which is probably for the best haha. I don't play games to be stressed out or pushed to my limits, I play games to relax.

Astral Chain's final boss sucks, one of the most frustrating I think I've ever fought in my life.

Between him having way, way too much HP and taking forever to die, to his attacks always being in a constant lightspeed flurry where you can perfect dodge three times in a row and still be hit, I felt like I had to cheese the game by just riding around the dog most of the time just to beat him. Way too much of a difficulty spike and extremely annoying.

It felt as though the difficulty has suddenly been jacked up to "hard", and as someone who was playing on casual for a reason, this was like being told your pizza is vegetarian only to find a piece of salami in the last bite.

Extremely not fun and the only serious blemish on an otherwise excellent game.

Weird, I found it epic and fun. Challenging but fun.

To me it crossed the line and just became way too frustratingly and unreasonable. I had no trouble with any of the game's other encounters but this fight was just an endless grating assault of unfair feeling attacks. It really spoiled the game's finale for me, that after thoroughly enjoying myself for the first 15+ hours I had to spend the last 20 minutes stressed and unhappy.

I mean it was long, but the phases were very different, so it didn't feel overlong to me and it didn't feel unfair to me. For me the game ended on a highnote, also an emotional one because of my final decision after the fight. Not spoiling for others.

The closing cutscene and choice was well done, as were the first two phases of the final boss.

The third though, it just felt like the game wasn't playing by its own rules; when you call a difficulty setting "casual" and the whole game up to that point is manageable for a player like myself, suddenly throwing a super hard boss into the mix just doesn't feel fair or respectful of the player.

It's not a dealbreaker, just something I wish the game had done a better job of considering everything else about it is so good.

I agree, the final boss is so difficult compared to the rest of the game, it really feels out of place. Congrats for still beating the game!

On a side note, the same issue is present in Daemon X Machina. The final boss is super hard! When I got along the whole game pretty fine but then the final boss kicked my butt over and over, I asked myself if I played it wrong the entire time. At least he had an amazing boss theme, so that's something. Funnily both games released pretty close to each other.