This game has very nice visual style and game mechanics premises, however, the way the latter is executed leave a lot of frustration. The level of timing and precision needed to pass certain sections is unreasonably high making succeeding through them rather a result of luck and evoking nothing but relief when it's done. Boss battles are not as much difficult as they are unfair. As most of them go through multiple stages with no in-between checkpoints. but with distinct behaviour patterns for each, games makes you die and replay them from the start a lot just because you didn't know of the next stage specifics in advance. The most irritating part happened when I completed 90% of the game just to learn that I cannot proceed to the main boss because I haven't picked up enough collectables which appeared as optional and where nothing hinted their crucial role in the game progress. Essentially, the game forced you to backtrack and roam around the complete areas just because it wanted you to. I see no way how this was supposed to increase a player's enjoyment with the gaming process. There are zero adjustments to how relaxing you want your gaming experience to be. Alas, the abundance of frustrating parts cancels out the positive emotions of progression and exploration.
Alas, the eventual immersion with highly acclaime specimen of the quest genre turned to be dissapointing for quite mundane reasons. Even delaying the attempt to fainally pass the game by 15 years did not help to see more patched and polished product. Passing the game turned out to be simply impossible without implanting external saves as already in Barrockstadt alone I came across of two intances of being fully blocked from progressing by bugs. Once the necessaruy dialogue topic "Sauvignon" failed to appear even with all the conditions fulfilled (was ok for the saves I found on the Internet), another case featured the captain tryinng to look in a telescope and - poof! - just dissapearning and jamming the anumation scene turning the game non-responsive. Sorry, it is still quite a noticeable ratio of issues per itemes of game to consider it playable.
