This was a solid 4 to 4.5 star game until I got to the final boss. Very rarely do I quit and delete a game before finishing, but this was just too much frustration to be fun anymore. Even dropping everything down to the easiest levels, the final boss battle is just too difficult to be enjoyable. Surrounded by enemies, constantly being knocked down so you can't recover, and when you restart from the autosave, you have to spend a few minutes trying to skip through all of the end boss monologuing. I wasted a full day trying different tricks and combos. Nope, the battle is still stupidly broken. Congrats to everyone who did manage to finish this game. I'm glad I got this game at such a steep discount, so I can say that the time spent prior to the final boss was worth the money. But not being able to end the game unless I chug some Jolt Cola and de-age myself back to my twitchy 11 year old self is not how I want to spend my free time. As to the rest of the game: Being forced to choose to align with a competing faction even though there is the theoretical possibility of forming your own was annoying. The game pretends to give you choices, but you are mostly railroaded. You can roam around freely, but doing things out of order can have a serious impact on the game, and could possibly even break it if a key NPC accidentally gets killed by a critter in the environment when they were barely on your area map. Save frequently with several saves if you don't want to risk having to lose dozens of hours of game play because of this.
