I've been stuck at the side quest 'Forbidden Games' for two days now.
The game says 'go find out info'. So you have to talk to people. This involves going up to people and pressing square, and if you've found the right one a cutscene will play. There's nothing more to it than that - go press a button next to 100 people and hopefully one of them will be the right one. It's such a good example of how the objectives of these quests have absolutely no effort or actual gameplay put into them.
Anyway, I find the first two people without issue. But the third? Half an hour last night. Half an hour this afternoon. An hour of fucking nothing but walking around pressing square next to hundreds of NPCs that shake their heads and move off. This is the worst gaming experience I've had in a long time. I went and looked it up online and the person appears to have dark skin and an orange jacket. There is no such person being spawned anywhere in this region in my game. Is it bugged? Might be, but there's no way to know for sure, the mission is designed that poorly.
It doesn't matter what the game is asking you to do, they never actually put the effort in to make new mechanics for objectives. Handing out flyers? Just brush past people, that'll do. Chasing a bird? You can't actually catch it even if you catch up, you have to wait until it gets to its destination and then just reach said destination.
And that's all this game is, ever. 'Follow the marker, press a button when you get there.' There's no real exploration, no challenge, no missions that shake things up beyond restricting your move pool. I saw someone hanging out on a strut at the bottom of the town yesterday. Excited to finally find something, I flew towards him. The guy from the first game who would disappear, perhaps? Oh wait, it was a graphical error that just blinked out. There was nothing to find. Typical. And as for the quest design, the only strength of the game at all is Kat's gravity powers, yet it seems like the game is absolutely resolute about having you NOT fucking use them in favour of the most bland and mundane chores. The first game was so well paced and understood its strengths. The challenges were finely honed around understanding each of Kat's gravity skills. Here, by contrast, you're given Lunar style (awesome) and Jupiter style (meh), but outside of the tutorial sections, when does the game ever create moments where you have to use them? Never, so far.
Instead the entire game's focus appears to have been taking what was quite a mysterious and intriguing fantasy / sci-fi story from the first game and turning it into garbage slice-of-life anime shit in this one. Chapters I and II are barely related, for fuck's sake. They feel like entirely different games, like the writers just didn't give a shit. "Hey, Kat's being cute again! Isn't that enough?"
Also, why didn't the game have the intro cutscenes released on Youtube in it? Until I went hunting for help with that side quest I had no idea they existed. Would have made a huge difference at the start. It's always bullshit to deliver important plot points through a different medium and not even signpost that it exists through the game in some way.
Total failure of a product. Wish I'd read the slate or Kotaku reviews before buying, would have saved my money and more importantly my time. Both are absolutely spot on.
Anyone reading the thread and hasn't bought it yet in the EU sale really needs to watch some Youtube videos first. It's a bad, bad videogame.
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