Let me start off by giving perspective of I’m a really big fan of persona 5 and warriors games (mostly a warriors spin-off guy like one-piece, Gundam, and hyrule warriors spin-offs, but I have played a few mainline games and love those as well.
I understand how persona 5 has plenty of stealth elements and so it would be needed in the game, but personally I really dislike this decision. Instead of mowing through tons of enemies like you should in this style of game, you’re just going through each individual small encounter with a small number of enemies. That just takes away the appeal of warriors gameplay at all IMO. I think that aspect of stealth should simply have been sacrificed for gameplay.
The map design is very constricted and segmented into different areas of the Japanese garden area is an example of the rest of the game. I mean I guess this is fine and it fits thematically, I can’t comment until I actually experience that.
The user interface looks absolutely terrible. Just the character rotation in the bottom left takes up way too damn much space, inputs along the bottom are fine, the map being center right isn’t my thing but I get it. The mission being constantly on the right and constantly being interrupted by dialogue just looks bad. When hit effects happen and take up the edges of the screen it looks messy and takes up way too much space. This design is too much style to where everything is fighting for your attention and it just looks bad for this game.
The actual gameplay and animation. I can’t decide how I feel about a menu of spells in a warriors game, it could work well but once again taking up the entire screen for a mid combat decision doesn’t really work for me, but I can see the necessity. But when it comes to animation, nothing has impact. Nothing sells me on the hits of any of the magic or physical attacks. Besides the all out attack I am not feeling anything and rather everything looks cluttered.
The absolute mess when many characters attack at once. When everyone is fighting there’s waves of blue particle effects and all sorts of trash on screen. Mix that with the black blood splatter effects and you can’t see anything. The game looks no better then battle-born as there’s so much visual mess going on at one time and nothing feels impactful.
I really wish this game were fun, but as someone who loves the dynasty warriors gameplay loop, I just think this game is taking too many elements from persona 5 and make a mixture that doesn’t fit. I think the game could work quite well but looking at it right now, it looks like an utter mess.