The only thing Pokemon-esque about it is the monster designs and that you catch them in spherical objects.

Everything else about it lends itself more to the survival crafting genre.

Gameplay I think is quite enjoyable from the bit I’ve played. It feels a lot more sandboxy than Pokemon would have ever allowed in their games because they care a lot about story narratives that everyone now finds super boring.

The Ryujin quest line is exactly what I expected the corpo background to be like. It’s too bad the backgrounds/origins aren’t fleshed out enough beyond what is essentially the prologue of Cyberpunk.

My gripe with him isn’t so much his fight mechanic, it’s his absolutely massive hitbox that activates whenever it moves a centimeter.

Fighting him from the air is the most efficient, I’ve discovered, but I spent a good few attempts trying to get in close with the plasma blade and would see three quarters of my HP bar disappear because my recovery animation overlapped with the startup of his charge attack that shouldn’t have been able to hit me because I was to his side or rear.

The Cataphract has been my favorite fight so far. Really challenging, but really rewarding.

In my experience, you don’t have to compromise. You can take meta dual shotguns and two heavy hitting shoulder mounts and just vaporize enemies. Almost trivially, in fact.

The problem is, the game is not more fun if you force yourself into something like a melee hybrid build. It’s significantly harder and there’s less room for error when piloting lightweight ACs, so it’s no surprise that most people find the most comfortable build to be one where you have high health and damage mitigation, insane burst DPS, and stunlock potential.

In short, there’s not a good balance between the different playstyles and difficulty. Some bosses are actually really fun to fight, but two or three of them have made my shit list already just due to the nonsense you are forced to put up with. Juggernaut, Balteus, and Sea Spider are the three biggest offenders right now.

Oh look, a boss fight. Will this be a fair-and-balanced skill-based experience? Or will it be a DPS race against the clock and hoping I get good RNG on the enemy attack patterns so I don’t die to mostly unavoidable or unreactable damage?