izigame.me

This is a decent Souls-like action title that is pretty enjoyable, but is also slightly let down by some of the game-play execution, and suffers from occasionally brain-damaged plotting alongside dubious translation.
As far as the mechanics go it's a straight-forward hack and slash, with modest combo potential, a parry, a dodge, a charge attack, and a jumping slash. Beyond that you have items that provide buffs to offence / defence, and magical skills to aid you in combat.
There's just enough flexibility to experiment, and enough challenge in the combat to be satisfying, that the relatively basic level of everything is still on par with the likes of Elden Ring and the other FromSoftware titles.
These games tend to only have a mild level of complexity and then it's generally just a whole lot of grinding to upgrade this, that and the other. Which is where this game gets it slightly wrong.
It starts off hard and you have to level up to get anywhere, and then level up again, and then again, and again. That is the genre, but here what happens is that the first two or three bosses are really tough, but once you level up x amount of times there's a stretch where the bosses are fairly easy and I would beat them within only a few attempts.
It's only when the game gets to the final bosses that the difficulty spikes back up, and by this point you can have almost entirely upgraded skills, so any more grinding is just for incremental increases. You know, the same as it always in this genre and it becomes slightly tedious to carry on at the level you're at, but also really tedious grinding to level up whatever remains.
But I persisted and got to the end of the game. Only...it feels incomplete and unsatisfying to finish, with a villain who you beat without much explanation for their motivations, and then it seems like there's more content in new game plus, because the trailer shows another character entirely.
Also there were scenes where I never saw them in the game, so I think it's a bit like Nier Automata and has extra levels / scenarios that open up upon completing it once. However: I can't prove that, because having "finished" it in 17 or so hours I really can't be arsed to play through it again to see if that is the case.
The ending is pish, so if there is more to it then I would argue you shouldn't have to play through it multiple times just to get an outcome that has enough context to make it substantial. As is: the final result is rather flimsy, and along the way there were a couple of stupid moments that lessen what is an otherwise slickly produced experience.
If I'm right about the extra content then that's added appeal for people who really like to extract all the "goodness" from a game, but personally I think if one play-through doesn't give you at least a moderately "complete" experience then the developers have failed at a pretty basic level.
It doesn't make this a bad game, and generally it is fun to play, but balancing issues and a shonky narrative make this a slightly cautious recommended.