Left to rot in a broken state. Never fixed and instead abandoned shortly after release.

Now a few years later, they suddenly have the budget and manpower to port it over to the switch instead of doing the bare minimum for every other platform.

To hell with Koei and EA

Try it for yourself. Definitely better than the reviews make it seem. Not sure that it has much replayability, but it definitely HAD the bones to be a series that contended with monster hunter before the studio gave up and moved onto the next thing.

Beautiful game. The controls are very strange, and very obviously geared towards controller play, leaving keyboard and mouse in the dust, but once I switched to controller, on there the controls are intuitive and comfortable. The movement and the hitboxes are also very strange. I don't play many games in this genre, but the way jumping just sets your horizontal speed to a set number, no matter whether you do it standing, walking, or sprinting, is very jarring. If you jump while running, your jumps seem super fast and then you're slow once again after landing, and if you jump while sprinting, you suddenly lose all your momentum once you're airborne. it's very clunky as far as controls go. But you eventually get used to it, this isn't the real issue with the game.

The real issue is the progression. For example, weapon upgrades are locked behind having defeated bosses and require materials. But more often than not, they require some materials from the 4th or last zone of the game (that are locked!) but everything else around them is unlocked in zone 1 or 2. So mid zone 2, your weapon damage upgrades are entirely stunted until you're nearly at the end of the game. Why even have it at that point? Why would an upgrade unlocked by a boss in zone 1 require 4 of the trash rock you can pick up in zone 4? And the other thing is, they require several boss drops, which is fine. In fact, I enjoy that the bosses drop loot based on which body part you damaged most. But this encourages doing the same boss over and over again. Especially gritdog. Gritdog is a boss in zone 2, and its drops are needed to make the armor set, that you WILL need, because another boss called Lavaback is BY FAR the hardest boss in the game, and it is in zone 2 for some reason. After that, the game just feels like smooth sailing. And this issue with progression is what has entirely put me off this game. If I managed to beat this boss without upgrades, then why keep going forward so I can get upgrades that will make it easier? You've practically won the game once you're past Lavaback, after that it's just a victory lap, and that's not very interesting to me, it's not like the cosmetics are that good. So yes, if you're just looking to kill time, look at pretty japanese-style mystical locations, and pummel huge fantastical beasts, this is the game for you. It could be a fantastic game, if the progression both in difficulty, and in weapon and armour unlocks were more linear ike... any other game. You kill the latest boss, and its drops are used to prepare for the next boss etc. Not pick up garbage near the end of the game so you can craft the 3rd weapon upgrade out of 50, that you've had unlocked since the very early game.

Other than this, co-op is implemented very strangely too. You join other people's worlds, while your own progression may or may not happen while there. Sometimes we did the quest and it was done in my singleplayer game too, and sometimes I found that I have to redo two bosses because the game lost my plot somewhere. And sometimes, the game just kicks you. That's right: if you start the game playing together, the first time you get to Minato, when the host enters, the game just kicks you, because you're not allowed to go to Minato. Once you unlock Minato in your singleplayer world, then you can rejoin the host. Unfathomable.

I've never experienced performance issues, but my boyfriend absolutely has, like game-breaking 5 second freezes while I watch the kemono obliterate him as a guest in his world. I think it really depends on your graphics card. His graphics card is one generation newer than mine, yet he gets the issues not me, so it's not about performance, they just did it in a way where it doesn't work on all cards, even from the same manufacturer but different generation. It's basically a lottery to buy this game because it may be just fine or unplayable. Rather cringe.