After playing this game nearly 10 hours, I would like to share some thoughts with you, for those who are still asking themselve, if they should buy this game or not.

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First of all I need to say, that I was very hyped for this game and couldn't wait for it to be released and to play it. The game has a lot of potential and very interesting concepts.

When should you buy this game?

• If you like Japan and are interested in japanese culture
  
• If you like very good visuals in a game making your graphics card go brbrr
  
• If you like exploring and taking your time in checking each corner of the map
  
• If you like petting dogs and feeding them
  
• If you like not very skill demanding games
  
• If you are the story game type of player
  
• If you like simple and straight forward skill trees and mechanics
  
• If you like having a lot of side quests (some of them a bit repetitive)

Cons

• The game feels to easy
  
• Repetitive tasks
  
• Not much to do if you leave away the collection of spirits (which takes most of your time)
  
• Collecting spirits to level up becomes annoying after some time.
  
• Combat is too easy and feels too basic. No enhanced mechanics.

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COMBAT

What disappoints me, is, that the combat system has a lot of potential which is unused and the fights are far tooo easy. I would say the game makes it a challenge to die. Basically, the combat system works like this: Press: hit, hit, hit, defend, hit, extract soul , hit, hit, hit, defend, hit, extract soul and so on. You have basically 3 to 4 elements you can change (wind, water, fire, ...) and I have the feeling that between water and wind there is nearly no difference (except maybe that striking with you water ability has a shorter range but is able to hit more targets at once) and the fire element makes most damage but you do not have a lot of munition for that one.
You also get a bow, which is basically never needed (Only when you are seperated from KK because the story forces you to be and therefore you have no supernatural skills until you get him back ). You could litterally stand there without moving a cm when fighting against some enemies untill you killed them).
You have no possibility to dash or something like that. Spamming the "attack" button does totally the trick here.
I had already a boss fight and I need to say, that it was far too easy to win.

GAMEPLAY

The city is beautiful and I can tell you: if you have the hardware you can enjoy a lot of small details, like the puddles on the floor where parts of buildings and lights are reflected in a beautiful manner. The details of the city are impressive: Buildings, objects etc. I mean the furr of the animals could have a bit more details, but I think the game is already demanding a lot of performance.
Exploring is very nice because you can find a lot of loot in different corners. You can also use so called Tengus to "catapult" yourself on roof tops in order to float then from roof to roof for collecting spirits and finding stuff.

If you are not simply rushing through the story, than you will spend the most time in collecting spirits. Collecting spirits allows you to level up in order to become better skills and additional abilities. Most of them are sort of: Increase attack speed, damage, increase floating time in the air, increase movement speed when crouching, increase number of arrows you can carry with you, etc. I'm Currently level 16 ( in the beginning of chapter 3) and I spent most of the time in doing side quests and collecting spirits (currently I have nearly 33.000 spirits (out of something like 250.000). In order to make it easier for you to spot them you have an ability which works like a radar so you can see their silhouette in the vicinity (until 30 m away, can be upgraded to 50).

The entire city is shrouded in a fog that damages you as soon as you touch it. Therefore, so-called tori gates have to be cleaned so that the fog in the area disappears. In order to roam freely around, you need to find those gates and clean them.

There are a lot of Yokais which ask you to find and collect different items for them which can be found in the city, appartements etc. Collecting a certain number of those will grant you items, emotes or even outfits.
I mean, it is nice that you can change your outfit, but you will only see it in cutscenes, as you are playing in a first person view.

TECHNICAL ASPECTS
I play the game on a 120 Hz 4k OLED screen using a RTX 3080 and an Intel I7 11700K and without DLSS and RayTracing enabled, the game would not be really playable from frame perspective. Using DLSS Balanced mode i get 45-80 fps which is a high fluctuation from my point of view. Of course it depends on the scene, the number of reflections displayed etc.
Without DLSS I get something like 25 fps (Ray Tracing ON).
Until now I couldn't experience any bugs (beside one crash of the entire game).

Conclusion
I like the game very much although the combat is far too easy and there are a lot of repetitive tasks, because I like the aesthetic of the entire city, the light effects, simply the whole visuals of the game. I simply enjoy the story, farming a lot, enjoying the beauty of Tokyo.

From my point of view, this is not a game where I think paying the full price is worth it and representing the buyers interests I would recommend waiting for a sale or something like this, because the game has nothing really outstanding (for those people who are not fully into japan, it's culture etc.), although it's a really good game.
Yes, the city is beautiful, yes the details are lovely and dude: You can pet dogs and cats, but: All those things are not that mindblowing that I would say: Shut up and take my money (after knowing it better playing it nearly 15 hours).

Normally i do not write reviews on games , but as I see that this game is getting bad reviews which are for my point of view missleading, I decided to write a review on my own.
To be honest: in the beginning I was a bit sceptical. A lot of pages writing reviews claim that the game is bad. So before you already start playing the game you get a bad feeling and lets you prejudice although you did not play a single minute...but let's cut to the chase:

Story: I played now for 4 hours and I can say that I'm really interested in how the story evolves. You have a lot of decisions you can make already in the first hours: which tribe do I want to assist? Am I good or evil or maybe something in between? I really like the options I have. So you can decide do I want to assist to destroy the tree of life or do I want to try reunite the different tribes and save the tree.

Combat & weapons: there are a lot of weapons . you can craft your weapons by assembling different parts together and after 4 hours gameplay I really START getting the hang out of it. The weapons have different attributes as: State, rarity, Type and so on. You can destroy the parts to gain materials to craft new parts.
I read some reviews that you are dealing not a lot of demage in close combat. I can say that I can truly understand this and this can not be criticised if your close combat attribute is very low at beginning and you need a lot of level ups to increase the power. It also depends how you spend your DNA in the beginning . Which race are you playing etc. I think reviews saying after 2 hours of gameplay that you deal not a lot of damage is untrustable, because of course you deal less damage with low attributes. But therefore you have different types of combat. Close combat, ranged, mutations etc.
To be honest I must say I still didn't find my fight style as I'm trying out different things. But I think this is a good point instead knowing from the first moment what you gonna do.

Graphics: I play at 4k on a 120 Hz Monitor at maximum Settings and I need to say that the graphics is stunning. I love the details and simply to watch the different corners and angles of the world. Beautiful! People wrote that the camera is too close, but when they would look into the settings instead of focussing on the bad things of the game, they could see that you can adapt your field of view in the camera settings . you have a lot of adaptions you can make in order to adapt to your play style.

Narration: Yes, there is a narrator. That's it. The characters In game talk in a fantasy language. must this be immediately bad? No! Its simply a different type of telling a story. There are also different types of books which use different techniques to tell a story (metaphor). I like the idea. Its something different and not like each other game you play nowadays .

I need to say that although the developer studio is small in comparison to others (which a lot of people forget), they did a really great job and then game is stunning, interesting and I didn't want to stop playing it. For the size of the team they did a lot of work and crafted a game which brings a bit of a twist into your steam library.
All in all I can only say: forget what people are telling you about the game. I think in lots of cases people simply tried to find out I'm 2 hours if they will refund it or not in order that they get their money back. This is definitely not possible in this short amount of time.
Try it on your own and give the game a realistic chance.