Finished it, even got the true ending which was nice. While I had overall fun with it, the game had couple of gameplay issues and ended up feeling few hours longer than it should.
The biggest problem is the parrying. First, I don't know if the timing is too tight or the animations showing attacks are too janky but you end up being hit either way. Enemies have too much of a janky movement which just feels ridiculous, like if they wouldn't had super armor you should have been able to stun them mid combo as they fucking prep an attack for few seconds that you wait to fall on top of you, which is only reasonable in a game while a prime way in real life to die really fast. Second, the parrying itself isn't rewarding. Staggering a boss will give you a "fatal" attack which does, at best, a 1/6 of their health. Compare it to Sekiro where until the final boss, those attacks remove 1/2 to 1/3 of the life gauge. It's just better to dodge or use the shield arm. And finally, by the midgame bosses all do ridiculously long uninterrupted attacks which are basically a death sentence if you get into them and can't dodge out or perfect block most of them. It's an issue that plaguing the genre as devs don't realize that those ridiculous combos look neat but aren't fun to play against, and it is compounded by nearly every fucking boss having a second phase with completely new attacks so fuck you if you want to memorize combos.
Besides that the other issue is how exploration is too limited. There are no optional areas and every optional corridor ends nearly immediately. It's basically the FF13 corridor meme though at least you can backtrack for a sidequest once in a while. Additionally, a lot of the exploration feels uneven, you can walk a hard path and get a completely useless item or some new weapon.
The quartz system could be good but the game massively cheaps out on it so you barely dip into skills and have no real choice in what to choose. Also locking dodging out of a fall is bullshit. It would have been cool if it could have changed gameplay.
Overall it's pretty much what I said when the demo dropped in. Very good first 2/3, underwhelming last 1/3.
