I think it's a shame that typically there is so much more to say about media you don't enjoy, but... when one element slips, it's often then a cascade of problems caused by losing patience with existing issues that you were willing to let slide for the sake of a whole experience that hadn't yet lost you.
unfortunately, crosscode was barely holding it together for about a third of its runtime, but that cascade hit me nonetheless. here, it was death by a thousand cuts to begin with, myriad design decisions coalescing into a game I ended up finding baffling and illegible about 15% of the time, and simply annoying to execute another 45% of the time. the visual style of the pixel art and environmental designs made parsing what could've been an easy to read 3D environment into an impenetrable mess, where trying to move quickly became trial and error, and I often could not tell what was meant to be one of several floor layers without probing with my ranged attack to see if it was on my level or above me.
combat starts out dreadfully slow, with not much to recommend it before you get access to your elemental powers, and it really does come into its own once you have at least two to swap between, to exploit weaknesses more effectively. it gets to be quite fun to be able to just hotswap between toolkits and movesets on the fly, and take care of all the monsters with ease, but even then, it's got some baffling decisions. for some reason, all of the elemental powers are tied to the same overload gauge; the only way to reduce it, if you've been dealing damage and are nearing elemental overload, is to drop the element entirely. the fact that you can't swap to, say, an opposing element to change your polarity, and then hop back to the one you need for a mechanic, and instead just need to sit there twiddling your thumbs and doing (probably 0) non-elemental damage until you've unjuiced yourself hard enough to load the element you need again... it's really fucking boring. and basically most enemies in a dungeon work like this! they'll have a way you need to interact with them, in a single element, before you can do Significant Damage, and if you don't do that, they dance around and run away like little bastards.
there are a few enemies who take Actual Environmental Puzzle Mechanics to beat, and they're the worst of them. for example, the final dungeon has a set of four minibosses who have a permanent elemental shield up and you have to get your own shield in order to get in for damage; you get this shield buff by hitting an orb with sufficient elemental shots, and two of the four orbs require you to synchronize two larger environmental element shots to hit them at the same time or they will fail to buff you. it's awful! it's annoying! it's so goddamn frustrating! it was a relief when I got to fight all four of the miniboss elements at the same time and they each guard the orb for the next one in the cycle so you don't have to do a puzzle, they just plop the orb down and let you go to the next one. only time the "and now all at once" miniboss clusterfuck has uncomplicatedly been an improvement on 1v1s, I swear to fuck.
the plot started off fine but eventually hit a point where my predictions came true because it's not trying to be very surprising, and that's fine, but also I wasn't super compelled by many of the character beats after Lea visited the Vermillion Wasteland, and by that point most of my patience was gone in general.
still didn't expect nor need the man who was piloting the final boss to throw himself off the top of the final dungeon after I beat him. sigh.
I wish so many little things about this game were different, to the point that it would be a significantly different game... and that'd be fine. because it might be good, then, instead of a tedious chore. I won't be paying for or playing the DLC.