despite playing this twice before, once on ps2 and once on ps3, about ten and eight years ago, respectively, I didn't remember much about this game.
I remembered the broad strokes, but not that you could paint with them. a dozen little things about playing this game came back to me as I strolled through it again, from the wiggly animation of all the 3D models to convey a nervous energy where applicable, to the environmental design highlighting sweeping vistas for both the purposes of gameplay and for the view. from the flow of dashing around the world, to the little details, like the final set of weapons emitting elemental particles if equipped so you can always have access to the elements in question.
so many little details about this game are lovingly designed, and while I feel like I struggled a lot with my past playthroughs, it never got truly cruel in this most recent one. it's a really fun romp, but it drags in some really amusing ways. I rounded out my file at a little under 27 hours, and it feels like barely a quarter of that was spent in dungeons actually doing dungeon stuff. so much of this game is running around in the overworld trying to solve problems so that you can actually get to the dungeon, and then the dungeon is hardly there. on top of that, it's all basic platforming challenges and basic instructional exercises for whatever power is the point of the dungeon until the last proper dungeon... there's nothing intellectually stimulating or challenging about it, and I breezed through everything as a result.
it's fine. it's good. maybe a bit too long for its own good, and I'm not super fond of having to suss out enemy strategy when first meeting a new enemy type, but at least once you beat one, you have on-hand reference which one of your several techniques work best. it's a big toolkit to remember all of, and I feel like people falling off after orochi, which is pretty common, are going to come back and not remember how to deal with enemies. it's not ideal.
speaking of which, the entire game like, pitches itself on the idea that amaterasu vs orochi is the big deal fight, but that rounds out the first third or so of the game, and people's energy kinda falters after that, but the middle third of the game is probably the strongest bit of the game. finally getting out of shinshu field and heading for the coast is fun, getting to visit sei-an city is a treat, and all the sidequests are pretty fun, if also sometimes a bitch (why does the old man who wants all the uncursed trees to blossom neglect to mention that he has one on his head and in his house. augh. rude)
it's a solid game, but if/when I dip back into it for a 100% finish, I think that will do perfectly fine for another decade for me. not much to think about here.