-Now that the story's over I can definitely say that the story as a whole is very underwhelming, considering how much potential it has, and how much effort has gone into making visually distinctive characters, a living, breathing city and a kick-ass art style and aesthetic. Like, the story has a lot of cool ideas, and a lot of well-directed cutscenes in terms of style and action. But in terms of actually pacing the narrative it has so many problems: Killing off its most interesting characters too early, under-utilising some of its best (Kyle), killing of its narrative momentum with chapters where where the narrative doesn't significantly develop, failing to give context for why we're chasing Jena, making Yoseph's role as the villain so obvious. The narrative pacing throws me off and makes it hard to tell what this game's actually about other than "Cool Cyberpunk Anime Cops". I wasn't sold on the whole sibling thing either, especially with a silent protagonist. How can I feel that the characters are close if they never express any sort of chemistry? It's hard for me to believe that Akira is jealous of me when my character doesn't even feel real? This isn't necessarily entirely a silent protagonist problem - Joker from Persona 5 is a silent protagonist, but he absolutely oozes personality, emotion and charm in his visual representation in-game.

THAT SAID!

-The combat is really fun! I feel like it becomes more rewarding, the more you begin to understand its intricacies. The fight against Noah Prime really made me appreciate this. You have to use the Arrow Legion to shoot the doubles and stun Noah. You need the beast legion to escape the force dragging you towards him. You need the Axe legion to parry the balls of light that he shoots at you - and to defend yourself when you get caught caught in the anticipation of one of his AOE attacks mid-combo. It was a really tough fight, but thankfully I made it through, with an S ranking!

-I thought this File's story had some very cool moments! Some parts of it were under-written, but Akira's existential struggle against the many clones of themself - and their subsequent sacrifice as they put their jealousy aside - were appreciable for not being over-written. I haven't read any case files since finishing the game, but the Noah Core fight visually suggests that Yoseph's plan, as opposed to Jena's plan to make humanity inhuman - is to return everything to nothing, the ultimate form of equality. It's also a fucking aesthetic boss fight so that helps a lot.