Alright, finished Afterimage and good riddance. That took way too long.
There're MV fans out there who're all about having as much content and as many biomes, checklists and endings as possible. Well, sure, if you're enjoying the game you don't want it to be over. But the game is as massive as it is scattershot, and by those tokens it exhausted me long before I could get into the fun of it.
Part of it is because you never get a good feel for story beats, or whether you're "done" with an area or not. The map stretches endlessly and strings biome after biome like it's automatically loading recommended videos.
The story is utter nonsense. I'm willing to tolerate the gobbledygook of something like Bloodborne or Hollow Knight or Blasphemous or Ender Lilies, so long as the theming is strong and there's a - how the hell do you phrase this - "air of mythical reverence that feeds the enigma of the world" (oh, atmosphere). The world is dead or dying and you're there to knock it off, probably via sacrifice. Everything else is color bubbles.
But the story in Afterimage is something else. The dialogue is overwritten as fuck and the lore is impenetrable as fuck. Something about clones, memories, robots, faeries, crystals, masks, confluences. The lead is a clone from a clone, or a failed experiment that got cloned, and acts as a rekindled memory to a crystalized vessel who has to become an essential go defeat a transcendental? I'm a story guy first and it takes a special kind of headache to get me to skip skip skip dialogue scenes, but man I got there quick this time.