I was so bright-eyed and full of excitement Friday morning. Couldn't wait to get home from work and play it. Then I saw my friends talking about how bad people were saying the performance and optimization was. I was like, "hmmm, in my experience, most people who complain about that are just angry geeks that get mad when the performance dips from 60 FPS to 55 FPS for a few seconds. probably not a big deal." I looked at the steam reviews and saw one person say something on the lines of "game can barely maintain 56 FPS, not recommended." I scoffed at this, feeling validated. "Capcom said they were targeting a solid 30 FPS anyway, that's plenty. what a bunch of whiners.", I said to myself.
Then I actually played the game, and for the first time I actually noticed when performance was bad. Normally I can't even notice frame rate dips, in any game I play. Everyone keeps telling me how bad Age of Calamity runs and I never noticed anything wrong with that one. Well, I noticed this. Game ran like a powerpoint slideshow. Definitely not even hitting 20 FPS. Granted I'm playing on a new Steam Deck OLED and not a high end PC (I would rather die than play something that's not handheld after two decades of the 3DS and Switch, personally) but my deck runs Elden Ring perfectly fine as well as games that aren't even optimized for it, like Granblue Relink. Never saw any issues with those. But with this game I'm getting powerpoint slides a vast majority of the time.
And honestly... that, I could kind of put up with, if I had to. If it's that or play off handheld, I'll stick to handheld where I'm most comfortable. What I really, really can't deal with though is all the crashing and freezing. Sometimes I can get a good hour of stability, and then boom, it crashes six times in the span of ten minutes. The vocation guild and the area outside of vernworth is especially bad. I can hardly go into a vocation-related menu without instant crashes, which makes keeping my arisen and main pawn up to date almost impossible. I'm also getting a ton of crashes on startup, which makes it all the more frustrating to get back in the game, because when you crash, you naturally want to get back in there and do damage control on your progress, right? The one saving grace here is all the auto-saves. I've never lost a significant amount of progress, usually only having to walk back a few feet. But it's still extremely frustrating and makes the game more unplayable than the frame rate does.
It really sucks because the game is extremely fun when it works. It's very engaging and is the sort of game I can lose myself in for hours and hours at a time. Unfortunately all the crashes make that unrealistic. I really wanted to keep trying, but I could only stand to do so for so long. So I can't recommend this game to anyone until Capcom fixes all the crashing and touches up the performance. If you want this game, wait for such an update. (I haven't even mentioned the ridiculousness of being unable to remake your character without buying a voucher with real money, not even through ng+, but that's a whole other can of worms.)
