With the battle system, you can always crank down the difficulty if it bothers you (though you may have to be out of the tutorial section to do that). There's a lot more story in this game than combat, you'll be glad to know. I actually quite enjoyed the battle system which surprised me, as I was not expecting to. It did take a bit of getting used to though.

Is this game going to have ridiculous shippy subtext all over the place?

Yes!

'Half a Year Later: 1985'. No, game. 1985 is not half a year after 2024. That's not how this works.

Of course it is! :P

Is Kurabe a mess haunted by traumatic things he can only half-remember, i.e. one of my favourite character types? Yesssss.

Do you remember when I played 13 Sentinels and came here immediately to non-spoiler ramble about it? That's my code for playing a game and going, "Riona would really like this." We do have very similar taste in character types. :P

Btw, the voice acting is really, really good, especially considering the vast majority of it was done from home due to the pandemic. Apparently they had people doing their voice acting in wardrobes at home for decent sound proofing! Then the sound engineers have worked really hard on making it all sound consistent and a decent quality - you really wouldn't be able to tell.

-timydamonkey