Six years ago, Marvelous Entertainment debuted a new mech series called Daemon X Machina for the Switch that promised players a broad adventure full of robot customisation, a dazzling world and a memorable story. It delivered on about half of those promises. Fast forward to now, and we’ve got a sequel in Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion. Now a multiplatform release with more to do than ever, a continuation of its story and what looks to be a bigger budget, you’d hope the kinks and issues would be ironed out and the game would be soaring sky high. Well, no. History has repeated itself. Titanic Scion treads the same ground and issues, if not also sprouting new ones. Chalk this one up to a crying shame.

Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion heavily follows on from its predecessor. It’s offering this open world with mech exploration and customisation, intense combat, including climactic boss fights. At the heart of it all, you are a mercenary for hire who has left a space station with a hostile civilisation, instead finding home on a dusty planet with new friends and allies alike. Taking up odd jobs about the fort to better your and your peers’ encampment and your own mech craft, you start to live a humble scrapper life, only really seeing trials and tribulations in taking on the hostile alien threats that are outside your front door. However, before long, the tides start shifting. The planet and its fauna start changing. Those from your past life start visiting you, threatening to disrupt everything you’ve worked towards. Using all that you’ve learned, you must fight for freedom.

Comparisons are undoubtedly going to be made to titles like Armored Core. While you’re not quite piloting as big a bouldering giant as the crafts you’re navigating in that series, those comparisons are still quite fair: you’re similarly controlling your suit, flying, dashing and clashing big swords against opposing crafts and beasts. Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion features quite a robust mech customisation system — and that’s the damn best thing it’s got going for it. Along with getting to create their own original character that’s entering the craft itself, players can manually customise every individual part of their mech. Coats of paint, scuff marks, rust, emblems and the like are all fine-tune tweaks that you can make to your tweak. As you play, you’re unlocking more options in all these suites, allowing players to refine their craft throughout the campaign.

What is quintessential when crafting a mech game is making sure players are able to be invested in their own suits and crafts. Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion more than succeeds on that front, and that stings when it’s held up against all the game’s pitfalls. Because I’m a walking stereotype, I painted my mech to be the colours of the trans pride flag, outfitting it with a missile-cluster-firing weapon on a shoulder and a cool big sword in one arm, a gauntlet on the other. As it should be. With this, I cared when I saw my suit scuffed up from rough encounters. I was sweating a little when I was entering critical health mid-battle. Its battle scars were mine.

Similarly, there are a lot of different weapons and tools you’re using to get yourself through battle. Blades with a chainsaw motor and edge, rocket launchers, shotguns, sniper rifles, pistols… the list goes on. As Titanic Scion is a looter game, always chasing that new piece of gear, you’re given ample opportunity to test out all weapon types as you’re able to bind a different weapon attack to every bumper and trigger button. I play these sorts of games where I just opt for the piece of loot with the biggest number stat and don’t think about much else. The game facilitates this method of play, and I appreciated that. You’re constantly seeing loot drop, but higher-number item drops aren’t as frequent as, say, every second enemy. It’s giving you enough time to grow attached to a weapon before you move on to something new. Things have value. Often, games of its ilk do the polar opposite of this, and therefore, it’s a muddle of items and goodies.

I sound quite positive about the game thus far, so where exactly did everything go wrong? Well, just about everywhere else. Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion is so much of a slog and an uneven and unoptimised mess that it hurts its strong core pillars. Instead of remedying its predecessor’s biggest issue of story pacing and storytelling, it makes those faults ultimately more glaring.  Its attempts at investing players in its story, stakes and world are hampered by a weak script. Your time with the game is filled with long cutscenes and countless figures that you’ll meet and struggle to keep track of.

When you reach the last third of the story, you’re railroaded toward the ending, going through a long gauntlet of formidable villains from the giant opposing organisation in quest after quest. They’re all waxing poetic at you. They’re all either under- or overdesigned in looks. Your long run through taking every single one of them down feels endless and tiresome—and that’s coming from someone who enjoys the moments in games like Kingdom Hearts where you’re taking on the entire baker’s dozen of villains in Organisation XIII. Characters with no personality while sponsporing fan-service designs that feel egregious and pointless. Reveals and tropes throughout the game that you see coming a mile away. Spending several minutes over-explaining concepts. Entering a boss arena and getting three meaty cutscenes before you can actually start fighting them. This is the stuff that Titanic Scion is full of: stereotypes that detractors and JRPG haters often exaggerate their presence and existence in the genre, plain as day for all to see. C’mon Marvelous, you’re making us look bad with this one.

I can forgive and take most of this. I’m not immune to generic anime slop; it’s often what I feed off of if I’m honest. However, this generic nature is worsened by how ungodly, unsightly, and poorly optimised the entire experience is on Switch 2.  Marvelous, unfortunately, has become synonymous with such a reputation, consistently putting out (both as developers and the games they publish) similarly poorly-running titles. You simply need to look no further than the Rune Factory series. Graphics aren’t everything, but I also should be able to at least enjoy the sights I’m seeing if I’m going to be sticking around in its world for a while. Though Titanic Scion offers biome variety, it doesn’t mean a whole lot when I can see plain as day where textures repeat on cliffs and seasides, taking me out of the experience as I can physically see the seams of the game… something that generally should be hidden.

That’s unfortunately not all. I experienced a half dozen crashes throughout my 15 hours with the game, losing progress. Texture pop-ins of assets would interrupt me mid-flight, suddenly crashing into trees and the like that weren’t there a second prior. Boss fights that are meant to be grandiose events can feature tight combat with a push and pull for control… but if the arenas are so big and filled with stuff, your opponent will often get stuck on the topography and be a trivial target to take down. Worst of all are the consistent frame drops found within, playing both docked and undocked. Flight will now and then feel choppy as you watch your mech stutter as the world and environments struggle to load in. When things get busy (which they often do, given, you know, it’s a fast-paced combat game) on the screen with explosions and other particle effects, things will absolutely crawl. One crucial boss fight saw the game freeze for, and I’m not joking, a full thirty seconds, before it all caught up again and I could continue playing. All of this is unbelievable and poor form performance for a game on an entirely new Nintendo system. I can only hope other platforms fared better.

I’m an optimistic person. I try to view games as more than the sum of their parts, flaws and all. I’m struggling to maintain that train of thought as I reflect on my time with Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion. An odd release here or there from a studio is forgivable. They can be viewed as an off-game, one where they weren’t at their best. Two uneven titles down into the mech series, and it’s clear there are problems with this series down to the core. If this is an IP that is to be continued, something fundamentally needs to change. Fans who see that diamond in the rough here deserve better.