I loved my first 40 hours with the game. Then I went to Chapter 8 and the downhill started. Oh my god I've HATED the last 10 hours of what I've played. So restricted. So gooey (QTE-y). Even started hating my crew that I've grown to like, so weird. ..I've never had an experience like this with a game. Just wow.

Also I've never seen that Umbra thing when I go to bed so I can't go back to the "open world". Hopefully I'll finish up this restricted-corridor-running-push-a-button-feels-like-an-eternity-ending-sequence-which-is-actually-five-chapters long soon so I can return to fishing or something.

The option to call Umbra (that's the dog that carries the notebook from the end of chapter 2) should be under your options when you stay at a hotel. It is a bit of a jarring shift, but going back to the open world does yield some extra quests, so it's worth doing.

Yeah, the game kinda flirts with FFXIII (aka dumpster fire 13) design decisions for the last 15 hours. There are basically two games here, the open world and the corridor crawl, the former being obviously the better half of the game. They've gone on record saying that this was intended, so they essentially wanted to have their cake and eat it too. The game would have been better off sticking with the open world formula the entire time. I'd say it's a miracle that this came out and was any good at all, but Nioh just came out after having been in development hell for 10 years as well, so that isn't really an excuse for why this thing ended up being so all over the place.

The last chapter is very strong, though. You could see the potential for what could have been, for how all over the place the story is and how poorly it's executed, the ending is incredible and really makes me wish things were done differently for everything leading up to it. "Somnus" is an incredible track.