Tears of Metal

i feel the easiest way to say how i feel is that i don't understand what tears of metal is going for. I'm only really acquainted with the musou genre through it's more recent output and crossover series (hyrule warriors fire emblem three hopes etc) so i bought tears of metal for myself and two friends and left confused it lacks the roster size aiming for seemingly five characters it's much harder than the usual having a dodge cooldown and parry with enemies that are far more active and faster than most of these games it's combos are less flashy and there are less of them every character and weapon they have is limited to 4 combos including a block attack string and dodge attack for wallace (the first character) so he ends up feeling like he has 2 combos so it's simultaneously more and less braindead than the usual musou and i end up wanting to stop comparing it to the musou genre as tbh it doesn't scratch the itch the musou game does of a large scale flashy battle it really feels like it has more stake being pitted with the roguelike genre but then it ends up having completely different issues biggest gripe for me is variety in most areas low amount of characters weapons don't change much of a characters playstyle the hades style boons only have 8 types and like (from what i can tell) 8 individual boons in each of these types items feel very copy pasted as most effects exist across all rarities for example there is a crit chance up item it exists in all rarities simply giving more per rarity so common is 5 rare is 20% there are 3 acts they don't have variants for each acts you will see the same stage layout often there are 3 bosses one per act they don't change (i haven't gotten to act 3's boss but i doubt that one suddenly has a number of variants) the only part that seems good is enemy variety there is a good roster of fodder and captains to fight the issues with the item pool and boons are particularly damning as i end up not caring about either of them i feel practically nothing when i get any of them (except the one that makes the heavy finisher a multi hit that ♥♥♥♥'s awesome) and so i end up having a hard time recommending this to anyone as i feel like either way i'm giving it to someone who won't like it i also have smaller issues with clarity it's very hard to tell what's happening when fighting several captains and since this game is meaner with things like health recovery that does end up frustrating me quite a bit so yeah my biggest gripe is variety runs feel so samey for ironically a variety of reasons until there is more variety in everything i can't recommend this game with that being said there is some cool stuff that i hope is conserved if they do fix variety mainly the combos themselves all feel usefull especially on wallace he has a light combo a heavy combo a shield breaker (his block attacks) and an aoe with his dodge attack it makes the whole set feel handy and i hope if they do expand the combo list they manage to find uses for all the combos an example would be having different types of aoe's on each a thin but long reaching one a circular one a cone maybe also add some charge attacks (aka hold inputs) as a way to have easy access to light finisher's without to long of a combo ie press X then hold X for a two hit light finisher