I was easily drawn to this one as evidently the art direction is impeccably coherent, which at the risk of sounding shallow goes far further than design direction in attracting users. The music also has a lot of drawing power, but it's somewhat pulled back by the overall sound design which doesn't feel as attached to the theme and characters. To say nothing good about the game design would perhaps be going a bit too far, so I'll say that it's an acquired taste which I do enjoy, but which hasn't been drawn out for its full flavor. The amount of vertical traversal begs for an aerial combat option, and the area of effect for the special attack is too small to have very little in the way of visual feedback, and the paramount strategy of kiting the enemies into a bundle to ult them all isn't so much a fun thing to do as it is a necessary thing to do. When it comes to unrepentant difficulty in video games, I think the important thing to assess is the gradient of recuperation, meaning how many different ways can I approach the situation if I fail? To what degree can I simply go and explore other parts of the game in order to let my subconscious settle into the challenge? To be more direct, a very simple implementation would have been to give healing roses a cooldown to respawn, long enough to catch the players like me who find themselves kiting half a dozen enemies at half a heart with not much else to do but run in and die, or turn on god-mode, which in terms of the recuperation gradient is a stark black-and-white switch and it hurts my eyes a little bit.
The game feels as though the Nerve gameplay went ignored in favor of the perfectly polished linear Land design. This doesn't necessarily mean that the Nerve gameplay doesn't exist; in some respect I felt myself getting more adept at wringing out a full combo exactly when I wanted it, but the ignorance of these mechanics in visual or audio design requires them to be known rather than felt. If a player starts out as I do, spamming the attack button at a moderately fast but random pace, they recieve a mix between a full combo and absolutely nothing, and the combo itself isn't signifying that well-timed inputs are far more effective.
Although their modern titles have made them far more famous, I grew to love the clunky charm of the original Witcher shortly before the third installment had arrived. This style of gameplay becomes an even harder sell when it's not clear whether you wanted the players to know it's happening. If you didn't intend for this style, then the input buffering should be as robust and reliable as Dark Souls. As I've noted several times already, the art direction is superb, on par with Gamecube classics like Mario Sunshine or Wind Waker. Don't let that get to your head; make the game fun to play, too.