>>713418536 (OP)
The reason why so many people like this game is that it does a great job marrying the presentation of the music, art direction, animations, writing, and all the other "unimportant" parts together into a something that is beautiful to look at and listen to. It is presentation value, but not in the BG3 way of "woah, CRPGs can look like that?!"
The game isn't misery porn because the writers wanted to write an Oscar-bait movie but had to settle for writing a video game instead. It still gets some laughs out of you without hamstringing the genuineness and tone with a Marvel quip anytime something happens. The Sirene boss fight is the best example of making a boss fight memorable outside of it's moveset. It honestly feels like this is what "soul" is. The gameplay is also satisfying and offers decent build variety, I didn't use Stendhal and got through the whole game just fine while switching up party/weapon/pictos pretty frequently.
As someone who has it as his GOTY even I'll admit part of the reason I love this game so much is that I haven't experienced a game that gives me these feelings in a long time, and maybe if we didn't completely just abandon this type of authenticity in developing all parts of a game people wouldn't be talking about it this much. But sadly here we are
tl;dr soul
