I'm still kind of divided on this one. There are definitely some interesting ideas in it, but there are also some odd design choices. I finished the game, but by the end I wasn't really enjoying it anymore.
There are a lot of interesting elements in the story. An agency of magical girls, a mysterious mountain with mysterious happenings, alternate universes and eldritch abominations. Almost like mahou shoujo meets X-Files meets Lovecraft. The execution meandered a bit, with some weird shifts in tone and some questions left unanswered (what's up with the statues?) but I think it doesn't help that I never finished Magical's End and don't remember Magical very well. I'm not totally sold on the characters but their chemistry is decent enough.
The side scrolling sections were a neat idea. I don't feel they worked out very well- the layouts are odd and the visuals are drab at best- but I like that it was tried.
The gameplay itself, though, is best described as conventional to a fault. It doesn't do much to distinguish itself from other RPG Maker games and it has all the common elements including the ones I find incredibly irritating. It's got oddities in the world design like a tent to rest in near the end area which is both classics 1990s RPG and makes perfect sense from a gameplay point of view but zero sense in the story. I always find random encounters to be an absolute drag, and there's no exception here. While there's an item shop, I'm not sure if you can backtrack to it- I didn't want to try because of the random encounters. I feel getting items could have been handled in a way that worked better with the story than collecting gold to buy them and finding random items in fortuitously placed chests. Supply drops, maybe?
The battles themselves are okay at first, but get repetitive fast and by the end are basically just repeating the same weak attacks against tanks of enemies, healing where necessary. The boss battle is especially egregious here; it has stages but all of them play exactly the same. There are elemental weaknesses but it isn't intuitive which enemies are weak to what and why. I did like how the characters' abilities worked with each other, and while the battles were excessively long they didn't feel unbalanced.
There are some weird design choices in the game, some of which I wasn't a fan of and some of which aren't bad per se but just leave me scratching my head. I'm not a big fan of the character designs, all of which seem to have the same giant breasts for no apparent reason. I also have no idea why applause plays when you take on a follower. Some of the overworld and battler designs are really weird. Moreover, the style doesn't match the portraits, and frankly the art just isn't as nice. Some of the animated battle backgrounds gave me a headache, and I found some of the battle music oddly calm versus the more energetic overworld music.
I did slog through it and finish the game, though, so that's something. I was invested enough to see it through, but by the end, it was really starting to drag. I was at least able to finish it, which wasn't true of Magical's End. Although the game advised me to grind before the final boss, I didn't bother and didn't need to.
It also let me save scum, which was nice. I wish there were autosaves during the boss battles, but in the end I didn't need them.
Enemies do have a healthbar, but it's not visible most of the time. I think this is a bug?
It also had the bug in MV/MZ (possibly an nwjs bug) where the game kept going but the graphics froze. I saved often enough that it didn't kill my run, but it definitely had the potential to.
While the story meandered a bit, it's a very important story in the context of tying together the series (I'm being deliberately vague to avoid spoilers). As an entry in a series, it does work a little better. I still do think this game is longer than it needs to be, and really suffers from it. If it was shorter, it wouldn't have had time for the flaws to really become grating, and I think still could have told the story it was trying to.