First of all, it's worth recognizing how impressive it is that a game of this size and scale gets released at all. This is clearly something that you've been on and off developing for a long time, with bits and pieces of the ideas kicking around for years before that.
That's why, after over 40 hours spent with the game and seeing its story to the end, it almost physically hurts to say that it was a tedious broken mess of a game.
The story is long-winded, meandering, exposition heavy, and generally hard to follow. Plot threads and characters are picked up and abandoned with an unpredictable pacing. With a few exceptions, each chapter feels like its own self contained story that probably should have just been its own game, where it would have more room to breathe and develop its characters.
The best way I can describe it is that things sort of just.... happen. In the wake of a story beat, it's common for a character to say something like "alright, let's go to..." without all that much indication on why they would know that's the way forward. It's a roller coaster ride of the worst kind: a bumpy and nauseating one. The story being so scatterbrained and the events coming from out of nowhere made it really hard to get invested in both the overarching story and the individual planet stories.
The silver lining of the iffy writing is that a staggering amount of it is fully voice acted. I think the voice acting is the game's greatest strength. Not because it's good or anything like that, but because it's there. It frequently elevates the writing to something I can only describe as peak comedic gold. There is some seriously meme-worthy stuff in here that I just might be quoting for a while. If any kind of fanbase or streamer latches onto this game by some miracle, this will be the reason why. I can say with certainty that it's what kept me going.
If the entire game were nothing but cutscenes and spotty voice acting, it might actually be pretty easy to recommend. Unfortunately, to get to that good stuff, players have to actually play the game, and I don't see a full playthrough of this appearing on YouTube any time soon for people to experience vicariously.
The game is riddled with countless softlocks and crashes, and a player not savvy enough to keep multiple saves can very easily ruin a playthrough. A lot of these bugs come from a frankly embarrassing use of RPG Maker's events system. Seeing how many event tiles were controlled by other parallel events instead of simple pages and/or self switches broke my brain. To that end, it becomes even more impressive that the game managed to get finished and released, because I don't know who could ever have what it takes to create and test a game that's scripted in this way. But this crazy way of doing events is probably also why a comprehensive bugfixing patch is unlikely; it's pervasive throughout the entire game, and would probably take months of reworking and testing it.
The best I can recommend for anyone looking to experience the game is to install RPG Maker VX Ace so they can make whatever fixes and edits they need and boot the game in playtest mode.
The LMBS scripts used for combat are.... fine.... but nothing was really done to improve the feeling of controls or attacks. Balancing of progression and stats is completely broken, and by the 2nd hour no enemy was a challenge ever again. Nothing could stand up to my adaptool-beefed stats and my trusty basic attack button.
It's a shame that the combat ends up being so throwaway and nothing, because if it actually felt like a LMBS Tales game instead of superficially resembling one, it could be the glue that holds the whole thing together.
As much negative as I've said, and how much more negative I could say, I still think that Dark Matter Hudokai must be seen. It deserves a special place in RPG Maker history for its sheer scale and its lengthy development. There weren't a whole lot of naively-scoped "dream game" projects from over 10 years ago that actually managed to get finished, and Dark Matter Hudokai feels like a time capsule from that era. I'm crossing my fingers that some moderately well-known online personality that digs into obscure indie games sheds a spotlight on this game sometime soon.
I really hope that Dark Matter Hudokai is not Edgar Duncan's last game. With a smaller scope and more focus, the ambition could be put to great use.