I decided to finally fire up the PS5 yesterday and go work on slaying Chaos in Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins. I was quickly reminded of one thing... updates are a bit lackluster on the PS5. The system update isn't all that bad, but whew... if you were hoping that small game update was only going to take a minute or two, you better be prepared for disappointment! Even though the 5GB download -- likely related to the recent DLC update -- downloaded pretty quickly, it took about 10 minutes to apply it. Returnal also had an update -- and I'll get to updating other things in a second -- which was only 1GB but it took 15 minutes to apply.
Now, I assume that this is partially due to the download likely being a partial update, which had to be "applied" to the installation. What exactly that means likely depends heavily on the package and update method, but it does mean that extra processing is likely occurring. I'm kind of used to this with Steam since downloads are sometimes compressed, which can require a hefty amount of CPU use to handle the incoming amount of data (especially with a fast connection). Although, I thought I recall hearing that the PS5's SSD setup was geared toward read access and had slower write speeds, which could account for why it isn't as fast with updates.
Anyway, to talk a bit about the game, I had bought it on PlayStation because I heard that it didn't run that well on PC. (I'm not terribly surprised.) Although, there is a serious amount of jitter on hard edges that you have to try really hard not to notice. In regard to the gameplay, it would be interesting to hear about the development of the game, because I get the feeling that it wasn't really finished. I get the feeling that the game was supposed to be far more open world, but in the end, they likely didn't have the time or resources. In the end, you get this ugly blue on blue world map with pin points that represent missions that you can do. The systems all feel somewhat convoluted with nothing really gelling all that well.
It's still fun enough and silly enough to play. I use English voices due to how silly the dialog is, which is rare for me in a game like this. Also, the Japanese voice track doesn't align with the English subtitles, because they're truly subtitles for the English voice track. ...but whew... it's really one of those games where it felt like it could be a lot better overall than it is.