Personally, I thought it controlled well with the exception of using the right analog stick to do rapid sword slicing.I do agree that the dialogue exchanges between Raiden and the other characters was pretty bad.
You can map it to left stick if you want to (which strangely enough feels a bit odd after you spend a few minutes playing it the other way around and get used to it), and for rapid slicing in blade mode you can use X/Square or Y/Triangle. The manual slicing is really not needed but it's nice to play around and cutting things in the environment.
I don't like how the code conversations have a character that moves his mouth randomly instead of lip syncing the dialogues, I'd much prefer to just have a picture of the character speaking than that.