I’d say overall it’s been a good degree of punishing. I die a lot, and it does feel cheap sometimes (when one mistimed soul break leads to getting broken and killed without the chance to do anything else). But I can usually identify something I could have done differently to not get into that situation, and retries are quick. It’s extremely gratifying to come back and turn the tables on a room or boss that had been wrecking me, so I stick with it.
I do sometimes fall back on the “easy mode” that is black magic, though. The other classes feel like they engage with the systems more fully and are more fun, but being able to hang back and have plenty of time to react to attacks while dropping nukes is a huge advantage.
You can run past most enemies (bar the occasional progress-blocking dark vent or key-holding miniboss), though I generally clear each room honestly at least once for my own satisfaction and because I’m enjoying the combat. There was one obnoxious sequence where starting at the checkpoint, there were several rooms I could safely run through, then a tough group guarding an elevator too closely to be bypassed, then the wait for the elevator to arrive after pressing the button, then the actual elevator ride to the next area, and then a really tough fight with a dark vent and several additional monsters. That was one area where I eventually cheesed that last fight by sprinting straight for the vent and taking it out fast. But that was an exception – for the most part, the checkpoints and shortcuts feel fairly generous and it doesn’t take long to catch up to where I was after dying.
Hmm, I’ll give that a shot. I wound up dropping the resolution to 1080p to try and lock in the performance at 120fps, and it still looks better than whatever weird dynamic scaling algorithm they use.
I know many people love this from the angle of “it’s so bad it’s cheesy/funny” but I expect better standards of writing and characters from Japanese developers at this point.
Just rolled credits on this, at around the 50-hour mark. The last few stages had some spots that felt cheap enough that I probably should have dropped down to normal difficulty. But I had come far enough that I wound up sticking it out, and it was super satisfying to finally get over some of those humps with a combination of build changes, strategy changes, and better execution.
It’s a close cousin and scratches the same itch for me. Similar rhythm of combat, and a sizable though distinct possibility space of mechanical options at your disposal. I don’t think it’s quite as finely tuned and might not have the same legs, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants a Nioh-like combat system to explore.
The groups of monsters are generally larger (since you always have AI party members), and that can lead to things getting more chaotic and harder to follow, with some cheap-feeling hits.
You can swap between two different classes (and stats and equipment sets), giving you very different tools to deal with different situations, similar to Nioh’s weapon switching but even more varied. My go-to by the late game was Breaker (physical offense with big weapons) and Sage (pure magic).
The jobs all have pretty interesting special abilities that were fun to try out. I’m not sure how well balanced they are, though, as I struggled to find much use for the various buffs, which never felt impactful enough to justify themselves compared to the immediate abilities.
The break gauge is a solid addition that plays a bunch of roles in combat. You can take down enemies quickly with a finishing move if you can break down their defenses. It also applies to you, and you use your break gauge to absorb enemy attacks and refill your MP, so defense feeds into offense in a satisfying manner. It also encourages you to swap jobs to let your break gauge recover, since each job has its own gauge.
There’s nothing that I’d consider “so bad it’s funny” – the overall plot and a lot of the written text was unironically enjoyable, and the characters and dialogue were more bland and underdeveloped than entertainingly bad. The things people made fun of were definitely intentional storytelling choices with deliberate reasoning behind them.
Yeah I’m still interested but I need to decompress after Elden Ring for a bit. Usually with an addictive game I need another compelling (but short) game to help me break free, but Elden Ring was so much that I need some time away from a game pad.
Yeah, I wound up playing them in parallel, which may have not been advisable from a muscle-memory point of view, but I didn’t want to put off either. I deliberately got them on different platforms though – progress is slower in Elden Ring because it’s on the Xbox in the living room, where I have to share TV access.
It’s 25% off on Xbox already. Despite how everyone says it looks bad on the Series S I don’t think I’m going to be able to resist. Every single thing I see of this game makes me think it’s the Point Break of video games, and I fucking love Point Break.
Like I mentioned, people are still reporting poor performance on PC due to other issues. Performance is all over the place depending on platform and tolerance level, so mileage may vary. It’s definitely not safe to buy without a little digging first.
I’ve been playing this on Hard (incidentally it looks and performs fine for my taste), and it is hard! The first boss is completely kicking my ass. As a game it sort of doesn’t feel like there’s a fail state because when you die you go back to the last save point but you keep any XP and world state progress you made (doors open, etc.). Enjoying!
I picked this up from the Epic Mega Sale. Ended up being a little over $35 after tax, not too far off from the $30 I was hoping for. Looking forward to playing it and seeing what kind of performance issues I run into!
