Been playing much of the afternoon, only put about 5-6 hours on the PS2 game, but I am loving this so far.
It’s really debatable whether this port is an improvement though, the 16:9 progressive scan support is nice. The game is very vibrant and has been argued to have lost some a filter effect or two from the original in favor of giving the fidelity a real clean look. It still looks great regardless.
I’m hating the waggle for combat though. Performing basic 3-hit combos is a mess, unlike Zelda TP, swinging relenlessly or too fast will ultimately make your wolf stop responding to any attack(forcing you to go neutral and restart the waggle), while going too slow will leave you spamming basic 1-hit strikes with clear downtime between. The timing window for getting the strings is very rigid and I can’t get the feel for landing multi-hits pretty much at all.
Drawing ink blots takes practice, even nailing straight slashes has a huge hit-miss ratio, and circles has taken a bit of conditioning to pull off regularly. It just isn’t the leap in control management I was hoping.
Still, whatta game!