Nojento, não pela protagonista. Mise en scene, level design, tudo meio torto. Um mal gosto geral.

Pastiche demais de Nier Automata, ao ponto que fica bem esvaziado.

Mas é interessante em momentos.

Talvez eu retorne no futuro.

Stellar Blade’s combat and soundtrack shine, but its narrative and world lack substance. The main story is largely forgettable and marred by poor voice acting, while the side content is repetitive and unrewarding. There are many visually appealing action sequences brought about by challenging-but-fun souls-like enemies and boss encounters. However, the ‘fauxpen’ world surrounding the linear progression looks straight out of an Unreal Engine starter-pack. The character designs are cyberpunk-esque and genuinely cool, but the protagonist’s design made me embarrassed to call video-games art. Fans of over-the-top action and anime will enjoy, but those wanting a meaningful story should avoid.

An excellent first release for a studio. Wears its inspirations on its sleeve. The combat is fun enough in the overworld and individual levels, though the bosses sometimes leave something to be desired. You feel the limits of your defensive tools quite quickly, which is frustrating in some fights.

They even have a Vergil, though one who really doesn't work as a Vergil - something for the sequel to work on.

Excellent fishing minigame, uses the dualsense in a cool way. It was introduced later than it should've been for how good it was, I think.

OST is full of unexpected bangers, too. You'll get that wasteland tune stuck in your head.

Best characters and character design of a Sony published game in the last five years, easy.

2024 has been a weird year for video games for me, I don't remember the last time I had so many opinions that go against everyone else's generally positive views.

Let's get the big old "...but(t)" out of the way. Stellar Blade is a deeply unsexy game, full of tentacled monstrosities, dusty deserts, and miserable sewers. I'm honestly surprised Eve's design has gotten so much attention. Yeah, I get it, she's a boobiebutt lady and her entire personality is polite boobiebutt lady, but I'm absolutely surprised by the game's complete lack of personality. When it comes to other anime games that get little to no attention, for example, a game like Senran Kagura. You could take one look at it and knock it for its childish gimmicks, but you'd never come away from it thinking it didn't have its own identity. Stellar Blade is full of cool shit, like some truly genuinely cool designs and visuals, but all of its elements seem to be fighting with each other. For as much as I thought some of the late game bosses had some of the most striking designs, that doesn't take away from the fact that every single piece of dialogue, whether that's main mission, side mission or whatever is just a mush of uninteresting words telling a story that feels like every other story you've ever seen.

But(t) Neil, this is a cool, flashy action game, who cares about the story? I mean, Eve is so very shiny, isn't that enough? Well, I feel like the trailers for this game are one of the most misleading I've ever seen. Every exciting thing in the trailer is just a QTE, and this game is riddled with big, QTE set piece moments straight out of 2008, and auto-climy ledge platforming out of 2008, and fetch questy missions right out of... You get the idea. The game feels old, and despite some really nice character models, looks and feels straight out of the PS3/360 era, only the platforming is incredibly wonky, and make no mistake, this game has just as much jumping and climbing as awkwardly killing enemies.

And here is my biggest complaint. The game has no idea what it wants to be. It wants to be part Souls game, and part Bayonetta, and it's good at neither. The entire combat system revolves around cooldowns for powers, and you only really do substantial damage by using them, and to charge them easier you have to stand there awkwardly having to parry some sometimes unreadable attacks. The standard sword damage is so feeble that I had to max it out and upgrade it four or five times in NG+ to have it feel like it should. It's just a weird system, that has upgrades that are meaningless because the boss enemies that drop them scale along with you. I never felt comfortable out in the open world sections, because it doesn't matter how powerful you are in some situations, multiple enemies can just gang up on you and loop hit you until you're dead. I just don't think it feels very good, almost nothing, including some of the special attacks don't stagger enemies, meaning you take hit after hit, regardless of skill.

I just think this game has so many problems, and if it hadn't have been backed by Sony would be forgotten along with all of those other action games you see on PSN that are endlessly on sale. I haven't even gotten into it being such a slim game when you remove all of the open area busywork, or how tiring the fake Nier soundtrack gets at times. (some of it's quite nice) but, I think you get a good idea on how I feel about this.

I do want to leave this on a positive note though, and I want to say that Shift Up have done a really great job with some of the costumes, as previously mentioned, some of those late game bosses are truly spectacular, and their NG+ should be a blueprint for how it's done with new upgrades, skills and a ton more cosmetics... It's just a shame it's in Stellar Blade, a bad game.

Here it finally is; the game that saved gaming through its respectful use of Dead or Alive Xtreme T'n'A physics, revolutionary side quests that all end with you finding a random corpse, revolutionary gameplay where you mainly hit enemies with your sword over and over again, worthwhile collectibles in the form of 40 soda cans spread mostly throughout the two very varied open zones (a wasteland and a desert), storytelling that makes us ask big questions such as "is my haircut too basic?", and memorable twists that will make you go "no way, the robots were robots all along?!"

In all seriousness, Stellar Blade has some of the dumbest discourse of 2024 surrounding it, but it is a fun albeit pretty flawed game. A mostly linear action game focused on parrying is not something I'll say no to, and with a lower difficulty than a FromSoft game, which makes for a mostly pretty chill experience where you mostly learn enemy patterns and their tells (which are usually very good; not too obvious or easy, but no attacks that come without clear warnings either) in order to get perfect parries, charge up special attacks and unleash them on the fools who dared attack you. It's a simple but satisfying gameplay loop, and the impressive enemy variety with very different attack patterns kept it from ever getting boring, and Eve's attacks have a real weight to them so slashing away always feels satisfying, while the controls are super responsive so a mistake always feels like it was my completely fault and not at all the game's.

And the boss fights are great fun! Not only are most boss designs really good and grotesque, but they're also such good tests of the player's skills. They pack a mean punch, but none of them have a particularly high health pool, so even if they can mess you up quickly, you don't feel too weak when attacking them so their fights don't last particularly long, keeping it short but memorable, with some really cool combo chains to learn how to parry and look extremely cool while doing so, and Yakuza or Metal Gear Rising-like cutscenes in the middle of the fights that are there just to make you look even cooler, which I always appreciate in action games.

The final three bosses are pretty extreme difficulty spikes, I should probably mention, but I didn't find them particularly unfair. The game just expected me to have learned its mechanics by this point and to use them to their fullest to win, which still made for hard fights, but very satisfying and almost like a well-choreographed dance between me and the boss where I was linking special attacks, dodges, parries, normal attacks and the Devil Trigger equivalent in a very fluid way that I didn't really think I had in me, and it felt great!

As for the rest of the game, well... The story's decent, but the storytelling is terrible, with twists that should not be twists, characters that don't really get to do anything, a plot that goes absolutely nowhere and makes about zero sense if you spend about two seconds thinking about it, and some voice actors that seem to have been plucked straight out of Werner Herzog's Herz aus Glas (where most actors were hypnotized before filming to give more trance-like performances. Fun fact: jokes you have to explain like this shouldn't have been written in the first place), especially one of the main characters, Adam, who seems to be half-asleep for the entirety of the game. And it's not a story or acting that's bad in a fun way either; it's all quite boring and ends on a very unsatisfying notes (no matter which of the three endings you get.) Worst of all is that you can't even reliably skip the terrible cutscenes since most of them just aren't skippable even on New Game+, but even others that are force you to wait a few seconds before you can choose to skip. Very annoying!

The side content is fine. Almost every side quest really does end with you finding a corpse and a note of them saying things like "I never should have gone out into the wasteland. Argh!" but at least most of the quests lead you to unique fights against powered-up bosses with new attacks, and other fun combat scenarios so they're still worth doing just for that. It is very stupid, though, that the game always asks you if you want to return to the main hub after completing a quest, but you can't manually fast-travel to it in any other way. Instead you have to fast travel to what is the closest point to the exit of the current area you're in and run back from there, which is kind of a baffling design choice. The open zones are pretty good overall, though, despite being a bit too similar to each other. They're not too big, are fairly dense with collectibles, power-ups and missions in most nooks and crannies, and you don't really have to engage with them at all if you don't want to. Just run straight to the next story mission and you'll never have to see them again.

Level design for story missions is really impressive, by the way. Especially considering this is the developer's first attempt at a game like this. The levels are linear, obviously, but usually wide enough that there's some exploration for those who want it, and the game is great at rewarding exploration with both power-ups and new outfits for Eve (you might not think it from just watching the design of female characters and their clothing in the game, but some of these outfits actually look really good so I'd highly recommend looking for them), and the art direction for them overall is really strong, with all of them looking really great and being varied from each other while still feeling like they're part of the same cohesive vision for the game and its post-apocalypse vibes. They feel like part of the world and not just video game levels to get through, and are also very good at changing things up occasionally, giving you other things to do other than just fighting against the (still impressively varied) group of enemies over and over again. Very basic things, admittedly, but things like finding keys/codes, swimming around, or doing some light platforming are appreciated as small moments of reprieve between all the hacking and slashing.

So Stellar Blade is definitely good, despite some embarrassing sexualisation of its female characters that would fit in an edgy 90s comic book and absolutely nowhere else. It's super fun to play, has good level design, one of the best soundtracks of the year (even if I personally feel like some of the tracks are a bit too diet Nier), and is overall just a good time that I even enjoyed enough to Platinum. Nothing groundbreaking at all, but I very much enjoyed my time with it and certainly wouldn't say no to a sequel in the future that could tighten up a few things.

Stellar Blade just restored the concept of femininity, or whatever, I don't actually give a fuck.

But what I do care about is that this game is actually pretty good. The combat is fluid and responsive, with some minor gripes pertaining to how the encounters are designed. Parrying feels good, dodging feels good, and the game actively challenges you to keep being aggressive.

Alpha and Beta skills aren't the most intuitive thing in existence, but I don't think they detract too heavily from the core combat. Tachy mode on the other hand, totally different story. Figures that forcing bosses into your DPS phase while being invulnerable (paradoxically doing zero damage anyways) doesn't make for the most riveting gameplay.

But the story is basically a reskinned Nier clone. Not being able to skip cutscenes is a cardinal sin.

Make more games like this please.

What an awesome combat heavy game! Though the story was predictable in my eyes, I enjoyed my stay! Sometimes a game can just be FUN and that’s okay!

For transparency I played on story mode, so I had an easier time getting through it.

This game is an action RPG that takes elements from great games like FF7, Elden Ring, Breath of the Wild, Nier Automata and others I’m sure. If you play this on a difficult setting…good luck..

It was a great time! 8/10 would recommend (: