Overall it's an overrated hassle of a game, and unnecessarily long. The first like, 20-30 hours was stellar; though that is only like a quarter of the game.
Some of the boss fights were actually good, although they can only be counted on one hand. Exploring the densely interwoven legacy dungeons was fun and tense at times, and the jump button is greatly appreciated for making (some of, lol) the platforming actually fit more neatly into the game. There's some pretty/stunning reveals for areas to explore or boss encounters, cool art design, atmosphere, yadda yadda.
But everything else brings the game down. ESPECIALLY how long the game is, how BS the bosses become, and how often you start seeing everything else being shamelessly copy-pasted.
As for that huge, sprawling open world? Not fun. There's a decent amount of encampments of enemies/cave dungeons/catacombs dotted here and there, but the single reward chest that is a useless item 95% of the time/all those items that turn out to just be mushrooms just make me question why I even explore.
The rest of that overworld space is filled with basically nothing but pointless copy-pasted BS enemies that you should never even bother to fight, but if you do, horse combat with colossal weapon heavy attacks is the best way to do it, and it is awful.
Concerning combat, fighting humanoid non-boss enemies is generally fair, even when they're hard. But idk why the devs made every single animal like dogs/rats/birds/big dogs/big rats/big birds/big bears/dragons, or the two mechanical enemies so god-awful and unfun to fight.
Massively large enemies that take up the entire screen so that their telegraphs are obscured - even if you try to free-aim the camera - are awful all around. All dragons, golems, tree spirits, Astel (though dodging his laser beam was cool). Have fun running past their attacks to get to their back legs or underside, and then have a third of your attacks not hit because the enemy decides to shift around. Then they stomp their feet and you can temporarily move to the side, or they do some big goofy attack that makes them clip through the walls, or a disengaging attack that puts them a ten second run away from you. It's mindblowing that these unpolished encounters even made it into the game.
Also there's a ton of times where an encounter is made up of multiple minibosses clumsily thrown into the same arena - but at least this was supposedly patched to make them a bit less aggressive. Yet coming back at a higher level, using a busted weapon/bleed attacks, or using spirit ashes/summons just feels like cheesing the fight, but honestly that is the only solution if you value your sanity.
And speaking of higher levels, being overleveled was a big issue for me, because I wanted to explore everything. But it turns out that the ideal way of playing this open world game and not having too easy of a time with some earlier boss fights is to, uhh, not explore at all? Just run straight to the legacy dungeons? And maybe explore stuff for a few levels if you find that your ass is getting handed to you a bit more than it should be? Man, I wish I knew that before, so I didn't just have the stats to blow through some of the earlier or midgame content which might have actually been enjoyable.
Concerning enjoyment, I had heard before I started playing that some stuff was absolutely busted - Moonveil, bleed attacks, various sorceries, etc. I felt that I wanted to have a balanced experience, the sort of one that the devs would have 'intended'. In hindsight, me trying to divine a sort of 'intended' experience out of this unbalanced mess should never have been my job to do, and I should have just stuck to what stuff looked cool and did a lot of damage, instead of stubbornly doing jump attacks with dual colossal weapons. As the game goes on, the bosses get longer more obnoxious combos, and have shorter and fewer windows to be punished (which also have a chance of reading your inputs and extending their combo anyway). So if you want to have a better view of the game by the end, I guess the key to that is just using the broken stuff that looks cooler. But maybe hold back until you feel like you've seen enough of the boss, before you just delete it.
Also the quests in this game are as godawful and as impossible to do without looking up a guide as they always are in From games. But this time, the game being open world/having the time of day mechanic really exacerbates this problem.
But yeah, sure. 10/10, flawless game.
Some of the boss fights were actually good, although they can only be counted on one hand. Exploring the densely interwoven legacy dungeons was fun and tense at times, and the jump button is greatly appreciated for making (some of, lol) the platforming actually fit more neatly into the game. There's some pretty/stunning reveals for areas to explore or boss encounters, cool art design, atmosphere, yadda yadda.
But everything else brings the game down. ESPECIALLY how long the game is, how BS the bosses become, and how often you start seeing everything else being shamelessly copy-pasted.
As for that huge, sprawling open world? Not fun. There's a decent amount of encampments of enemies/cave dungeons/catacombs dotted here and there, but the single reward chest that is a useless item 95% of the time/all those items that turn out to just be mushrooms just make me question why I even explore.
The rest of that overworld space is filled with basically nothing but pointless copy-pasted BS enemies that you should never even bother to fight, but if you do, horse combat with colossal weapon heavy attacks is the best way to do it, and it is awful.
Concerning combat, fighting humanoid non-boss enemies is generally fair, even when they're hard. But idk why the devs made every single animal like dogs/rats/birds/big dogs/big rats/big birds/big bears/dragons, or the two mechanical enemies so god-awful and unfun to fight.
Massively large enemies that take up the entire screen so that their telegraphs are obscured - even if you try to free-aim the camera - are awful all around. All dragons, golems, tree spirits, Astel (though dodging his laser beam was cool). Have fun running past their attacks to get to their back legs or underside, and then have a third of your attacks not hit because the enemy decides to shift around. Then they stomp their feet and you can temporarily move to the side, or they do some big goofy attack that makes them clip through the walls, or a disengaging attack that puts them a ten second run away from you. It's mindblowing that these unpolished encounters even made it into the game.
Also there's a ton of times where an encounter is made up of multiple minibosses clumsily thrown into the same arena - but at least this was supposedly patched to make them a bit less aggressive. Yet coming back at a higher level, using a busted weapon/bleed attacks, or using spirit ashes/summons just feels like cheesing the fight, but honestly that is the only solution if you value your sanity.
And speaking of higher levels, being overleveled was a big issue for me, because I wanted to explore everything. But it turns out that the ideal way of playing this open world game and not having too easy of a time with some earlier boss fights is to, uhh, not explore at all? Just run straight to the legacy dungeons? And maybe explore stuff for a few levels if you find that your ass is getting handed to you a bit more than it should be? Man, I wish I knew that before, so I didn't just have the stats to blow through some of the earlier or midgame content which might have actually been enjoyable.
Concerning enjoyment, I had heard before I started playing that some stuff was absolutely busted - Moonveil, bleed attacks, various sorceries, etc. I felt that I wanted to have a balanced experience, the sort of one that the devs would have 'intended'. In hindsight, me trying to divine a sort of 'intended' experience out of this unbalanced mess should never have been my job to do, and I should have just stuck to what stuff looked cool and did a lot of damage, instead of stubbornly doing jump attacks with dual colossal weapons. As the game goes on, the bosses get longer more obnoxious combos, and have shorter and fewer windows to be punished (which also have a chance of reading your inputs and extending their combo anyway). So if you want to have a better view of the game by the end, I guess the key to that is just using the broken stuff that looks cooler. But maybe hold back until you feel like you've seen enough of the boss, before you just delete it.
Also the quests in this game are as godawful and as impossible to do without looking up a guide as they always are in From games. But this time, the game being open world/having the time of day mechanic really exacerbates this problem.
But yeah, sure. 10/10, flawless game.