Really fantastic Metroidvania with some of the best feeling AND looking combat I have seen in any 2D game. By the time you get every upgrade and fight some of the very well-designed bosses in the latter half of the game, you genuinely feel so badass putting all your tools together, I could not recommend this game enough for the combat alone to anyone who enjoys of fast-paced, parry-based combat with great movement. Easily one of the most beautiful games I've ever played as well, with a solid upgrade/customization system that doesn't really innovate necessarily but is very effective in enhancing the experience.

Nine Sols is also one of the most beautiful games I've ever played, although that beauty only gets to fully shine sometimes, as a lot of the locations in the game are unfortunately pretty dreary and boring factory-like settings, which makes sense due to game's plot but I was a little disappointed that there weren't more beautiful and varied areas to take advantage of the game's gorgeous hand-drawn art style.

The level design itself is great though, and felt like it flowed well from area to area, along with the typical secrets and secondary paths that you'd expect from a Metroidvania. I also very much liked how valuable they made the game's currency, as everything that your skill points don't upgrade, the money is used to, so finding any and all secrets felt very rewarding.

Really enjoyed my time with Nine Sols, it was a little slow to get going but once you are mostly fully upgraded and used to the gameplay by like the halfway point, it really gets going and rivals any other excellent metroidvania experience I have had.

9/10

Phenomenal expansion for one of my favorite games of all time, at the level of quality that I always expect from FromSoft. The biggest improvement over the base game is the boss design, which definitely contains some of my favorite FromSoft bosses ever, which I cannot say about the base game really, as it was one of my main, and really only, complaints about base Elden Ring. Environments are as gorgeous as ever, I still very firmly believe that the The Lands Between is the greatest open world ever made, and the Shadow Realm only adds more to the masterful art direction and design of this truly special game. I have a couple small issues, mainly with the fact that I found exploration to be slightly less rewarding than the base game, with some areas feeling a bit to disappointingly empty, despite being so beautiful to go through. There's also continues to be some questionable balancing issues with certain builds and some enemies and boss attacks, but not really enough to detract from the experience. SotE was as great an experience to go through as the base game, completing one of the greatest games ever made with the hardest boss I've ever fought in my life.

9.5/10

Stellar Blade is an at-times serviceable action game that I have a LOT of issues with, the biggest one being that it is honestly pretty boring, outside of some of the combat. The visuals and, in particular, the animations, are impressive, but that's really the extent of elements of this game that I would consider as such. The pacing is pretty odd; for about 2/3 of the game, you have access to the hub city that gives you a number of mind-numbing side quests, and the rest of the game is equivalent to a point of no return, locking you out of the hub, and with the final 10 or so hours being an exhausting boss rush of four of the game's most difficult fights, one after the other. Most of these are decently designed, but the decision to have them back-to-back-to-back-to-back is questionable at best.

Stellar Blade's narrative is again, serviceable, but not much more than that. The voice acting is pretty great but the characters themselves are whatever. I liked Eve but that's about it. I really did not feel engaged by the story at any point, and there are a number of post-apocalyptic narratives that do a much better job with the twists, such as the obvious comparison to Nier: Automata, and even something like Horizon Zero Dawn.

The biggest issue with this game is that the only real draw is the combat, and anytime you are doing anything but that it becomes a real slog. I did not enjoy nearly any of my time with these other sections, particularly the ones that disable your sword, forcing you to only use your gun, which has some of the least satisfying gunplay I've ever experienced in a game. There are also a number of platforming sections that I hated, as the game's movement is not at all balanced for precision platforming.

Stellar Blade's combat is good but not great. My favorite part of it was the flashiness, but as a parry-based system, it is far inferior to something like Sekiro or Lies of P. The parry timing is weird; it is a lot earlier than you'd think, and I never quite got used to this even by the end of the game, and determined it just did not feel good. This is especially an issue in fights against bosses with very fast combo attacks, as you have to predict the timing, instead of reacting to it, which is not really feasible in most cases. As I said before, the gunplay sucks, and is very poorly integrated into the actual combat loop. The only time you really want to use it is when you are 'supposed' to, like when an enemy weakpoint is exposed after doing a certain defensive action. There is also a sort of 'super' mode that you unlock about halfway through the game called Tachy Mode, which unfortunately is pretty miserable to use. It looks cool but you deal effectively no extra damage compared to your regular for while it barely lasts 10-15 seconds, doesn't heal you, and gives you no i-frames upon de-activation. I ended up only really using it as a way to absorb hits from boss attacks that I could not understand the dodge/parry timing of, as you are invincible during it and it charges relatively quickly.

I do think there's plenty of people that will enjoy Stellar Blade more than I did, but I feel as though most aspects of a game like this that are really important to maintain player engagement were quite hollow, forgettable, and at times miserable to get through. Not the worst action game I've ever played, but generally one that I would consider a disappointment.

6/10