I'm walking away from this game with a very mixed view on it.

I played a little over 20 hours of the game and there are some things I really enjoyed, some of the build crafting you can do, the visuals and the weapons and armor you can get were all pretty awesome.

There are so many other elements to this though that, when compared to it's FromSoftware contemporaries, really miss the mark. The enemy variety is shockingly low. When I can fight an enemy in one area with ease, then the EXACT SAME enemy in a later area gives me a hard time, it just breaks my immersion. The combat feels pretty floaty with my character almost feeling like he's running on ice at times.

The world design is a pretty mixed back, the visuals are GORGEOUS with some stellar art design that leads to some fun photo mode shots! When it comes to the map design, it's so easy to become lost. This is game that really needed some kind of map to help the player get oriented with where they are within the context of the larger world.

My biggest complaint has to be the bosses though, they range from dead easy with a total of 2 moves, to complete cheap shot artists who have moves that just feel unfair. That's my main issue here is the difficulty. Not in a "this game is too hard" sense, but when you play Elden Ring you know it's hard but the game FEELS so fun to play that you want to learn it and get better. The FEEL of playing this game just isn't as fun so that takes the difficulty and deaths and just annoys you.

You may have noticed that I have marked this as "Shelved" because yes I did not complete this game. I won't say I'll never come back to this game, but I don't really know if I will or not. I'm learning that I don't have to finish every single game I play and this is one of those moments.

There's stuff to like here, but not enough to make me want to finish it.

Style is amazing as hell from the cutscenes to the pixel art, plus there's a thumping OST in there. Full eyes, full ears, mid game.

I was pretty pumped for this one but can't help other than feel utterly let down by the actual gameplay itself. It's decent enough but over the 5-6 hour runtime, despite some pretty cool platforming ideas, it doesn't ever truly break out of the box in a way that is exciting or satisfying, nor does it scratch the metroidvania itch very well, as everything is pretty much discoverable on your first time through.

There are also some...interesting...design/balance choices. You have a health/energy bar which refills by hitting enemies, or when you hit zero you can regen some. You also have to use this bar to damage certain enemies, which honestly, I think is a pretty cool idea. However, the rate at which you lose/gain back energy/health is weirdly disproportionate.

In one boss fight, you can only trigger a damage phase on the boss by hitting him with a special attack that drains your energy. However, the rate at which you regen this energy from hitting the boss, as well as his projectiles, is not enough for what you actually need for the fight. The solution is in a damage phase to pause actually doing damage in order to dump all of your energy/health to zero and then use the regen ability to get enough back. This is incredibly backwards and weird and feels much more like an oversight in encounter balancing than a purposeful strategy.

9 Years of Shadow has the outline of a fantastic game but unfortunately it comes off like a term paper written at the eleventh hour - the introduction and main ideas are fantastic but...shit, it's due at midnight so let's throw this conclusion on there, a few block quotes, make those periods into 16-pt font, and pray that 9 and 2/3rds pages will count for 10. Have we tried bolding the title?