Quit on the last boss. Fundamentally, I think that boss design is a joke, and I don't respect it on any level, so my conclusion is...why would I even do it? I'd just finish it and go, "Yeah, that sucked, and I didn't enjoy any of the things I had to do to complete it," which is the same as, if not worse than, not finishing it and saying the same thing.

For some reason, I 100%'d the base game (Moonveil Katana carried me through 60 hours of it, making it a trivial romp rather than a challenging or interesting action game, which was great because I was completely bored with it as an action game by that point). This time, I nearly 100% the expansion, but my conclusion is that I fundamentally do not enjoy a single aspect of the core combat design of this game. I had a few moments versus some bosses here where I had a bit of fun, but 90% of the time I spend in combat, I'm either thinking, "This is repetitive and boring, and I don't actually enjoy killing any of these enemies," or I'm thinking, "This boss design is either easy, monotonous, boring, absurd, and/or stupid." I genuinely only respect at best 1/3 of the bosses they've made across this entire game.

It really boils down to the fact that I think rolling in this game is the lamest thing I literally have ever done in an action game. My character looks stupid, it feels stupid, and the idea of rolling 5 times every time a boss moves just to hit them once is fundamentally the lamest shit imaginable. I play action games to feel cool, and the bosses in this game make the player character look like a moron by comparison. It's kind of unbelievable to me that the peak of sales and popularity in action games had to be the game where you just roll five times in a row at awkward cadences and then do one heavy attack. "What about all the cool weapon arts!" What about them? Half of them are unusable against any actually challenging boss. "What about the RPG systems?" Ah, yes, I equip a thing and now the boss dies 50% faster to X or Y status buildup, something I did not express through cool gameplay inputs or choices, it just sorta happens. Most of the spells feel awful to use, can't reliably hit a boss, and/or do no damage anyways. Imagine if Fromsoft used all of their amazing abilities to make a game where the player character was even a little bit cooler than that -- oh wait, they did, but Sekiro didn't catch on the way these endless Souls games do, and Bloodborne is rotting in hell.

The only parts of the game that I actually like are the exploration, and I consider most of this map to be considerably more boring than the base game. Or maybe I just gave the base game too much credit. I don't know. When I finished it, I said many times, "How could they possibly make any more of this? They've completely run out of ideas." I was right. There are no new ideas in this game -- it's just more of the same stuff with slight riffs in new ways to be annoying. It's a nice atmosphere to go on a majestic hike. I put on Critical Role, I get on my horse, and I explore all the corners of everything, and I collect all the stuff, and then every hour or so, I have to deal with something tedious and annoying and stupid that doesn't make me happy on any level, I yell at the dumb traps or projectiles that spawn through the floor or enemies that blow me up from around a corner, and then I say, "Yeah, that sure was annoying," and then I keep going.

Do they do open-world design better than most other studios? Yeah, in the sense that as a map, it's really well laid out, in the sense that you can get to everything you see, and you feel like a little mouse crawling through a massive artifice. In terms of substance, though? Largely empty, pretty soulless, rehashing the same ideas, just full of moaning corpses and rocks and another majestic building that has no narrative or aesthetic meaning to me. A lot of locations are just the bare minimum to be visually interesting, with no improvement over the creativity of the base game. I'm not even gonna get into my take on the writing and lore -- it's all been said a billion times before, but going to Poopguts's Hovel to pick up the Trowel of Irrevocable Splendor and then give it to Crying Babyface so that you can collect their Greatsword of the Weeping Mother is just...blah blah blah, it might as well all be randomly generated to me and many (if not most) people who play the game. At least 50% of the open world is empty, so why would I care how well-designed it is? This isn't Death Stranding, as a gameplay function, most of this space holds zero meaning.

There is a whisper of a fun video game between all of the pieces here, and I can largely understand how some people love this game, but I also am pretty sure some people trick themselves into thinking they like it more than they actually do. I know some people really actually love all the stuff I think is annoying, the fact that it's silly and annoying is part of the joy, it's like a circus except everything is setting you on fire or a screaming pile of flesh. But I'm tired of trying to trick myself into liking it. I like Sekiro, I like Hollow Knight, I like Monster Hunter, I like God of War. Hell, I probably even find Nine Sols more fun than this, and I trashed that game for being way too hard. This game isn't too hard in an interesting way. It's just tedious and annoying. Even when I do well, I'm often like, "Oh, that was it? Ok." I don't feel like I've ever "gotten good" at this game because I don't really feel like the core mechanics are interesting or engaging in the first place.

I don't think I'll ever touch another Fromsoft Souls game again. Beautiful art and cool animations, but I can't pretend I am experiencing "fun" in the way that I do in literally every other action game I enjoy. I really hope they make something else like Sekiro one day, and they don't just keep doing more of this.

I genuinely think with real writing, dropping the whole sex doll aesthetic, and some balance tweaks to combat, this would've easily been on many GOTY frontrunner lists. A lot of the fundamental principles in polished combat animation and exploration are hitting harder here than many comparable games out there from first efforts into huge AAA bombast. However, the story is attrocious, the characters are all wet noodles, and the entire game feels like it was conceived by a basement of smelly straight cis male nerds who sexually harass women online every night before bed. (Given that this exact demographic went to bat starting a childish culture war because the devs made the protagonist's nearly exposed vulva slightly less nearly exposed, they really got exactly what they asked for with their choices.) Beyond that, the gameplay is all over the place, with player abilities that are hilariously overpowered alongside bosses that are beautifully designed but highly inconsistent in the readability of their animations.

My biggest gripe with gameplay was getting to the end having had most bosses go down in 1-2 attempts and then the final 2 bosses taking 10+. I recently spent hours learning to beat the final boss of Nine Sols, but I actually ended up dropping this game to easy mode after 30 minutes of the final boss (the one you fight if you side with Adam) just because I didn't really feel like it. (Ironically, that boss ended with giving me the last 30% of its health bar for free in a cool anime moment, so I didn't actually need to lower the difficulty.)

The biggest annoyance was that these last two bosses had more animations than any boss I can recall fighting in any game I've ever played, but soooo many of them read the same. Like, literally, a boss raises its arm in a pose to attack, and that pose could lead to fully 3-5 completely different combos, some of which have optional enders, and some of which are not meaningfully visually distinct from each other in any way despite having radically different timings and layers of fakeouts.

It's one thing to deal with crazy hard attacks, but the thing that really makes Fromsoft games and other fantastic action games work is by making all of those animations incredibly readable and learnable. Even Lies of P following the "haha fuck you" fakeout timing design of Elden Ring has a manageable number of animations to learn the silly timings for. In this case, it's just whether you have the reaction times necessary, because the average player will never memorize this many animations. However, the game up to that point hadn't required this skill much at all, with all the earlier bosses having very readable and learnable animations, so I would say overall good boss design with just a weird difficulty spike at the end. You can also tell the extremity of the final bosses is in response to how comically powerful the player is by the end, as the game literally winks at this when the second-to-last boss has the ability to instantly cancel some abilities that normally interrupt enemy boss animations with an instant counter where she throws you to the ground and kicks you in the stomach. (I could say a lot more about the boss animations and player toolkit, but I'm spending too much time lately writing game analysis for video essays and other things, maybe one day I'll fold it into an analysis of combat across similar games.)

Aside from that, my last gripe is the side content is pretty awful by the end. A few side quests were decent in at least leading to some more exploration and boss fights, but the vast majority are just literal chores. The exploration itself often felt great in the fundamentals, but the traversal mechanics were rough, with a lot of unnecessary hiccups in the animation and controls for jumping and climbing, especially some of the worst "attach to ropes/ledges" affordances I've seen in a game with this tier of visuals and animation. Lastly, far too many collectibles and a pointless and overdone fishing minigame. With some more restraint in side content, it could've been great on this axis, but you can tell these devs might not know what restraint was even if it was court ordered.

Likely won't come back to write more later when I'm done because I'm honestly just sticking it out to the end out of curiosity and for reference to compared to other Soulslikes and Metroidvanias. There are people who may disagree with all of this, that's fine, I'm pretty sure most of them are better at these games than they realize, but I've played, replayed, and studied enough of these to feel pretty confident this one is not going to land for a LOT of people who like these games without lowering the difficulty.

[edit] Only 20% of players have the "beat on standard mode" achievement. When you pick difficulty, the other option is literally called "story mode." I think perhaps something very major was lost in the translation of the English terminology here, folks. The last boss took me nearly 4 hours, and that's WITHOUT the extra phase for the true ending (because the game has a point of no return that I didn't catch the dialog describing, and I forgot to use a guide like you always have to for that).

This game is obnoxiously hard compared to many other major games in the genre. It's got difficulty sliders (that I've opted not to use because I want to understand the intended experience), but I don't know if making the game marginally easier through just modifying damage values would really improve the experience, depends on how you feel about that as a player. I generally feel like it defeats the point in certain types of combat design, and this is one of them for me -- it's clearly all designed around a kind of nearly flawless style of play and raising the margin for error would just make you not really see what they were going for.

The parry system is fundamentally more input-intensive and punishing than all the games that inspired this one. Every other game I've played has a more reliable block/parry mechanic other than Lies of P. It's nothing like Sekiro, so those comparisons are really misleading -- I think the average player who has actually played them both in a recent enough window would find this game moderately harder. That could be a positive for some, but it is definitely worth warning people going in.

As for Hollow Knight comparisons, it's also just not really close. Exploration is muuuuch more tedious, with far more frequent enemy placements and hazards that all do very obnoxious things. I say this as someone who barely ever dies in Hollow Knight, Sekiro, Souls games, etc, outside of boss fights, I've died just exploring in this game more than any game I've ever played that wasn't just a platformer with more checkpoints. The best Soulslikes AND Metroidvanias are very easy to not die during exploration while basically sprinting past 90% of enemies in the game when backtracking, this one is full of so many projectiles, flying enemies, sequence-based moving platforms, room-spanning hazards, and back-to-back elite enemies, you've gotta kill 30%-100% of what's on the path if you ever redo a room. (A lot of fans of these games don't realize how few enemies you actually have to kill when they're tuned well.)

I'm enjoying the experience enough to potentially finish it, biggest positive is the bosses are incredibly cool even if the fundamental design (especially in the first third) is overly frustrating, but I can't in good conscience add to an overall "recommend" on Steam because it's really not the kind of game it seems like it would be.