I want whoever did the balancing for Snake Eyes Poplar to be publicly stoned for his crimes
This game is great until you make the greatest sale of your life only to realize you actually just bought that fishing rod at a 300 percent markup and now the debt collectors are going to arrive to collect your intestines later in the day
I hecking love the grinding lands pepeW
Brave of Nintendo to release a DLC that's just 10 straight hours of Pearl and Marina sloppily making out in an elevator while Acht watches uncomfortably
2023
This review contains spoilers
Miyamoto "Let's Give War a Chance" Iori
Kino farming experience, does everything right. Most important thing: talking to villagers is worth doing because the script has life to it and the villagers will never repeat dialogue for a LONG time. Have hundreds of hours in this game and I still always talk to any villagers I come across just because I want to.
This game is just designed from start to finish nearly perfectly. There are some rough points like the Headless Ape x2, but everything is meaningfully and carefully designed. Extremely difficult, but fair game, like way more difficult than any of the Souls games I've played, which all have a plethora of builds to use, multiplayer co-op, and offline summons to supplement players who are struggling. In this game it's literally just learn the game's mechanics or die.
I think the point everything clicked for me in this game was Genichiro. He's a well-designed fight that I think perfectly teaches you how to do a lot of things well.
He has sweep attacks and thrust attacks that are visibly well-telegraphed and slow enough for people getting used to it to parry, his posture is suiting for a boss meaning you have to get used to or learn how whittling it down works (play aggressive or lose progress), he has ranged attacks that can be parried... He has a quick flurry combo with the same timing on it every time which will acclimate players to consecutive parrying, on phase 2 he adds a mix-up to follow-up after the overhead attack where he either sweeps or thrusts, which highlights why the rock paper scissors of jump, Mikiri, and deflect are wonderful, and of course the final phase teaches you lightning reversal. And then from there on the game keeps throwing different shit at you, and the difficulty continues rising.
I really think he's the perfect boss for acclimating new players to the game and it's just one example of the many bosses in this game that I think are thoughtfully designed. The feeling of getting better and absolutely obliterating bosses/enemies is unparalleled in this game, even more than From's other games since this game has all the spectacle to make it feel even more satisfying. I could go on, but I think this is one of my favorite games now.
I think the point everything clicked for me in this game was Genichiro. He's a well-designed fight that I think perfectly teaches you how to do a lot of things well.
He has sweep attacks and thrust attacks that are visibly well-telegraphed and slow enough for people getting used to it to parry, his posture is suiting for a boss meaning you have to get used to or learn how whittling it down works (play aggressive or lose progress), he has ranged attacks that can be parried... He has a quick flurry combo with the same timing on it every time which will acclimate players to consecutive parrying, on phase 2 he adds a mix-up to follow-up after the overhead attack where he either sweeps or thrusts, which highlights why the rock paper scissors of jump, Mikiri, and deflect are wonderful, and of course the final phase teaches you lightning reversal. And then from there on the game keeps throwing different shit at you, and the difficulty continues rising.
I really think he's the perfect boss for acclimating new players to the game and it's just one example of the many bosses in this game that I think are thoughtfully designed. The feeling of getting better and absolutely obliterating bosses/enemies is unparalleled in this game, even more than From's other games since this game has all the spectacle to make it feel even more satisfying. I could go on, but I think this is one of my favorite games now.
2016
I didn't have any personal issues with DS2 that were as major as some people have, but Christ just by comparison to the first and third games it looks bad. DS2 had a quantity over quality problem, which I didn't really think much during the playthrough until I played DS3 where pretty much every boss is cool or super inspired and unique in some way.
As someone who started with Elden Ring and worked my way through, I can see this is the transition point between the two in gameplay. DS3 is noticeably a LOT faster and to compensate for this, the stamina economy on all your actions has been increased greatly. In 1 and 2 you basically had to think about every roll and attack carefully and not get greedy, but in this game not only is spam rolling and attacking an option, but it works in a lot of scenarios. I was able to roll and attack the same amount with sub-2 digit Endurance in this game vs. my DS2 playthrough where I had 30+ END. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as the game takes this advantage this new advantage the player has and challenges it with faster, harder hitting bosses. Pontiff in particular stands out to me because he has a literal 6 hit combo that took me a while to figure out that is essentially just roll through the attack in certain directions 6 times in a row (with some timing involved).
That being said if you're going to have a game where rolling is this frequent, don't make the input queue for rolling last for a century, especially if you're going to give bosses options to punish rolling immediately out of hitstun. Like yeah, sure, I'll eat the hit because I timed the roll a split second too late. I'll learn next time. Don't really appreciate not pressing any more buttons during that hitstun and the game still making me roll into the follow-up after.
Areas are cool, weapons are cool, combat is faster, game is more DS1 than DS2, lacks a lot of the small imbalances that DS2 had like Lifegems and infinite Ring of Protection that invalidated the soul loss mechanic, it also went back to DS1-esque controls, meaning turning while sprinting isn't at such a wide angle, and you can change the direction mid-attack again! This game also had a really had a lot of "this is one of my new favorite bosses in Soulsborne" and not a lot of if any "this boss sucks and I can't wait for it to be over." It's insane how easy you can tell that not only was the original/a different team working on it but they actually had the time to polish it and properly bring their vision to fruition.
I think one of my primary thoughts in retrospect now is that Elden Ring really needed the sort of polish that this game had. I know that it's a massive game and all, but the boss variety in Elden Ring is infamously slanted towards re-using bosses, and the duo bosses were something they just forgot to program AI for, then broke the AI during a patch - AI went from oppressive and overwhelming to literally doing nothing. If the duo bosses in ER had the AI this and DS1 had it would be good. If all the bosses were as inspired as it that would be incredible. I guess what I'm saying is DS3 is basically Elden Ring but way more polished. A better game, even.
Okay time to go sit through some lore videos. Vaati save me AIEEEEEEEEEEEE
As someone who started with Elden Ring and worked my way through, I can see this is the transition point between the two in gameplay. DS3 is noticeably a LOT faster and to compensate for this, the stamina economy on all your actions has been increased greatly. In 1 and 2 you basically had to think about every roll and attack carefully and not get greedy, but in this game not only is spam rolling and attacking an option, but it works in a lot of scenarios. I was able to roll and attack the same amount with sub-2 digit Endurance in this game vs. my DS2 playthrough where I had 30+ END. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as the game takes this advantage this new advantage the player has and challenges it with faster, harder hitting bosses. Pontiff in particular stands out to me because he has a literal 6 hit combo that took me a while to figure out that is essentially just roll through the attack in certain directions 6 times in a row (with some timing involved).
That being said if you're going to have a game where rolling is this frequent, don't make the input queue for rolling last for a century, especially if you're going to give bosses options to punish rolling immediately out of hitstun. Like yeah, sure, I'll eat the hit because I timed the roll a split second too late. I'll learn next time. Don't really appreciate not pressing any more buttons during that hitstun and the game still making me roll into the follow-up after.
Areas are cool, weapons are cool, combat is faster, game is more DS1 than DS2, lacks a lot of the small imbalances that DS2 had like Lifegems and infinite Ring of Protection that invalidated the soul loss mechanic, it also went back to DS1-esque controls, meaning turning while sprinting isn't at such a wide angle, and you can change the direction mid-attack again! This game also had a really had a lot of "this is one of my new favorite bosses in Soulsborne" and not a lot of if any "this boss sucks and I can't wait for it to be over." It's insane how easy you can tell that not only was the original/a different team working on it but they actually had the time to polish it and properly bring their vision to fruition.
I think one of my primary thoughts in retrospect now is that Elden Ring really needed the sort of polish that this game had. I know that it's a massive game and all, but the boss variety in Elden Ring is infamously slanted towards re-using bosses, and the duo bosses were something they just forgot to program AI for, then broke the AI during a patch - AI went from oppressive and overwhelming to literally doing nothing. If the duo bosses in ER had the AI this and DS1 had it would be good. If all the bosses were as inspired as it that would be incredible. I guess what I'm saying is DS3 is basically Elden Ring but way more polished. A better game, even.
Okay time to go sit through some lore videos. Vaati save me AIEEEEEEEEEEEE
2014
Started with Elden Ring, going through all the DS games in order now. I've heard A LOT of negative things about DS2, so many things that I thought a lot of the worst this game had was going to be most of it.
-Controls are a little different from DS1 and get some getting used to, and it was really weird not being able to change directions while attacking out of a roll for instance.
-Really weird decision to tie agility to the i-frames on your roll (LOL???)
-Hitboxes are at times questionable, usually with attacks that impale you, they teleport you onto the sword even if you've already rolled behind them, it's bizarre
-"This game is 90 percent dudes in armor" is a correct criticism, but the bigger problem is the bosses are too easy because their movesets are minimal in size, variation, and mix-ups. Oh hey, the stationary boss hits twice close to them with the exact same timing and has no other melee options, how novel. One of the bosses that killed me the most has like 5 moves and only killed me so many times because his damage, poise damage, and HP are just so overtuned. Just take a boss with a very simple moveset, give them some gratuitously large hitboxes and jack their stats and you have a boss! Nice.
-Lifegems are to me a positive addition since they aren't the best for healing mid-fight and are mainly just used in between fights for prolonging exploration runs 90 percent of the time. Sure, it makes the feeling of relief when you finally make it to a bonfire lesser, but the trade-off is a less stressful experience in general which usually means I play for longer.
-Souls games in my experience usually have a rough start until you manage to get a build going but man does this game really wants you to quit early. The hollowing mechanic reducing your HP repeatedly until it hits 50% and giving you only one Estus Flask can make things really hard especially when you consider enemies not respawning if you kill them too much. I'll admit I almost considered quitting early but stuck it out. Get the Estus Shards from Majula and only use Human Effigies early if you've accumulated multiple deaths. Unfortunately you have to respect the basic hollow enemies in forest because they learned from the Elden Ring school of PVP and camp behind greatshields while poking with a spear.
-There's a lot of BS level design but a lot of it is manageable either once you die to it the first time and think about how to approach the room, or you just play under the assumption that there's a gank or some ambush around every corner. The worst this game has to offer in levels is THE WORST, but that's not ALL the game has fortunately. It has some good stuff and if you just approach things carefully and safely in general you should be alright.
-Bonfire Ascetics are a really cool mechanic and it's also very cool that there are actual differences between NG+ and the base game??? Why don't the other games do this?
-Economy on some items is bizarre. Slabs were extremely rare in 1 but in this game I've always had twice as many Slabs as I had chunks, and the shop only starts selling them in unlimited stock once you beat the game? Great. Why is Ring of Protection only 3,000 souls to repair infinitely? It effectively removes the soul recovery and hollowing mechanics with the only trade-off being such an insignificant amount of souls it's laughable. Maybe some of the complaints about lifegems breaking balance would be offset by simply making them not cost so little. Make them like 3k per small lifegem or something, and the ring cost 10k to repair.
-It's just more Dark Souls so I enjoyed it when I wasn't in Frigid Outskirts, Cave of the Dead, Black Gulch, the Pit, or doing some cancerous boss runback. Sir Alonne is the GOAT and Burnt Ivory would be 10 times better as a 1 on 1 duel without all the shit before it, even if the idea is cool on paper.
-Controls are a little different from DS1 and get some getting used to, and it was really weird not being able to change directions while attacking out of a roll for instance.
-Really weird decision to tie agility to the i-frames on your roll (LOL???)
-Hitboxes are at times questionable, usually with attacks that impale you, they teleport you onto the sword even if you've already rolled behind them, it's bizarre
-"This game is 90 percent dudes in armor" is a correct criticism, but the bigger problem is the bosses are too easy because their movesets are minimal in size, variation, and mix-ups. Oh hey, the stationary boss hits twice close to them with the exact same timing and has no other melee options, how novel. One of the bosses that killed me the most has like 5 moves and only killed me so many times because his damage, poise damage, and HP are just so overtuned. Just take a boss with a very simple moveset, give them some gratuitously large hitboxes and jack their stats and you have a boss! Nice.
-Lifegems are to me a positive addition since they aren't the best for healing mid-fight and are mainly just used in between fights for prolonging exploration runs 90 percent of the time. Sure, it makes the feeling of relief when you finally make it to a bonfire lesser, but the trade-off is a less stressful experience in general which usually means I play for longer.
-Souls games in my experience usually have a rough start until you manage to get a build going but man does this game really wants you to quit early. The hollowing mechanic reducing your HP repeatedly until it hits 50% and giving you only one Estus Flask can make things really hard especially when you consider enemies not respawning if you kill them too much. I'll admit I almost considered quitting early but stuck it out. Get the Estus Shards from Majula and only use Human Effigies early if you've accumulated multiple deaths. Unfortunately you have to respect the basic hollow enemies in forest because they learned from the Elden Ring school of PVP and camp behind greatshields while poking with a spear.
-There's a lot of BS level design but a lot of it is manageable either once you die to it the first time and think about how to approach the room, or you just play under the assumption that there's a gank or some ambush around every corner. The worst this game has to offer in levels is THE WORST, but that's not ALL the game has fortunately. It has some good stuff and if you just approach things carefully and safely in general you should be alright.
-Bonfire Ascetics are a really cool mechanic and it's also very cool that there are actual differences between NG+ and the base game??? Why don't the other games do this?
-Economy on some items is bizarre. Slabs were extremely rare in 1 but in this game I've always had twice as many Slabs as I had chunks, and the shop only starts selling them in unlimited stock once you beat the game? Great. Why is Ring of Protection only 3,000 souls to repair infinitely? It effectively removes the soul recovery and hollowing mechanics with the only trade-off being such an insignificant amount of souls it's laughable. Maybe some of the complaints about lifegems breaking balance would be offset by simply making them not cost so little. Make them like 3k per small lifegem or something, and the ring cost 10k to repair.
-It's just more Dark Souls so I enjoyed it when I wasn't in Frigid Outskirts, Cave of the Dead, Black Gulch, the Pit, or doing some cancerous boss runback. Sir Alonne is the GOAT and Burnt Ivory would be 10 times better as a 1 on 1 duel without all the shit before it, even if the idea is cool on paper.
Started with Elden Ring, going back and playing through all the Souls games minus Demon's Souls/Bloodborne because I don't have a Playstation, surely it'll come to PC soon right? My only frame of reference so far for Soulslikes is Elden Ring so if you don't like me comparing the two then stop reading.
I find it rather interesting that a lot of the DNA in Elden Ring can be found here in the original (sans Demon's Souls) in that there are a lot of diverging paths and exploration is on some level free-form. I was expecting a mostly linear experience but found it was actually pretty open-ended which was really neat, and stumbling randomly across new areas when I was just expecting a dead-end with some item was fantastic. The whole "if you're stuck somewhere go some place else" idea is present here as well, although the lack of fast travel until O&S ended up being really annoying for backtracking.
I was expecting to be more annoyed by the massive walks of shame but I got pretty used to them quickly. There are some that are more egregious than others, but the game teaches you to be patient and slow when exploring, so taking time to go back to the boss room wasn't as frustrating (unless I had to go through annoying enemies to get there.) The walks in this game make the run back to Placidusax look like child's play, since while it's pretty long with that fight, you can at least run past a lot of the enemies whereas in this game you often are pretty much forced to fight them unless you want to get stabbed in the back.
PvP is just as bad as Elden Ring, tried it out for a bit, and got teleport backstabbed by a gravekeeper UGS that one-shot me three times in a row before I gave up on trying to guess where he was on his screen due to latency. Speaking of, it's really neat and interesting to me that there are so many different PvP factions that often have unique mechanics. Makes me wonder what it was like in the hayday at peak activity. Kinda rare to get invaded in my playthroughs.
Damage scaling was a nice surprise but it took me one bricked build to realize that vigor is a stat you basically don't have to invest in for half the game. I got stuck on Moonlight on my first playthrough because my ZDPS dex build was failing to 6-round him and it was getting annoying. Read a thread that said you should be 3-rounding him and that re-speccing isn't in the game and got the hint. On my second I basically didn't even level Vigor at all for like half the game.
This game does Dual Bosses right which is a shame since Elden Ring seems to have deeply forgotten this methodology of design. O&S might be one of my favorite bosses now and it's comical to compare it to the foreskin duo in ER. That being said, while boss design in some respects is better, some are just kind of... bad? Capra Demon stands out to me since he's really aggressive and in a tiny room with two dogs that also rush you down, so there's basically nowhere to run and heal. Sure, you can just adapt by playing aggressive and using shield instead of trying to heal off all damage, but I can't help but feel like this fight would be more fun if you had A LITTLE more space between the enemies before they were on you and the arena were maybe... twice as large. with another arena that size placed horizontally? I don't know.
idk how to finish this off, I'll just say Claymore is my baby (love the rolling two-handed R1) and it's insane how they only have one ring slot in the game since one of them is permanently taken up by Ring of Favor and Protection. Moving on to Dark Souls 2 next, surely it can't be that bad right?
I find it rather interesting that a lot of the DNA in Elden Ring can be found here in the original (sans Demon's Souls) in that there are a lot of diverging paths and exploration is on some level free-form. I was expecting a mostly linear experience but found it was actually pretty open-ended which was really neat, and stumbling randomly across new areas when I was just expecting a dead-end with some item was fantastic. The whole "if you're stuck somewhere go some place else" idea is present here as well, although the lack of fast travel until O&S ended up being really annoying for backtracking.
I was expecting to be more annoyed by the massive walks of shame but I got pretty used to them quickly. There are some that are more egregious than others, but the game teaches you to be patient and slow when exploring, so taking time to go back to the boss room wasn't as frustrating (unless I had to go through annoying enemies to get there.) The walks in this game make the run back to Placidusax look like child's play, since while it's pretty long with that fight, you can at least run past a lot of the enemies whereas in this game you often are pretty much forced to fight them unless you want to get stabbed in the back.
PvP is just as bad as Elden Ring, tried it out for a bit, and got teleport backstabbed by a gravekeeper UGS that one-shot me three times in a row before I gave up on trying to guess where he was on his screen due to latency. Speaking of, it's really neat and interesting to me that there are so many different PvP factions that often have unique mechanics. Makes me wonder what it was like in the hayday at peak activity. Kinda rare to get invaded in my playthroughs.
Damage scaling was a nice surprise but it took me one bricked build to realize that vigor is a stat you basically don't have to invest in for half the game. I got stuck on Moonlight on my first playthrough because my ZDPS dex build was failing to 6-round him and it was getting annoying. Read a thread that said you should be 3-rounding him and that re-speccing isn't in the game and got the hint. On my second I basically didn't even level Vigor at all for like half the game.
This game does Dual Bosses right which is a shame since Elden Ring seems to have deeply forgotten this methodology of design. O&S might be one of my favorite bosses now and it's comical to compare it to the foreskin duo in ER. That being said, while boss design in some respects is better, some are just kind of... bad? Capra Demon stands out to me since he's really aggressive and in a tiny room with two dogs that also rush you down, so there's basically nowhere to run and heal. Sure, you can just adapt by playing aggressive and using shield instead of trying to heal off all damage, but I can't help but feel like this fight would be more fun if you had A LITTLE more space between the enemies before they were on you and the arena were maybe... twice as large. with another arena that size placed horizontally? I don't know.
idk how to finish this off, I'll just say Claymore is my baby (love the rolling two-handed R1) and it's insane how they only have one ring slot in the game since one of them is permanently taken up by Ring of Favor and Protection. Moving on to Dark Souls 2 next, surely it can't be that bad right?
I love Ina!
Crazy that they just put an entire extra Hyrule under the old one. This game is just better BOTW, and I like the overall mechanics, but menuing during combat remains REALLY tedious and you can still just pause and restore your health to full at any time during battle. There are also frame drops in certain areas that are hard to ignore, but I will overlook it because this game as a whole is still impressive anyways.
Cute game, but very simplistic gameplay that can be pretty boring. After a while I determined I was playing out of obligation and not fun, so I quit. Also fuck Crunchyroll.
2016
I quit like 2 or 3 years ago? I remember playing this game during a time when reddit was sucking Vespa off for everything, and quit around the time they've been turning on them (rightfully so.)
This game at the time had an issue where upgrades kept getting power crept by new systems, which increased the amount of time to max out characters significantly if you're F2P, but not if you pay. That's their way of getting your money when you can just use free currency to purchase a unit instead of rolling the gacha.
The amount of resources you need to max out a unit even then was absurd and it would take months to do. I was at the point where I finally had a full team and was content, and then several new time gated upgrades got added and I got fed up. Literally a job of a game, and the gameplay itself isn't even that good. People who pay are strictly better than you and there's nothing you can really do about it.
This game at the time had an issue where upgrades kept getting power crept by new systems, which increased the amount of time to max out characters significantly if you're F2P, but not if you pay. That's their way of getting your money when you can just use free currency to purchase a unit instead of rolling the gacha.
The amount of resources you need to max out a unit even then was absurd and it would take months to do. I was at the point where I finally had a full team and was content, and then several new time gated upgrades got added and I got fed up. Literally a job of a game, and the gameplay itself isn't even that good. People who pay are strictly better than you and there's nothing you can really do about it.
A really good metroidvania that I have minimal issues with. The main one I can think of is that the way forward can be pretty cryptic at times, not in a "you have to just explore to find the path now" kind of way, but a "you have to do randomly some specific stuff in area 3 to proceed in the next area" type of stuff.