Thoughts after putting in 10+ hours

[yyoshh]

Overall I have to say that I really enjoyed the demo, so much so that I spent the time to grind out the levels for a large variety of weapons and skills so that I could have a better understanding of as much as possible. Build variety is surprisingly pretty fun, I found myself swapping between builds a ton and there's some really nice synergy available, it's just a shame that in order to really get to that point you have to invest a totally stupid amount of currency to upgrade. Why is there incentive to build for 3 loadouts but enhancing weapons and skills etc cost so much? I wouldn't be surprised if most everyone just sticks to their one or two weapons and not explore the variety at all, which imo is the very thing that lets this game stand out. You shouldn't make your shining feature be a slog or else people won't be able to see it before being turned off. In this same vein, I hope you make it possible to swap between loadouts faster and allow for doubletap or something to go from set 1 to set 3 etc.

My main complaint outside of the grind is mostly UI related. After grinding out a lot of levels and clearing the whole map multiple times I ended up with a looooooot of weapons filling my inventory, I hope there's a way to sell those in the main game. Also just a way to sort or fast scroll would be nice. I also found it strange that everything is listed in order of acquisition, it makes the perk list really sloppy feeling, and it makes going to use the newest item or checking out the newest weapon pretty annoying. I would recommend an ascending/descending toggle at least.

With stats and weapons, it would be really helpful if there were both a comparison visual for weapons as well as a current stats visual that takes into account your perk. When I was initially levelling up I had to check over and over again and do the math myself for where to invest my levels to be able to equip a weapon while wearing the boss items. And with the weapons it would be nice to have a compare with the weapon you're switching out or current weapon or something along those lines, no comparison combined with the massively cluttered inventory makes trying to compare an earlier acquired weapon to the shiny new one very annoying.

The criticism I have for balance and combat is really minor, it seems like I may be in a minority in thinking that the combat feels nice and rewarding overall. I understand the complaints about difficulty scaling and health pools of bosses etc, but this goes to my first point about everything costing way too much. If normal players are going through at a typical pace, then yes it scales up quite a lot and forces you to grind which nobody really wants to do. Some tweaking in that department would make things more inviting.
I messed around with all of the weapons and weapon types and theyre all pretty nice to use. the only thing thats weird to me is that the colossal light attack is like the slowest attack in the game and its much faster to do a dashing heavy or really anything else. It could be a design choice idk but it is strange lol.
The elemental implementation is really cool and i like how there's both an incentive to apply elements to enemies as well as yourself, except for poison. This makes using the rotten colossal just about impossible to use because every hit puts out a poisonous cloud and you end up killing yourself as much as everything else and there's no way around it. To be honest I did have fun using it and trying to make it work, but I couldn't help feel like it's an oversight rather than a design choice if all poison weapons just backfire on you like that lol. My favorite thing was grinding out the lumberjack mask which no normal player of the demo would have done because this took way too much time, but it's so cool and makes for some super fun builds (fix the hat clipping tho please!). Oh also because that reminded me, when you've maxed out your mask shards it should really be removed from the loot table altogether since making multiple doesn't do anything, and when you're sitting at max shards you get phantom loot drops which i presume are the shards but they wont add into your inventory.

Anyways yea overall I enjoyed the demo a lot, I had fun exploring the world and finding the secrets (I'm curious how many people missed the Guts colossal). The environment is really cool, especially the first arc. I think there's a lot of potential that I'm looking forward to and it would be a shame if people didn't give it a chance. I'm really excited to see what other weapons and skills and masks and enemies and whatever else the full game will have to offer