Just Finished It - God, that was NOT Fun...

[Rutsah]

I might write a proper review later, but for now, I just wanna pile up my thoughts about this mess:

1)Most areas are way smaller than they look. Especially towards the end-game, only the dust ziggurat was somewhat-properly sized. The rest of the areas were almost tiny, and pretty disappointing. (earlier areas were far larger)

2)Floating enemies can suck a d!ck. The game is in DESPERATE need of a double jump, especially when combining floating enemies with ranged attacks. More specifically, both the emberskulls and the hanged men can go f@ck themselves.

3)You can't finish this game without googling. It copies some of the worst aspects of Dark Souls, including not knowing wtf your own armor does. Not to mention that most of the time you need to read spreadsheets to figure out the ideal armor that is worth leveling. In other examples, I often didn't know what the brands I was just given actually did or how they worked, having to read the elements bosses are weak towards, learning that the same buffs don't stack (which makes me wonder why some rings are available twice in the game), or understanding how the convenants work. Also add to this not explaining wtf the refillable items you can earn from work do. I ended up accidentally getting 2 magic-refilling flasks because there was no explanation next to them, despite not even knowing how to cast magic. Heaven forbid the game explains what your stats do by the way.

4)The game will reset your refillable items in your quick-select EVERY time you resurrect, even if you don't want it to.

5)F@ck invincibility frames. That's just bad design.

6)In certain areas the platforming/exploration is actually pretty fun, including some of the final areas. (unfortunately some of the final areas also require leaps of faith, so that cancels out the good will you have). I am a big fan of how wall jump and dash interact.

7)The game gets progressively cheaper towards the end with boss designs, with RNG determining everything.



The only good boss fights in the entire game:
-Skourzh (though that still had a heavy amount of RNG)
-Murdiella (best boss fight in the game)
-That Stench Most Foul (I actually liked this one as a dagger-user, though from what I've seen online many consider it a weak fight, for me it was pretty ok)
-The Coveted (also a boss fight I really liked as a dagger-user, though most people don't)

The rest of the boss fights were all either so easy that I barely understood they were bosses, or complete bullsh!t, with little inbetween. More specifically the first bosses were too easy, the final bosses tended to be more bullsh!t.

Bosses you beat strictly based on RNG:
- The Third Lamp
- Witch of the Lake (don't you just LOVE it when your boss can fly off-screen, and potentially fire a KO bubble-stream from there?) (also as a dagger-user this was incredibly frustrating, as there were very few positions from where I could jump and attack her, the rest of the time the best I could do was just dodge her attacks from the ground and wait for her)
- The Nameless God (the last boss fight was 50% learning how his attacks work, 50%the game f@cking you with the RNG. His sword charge and grab charge have almost the exact same animation but completely different range and dodge-roll interaction, his soul volley MIGHT only send 5-6 of them your way or MIGHT send a whole barrage, if you have died to him previously the salt-break point will completely blind you due to the stupid lighting in the room, you MIGHT stagger him allowing you to do a second light attack combo or it MIGHT not and he ends up hitting you. Also you MIGHT get stack in the left wall, he MIGHT do 2-attack combo instead of a 3-attack combo, his first attack MIGHT hit you from behind him (or it might not). It was mostly a battle of frustration, as the only instance when you can safely damage him for a single hope (2 if you get lucky with the stagger) is after he has thrown his sword). And of course, last but certainly not least...
-THE TREE OF F@CKING MEN (by far the worst boss fight in the game). That thing can go f@ck itself.

Having finally finished it, I am honestly feeling frustrated. The final boss was not a good one, at all. You don't feel like you have learnt its tricks, you feel like you just got lucky.

[76561199071965260]

1) What do you mean "properly sized"? Properly sized compared to what?

2) There is no need for a double jump. Floating Enemies are only a real issue if you only use something (like daggers) that doesn't have reach. Emberskulls are very weak, its all about the timing and learning to avoid their attacks. I agree on the Hanged Man being frustrating, but even those are rather weak and any form of damage will interrupt their switch-teleport.

3) Yes you can finish the game without googling, its called exploration. There is no need to use spreadsheets or anything of that sort. Why not just upgrade the armor that you like / check which gives more defenses of the type you need and upgrade that?
The Brands literally tell you what they do in their description. The NPC that gives you the brand will also tell you what it does before you get it, so i don't know where the issue is.

To my Knowledge no Ring drops twice, unless you were starting with it.
Why would you get TWO Focus refill flasks, without reading what it does in the first place?
Even so, its not useless if you don't use magic, since everything costs focus.
Everything on the Skilltree tells you what the stat does and even if it didn't, its pretty self-explanatory.

4) Yes, that is how that works. You rest -> things reset. There is literally not downside to your things refilling, if you don't want that, then just don't use them??

5) How are iframes bad Design? Why are you upset that iframes exist?

6) The only Area that has "leaps of faith" to my knowledge is the Crypt of Dead Gods. Any other Area has some way to let you know where you can and can not jump. You can move the camera and look up/down btw.

7) The only Boss that has some kind of RNG is the Witch of the Lake.


I feel like you were overall determined from the start to dislike and be mad at the game. According to yourself, you were using Daggers, which by design lack reach, while complaining about them lacking reach. Thats the whole point!
You have 2 Weapon sets for a reason. If you lack something, like reach, with one set, make another that allows you to deal with your weakness of, in this case, reach.

[Yojo0o]

It kinda sounds like you never opened your inventory screen? Items have stats, and runes clearly show what they do...

Anyway, not that I'm a die-hard fan (just found the game and completed my first run-through this past week), but I don't really follow a lot of the rest of your complaints. They seem either entirely subjective frustrations that apply to the entire genre, or aren't factual. I don't follow any of the idea that bosses are RNG-based, except for the Witch boss flying off screen, that was an issue.

Also, I don't mean to brag, but I actually was able to take out the final boss on my first attempt. Felt like a culmination of learning the best ways to succeed in the game to me. I dodged nearly perfectly against his various windups, created gaps to re-buff my weapon, and convincingly took him out. Perhaps not the way the game was meant to be completed, but I found it quite satisfying.

[No One]

Games are for fun. If you're not having fun, you should stop playing it. Would you keep going to work if you stopped getting paid?

If you want to take out flying enemies easily you either need spells or one of the OP weapons with lots of burst damage. Hitting them once isn't hard. It's hitting them enough to kill them without knocking them out of range that's the issue. You have sweet air combos with scythes but you still can't something in the air with the full combo.

That said you can kill flying enemies with only a dagger, without getting hit. It just takes about ten minutes per unless you can lure them to the ground. See above regarding when games aren't fun.

Originally posted by Dwagon Knight:

Why not just upgrade the armor that you like / check which gives more defenses of the type you need and upgrade that?

Because most armour is trash. If you drop a roll category you'll end up dying more, not less.

Being naked is better than just about anything lighter than upgraded cavalier's. Without armour you die in two hits. With armour, you die in two hits but can't roll as well. Dark Souls is the same way.*

By contrast with the heaviest sets you can poise through one of the last boss' hits, for fun and profit.


--


Witch's RNG can be neutralized. Yes, she can go off screen and fire the shotgun flamethrower. However, if you start moving away from the edge as soon as she -might- be going off it, you can get far enough away to live. You'll probably lose the opportunity to hit her in the next cycle, but if you die you lose the opportunity to hit her in every cycle.

As far as I can tell, the Witch is the only boss that encourages usage of the correct armour. It's easy to screw up, but if you don't screw up completely the armour will save you. For every other boss, my advice is, "lol just don't screw up".

--

*A lot of Dark Souls is based on Dragon Quest. Dragon Quest's armour system is about making your healer's MP last longer. In DS and S&S, you don't normally die from running out of estus, so the armour system is almost entirely ill-fitting.

[Ñokk]

1)Earlier areas were far larger? Oh, you mean a Banquet, or do you mean a Village?
The earlier area that you're referring to is The Red Hall and it's an outlier when it comes to size.

2)I did a dagger playthrough, emberskulls die in a single kickflip, but hanged man are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, so you just don't fight more of them that you have to.

3)The fact that armor pieces that give you effects like wounding reduction or +10% damage don't say anything about it in the description is a bit annoying, but you don't need to read any spreadsheets to figure out "THE PERFECT ARMOR", if you're either so bad that you need every crutch you can get or you're so tryhard you can't play the game for more than 5 minutes without getting an itch to optimize something - it's not the game's fault. The only thing that I felt lnclined to do in my first playthrough is to go through my armor searching for the best fire resist in some instances like Wyrm or the Tree of Men.
Brands tell you exactly what they do, it seems like you just never figured out how to open an inventory.
You having to read boss resistances is another example of you either being bad and not doing any damage or you feeling inclined to meta everything.
Certain rings are available throughout the game twice for the same reason that certain armor sets and weapons are: your starting class. Would you want the game to change the loot from certain chests and bags depending on your starting class? You could google that the same effects don't stack or you can just spend 2 minutes testing if two grasping rings or Queen's crown and bloodflower ring do stack. For someone complaining about having to google you seem a bit too eager to look for answers on the internet rather than figuring out things on your own.

4)That is kind of annoying, a agree. DS1 had the same thing going with putting things you pick up on your hotbar and they realised it was annoying and "fixed" it in remaster.

5)What mechanic would you rather have to avoid damage?
Make shields mandatory and cut the variety of builds out of the game?
Take a Sekiro approach and build the game's combat around blocking and deflecting enemy attacks with your weapon? (ignore the fact that Sekiro also has i-frames on the dodge) Not gonna make sense with bosses that 10 times bigger than you are.
I don't think roll i-frames are a bad mechanic, we are getting to the time where rolling to avoid damage in videogames starts feeling stale, but you can't blame the devs (all 2 of them) for going with something that they know works instead of trying to come up with some revolutionary damage-aviod mechanic.
Or is your i-frame complaint based on you being unable to roll through stuff because you're either fatrolling or just bad?

6)There are no leaps of faith in this game: follow the water/candles. If you didn't pay enough attention to surroundings to figure this out - again, not game's fault.

7)"The Third Lamp" what?
Where's the RNG? Is the RNG in how Lamp chooses what attack to do? I'm pretty sure this is how most bosses operate in these games. Or are you talking about the second phase, in which you never payed attention to see the patterns? Are you complaining that the boss gets an expanded moveset and becomes more challenging in the second phase, requiring you to learn it's patterns instead of memorising singular attacks that it does in the first phase?

God's grab and thrust have simular but not the same animation. For a thrust he has a split-second wind-up when he assumes a T-pose and then hovers towards you, for a grab he has a longer wind-up, where squares up, moving his right hand behind and then hovers towards you with his right hand extanded and his left(sword) hand behind him, here's a comparison: https://i.imgur.com/dZgiPYd.png
That's a pretty subtle difference and it might be difficult to notice, especially with how the arena is. But that doesn't really matter because for both of these you just roll into him while he's charging and thats it.
There is also only one MIGHT in his fight:
-His barrage will sometimes fire less projectiles because he's doing it next to a wall and half of them get spawned inside the wall, so they don't fire.
-He has a set poise and your weapon does a set amount of poise damage, if you were to do the same attacks and count the number of hits - you would find out that you stagger him after the same number of hits every time.
-That is the single MIGHT that is correct, if he grabs you too close to one of the walls - he will slam you into it, that's dumb but not more dumb than Wyrm jumping off and killing himself sometimes or Stench's summons losing tracking and chilling on the edges of arena.
-Yes, he can interrupt his combo and hold each particular attack of it for about ~1.5 seconds according to where you are, that is an itended mechanic.
-I'm gonna call ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on his first combo attack hitting you behind him, I fought him many times and this attack has never him me when I was behind him.

THE TREE OF F@CKING MEN what? Same as with Lamp, you didn't say anything of substance regarding RNG in this bossfight, you just said "Tree of Men bad". Is this about flamethrowers? I guess it is RNG but you just move out before you get hit by them, and even if you do get hit by them, judging from you "reading the spreadsheets", you should be wearing blacksmith set to make a fire damage pretty insubstantial in this fight.

[Ñokk]

Originally posted by No One:

Being naked is better than just about anything lighter than upgraded cavalier's. Without armour you die in two hits. With armour, you die in two hits but can't roll as well. Dark Souls is the same way

I've seen multiple people doing their first playthrough with the same mentality only to start fighting a boss that double-taps them and decide to wear at least some light armor. Where they were getting double-tapped I was taking ~25% of my HP while being same level. Just having 100 defense gives you 33% damage resistance. Armor does make a difference.
The problem with rolls gets fixed with a wrapped link and this is the easiest to find secret door in the game with multiple bottles next to it.

The only time when I felt like I need a better than >50% wrapped link roll is when I fought Skourzh, Wyrm or Prince and I throught "I wish I wouldn't have to use 2-3 rolls to get behind them", especially with Wyrm's and Skourzh's breath attacks that start from underneath them, so you need to roll through them FAST when they start the animation.

[No One]

The grab gets me all the time but it doesn't do any damage so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Rutsah]

The reason I am complainging about i-frames is that it feels too cheap and overpowered. beat husk on the second try by rolling through f@cking pistol shots, same for trident kraekan and a lot of others, how the f@ck does that work? My suggestion for a replacement is a proper double jump, or alternatively making the parry work on more attacks. As it is now, it feels really cheap.

As for what the armors do, obviously I want an optimized build, but that's information that should be provided in-game and not from Google.

[Ñokk]

Originally posted by L. Rutsah:

The reason I am complainging about i-frames is that it feels too cheap and overpowered. beat husk on the second try by rolling through f@cking pistol shots, same for trident kraekan and a lot of others, how the f@ck does that work? My suggestion for a replacement is a proper double jump, or alternatively making the parry work on more attacks. As it is now, it feels really cheap.

As much as I would like to see something new that works in games like these, are you really gonna bring up the "it makes no sense" argument against a roll, that has been the staple of these games for almost 10 years because IT WORKS? And you're gonna do this against a team of 2 devs and a first installment of this game?
That's not complaining that something is bad, it's complaining that something isn't great.

Originally posted by L. Rutsah:

As for what the armors do, obviously I want an optimized build, but that's information that should be provided in-game and not from Google.

It's not obvious that you want an optimised build. You're complaining about roll being cheap and OP and saying that half of the bosses "were so easy that I barely understood they were bosses".
If you have an optimised armor set then bosses won't to enough damage for you to respect their moveset and if you have an optimised weapon - you will do so much damage that you won't even get a chance to see a boss moveset.
Combine optimised armor and weapon and you will just run up to the boss and trade hits with him and heal when needed, because you're just doing more damage to him than he does to you.
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game"

But if you do want to find an optimised armor set without having to google, here's how you do it: https://i.imgur.com/ZbS9E9m.png
You open up an armor info tab, you look at the defense values, you divide those by the weight and then you do all of this for every defense value for every armor piece and then you compare them while also keeping in mind your endurance. This is how people make these spreadsheets.

[HerrDave]

I agree with everything in this, except the Tree of Men - I'd replace him with Hager.

*Edit
I still love the game, 9/10

[AgataKoko]

Well, you've picked kinda long way to just say `I suck at it`

[^_^]

I found the game much better than Hollow Knight and i don't agree with any of the points especially not being able to beat the game without google or RNG determining everything what is that even supposed to mean?

The only two issues i had was no map / minimap and fast travel should work once you rest at the sanctuary not requiring you to use item to summon a NPC that allows you to do so.

I do remember witch of the lake going off-screen sometimes but it wasn't a big reason to make me dislike the game.