this game will be a pass from me

[ZexxCrine]

saw the trailer and was intrigued. then I saw there was a demo. the demo prevented me from having to refund this game. according to the demo, this is exactly how the game will be.

The combat is far too clunky. I believe the devs were going for a more methodical approach and that would be fine if they had reached that goal. however, the demo leads me to believe that the game is just poorly crafted. your attacks are slow and your actions are slower. this creates a terrible play feel because using skills is a commitment that isn't worth the cost. this will naturally lead the player into a mindset to use normal attacks more than skills. I found myself doing that anyway. the game even rewards this play by increasing your affinity at a faster rate. when you have created a mechanic that your player has no real reason to use, you have failed.

furthermore nothing can be canceled. I was hoping to see this on a skill tree somewhere, but there are no true cancels in the game, just more commitments. you can't dash or jump cancel, you can only dash or jump and then cancel that into an attack, but your attack replaces the endlag it doesn't remove it, not that it really matters in the case that you will be avoiding an attack with your dash/jump but canceling the end of those actions with an attack should be standard not a skill you need to invest in. without these things being a standard feature it creates a very slow and unrewarding feeling of "i see an attack coming so I dash through it, now I have to wait until the game decides I can attack"

The first boss was really scary in terms of what the design of the game going forward will be. this boss was designed to force you into using Zaav. you must use Zaav. you like the sword? ♥♥♥♥ you kid, switch to Zaav. I get it. this boss is the zaav tutorial and thus should give the player an advantage for using Zaav as a means to teach new mechanics. however, the boss outright tries its hardest to disallow using Aisha. that is why it is concerning. in a game that presumably has 4 or more spirits that give distinct movesets, you should allow the player to use whatever fits their playsyle more. some should have an advantage and others should be weaker, but making something unusable is a big mistake. this first boss has 2 attacks that are problematic. the first is a 360 fissure AOE that aisha cannot dodge. even if you time it "correctly" the visual for the fissure fades away and you still get hit by a lingering invisible hitbox. yet Zaav can jump it and land on the fissure visual and not get hit. this screams of purposly designing a move to be undodgable by aisha rather than just designing a move that you need to dodge. the second is the missle barage. zaav can just use his skill to become invincible and dodge it. you need to be far enough away from the boss to sheath your sword and run away to avoid it otherwise. I really hope that this boss isn't representative of future content. I really don't want the final boss for instance to be like "♥♥♥♥ you kid use this specific daemon because its the one I want you to use"

the third and final issue I have is the massive amount of controller input bugs I experienced with the game. it began immediatly. in the options when you first boot up the demo puting the game in fullscreen caused my inputs to double sometimes. repeatedly making the game windowed and fulscreen again stacked the effect until hittng down moved me down the entire options menu. I unplugged and pluged my controller back in and all of the sudden every single button on my controller was up. no matter what button I pressed, the cursor moved up. finally, after restarting the game, I got it to work properly. however, through the entire demo the game told me to press A to interact with things. after messing around with all the buttons on my controller, the B button was the real interact button. not sure if the prompt or the button is currently incorect or if there was a bug, but this needs to be fixed.

lastly it bugs the hell out of me that it is the current year and we have a game that isn't dubbed and has audio conversations that arn't subbed that play when your daemons talk to you in battle. like really?

I wanted to like the game. the trailer gave me Ys vibes and something to hold me over until Ys9 would have been nice. the game world is interesting as well and I would like to see where its going, but I can't stand the gameplay or design philosophy that was shown in the demo.

TLDR game is very janky and makes some questionable design decisions that are keeping me from what seems to be an interesting game.

[Laughing kookaburra]

agree with you, the combat is awful and the game colors hurt my eyes

[Serprio]

Thanks for the good write up I agree with a lot of this. The no canceling in combat feels really bad being stuck in place for so long. After getting the cancel sword dash with attack skill it feels a bit better as I believe the delay is reduced overall. However, the skill does not let you cancel the dash midway; it has to be at the end. The enemies attacks are slow enough to compensate for the how slow your character is but it just feels bad. Trying the battle mode it was a definitely better swapping between characters / the two worlds and having more skills was alright (in particular the scythe was cool) but everything still had that slow clunk. It seems very strange to put weapon swapping speed and a diminished form of attack canceling in the skill tree.

That kind of continued in other parts of the game as well; the text boxes open slowly and have a delay before can press a button to bring up all text in the box. Demon memories also do not allow for advancing dialogue faster. I dislike being unable to advance scenes as fast as I can read and having to wait for the voice.

I also had problems with controller input and need to use mix of keyboard and controller to get through the demo.

TLDR; Interesting story but clunky slow gameplay that is a bit like Ys but worse