Good points and yes the rabbits at the farm are insanely hard for the very first encounters. It’s easily the hardest fights you’ll have in the entire first act.

I did appreciate the different types of dialog skills but really I think it could have been done better. Mostly because there are so many other skills to level into that by the time you’re done, you’ll probably have not even hit level 10 on your main weapon skills with some characters. I’d say you get about 2 skills that you can max out with each character and then 2 other skills you can half invest in by the end. And that’s out of close to 30 skills I think? So there’s just much more meaningful stuff to invest in.

IMO the way this should’ve been handled is through skills. So have a general speech stat that allows you to talk your way through difficult conversations and then either use items or actual skill points to get special outcomes using kiss/kick/smart ass. They also aren’t used the same amount it seems. Smart ass barely seems used in the second half of the game. Kick ass is used the moss, kiss ass somewhere in between. Just an odd choice of systems.

Good to hear. I’ve heard really great things about 3 so I’m excited to try it. Your points did bring up what I thought a lot about this game though. It feels like they had a lot of time for world building, dialog, and level design but just never put all that work to good use. Likely that was due to time and budget but what you get is a product spread too thin. Still fun but not enough meat on the bone to stay constantly engaged.

And yeah talking to people was fun with the voice actors doing a great job but I look forward to actually seeing their faces instead of a poorly rendered character portrait.

eh don’t write it off entirely, these things bothered me but I still think the game is decent especially for an old school RPG

Well saying the nemesis system wouldn’t have worked well in other games is almost assuming that it wouldn’t be changed or evolved to fit other genres. People forget that the real damage some patents/copyrights do is not in their explicit existence, it’s the sphere of influence they exert on related concepts entirely. We weren’t just robbed of the nemesis system, we were robbed of anything even slightly resembling it.

And I feel like once you understand that you realize it can be adapted to greater things. Spider Man games could have used it. Assassins creed would have been an amazing place for experimentation with those ideas. Could be adapted to Star Wars games, dragons dogma, yakuza, borderlands. And it doesn’t need to be a central focus of these games like it was with the WB games. But even the concept of having enemies that kill you be leveled up in some way is now tainted.

Yeah I’m not sure why I had so much trouble doing the controller combos but they would trigger fine sometimes and other times not at all. I just think doing combos with the movement stick is awkward in general because I have to move differently to activate them and can’t go where I want for a moment.

And yes the secondary attack for some weapons is very different, that is true but the game oddly doesn’t make much use of the bumpers so it would have been easy to do a combo button that way.

The way I would’ve done it probably is just to make the left stick a modifier button that made it to where you could do LT+A,B,X,Y combos to heal and what not. Holding LT+Left stick direction+attack would do the katana combos. And then just use RB for the alt fire button.

I think I share a lot of your thoughts and they apply pretty cleanly to my experience on hard difficulty as well. I can’t imagine insane difficulty just because as you said it’s like walking a marathon except the marathon is longer.

That and there are many many instances of damage in this game that are just basically impossible to avoid and deal way too much for group scenarios. Like yes I’m busy fighting 15 of the low level grunts but I took a third of my health in damage from some mob pounding on the ground out of my view.

Also maybe this is just a controller thing but the combos were infuriating to activate. Most of the time they would be ignored as inputs unless I was very deliberate and they never really flowed properly.

A bizarre decision was to use combos like moving the left stick right twice and left trigger to heal. Instead of just… hold right on movement and press left trigger. That was only done because they needed two attack buttons for some reason even though holding the right trigger for a heavy attack would have worked just fine.

What’s even more funny is that the victory lap you asked for is in there. It’s just not a level, it’s the ramp up to the final boss area. And I recognized it for what it was and got pretty disappointed that I could only use the sword that this entire game has been working up to for like a total of 3 minutes on mobs. That’s insane and just plain bad design for an FPS like this. Now reflecting on it I’m not sure if I’d land at the 8 I initially said. I think it’s a 7 or maybe even a bit lower for me

What I noticed is that my favorite FPS in this genre really do a nice crescendo towards the end that the 2013 reboot game lacks.

I mean they do great on enemy variety. They need some tweaking on damage but otherwise fine. Gun play is mostly good to excellent. But what’s lacking is that thing where the arenas get more and more intense. Enemies are combined in various types to make each encounter play much differently.

Like how in the newer doom games you typically have units that snipe at your from range, ones that are highly mobile, others that can tank damage. So in higher level combat you’re just swapping weapons constantly to counter each different mob while also coming up with unique strategies for each arena.

The arenas here are mostly plain. You have almost no verticality in any arena. Your movement is beyond basic and stilted. And then when you finally get some bigger battles you realize that none of the mobs really mesh together well at all.

To put it bluntly it’s like the difference between Batman Arkham series games where each enemy makes you dance to kill them versus Skyrim fighting 50 NPCs. They don’t play off of each other, they’re all just constantly fighting for your attention versus a complex and rewarding dance. A good FPS game is mostly measured by how differently you need to approach each encounter and here it’s almost all one note unfortunately.

I think the idea of playing through the OG game is a good one, the one I played (2013) you might just play for about an hour or so and if it’s not really clicking with you at any point, you may just drop it is my advice. The game is alright enjoyable but it never evolves much until the very end so if it’s not your thing, don’t force yourself to play it

I hear your point about the last part. It’s great that this sort of old school FPS got made in 2013 but ultimately I feel it’s been outpaced by newer games like the modern DOOM games. The two newer Doom games are just FPS perfected honestly even if they aren’t for everyone. They’re fast paced, varied, and compared to something like this they make this look slow and unsatisfying. But reject that comparison and this game is still enjoyable, if buggy at times.

They were more competent bozos. They ran Germany the way that your stupid friend gets laid more often because they aren’t smart enough to be embarrassed by themselves and they know only one goal.

Whereas these guys run America like an ugly stupid person that insists that no, actually, they have already in fact convinced you to sleep with them despite what your words say and the goal is to confuse you into bed.

It’s not nonsense at all, you can move to another country to make them try to sue you internationally which most of the time they won’t bother with. That and they’d have to track you down in the new country, it complicates things for them more than for you. Even just moving to Canada is a significant legal hurdle for them.

And I’m saying this post-trial not currently or as a criminal. If he’s found guilty, yeah he’d have to go to Russia. But if he’s found innocent and they’re pestering him, he has options is all I’m saying.

Not sure why you think this, they’d need a lawsuit with merits and standing. And if you do it enough there wrong way, the court can absolutely protect whoever it is you’re suing or they can counter sue.

Or even more realistically, Luigi can make his court appearances and ignore the lawsuits. At some point paying a lawyer to harass people with no money isn’t worth it. You can also waste their time as much as they waste yours and cost them money. Just get a cheap lawyer and tell them you’ll pay them to waste as much of their time as possible and it works. Your case may take 5-10 years to resolve that way.

Or you can just leave the country. Which sucks but it’s better than being harassed all the time and bankrupt.

Why do people assume that scientists don’t sanity check themselves? Genuine question, no offense to the OC here.

It’s not suspicious really. They apparently don’t operate in Florida due to those ID laws. It’s more so just that the states have targeted PornHub specifically for their bans to start with and since PH is owned by a conglomerate of sites similar to them, it’s affected many of those sites. Smaller sites remain unaffected often times.

Sorry to hear that but I can definitely understand why that would happen lol. That button is getting a lot of action.

Have you figured out any way to mitigate the arthritis issue? I know there are accessibility controllers out there to help with that. Would hate to hear that it causes you to play games less if that’s the case.

Luckily this game just clicked for me in that way with the parry system but I get why people would immediately be turned off if they couldn’t get it down.

I wouldn’t say it’s really bugs I experienced, the game just seems to play fast and loose with its hitboxes at times. Some of it is fine and it’s a game that needs to be playable so I understand but I think most souls players have had the experience of being hit by a weapon whose speed is nearly zero at the end of a swing but still does full damage, it’s just how the games have always been from what I can tell.

That and being hit because I’m too close to an enemy so the cylinder hitbox around their sword clips me, that happens. Or being hit while behind or beside an enemy happens sometimes. Just frustrating in this game more than most because when those confusing hits do happen, they do massive damage that is harder to recover than it would be in a souls game.

Also very good to hear the final boss is what I’m working toward. I know Owl 2 is optional but I wanted to push myself. I’m fine with the difficulty but the fight was pretty silly and grindy. Just highlighted some of the issues I had with other enemies but I’m not judging the whole game on either that or the demon.

And yes you’re spot on about the demon lol. My thoughts exactly were that it seems just ported from another game and utilizes few of the mechanics I’ve been honing my skills at.

I did think it was the final boss though so hearing people talk about how the actual final boss is better is giving me hope. The souls games are at their peak when you finish a final boss and feel like a Karate kid moment where the wax on wax off of the systems are showing their merit of teaching you to master them. Looking forward to it and thanks for your input

I think that’s why I don’t enjoy this as much as other souls games. It means you spend a lot less time just wandering and slowly getting to a new room or hallway bit by bit. And there aren’t a whole lot of regular enemies that I have to square off against, just mini bosses. The levels also don’t have the same variance to them that other Souls games do, it’s all pretty locked in reality.

So yeah I can’t say I will super remember the locations like I do with other souls games or remember certain enemies like I would the knight archers of Anor Londo. It feels more like a boss rush game

They are all over the place for certain enemies, you’re probably just used to it and are using sound and rhythm for most of it. Which is something I’ve had to get used to but I noticed many of the enemies make it harder to learn them because what I expect vs what I get out of the parry makes less sense.

I think most of the sword based enemies you’re correct, their attacks are fair and the timings make sense. It’s on the other enemies that I have issues. Specifically any spear enemy or any enemy who puts their weapon in the wall or floor or any enemy who has an exceptionally large weapon.

For enemies that put their weapon in the floor, of which there are quite a few in this game, they are incredibly hard to parry. How are you supposed to parry a weapon you can’t see coming? You just have to memorize the timing on most of them.

Similarly due to how circles work, if you’re close to an enemy with a large weapon you’re going to get hit sooner if you’re closer to them. Works mostly fine if the enemy is still, this makes sense to the brain. But when the enemy is jumping, flying, moving quickly it makes it very hard to even understand when the weapon might land. And if you’re close up to one of these enemies, the hitbox often extends even from the hilt of their sword. For instance I’ve been hit several times while hugging an enemy who thrusts away from me toward the side but the hilt of their sword does damage to me because its hitbox is likely a cylinder.

It’s not the worst thing in the world, it’s an improvement from other souls games. But they even do this intentionally just to mess with you and make swing speed varied at times even though there’s no way you can do it visually for some enemies.

So yes the timings are all over the place but it’s even intentional. Each different weapon used by the different enemies is something you must die and learn to parry. On the whole it’s mostly fair, but certain enemies it’s deliberate and frustrating.

Definitely I appreciate that. I’ll see how the ending goes and maybe give NG+ a shot. Just have a lot of other patient games on the list ya know? Either way thanks for your input!