Iagovisk
60 Reviews liked by Iagovisk
Pokémon Y
2013
Going back to Pokemon X & Y for the first time since 2014, I honestly didn't know what to expect. I remember when I first played these games, I thought that they were awesome; the next big step towards the complete modernization of Pokemon. Over time, hindsight has given me the benefit of understanding that just because a model is in 3D, doesn't mean that the game is revolutionary.
Pokemon X & Y did a lot right. The additions to the core gameplay are, frankly, awesome. The new Fairy type helps balance out the type chart and gives an added challenge to a Dragon aficionado such as myself. Mega Evolution is a neat mechanic that feels like the natural evolution of the Pokemon formula, and in hindsight is much more fun to use when compared with Z-Moves or Dynamax. The route design is neat, with lots of little mazes that help the player get lost if they are looking for as many extra items as possible (much better than I remember!). The difficulty of the game is actually pretty high if you don't use the EXP Share, but the fact that it is added allows you to level up an expanded party without some Pokemon lagging behind (I rotated about 12 different party members in and out throughout most of the playthrough). And, the music in this game was also far better than I remember; the Gym battle theme in particular was a nice surprise.
However, as someone who is a fan of the much more realized stories of Generations 5 and 7, the story in Pokemon X & Y remains a complete letdown. None of the characters seem to be dynamic at all, and a lot of the narrative is boring and unrealized. It feels like the characters around you are nothing more than tools used to direct the player in the right direction. The game sets up a lowkey romance arc with Shauna near the beginning, but doesn't expand on it at all. Your rival often talks about their aspirations to get stronger in order to beat you, but your interactions feel so bland that it's hard to get behind the "neighborly bond" they so often bring up. And, Team Flare is an incredibly underwhelming group of antagonists when compared to the likes of Teams Galactic or Plasma, with a leader whose vision for the world has potential that the game again does not explore. And, since so much of the story centers around the "rarity" of Mega Evolution, it inhibits the mechanic from being actually used in battle by the majority of your opponents, which is a major disappointment.
The theme that the game's story leaves much more to be desired remains common throughout the rest of the game. For example, some of the environments can be enhanced with the 3D effects, but not all. In a similar vein, some of the trainers in the game appear in battle as fully realized 3D models, but this is a noticeable minority. The choices of who gets to be a 3D model is questionable as well; how come Team Flare Grunts are 3D models with animations, but not Gym Leaders or Elite Four members? There are also several areas that are blocked off in the game (like the other parts of the power plant) that the player never gets to explore, even in the postgame. Whether or not these changes were at somepoint planned in updates, or perhaps a "Pokemon Z," we shall never know, but what it does is leave behind an experience that is simply unfinished.
Pokemon X & Y are not bad games. However, they pale in comparison to other, better realized, more complete games in the series. These games are often labelled as the worst in the series by many, but I think that is a bit too harsh; these games are not as poor as the broken Generation 1 games, or act as complete letdowns like Ultra Sun & Moon. However, these entries do, in my opinion, fall in the latter half of the Pokemon series as a whole. I enjoyed my time with Pokemon X & Y, but I'm glad that it took me so long to return to Kalos, and I don't expect to do so again anytime soon. 5.5/10
Pokemon X & Y did a lot right. The additions to the core gameplay are, frankly, awesome. The new Fairy type helps balance out the type chart and gives an added challenge to a Dragon aficionado such as myself. Mega Evolution is a neat mechanic that feels like the natural evolution of the Pokemon formula, and in hindsight is much more fun to use when compared with Z-Moves or Dynamax. The route design is neat, with lots of little mazes that help the player get lost if they are looking for as many extra items as possible (much better than I remember!). The difficulty of the game is actually pretty high if you don't use the EXP Share, but the fact that it is added allows you to level up an expanded party without some Pokemon lagging behind (I rotated about 12 different party members in and out throughout most of the playthrough). And, the music in this game was also far better than I remember; the Gym battle theme in particular was a nice surprise.
However, as someone who is a fan of the much more realized stories of Generations 5 and 7, the story in Pokemon X & Y remains a complete letdown. None of the characters seem to be dynamic at all, and a lot of the narrative is boring and unrealized. It feels like the characters around you are nothing more than tools used to direct the player in the right direction. The game sets up a lowkey romance arc with Shauna near the beginning, but doesn't expand on it at all. Your rival often talks about their aspirations to get stronger in order to beat you, but your interactions feel so bland that it's hard to get behind the "neighborly bond" they so often bring up. And, Team Flare is an incredibly underwhelming group of antagonists when compared to the likes of Teams Galactic or Plasma, with a leader whose vision for the world has potential that the game again does not explore. And, since so much of the story centers around the "rarity" of Mega Evolution, it inhibits the mechanic from being actually used in battle by the majority of your opponents, which is a major disappointment.
The theme that the game's story leaves much more to be desired remains common throughout the rest of the game. For example, some of the environments can be enhanced with the 3D effects, but not all. In a similar vein, some of the trainers in the game appear in battle as fully realized 3D models, but this is a noticeable minority. The choices of who gets to be a 3D model is questionable as well; how come Team Flare Grunts are 3D models with animations, but not Gym Leaders or Elite Four members? There are also several areas that are blocked off in the game (like the other parts of the power plant) that the player never gets to explore, even in the postgame. Whether or not these changes were at somepoint planned in updates, or perhaps a "Pokemon Z," we shall never know, but what it does is leave behind an experience that is simply unfinished.
Pokemon X & Y are not bad games. However, they pale in comparison to other, better realized, more complete games in the series. These games are often labelled as the worst in the series by many, but I think that is a bit too harsh; these games are not as poor as the broken Generation 1 games, or act as complete letdowns like Ultra Sun & Moon. However, these entries do, in my opinion, fall in the latter half of the Pokemon series as a whole. I enjoyed my time with Pokemon X & Y, but I'm glad that it took me so long to return to Kalos, and I don't expect to do so again anytime soon. 5.5/10
Pokémon Y
2013
This marked the beginning of the end of Pokemon for me. 3D Models are just depraved compared to the Gen 5 2D models, they really lack a lot of detail and expression. New Pokemon added were alright; some hype, most mid to cringe. Movement in this is still locked to 8 directions which is bullshit for the first 3d pokemon game, the only time you could move freely was on Roller skates and those were slippery as fuck. 4/10
Halo 2
2004
Sex the game
Doom Eternal
2020
Doom Eternal, for all intents and purposes, is very much a Doom game. Featuring a killer soundtrack, tight controls, exceptional performance, and mountains of gore and visceral carnage, it's hard to not derive some amount of enjoyment from the game if you weren't already a fan of Doom (2016). That said, Doom Eternal is more than just a level pack, but rather a proper revision of the combat and gameplay of its predecessor. Manual dashing and air-dashing, increased mobility options, and Quake-esque Arena design reinvigorate the Doom formula, and are welcome changes given their inclusion into the game's main combat formula. However, I have some rather minor gripes which compel me to view Doom (2016) as the superior game.
Doom (2016), I feel, has a better grasp of handling the overall tone of the plot along with the campy nature of the series, whereas much of that camp isn't embraced nearly as much in Eternal, much to my disappointment. In 2016, when Doom Guy finds a toy, he doesn't just casually brandish the toy before stowing it away, he twists its appendages around and gives it a loving little fistbump, displaying how, despite the potentially world-ending events occurring around Doom Guy, he genuinely enjoys doing what he does and relishes every moment, as seen in prior Doom titles where Doom Guy finds peace in the slaughter. Doom Guy is, overall, much more serious in Eternal, and that's appropriate given the context of the story, but the subtle comedy associated with his character is more centered around his legendary status or intimidating nature rather than his own personality traits, which I missed.
In regards to the gameplay, Doom Eternal is a far more challenging title than 2016, even despite the fact that I played on controller and not mouse and keyboard like I did with 2016, requiring the player to micro-manage every tool at their disposal to maintain health, armor, ammo, then dodge, shoot, jump, and more in a frenetic, violent dance. The necessary actions per minute to stay on top of your game is much higher than 2016, and can leave the player feeling exhausted by the end given how deeply one must focus in combat. Funnily enough, I find Doom 2016 to be a rather relaxing game to play (which might sound preposterous given its content), but Eternal will have your hands sweating as you try to stay alive, much less prevail against the hordes of enemies facing you.
Speaking of enemies, Doom Eternal features an abundance of foes that desire nothing more then to see all your lives be lost and for you to perish. Many enemies from prior Doom titles re-emerge, such as the infamous Archvile, a frustrating, yet satisfying, enemy to kill as always, and new enemies like the Marauder. My gripe with Doom Eternal lies here in its enemy design. While bosses are generally better than in 2016, general enemy design in Eternal can feel suffocating given the various stipulations required to kill each and every one of them. The Pain Elemental and Cacodemon are weak to the Ballista, the Arachnotron and Revenant is weak to the Shotgun's grenade launcher mod or the Assault Rifle's sniper mod, etc. While these weaknesses force the player to constantly be switching weapons on the fly and are encouraged to use their entire arsenal, enemies also feel railroaded in that there are specific ways the player should approach their opponent with very little wiggle room if they want to succeed. 2016, rather, was more open-ended with its combat design, and allowed for many approaches to defeating individual enemies. I preferred 2016's approach to this aspect of combat design, and disliked feeling railroaded in this fashion throughout Eternal, but I encouraged Eternal's guiding hand in forcing the player to use their entire tools etc. A happy marriage of the these two methodologies would be a welcome change.
On the topic of railroading, yes, I am one of those people who despise the Marauders. Obviously, I can deal with them, as I completed the game, but that doesn't mean I don't take issue with their methodology. More than any other enemy in the game, the Marauder forces you to focus your entire attention on them, for they absolutely melt you if you don't and harass you constantly until you do. Marauders require you to stand at a specific distance to trigger their AI to create an opening to let them be attacked and staggered briefly, and only heavy weapons like the Shotguns and Ballista are effective enough in dealing with the Marauder. Stand anywhere outside of their very specific range, and the Marauder will either shoot you with their Shotgun or lob energy projectiles and tracking animals to attack you. The problem with the Marauder is that they are so specific as to what you must do to defeat them that everytime they appear on the field, they suck the fun out the entire encounter. You can't engage the Marauder when preoccupied by other demons since you can't initiate the AI 's attack to create an opening, you can't escape the Marauder's hail of projectiles when you are out of the desired range since you need to stand completely still to trigger it, and, again, only the Shotguns or Ballista can even efficiently kill him. The Marauder frustrates me to no end since you always have to leave it to the very last moment of the encounter so you can then play the "Marauder game" where you hope the AI finally understands you're at midrange and you should attack me in the desired way. There is a strategy to kill the Marauder in one go using the Full-auto shotgun and supplemental grenades, but I still dislike the design of the Marauder.
Finally, though the tool tips on the different enemies are neat ideas, they only further exemplify the limited approach one must take when engaging certain enemies, otherwise you are being inefficient and might kill yourself as a result.
Doom Eternal is still a very much enjoyable game with some neat lore bits for those interested, but it's still inferior to Doom 2016 in my eyes which felt like capturing Argent energy in a bottle. The combat in Eternal is much faster and the environments are more varied, with fantastic art design, but I feel 2016 is an overall more preferable package. If iD were to maintain the toolset of Eternal and polish other aspects of the game, then an eventual Doom sequel (or hell, even a new Quake game) would most certainly be one of the greatest FPS games ever made.
Doom (2016), I feel, has a better grasp of handling the overall tone of the plot along with the campy nature of the series, whereas much of that camp isn't embraced nearly as much in Eternal, much to my disappointment. In 2016, when Doom Guy finds a toy, he doesn't just casually brandish the toy before stowing it away, he twists its appendages around and gives it a loving little fistbump, displaying how, despite the potentially world-ending events occurring around Doom Guy, he genuinely enjoys doing what he does and relishes every moment, as seen in prior Doom titles where Doom Guy finds peace in the slaughter. Doom Guy is, overall, much more serious in Eternal, and that's appropriate given the context of the story, but the subtle comedy associated with his character is more centered around his legendary status or intimidating nature rather than his own personality traits, which I missed.
In regards to the gameplay, Doom Eternal is a far more challenging title than 2016, even despite the fact that I played on controller and not mouse and keyboard like I did with 2016, requiring the player to micro-manage every tool at their disposal to maintain health, armor, ammo, then dodge, shoot, jump, and more in a frenetic, violent dance. The necessary actions per minute to stay on top of your game is much higher than 2016, and can leave the player feeling exhausted by the end given how deeply one must focus in combat. Funnily enough, I find Doom 2016 to be a rather relaxing game to play (which might sound preposterous given its content), but Eternal will have your hands sweating as you try to stay alive, much less prevail against the hordes of enemies facing you.
Speaking of enemies, Doom Eternal features an abundance of foes that desire nothing more then to see all your lives be lost and for you to perish. Many enemies from prior Doom titles re-emerge, such as the infamous Archvile, a frustrating, yet satisfying, enemy to kill as always, and new enemies like the Marauder. My gripe with Doom Eternal lies here in its enemy design. While bosses are generally better than in 2016, general enemy design in Eternal can feel suffocating given the various stipulations required to kill each and every one of them. The Pain Elemental and Cacodemon are weak to the Ballista, the Arachnotron and Revenant is weak to the Shotgun's grenade launcher mod or the Assault Rifle's sniper mod, etc. While these weaknesses force the player to constantly be switching weapons on the fly and are encouraged to use their entire arsenal, enemies also feel railroaded in that there are specific ways the player should approach their opponent with very little wiggle room if they want to succeed. 2016, rather, was more open-ended with its combat design, and allowed for many approaches to defeating individual enemies. I preferred 2016's approach to this aspect of combat design, and disliked feeling railroaded in this fashion throughout Eternal, but I encouraged Eternal's guiding hand in forcing the player to use their entire tools etc. A happy marriage of the these two methodologies would be a welcome change.
On the topic of railroading, yes, I am one of those people who despise the Marauders. Obviously, I can deal with them, as I completed the game, but that doesn't mean I don't take issue with their methodology. More than any other enemy in the game, the Marauder forces you to focus your entire attention on them, for they absolutely melt you if you don't and harass you constantly until you do. Marauders require you to stand at a specific distance to trigger their AI to create an opening to let them be attacked and staggered briefly, and only heavy weapons like the Shotguns and Ballista are effective enough in dealing with the Marauder. Stand anywhere outside of their very specific range, and the Marauder will either shoot you with their Shotgun or lob energy projectiles and tracking animals to attack you. The problem with the Marauder is that they are so specific as to what you must do to defeat them that everytime they appear on the field, they suck the fun out the entire encounter. You can't engage the Marauder when preoccupied by other demons since you can't initiate the AI 's attack to create an opening, you can't escape the Marauder's hail of projectiles when you are out of the desired range since you need to stand completely still to trigger it, and, again, only the Shotguns or Ballista can even efficiently kill him. The Marauder frustrates me to no end since you always have to leave it to the very last moment of the encounter so you can then play the "Marauder game" where you hope the AI finally understands you're at midrange and you should attack me in the desired way. There is a strategy to kill the Marauder in one go using the Full-auto shotgun and supplemental grenades, but I still dislike the design of the Marauder.
Finally, though the tool tips on the different enemies are neat ideas, they only further exemplify the limited approach one must take when engaging certain enemies, otherwise you are being inefficient and might kill yourself as a result.
Doom Eternal is still a very much enjoyable game with some neat lore bits for those interested, but it's still inferior to Doom 2016 in my eyes which felt like capturing Argent energy in a bottle. The combat in Eternal is much faster and the environments are more varied, with fantastic art design, but I feel 2016 is an overall more preferable package. If iD were to maintain the toolset of Eternal and polish other aspects of the game, then an eventual Doom sequel (or hell, even a new Quake game) would most certainly be one of the greatest FPS games ever made.
Doom Eternal
2020
This review contains spoilers
Doom Eternal eh um jogo sensacional. Uma gameplay muito fluída e legal. A variedade de mortes especiais é muito legal, apenas em alguns casos que houve uma ""falta de capricho"" nessas mortes especiais, e isso em uns demônios mais raros de aparecer. Falando dos gráficos, estão absurdos, graças a engine ID Tech, o jogo roda a 60FPS nos consoles, mesmo sendo um jogo absurdo de lindo e claramente de end gen. O jogo tem uma diferença bem grande em relação ao 2016, este sendo muito mais agressivo e tendo como requerimento um reflexo muito bom. Porém, depois de umas 3 horas de gameplay, já dá pra se acostumar e o jogo fica mais simples. Mas, se não conseguir se adaptar no início, nunca vai conseguir se adaptar, e é bem recomendado um reembolso, por que em questão de agressividade, o jogo só piora (fica mais agressivo) conforme o tempo. O jogo tem também agora elementos "LARA CROFT". Em diversos momentos Slayer terá que se agarrar em coisas pra se balançar e chegar em um outro local. Ou se grudar em algumas paredes específicas. Isso é bem interessante, porém em alguns momentos tira completamente a imersão da gameplay passada. Em um momento você está em uma pura ação com vários e vários demônios, muita ação mesmo, e em menos de 5 segundos você se vê em um lugar onde tem que virar pulando pra lá, pulando pra cá, se agarrando aqui, se agarrando ali. Fora que de primeira você vai cair várias e várias vezes no limbo, e ter que recomeçar tudo de novo. Algumas paredes tem tempo pra você pular para outra que também tem tempo, e em alguns locais você precisa pular e no ar atirar em algum lugar, para dar dash e aí sim chegar no lugar que o jogo pede. Também há alguns momentos da gameplay em que você precisa nadar em uma água toxica. Isso também é bem chatinho de vez em quando, por que novamente tira a imersão do player na gameplay, e se não tiver alguns upgrades, vai morrer algumas vezes nessas fases e ter que recomeçar tudo do 0 também. Isso é bem frustrante e tira bastante a imersão do player durante o jogo. Uma coisa muito legal de Doom Eternal, é a quantidade de upgrades que você tem para o Slayer. São MUITOS upgrades, muitos mesmos, você pode melhorar as suas armas, cada uma tendo 2 upgrades básicos de evolução para utilidades completamente diferentes, e uma outra especial, que você precisa fazer um desafio in game para assim poder comprar a habilidade para tal arma. Você pode melhorar também vários aspectos in game naturais que não envolvem armas, como efeitos para a granada e granada de gelo, facilidade nas ações de plataforming como se agarrar ou grudar nas paredes, aumentar a velocidade de carga do dash, melhorar a roupa anti toxica para nadar na água tóxica. E também melhorar o seu mapa, para rastrear segredos de forma mais fácil, e entre outros tipos de upgrade. Você também tem outro tipo de upgrade especial, que são algumas pequenas habilidades durante a gameplay in game. Como desacelerar o tempo enquanto estiver no ar, fazer execuções gloriosas de mais longe, após uma execução gloriosa ganhar um boost de velocidade, e entre vários outros. São muitas melhorias, muitos upgrades, muita variedade entre eles. Isso, para quem não curtir o jogo de cara, com certeza vai assustar, pois são muitas informações logo na sua cara, porém, é só ir jogando, que naturalmente, assim como qualquer coisa em Doom, você vai aprendendo. Se você gostar do jogo você vai dominar rápido.
Para fazer os upgrades, você precisa de coletáveis, e tem muitos coletáveis no Doom Eternal. Existem vários discos de música, bonequinhos, baterias sentinelas, pedaços da história em escrita, entre outros...
Fazendo os upgrades certos para o mapa, a coleta destes itens fica bem divertida, e é uma diferenciada na gameplay, porém em alguns lugares, é extremamente confuso e complicado, pois são lugares gigantescos, e as vezes o mapa coloca lugares em baixo de você, sendo que o ponto de acesso a eles não é ali onde você está. Isso confunde demais. Nas fases, terão o chamado PORTÃO DO SLAYER. Você precisa pegar a Chave do Slayer para abrir esse portão, e nos portões que abri, as chaves sempre estavam próximas do portão. Sendo um pouco difícil de encontrar o verdadeiro caminho para pegá-las.
Ao adentrar, você se depara com um portal para uma fase em um local diferente extremamente difícil, com vários inimigos. Se você morrer, a fase vai te levar para o portão do slayer e fica a sua escolha de tentar de novo, ou vazar.
O arsenal do jogo é muito vasto, tendo várias armas, e os upgrades pra elas, que tornam a gameplay com elas muito mais diferentes e divertidas. Desde a escopeta clássica, até a poderosa Big Fuck Gun 9000, removida de uma Big Fuck Gun 10000 que o Slayer usou para atirar em Marte. Conclusão de Doom Eternal: O jogo possuí um vasto arsenal, possibilitando um gameplay muito diferente para cada upgrade, também há vários e vários upgrades para melhorar o in game do jogo. Algumas fases com elementos plataforming são meio chatos e tiram a imersão, mas não dá pra julgar o jogo inteiro por isso, por que todos os acertos ofuscam em 90% este pequeno erro.
Para fazer os upgrades, você precisa de coletáveis, e tem muitos coletáveis no Doom Eternal. Existem vários discos de música, bonequinhos, baterias sentinelas, pedaços da história em escrita, entre outros...
Fazendo os upgrades certos para o mapa, a coleta destes itens fica bem divertida, e é uma diferenciada na gameplay, porém em alguns lugares, é extremamente confuso e complicado, pois são lugares gigantescos, e as vezes o mapa coloca lugares em baixo de você, sendo que o ponto de acesso a eles não é ali onde você está. Isso confunde demais. Nas fases, terão o chamado PORTÃO DO SLAYER. Você precisa pegar a Chave do Slayer para abrir esse portão, e nos portões que abri, as chaves sempre estavam próximas do portão. Sendo um pouco difícil de encontrar o verdadeiro caminho para pegá-las.
Ao adentrar, você se depara com um portal para uma fase em um local diferente extremamente difícil, com vários inimigos. Se você morrer, a fase vai te levar para o portão do slayer e fica a sua escolha de tentar de novo, ou vazar.
O arsenal do jogo é muito vasto, tendo várias armas, e os upgrades pra elas, que tornam a gameplay com elas muito mais diferentes e divertidas. Desde a escopeta clássica, até a poderosa Big Fuck Gun 9000, removida de uma Big Fuck Gun 10000 que o Slayer usou para atirar em Marte. Conclusão de Doom Eternal: O jogo possuí um vasto arsenal, possibilitando um gameplay muito diferente para cada upgrade, também há vários e vários upgrades para melhorar o in game do jogo. Algumas fases com elementos plataforming são meio chatos e tiram a imersão, mas não dá pra julgar o jogo inteiro por isso, por que todos os acertos ofuscam em 90% este pequeno erro.
Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights is easily right up there with Hollow Knight and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night as one of the best modern metroidvanias that I've personally played. It's about half the length of those games only clocking in at 21 hours for my 100% run, but even with its relatively short completion time it still hits the mark on everything that makes a metroidvania enjoyable.
Starting with the premise of the story, you play as Lily, the last and youngest White Priestess, your mission is to purify the kingdom of Land's End from the Blight, a rain which corrupts and drives anything it touches (aside from Lily herself) to madness while simultaneously granting immortality. The previous Priestess bound the spirit of her faithful knight companion to Lily for protection seeing as how Lily herself is young and defenseless. The Umbral Knight is your faithful companion who follows Lily on her journey and will occasional speak exposition as you reach new areas. The bulk of the narrative is told in a Dark Souls-like manner by giving the player bits and pieces of lore at a time in the form of diary entries you have to find and read and memories in the form of cut-scenes you witness from felling boss enemies. At the end of the day it's not a very complex plot, but there are a few twists and revelations and some moments that will definitely pull at your heartstrings and I found it compelling all the way through, it gave me a very dark fantasy fairytale vibe which I liked a lot.
Aside from Lily and the Umbral Knight there are many characters you'll meet along the way in the form of main story bosses and mini bosses, to avoid spoilers I won't name any specifics, but in true Souls-like fashion they all have their own tragic histories and stories, the game can be very dark and sad at times, but I feel like that is part of what makes it so memorable and even if you never talk to any of these characters you really feel for them with how well their backstories are written, especially if you take the time to read all the lore entries.
Next I want to mention the OST because it's just simply incredible. It was composed by the Japanese art pop/classical crossover group Mili, I've been a big fan of Mili for a couple years now so as soon as I heard the Cliffside Hamlet theme and heard the ethereal whisper humming of Cassie Wei I recognized it was Mili and knew immediately this OST would be a classic. There's tons of variety with plenty of mystical fairytale like medieval folk music to fit the fairytale vibe of the game, but there's also suspenseful and unsettling atmospheric songs and orchestral bombastic themes as well, I also have to mention that I love how the music slowly builds up during boss fights and as the boss loses more and more health it swells with more bombast. The ending/credits theme is also just gorgeous.
Gameplay as with every metroidvania is evenly divided into two major aspects, combat and exploration.
1) The combat. It starts out basic as you only have the Umbral Knight at your behest in the beginning. Being a frail little girl Lily herself doesn't fight, but summons spirits to attack for her and the game has a great sense of progression as you truly feel Lilly getting stronger the longer you play the game as you level up and collect new spirits to help fight for you. Spirits act as skill attacks and once you have enough you can bind 6 total, 3 to your primary set and 3 to your secondary set. These each correspond to the buttons square, triangle and circle, you can switch between sets with R1, normal spirits have cooldowns and limited uses while boss spirits don't, so it's good to swap between a set of each to chain together combos and do great damage. This is a Souls-like aside from a metroidvania so of course you have a dodge as well and I really want to mention the nice detail of how the animation for Lily's dodge is her throwing her entire body out of the way while landing on the ground, it really shows how weak and defenseless she is and another show of progression is eventually you'll unlock a dash and that changes Lily's default dodge animation to a graceful slide across the ground. Overall there's tons of variety in the combat and many cool spirit attacks to try out and utilize for different types of play-styles and builds.
2) The exploration. The map in Ender Lilies is a very decent size and packed to the brim with secret walls, hidden pathways and items galore to find. These will come in the shape of lore entries, Relics which you equip to increase various stats, Amulet fragments and gems which permanently increase your health and Blight which is used to enhance your spirits. A big portion of these items and secrets you can't reach at first, but as you progress further into the game you'll slowly unlock your metroidvania staple power-ups. Double jump, wall climb, air dash, breathing underwater etc. You name it, it's there, can never go wrong with the classics and these power-ups will make those backtracking trips just as fresh as the first run through the area. Which brings me to my next point...
The level design. Every time I got a new power-up I couldn't wait to backtrack through the map to find new secrets I couldn't reach prior and that's mostly due to the fantastic level design (Well and the fact that there's ample bonfire/fast travel locations to move between) level design is vibrantly colorful with tons of scenic variety, you have everything from a ruined castle to a witch's hamlet that's been flooded and a poisonous fog filled abyss. There were a couple areas that had some poor enemy placement, but they're few and far between and easy to look past, aside from that exploring each level numerous times was a joy.
The art direction and the actual background art itself is simply beautiful, reminds me of Vanillaware's style, especially Odin Sphere and it definitely helps accentuate the whole fairytale vibe the game has going for it. The animations are all high quality as well, everything from simple movements to the attacks look charming and feel very smooth and fluid.
Almost all the bosses were incredibly fun to fight, each boss has multiple phases as their health bar decreases and that changes up their moveset just when you think you've memorized it. The difficulty was perfectly adjusted to be just challenging enough to take a few tries to beat, but not so hard that the difficulty felt artificial, the only exceptions to this were a couple late game bosses which didn't rely on the boss themselves being challenging and just threw infinite mobs of enemies at you while fighting the boss, that felt pretty cheap to me, but once again I love everything else so much that it's easy to look past this.
All in all Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights is a masterfully crafted modern classic in the metroidvania genre, managing to tell a compelling narrative with plenty of interesting world-building and well written characters, feature a combat system that is enjoyable and has good depth to it, bosses which are both challenging and fun to fight and a world that is always a joy to explore with an OST that is truly a magical composition which perfectly captures the atmosphere of the beautiful art aesthetics. If you're a fan of games like Hollow Knight, Salt and Sanctuary or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night you certainly don't want to miss out on this gem of a game.
Starting with the premise of the story, you play as Lily, the last and youngest White Priestess, your mission is to purify the kingdom of Land's End from the Blight, a rain which corrupts and drives anything it touches (aside from Lily herself) to madness while simultaneously granting immortality. The previous Priestess bound the spirit of her faithful knight companion to Lily for protection seeing as how Lily herself is young and defenseless. The Umbral Knight is your faithful companion who follows Lily on her journey and will occasional speak exposition as you reach new areas. The bulk of the narrative is told in a Dark Souls-like manner by giving the player bits and pieces of lore at a time in the form of diary entries you have to find and read and memories in the form of cut-scenes you witness from felling boss enemies. At the end of the day it's not a very complex plot, but there are a few twists and revelations and some moments that will definitely pull at your heartstrings and I found it compelling all the way through, it gave me a very dark fantasy fairytale vibe which I liked a lot.
Aside from Lily and the Umbral Knight there are many characters you'll meet along the way in the form of main story bosses and mini bosses, to avoid spoilers I won't name any specifics, but in true Souls-like fashion they all have their own tragic histories and stories, the game can be very dark and sad at times, but I feel like that is part of what makes it so memorable and even if you never talk to any of these characters you really feel for them with how well their backstories are written, especially if you take the time to read all the lore entries.
Next I want to mention the OST because it's just simply incredible. It was composed by the Japanese art pop/classical crossover group Mili, I've been a big fan of Mili for a couple years now so as soon as I heard the Cliffside Hamlet theme and heard the ethereal whisper humming of Cassie Wei I recognized it was Mili and knew immediately this OST would be a classic. There's tons of variety with plenty of mystical fairytale like medieval folk music to fit the fairytale vibe of the game, but there's also suspenseful and unsettling atmospheric songs and orchestral bombastic themes as well, I also have to mention that I love how the music slowly builds up during boss fights and as the boss loses more and more health it swells with more bombast. The ending/credits theme is also just gorgeous.
Gameplay as with every metroidvania is evenly divided into two major aspects, combat and exploration.
1) The combat. It starts out basic as you only have the Umbral Knight at your behest in the beginning. Being a frail little girl Lily herself doesn't fight, but summons spirits to attack for her and the game has a great sense of progression as you truly feel Lilly getting stronger the longer you play the game as you level up and collect new spirits to help fight for you. Spirits act as skill attacks and once you have enough you can bind 6 total, 3 to your primary set and 3 to your secondary set. These each correspond to the buttons square, triangle and circle, you can switch between sets with R1, normal spirits have cooldowns and limited uses while boss spirits don't, so it's good to swap between a set of each to chain together combos and do great damage. This is a Souls-like aside from a metroidvania so of course you have a dodge as well and I really want to mention the nice detail of how the animation for Lily's dodge is her throwing her entire body out of the way while landing on the ground, it really shows how weak and defenseless she is and another show of progression is eventually you'll unlock a dash and that changes Lily's default dodge animation to a graceful slide across the ground. Overall there's tons of variety in the combat and many cool spirit attacks to try out and utilize for different types of play-styles and builds.
2) The exploration. The map in Ender Lilies is a very decent size and packed to the brim with secret walls, hidden pathways and items galore to find. These will come in the shape of lore entries, Relics which you equip to increase various stats, Amulet fragments and gems which permanently increase your health and Blight which is used to enhance your spirits. A big portion of these items and secrets you can't reach at first, but as you progress further into the game you'll slowly unlock your metroidvania staple power-ups. Double jump, wall climb, air dash, breathing underwater etc. You name it, it's there, can never go wrong with the classics and these power-ups will make those backtracking trips just as fresh as the first run through the area. Which brings me to my next point...
The level design. Every time I got a new power-up I couldn't wait to backtrack through the map to find new secrets I couldn't reach prior and that's mostly due to the fantastic level design (Well and the fact that there's ample bonfire/fast travel locations to move between) level design is vibrantly colorful with tons of scenic variety, you have everything from a ruined castle to a witch's hamlet that's been flooded and a poisonous fog filled abyss. There were a couple areas that had some poor enemy placement, but they're few and far between and easy to look past, aside from that exploring each level numerous times was a joy.
The art direction and the actual background art itself is simply beautiful, reminds me of Vanillaware's style, especially Odin Sphere and it definitely helps accentuate the whole fairytale vibe the game has going for it. The animations are all high quality as well, everything from simple movements to the attacks look charming and feel very smooth and fluid.
Almost all the bosses were incredibly fun to fight, each boss has multiple phases as their health bar decreases and that changes up their moveset just when you think you've memorized it. The difficulty was perfectly adjusted to be just challenging enough to take a few tries to beat, but not so hard that the difficulty felt artificial, the only exceptions to this were a couple late game bosses which didn't rely on the boss themselves being challenging and just threw infinite mobs of enemies at you while fighting the boss, that felt pretty cheap to me, but once again I love everything else so much that it's easy to look past this.
All in all Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights is a masterfully crafted modern classic in the metroidvania genre, managing to tell a compelling narrative with plenty of interesting world-building and well written characters, feature a combat system that is enjoyable and has good depth to it, bosses which are both challenging and fun to fight and a world that is always a joy to explore with an OST that is truly a magical composition which perfectly captures the atmosphere of the beautiful art aesthetics. If you're a fan of games like Hollow Knight, Salt and Sanctuary or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night you certainly don't want to miss out on this gem of a game.
Nioh 2
2020
More like Nioh 1.5, Nioh 2 is generally an improvement over the first game but the flaws mostly remain the same. I like that I can make my own character this time around since William being a set main character didn't do the first game any favors. The story is a little better but still an uninteresting mix of japanese history and characters you have very little reason to care about. The level design is better but Nioh 2 retains the problem of lacking enemy variety and you generally fight the same things 20 hours in that you fought in the first 2 or 3 hours. The loot system is still completely unnecessary and decreases the value in exploring the levels. The co-op is practically nonexistant but that's more likely the fault of there being so few people helping others out. The AI companions are some of the most incompetent I've ever seen in a video game and serve absolutely no purpose in anything besides a 1v1 human boss fight. The combat system is still fun at its core, but the enemies are radically unbalanced and do far too much damage. What caused me to drop the game was the process of spending 10 minutes fighting a boss or going through a level without any incident, then dying immediately after making one or two mistakes because every enemy can 2-shot you. A ton of enemies and bosses also happen to have extremely powerful grab attacks which is very annoying considering how poor the telegraphing is on most of the attacks in the game. The difficulty just left me feeling tired even when I pulled through in a desperate situation and I just wasn't having a lot of fun. The weapons, while fun to use, have very large skill trees with very few actual useful skills. The fact that they're still each tied to a different stat is also annoying because it basically means you have to build for about 2 weapon types at most, while in something like dark souls you can switch between many different types of strength or dexterity weapons any time throughout the game. The yokai abilities are cool enough but the snake ability is so powerful there's very little reason to use anything else, especially when a good amount of them have lengthy animations that don't make you invulnerable.
Doom
2016
O grande reavivamento da franquia é também uma enorme ruptura com os clássicos - tão grande ou maior até mesmo que a de Doom 3. Por baixo de sua estética demoníaca e metaleira noventista, é possível ver que as inspirações do reboot são eminentemente modernas. O level design de Half-Life, as armas e movimentação de Quake, os sistemas de upgrade e habilidades onipresentes em games atuais: dá para repartir cada elemento do game e compará-los diretamente com outros jogos, mas comparações diretas com Doom 1&2 são mais difíceis de achar. Em nenhum momento essa ruptura fica mais evidente que nos mapas clássicos. Tanto a movimentação mais cadente do Doomslayer quanto o comportamento dos novos inimigos parecem realmente "deslocados" dentro daqueles níveis pixelados dos anos 1990. Doom 2016 não atualiza as mecânicas de seus antecessores para uma audiência moderna; ele se comunica com ela usando sua linguagem contemporânea.
O que torna o game tão bem-sucedido e querido tanto por novatos quanto veteranos é como e para quê ele usa essa linguagem familiar. Ele consegue ser uma negação aos shooters modernos usando as mesmas ferramentas que eles. Se em sua forma observamos uma ruptura, em seu conteúdo há um resgate. Doom 1&2 eram mais do que uma inovação tecnológica ou mecânica. Eles eram uma experiência sentimental, uma explícita explosão de violência e visceralidade. É esse sentimento que o reboot resgata de maneira triunfal. Cada mecânica nova, cada upgrade nas armas, cada segredo, estão lá com o solene objetivo de fazer você, o jogador, ter somente uma preocupação: matar demônios.
Sabe aquela sorrisinho malicioso que o Doom Guy fazia nos clássicos sempre que pegava uma BFG, como se ele estivesse dizendo "agora sim eu vou !@#!@@## esses monstros!"? Ele vai estampar a sua cara toda vez que você fizer um glory kill ou sobreviver a um grande tiroteio.
Rip and tear, until it's done.
O que torna o game tão bem-sucedido e querido tanto por novatos quanto veteranos é como e para quê ele usa essa linguagem familiar. Ele consegue ser uma negação aos shooters modernos usando as mesmas ferramentas que eles. Se em sua forma observamos uma ruptura, em seu conteúdo há um resgate. Doom 1&2 eram mais do que uma inovação tecnológica ou mecânica. Eles eram uma experiência sentimental, uma explícita explosão de violência e visceralidade. É esse sentimento que o reboot resgata de maneira triunfal. Cada mecânica nova, cada upgrade nas armas, cada segredo, estão lá com o solene objetivo de fazer você, o jogador, ter somente uma preocupação: matar demônios.
Sabe aquela sorrisinho malicioso que o Doom Guy fazia nos clássicos sempre que pegava uma BFG, como se ele estivesse dizendo "agora sim eu vou !@#!@@## esses monstros!"? Ele vai estampar a sua cara toda vez que você fizer um glory kill ou sobreviver a um grande tiroteio.
Rip and tear, until it's done.
Shadow Warrior 2
2016
estranho e ruim
Shadow Warrior 2
2016
Looter shooters are a plague.
Shadow Warrior 2
2016
After thoroughly enjoying Shadow Warrior I couldn't even get through the first few hours. What happened
Sekiro, também conhecido como mais uma obra impossível feita pela From, foi lançado em 2019 e muito apreciado, tanto que até mesmo recebeu o GOTY.
Pessoalmente, eu curti bastante o jogo. A ambientação japonesa, efeitos sonoros e gameplay estão espetaculares. O ponto mais positivo disso tudo é de fato a gameplay, que possui um dos melhores, e se não, o melhor combate da geração. Sério, o quão fantástico esse combate é, fica até difícil por em palavras a complexidade e variedade do que fazer com ele. Apesar de que tudo leva a mecânica mais importante do jogo, o parry.
Parry é a mecânica mais importante desse jogo. Existem certos bosses que a única maneira de facilitar sua luta (sem transformar ela numa eternidade) é com parry. Por sinal, o combate de Sekiro no geral recompensa muito a habilidade do jogador, tomando decisões agressivas, rápidas e úteis. Qualquer movimento desnecessário vai ser punitivo, bem clássico dos jogos da From.
A estética japonesa é impressionante. Fiquei maravilhado pelos diversos cenários e paisagens que Sekiro tem a apresentar (principalmente Fountainhead Palace e Senpou Temple, Mt. Kongo). A dublagem japonesa está ótima, dando uma imersão maior ainda ao jogo.
Outro fator a se comentar são as boss fights. O jogo mantém uma alta qualidade nelas, apesar de ter certas lutas que sinto que vão contra ao que o jogo tem incentivado (a Boss fight do Guardian Ape é literalmente o oposto do que o jogo nos incentivou até o momento). Mas claro, isso não significa que é ruim, só vai contra ao que o jogo quer (ao menos é o que acho).
A trilha sonora é muito boa, realmente combina com a estética do jogo. Apesar de muitos não acharem memoráveis quanto as de dark souls ( o que eu relativamente concordo) é inegável dizer que combinam com a ambientação do jogo.
Agora vamos pro aspecto que sempre me pega em review de jogo da From... otimização. Sério, que otimização tenebrosa. Sofri de muitas quedas de FPS na Ashina Castle, principalmente quando (SPOILERS) os Shinobis invadem o Castelo. Fico bem triste com isso. Mas fora isso, não vejo pontos negativos no jogo.
Agora falando mais sobre uma opinião pessoal, eu realmente não senti a ''mágica'' que sinto com dark souls nesse jogo. Por algum motivo, Sekiro não tem o mesmo charme que Dark Souls consegue transmitir. Mas isso é algo mais pessoal meu do que um fato.
No geral, é um excelente jogo e teve o merecido GOTY em 2019. Vale a pena comprá-lo apenas em promoção (jogo caro da porra mesmo após dois anos).
Pessoalmente, eu curti bastante o jogo. A ambientação japonesa, efeitos sonoros e gameplay estão espetaculares. O ponto mais positivo disso tudo é de fato a gameplay, que possui um dos melhores, e se não, o melhor combate da geração. Sério, o quão fantástico esse combate é, fica até difícil por em palavras a complexidade e variedade do que fazer com ele. Apesar de que tudo leva a mecânica mais importante do jogo, o parry.
Parry é a mecânica mais importante desse jogo. Existem certos bosses que a única maneira de facilitar sua luta (sem transformar ela numa eternidade) é com parry. Por sinal, o combate de Sekiro no geral recompensa muito a habilidade do jogador, tomando decisões agressivas, rápidas e úteis. Qualquer movimento desnecessário vai ser punitivo, bem clássico dos jogos da From.
A estética japonesa é impressionante. Fiquei maravilhado pelos diversos cenários e paisagens que Sekiro tem a apresentar (principalmente Fountainhead Palace e Senpou Temple, Mt. Kongo). A dublagem japonesa está ótima, dando uma imersão maior ainda ao jogo.
Outro fator a se comentar são as boss fights. O jogo mantém uma alta qualidade nelas, apesar de ter certas lutas que sinto que vão contra ao que o jogo tem incentivado (a Boss fight do Guardian Ape é literalmente o oposto do que o jogo nos incentivou até o momento). Mas claro, isso não significa que é ruim, só vai contra ao que o jogo quer (ao menos é o que acho).
A trilha sonora é muito boa, realmente combina com a estética do jogo. Apesar de muitos não acharem memoráveis quanto as de dark souls ( o que eu relativamente concordo) é inegável dizer que combinam com a ambientação do jogo.
Agora vamos pro aspecto que sempre me pega em review de jogo da From... otimização. Sério, que otimização tenebrosa. Sofri de muitas quedas de FPS na Ashina Castle, principalmente quando (SPOILERS) os Shinobis invadem o Castelo. Fico bem triste com isso. Mas fora isso, não vejo pontos negativos no jogo.
Agora falando mais sobre uma opinião pessoal, eu realmente não senti a ''mágica'' que sinto com dark souls nesse jogo. Por algum motivo, Sekiro não tem o mesmo charme que Dark Souls consegue transmitir. Mas isso é algo mais pessoal meu do que um fato.
No geral, é um excelente jogo e teve o merecido GOTY em 2019. Vale a pena comprá-lo apenas em promoção (jogo caro da porra mesmo após dois anos).
This review contains spoilers
Ah, Dark Souls. The game that broke gaming journalism forever.
In 2011, the Wii was at its strongest: family-friendly and “easy” games were pumped out by the dozen, and mobile games became more popular. Xbox started heavily marketing the Kinect, and more and more games would include extra difficulties and excessive hand-holding through tutorials, non-punishing death mechanics and extra lives. Now, I'm not on of those neckbeard gatekeepers against making gaming as a medium more accessible and inclusive, but the market at the time was over-saturated with easy, more forgiving games and the concept of the truly "hard" game was beginning to die out. What I'm saying is that there's gotta be a balance so everyone has something to appeal to them.
Dark Souls began the painstaking work of restoring that balance. It took what worked about Demon’s Souls and began improving on it tenfold, bringing a brutally difficult experience that was so refreshing in an environment that had become increasingly more casual, that it created an entire “Souls-like” genre where apparently every hard game is “like Dark Souls.”
Each entry in the Souls series has its strong points and weak points, but there are 4 aspects of Dark Souls that really make it stand out against other games in the franchise: it’s nonlinear interconnected map and excellent level design, the atmospheric storytelling, it’s difficulty through lack of information, and subtle combat mechanics.
Dark’s Souls drab medieval kingdom of Lordran is one of the best and most immersive game worlds that I have ever played through. There are so many branching pathways, shortcuts and alternate routes you can take, especially if you picked the Master Key as your starting gift. (Do yourself a favor and pick it as your starting gift, don't make the same mistake as me.) The map is truly expansive, and the game rewards an intuitive player for exploring every nook and cranny for better items, ways to skip boss fights, shortcuts, and even entire hidden areas. The moment I fell in love with the game was when I finally fought my way to the church in the Undead Parish. I was panicking, with no estus and low on health, and I ran into the church with about 15 guys swarming me. I paid no attention to them, blindly scrambling to an elevator that took me down, to my amazement, all the way back to Firelink Shrine. Lordran is filled with these shortcuts that you slowly unlock to make travel between areas easier, and as you figure out the branching pathways backtracking becomes a sinch. There are shortcuts that take you to a bonfire you'd never expect to be back at, there's a ladder that takes you all the way around to the beginning of a level. There's a tower in the first part of the game with a powerful knight and a locked door at the bottom which connects to a late-game area where you get DLC. There is a moment where after unlocking the elevator from the cathedral, you can hop off it early onto the ceiling of a temple, platform across the ruins of the Shrine, curl up into a ball at a nest and return to the fucking tutorial area. No other game does this kind of interconnected level design like Dark Souls, and I wish the entire game was like this as some late-game areas are comparatively linear.
Dark Souls is always lauded as a difficult game. And sure, even basic enemies can kill you fairly easily, there are some very tricky platforming and combat encounters, and the bosses are challenging walls. Some would say Dark Souls is “bullshit,” but I don’t really think so. What I think makes Dark Souls difficult, and why some players might think the game is being a bastard, is the lack of initial player knowledge. Dark Souls gives you nothing in terms of help, except the basic controls. No tutorial screens, no characters explaining what to do, no explanation of the level-up system, mechanics, enemies, or where you had to go: the player had to figure that out by themselves. All you are given in terms of a goal was to “Ring the Bell of Awakening,” and even that is unclear because it turns out there are 2 bells. Rather than using tutorial screens, Dark Souls guides the player through death and trial and error. For the first section of the game, Dark Souls just kicked my ass over and over. It’s unrelenting in it’s enemy placements and maze-like areas such as the Depths and Blighttown. Aside from some late-game jank, enemy placement is excellent and level design feels natural, whether you’re snakeing (pun entirely intended) your way through Sen’s Fortress, dodging archers in Anor Londo, exploring the verticality of the Undead Burg, or fighting your way through the Painted World: there aren't as many points where you go “that’s completely bullshit” as you’d expect (though there are a few), and each new place, each unique enemy connects to the lore of the game.
What I like about the story of Dark Souls is how the handle it. They set up the basics for you with a short opening cutscene, showing off the Four Great Lords and how they defeated the Ancient Dragons to begin an Age of Light, and how the Darksign has plagued humanity. Through the environment, sparse dialogue, and flavor text, the player had to piece together the story themselves.
The player figures out the story through playing the game and reading flavor text. In an environment where games deliver their stories through extensive use of cutscenes, Dark Souls is refreshing by allowing the player to decide whether or not they want to care about the story. Many games like God of War and Spider-Man have a core story where if you dislike it, you dislike about a third of that game. Fro an example done poorly, as much as I love Monster hunter World, you have this really, really bad story told through unstoppable cutscenes that bog the pacing of an otherwise excellent game. If you don't like the story, you're gonna be sitting there bored as fuck waiting for characters to finish vomiting exposition for at least a few hours of your experience with the game. With Dark Souls, if you don't like the lore, it doesn't impact the gameplay at all! There are skippable cutscenes that only occur during extremely important events or before some bosses, the aforementioned opening cutscene and endings, and that's about it. The game focuses more on environmental storytelling, introducing settings and enemies and item flavor text that begin to clue you in on Dark Souls’ larger story.
The atmosphere of Dark Souls is-well-Dark. It's usage of drab grayish color gradient and a general lack of brightness lend to the image of this Age of Fire collapsing in on itself in an attempt to prevent and Age of Dark, so when you find those brief moments of light and warmth and color with the bonfires you breathe a sight of relief.
Another excellent worldbuilding technique that Dark souls uses is by actually connecting the standard gameplay mechanics, such as healing, checkpoints, and respawning into the overall story. Where some games are content to just keep “respawning” as a game mechanic, Dark Souls goes as far as giving a canonical reason as to why the player respawns when they die. It's not “respawning at a checkpoint” in this game: it’s a curse of undying, where the souls of the curse-bearers are drawn to Gywn’s fire only to repeat this cycle until they go insane from Hollowing. This is one of the many, many examples of how Dark souls allowed me to get lost in the world of Lordran and attempt to piece together the fragments of lore supplied by flavor text and dialogue.
Another aspect that really helps set the mood of the game is the music, which the game uses very sparingly: Aside from boss fights most areas are silent, so when you do come across an area with music it’s usually to set the overall tone. The only two areas that have background music utilizing Motoi Sakuraba’s excellently epic and melancholy music are Firelink Shrine and Ash Lake. The former’s music is that iconic, soothing, string-heavy, sorrowful track, insinuating that this is the one safe place left in this broken world. The latter uses the intense chanting vocals of the Everlasting Dragon in order to emphasize that the Ash Lake is a truly majestic and ancient place, a forgotten memory of a bygone era. Despite these two outliers, music only ever kicks in during boss fights. This restraint in how Dark Souls uses music allows bosses to feel more important and grandiose, especially with how intense they are. The boss themes of this game also perfectly encapsulate boss personality or how the fight plays out. Ornstein and Smough have this regality to their theme, as well as a sense of pride and power. The Four King’s theme is intense and filled with dread, further escalating the dread the player feels as they’re overwhelmed by more than Four Kings. Seath’s theme is a strange, zany piece with ear-peircing violins and an off-beat xylophone, highlighting the bizarre and grotesque nature of the Scaleless dragon. Knight Artorias has a very subtle and sad theme, contrasting the intense, face-paced battle while emphasizing the “fallen warrior” feel of the lost knight. The final boss of the game rather unexpectedly has this somber, beautifully depressing piano piece, which has become the iconic Plin Plin Plon of Gwyn’s theme. Even the first boss in the game has this intense, bombastic soundtrack, perfectly setting the tone and pretext for this game as the dread seeps as you realize that you have this hulking demon in order to progress.
This brings me into my next point: the unrelenting difficulty (or rather challenge) of the game. Right off the bat, right after giving you a starter weapon and some basic tips, you’re thrown up against the Asylum Demon, which you need to fight in order to continue. No buffs, stats or equipment: fight this fat-ass demon with what you’re given. Almost every encounter is designed to test your skill and deepen your understanding of the game, and due to the sheer amount of tools at your disposal and the variety of enemies, the same encounter can play out completely differently between each player. The stamina bar and equip load are also a genius way to introduce difficulty: every action consumes stamina, so the player must think carefully about their next action in order to manage stamina effectively. A limited equip load means that you must think about what you’re wearing: a light armor set or weapon gives you more mobility but sacrifices defense or damage, while heavy armor sets or more powerful weapons will sacrifice mobility and iframes. Two-handing, blocking, backstabbing, kicking, and parrying also bring more depth and nuance into the combat puzzle, as you slowly master these mechanics. Two-handing does more damage and makes swings faster, but at the cost of shielding and more stamina usage per attack. Kicking can break a guard against defensive opponents but has a long startup and insignificant damage. Parrying is a high-risk, high-reward mechanic that encourages a player to learn their opponent’s moveset and punishes over-offensive players. Backstabbing, in my opinion, doesn’t really fit into this puzzle: with such a low-risk, high-reward mechanic it undermines the point of parrying or kicking opponents in favor of running around them, fishing for backstabs. Despite this, the combat is very nuanced and rewards intelligent players, and the sheer amount of equipment and stat allocation possibilities really adds to build variety and player preference.
As a player, you’re not shoehorned into just “attack with sword.” Sorceries , Miracles, and Pyromancy are high-damaging ranged attacks, but usually because of the extra stats you have to invest in such as attunement, intelligence or faith you have to sacrifice equipment load, health, and strength just to use these powerful spells, resulting in many “glass cannon” builds. There are a ton of options for melee as well: Most weapons have certain stat requirements, scale better with certain stat, or give you a buff, so if you find a couple that you like, upgrade stats accordingly. Maybe go in on equip load and midroll your way to victory with even the heaviest armor sets. Between starting classes, rings, weapons, armor, and spells, there are so many ways you can approach the game, which brings me to my next point. I like when games allow me to express myself and play the way I want to, but also restricts me from being too crazy with builds. In Dark Souls, if I want to invest in one stat, because of the genius way leveling up works I'm sacrificing what I could've spent in another, so it' sa constant management of which stats I want to prioritize, or which stat is the best tor most "fun" option for me.
I feel like most of the difficulty of Dark Souls isn't from “bullshit” or “unfair” mechanics: it’s that you know nothing and are told nothing. It’s up to the player to find out what to do or where to go, and the game guides you on the right track rather than outright helping you by... well, killing you. For example, the Firelink Shrine has multiple different areas to go to, a few of which are late-game areas that you could explore early if you want to. But if you enter the graveyard by the shrine early, seemingly unbeatable skeletons will swarm you. If you go down the lift at the base of the shrine, a bunch of unkillable ghosts will swarm you. This is the game’s way of telling you, "bro. You’re not ready for this yet. Try another place." And eventually, you’ll find yourself at the Undead Burg. But, if you persevere, and you do go through these areas, you’re rewarded with some neat stuff: go far enough into the graveyard and you can find a VERY good sword that can be used very early if you two-hand. Go even farther into the Catacombs, you’re rewarded with a Pinwheel fight that’s actually challenging due to low-level gear, and have access to Rite of Kindling early.
Dark Souls encourages you to experiment, explore, and learn the game. Having a tough time with a certain area? Look around: maybe you can find a shortcut somewhere. Is a boss killing you over and over? Explore the area for better armor or a ring, find a route back to a blacksmith to upgrade your regular gear. Maybe the boss has a weakness to magic or fire or lightning, find some resin to coat your weapon with. Maybe find an NPC summon. Or, just leave. Come back when you’ve fought some other bosses and gotten better equipment.
Sen’s Fortress is one of my favorite places in the game for this reason: for some fucking reason snakes are everywhere and they use lighting, as the sounds of clanking machinery and the grinding of boulders rolling through the castle. Why are there a bunch of lightning snakes? Fuck if I know! If I wanted to I could look into it, but what matters is that it's FUN! It tested my limits as a player, testing me if I had remembered the lessons the game has taught me, and whether I was ready for the next half of the game. Dark souls is a difficult game if you're not paying attention, but rewards players for figuring out it’s obtuse mechanics and puzzles.
Another good example of Dark souls subtly teaching you these mechanics are with boss fights. Ornstien and Smough was my first wall, as it was with many players. So I decided to look for better gear, and I found the Ring of Favor and Protection and Havel’s Armor, which with Havel’s Ring allowed me to mid roll with the armor equipped, allowing me to secure a victory after multiple failures and breeze through the rest of the game with a tanky Strength build and a +15 Zweihander, to the point where I deleted the Sanctuary Guardian and beat Artorias first try.
Boss fights are a highlight in Dark souls: so many memorable and intense fights, like the Four Kings, Ornstien and Smough, and Gwyn. These fights act as a rite of passage for the player: overcome this wall, and you can overcome the challenges ahead. By having these well-designed bosses kick your ass over and over again, the game encourages experimentation: maybe try a new set of armor, use an elemental buff or spell, learn boss patterns to know when to dodge. Most of them are fun fights, are excellently designed in gameplay and visuals, and serve as challenging yet mostly fair battles. The DLC bosses especially are brutally challenging and excellently designed. Kalameet and Manus in particular destroyed me over and over with how ridiculously large their movepool was.
Although Dark Souls harbors some mediocre fights (such as the Moonlight Butterfly and the Firesage Demon and… well, I’ll get to that soon), and a handful of endgame fights are a bit boring or too easy, Dark Souls also boasts some of the most memorable and incredible bosses of any game.
Despite its interconnected and vertical world map, despite the great bosses and level design, Dark Souls also harbors some of the lowest lows the series has to offer. For one, there are a lot of weird jank moments and, for some reason, a lot of platforming for a game with fall damage and no dedicated jump button. There are annoying enemies such as the Basilisks and the Wheel Skeletons, and occasionally the game can be bs. Crossbows are also laughably weak and bows are a niece tool rather than a viable weapon to use. There are also a few rings that are so good that it’d be stupid to not use them. Finally, some of the late-game content ranges from mediocre to dogshit. Later areas are very linear without any shortcuts or branching pathways unlike the amazing early game, because at that point the player would already have the Lordvessel. Some of these areas are still great, like the Tomb of the Giants and the Duke’s Archives, but others are just…. Meh. First off, the Crystal Caves. It’s fine. It's a linear walk with annoying invisible pathways. There are like 4 clams and 2 golems to fight and that’s it. Then there’s Chaos Ruins. Ugh. It’s a huge area that hurts to look at and is annoying to traverse due to the sheer amount of copy/pasted enemies, bad pacing, and 3 mediocre bosses, one of which is literally the third Asylum Demon. There are like 14 Taurus Demons and Capra Demons, 2 enemies that were early-game bosses, that are a chore to take out because you need to take them out one by one. The only other enemies are these ugly, fat fire demons and these really annoying worm things that break your weapons. (Also, weapon durability really isn’t a huge deal in the game and more of an annoyance unless you're using a crystal weapon.) Chaos ruins is definitely a low point in the game.
Then there’s Lost Izalith.
Hoo boy.
The entire place just screams “We ran out of money.” So, the moment you enter this place, you have to deal with this annoying mechanic where you have to use a ring to walk on lava, except there’s still a huge danger of dying despite “protection,” and the sound it makes when you walk on lava is really annoying. As you walk across this lava, there are about 2 dozen of these giant, ugly… things that are just chilling there that look incredibly out of place and just copy/pasted there. They’re like, the bottom half of a dragon, have insane amounts of health, and can one-shot you. Once you get to the temple, all there are are these weak, uninspired fat fire demons once again, and the Chaos Eaters… are actually pretty neat, but there’s not alot of them.
And what do you get for getting through this boring slogfest? Oh, only the worst fucking boss in the series. Seriously, Bed of Chaos is the jankiest, most unfair, uninspired boss I have ever had the displeasure of fighting, to the point where even FromSoftware realized it was bullshit and threw the player a homeward bone, so that the boss has “checkpoints” and you don’t have to slog through it longer than you need to. In all, Lost Izalith is just an ugly, boring experience, and represents the worst of the Souls franchise.
Souls is a special game, one with an extreme amount of jank and some really low lows, but the highs of this game are some astronomically high that no other games in the series has quite recaptured yet, and set a precedent that changed the face of gaming forever, with the help of it’s older brother Demon’s Souls. I for one am glad that I got to be a part of this community, with so many incredible content creators, animators, artists, and modders, and I hope that this convinced others to pick up this game and experience the magic for themselves, because I feel like I haven’t done this game justice with words alone.
In 2011, the Wii was at its strongest: family-friendly and “easy” games were pumped out by the dozen, and mobile games became more popular. Xbox started heavily marketing the Kinect, and more and more games would include extra difficulties and excessive hand-holding through tutorials, non-punishing death mechanics and extra lives. Now, I'm not on of those neckbeard gatekeepers against making gaming as a medium more accessible and inclusive, but the market at the time was over-saturated with easy, more forgiving games and the concept of the truly "hard" game was beginning to die out. What I'm saying is that there's gotta be a balance so everyone has something to appeal to them.
Dark Souls began the painstaking work of restoring that balance. It took what worked about Demon’s Souls and began improving on it tenfold, bringing a brutally difficult experience that was so refreshing in an environment that had become increasingly more casual, that it created an entire “Souls-like” genre where apparently every hard game is “like Dark Souls.”
Each entry in the Souls series has its strong points and weak points, but there are 4 aspects of Dark Souls that really make it stand out against other games in the franchise: it’s nonlinear interconnected map and excellent level design, the atmospheric storytelling, it’s difficulty through lack of information, and subtle combat mechanics.
Dark’s Souls drab medieval kingdom of Lordran is one of the best and most immersive game worlds that I have ever played through. There are so many branching pathways, shortcuts and alternate routes you can take, especially if you picked the Master Key as your starting gift. (Do yourself a favor and pick it as your starting gift, don't make the same mistake as me.) The map is truly expansive, and the game rewards an intuitive player for exploring every nook and cranny for better items, ways to skip boss fights, shortcuts, and even entire hidden areas. The moment I fell in love with the game was when I finally fought my way to the church in the Undead Parish. I was panicking, with no estus and low on health, and I ran into the church with about 15 guys swarming me. I paid no attention to them, blindly scrambling to an elevator that took me down, to my amazement, all the way back to Firelink Shrine. Lordran is filled with these shortcuts that you slowly unlock to make travel between areas easier, and as you figure out the branching pathways backtracking becomes a sinch. There are shortcuts that take you to a bonfire you'd never expect to be back at, there's a ladder that takes you all the way around to the beginning of a level. There's a tower in the first part of the game with a powerful knight and a locked door at the bottom which connects to a late-game area where you get DLC. There is a moment where after unlocking the elevator from the cathedral, you can hop off it early onto the ceiling of a temple, platform across the ruins of the Shrine, curl up into a ball at a nest and return to the fucking tutorial area. No other game does this kind of interconnected level design like Dark Souls, and I wish the entire game was like this as some late-game areas are comparatively linear.
Dark Souls is always lauded as a difficult game. And sure, even basic enemies can kill you fairly easily, there are some very tricky platforming and combat encounters, and the bosses are challenging walls. Some would say Dark Souls is “bullshit,” but I don’t really think so. What I think makes Dark Souls difficult, and why some players might think the game is being a bastard, is the lack of initial player knowledge. Dark Souls gives you nothing in terms of help, except the basic controls. No tutorial screens, no characters explaining what to do, no explanation of the level-up system, mechanics, enemies, or where you had to go: the player had to figure that out by themselves. All you are given in terms of a goal was to “Ring the Bell of Awakening,” and even that is unclear because it turns out there are 2 bells. Rather than using tutorial screens, Dark Souls guides the player through death and trial and error. For the first section of the game, Dark Souls just kicked my ass over and over. It’s unrelenting in it’s enemy placements and maze-like areas such as the Depths and Blighttown. Aside from some late-game jank, enemy placement is excellent and level design feels natural, whether you’re snakeing (pun entirely intended) your way through Sen’s Fortress, dodging archers in Anor Londo, exploring the verticality of the Undead Burg, or fighting your way through the Painted World: there aren't as many points where you go “that’s completely bullshit” as you’d expect (though there are a few), and each new place, each unique enemy connects to the lore of the game.
What I like about the story of Dark Souls is how the handle it. They set up the basics for you with a short opening cutscene, showing off the Four Great Lords and how they defeated the Ancient Dragons to begin an Age of Light, and how the Darksign has plagued humanity. Through the environment, sparse dialogue, and flavor text, the player had to piece together the story themselves.
The player figures out the story through playing the game and reading flavor text. In an environment where games deliver their stories through extensive use of cutscenes, Dark Souls is refreshing by allowing the player to decide whether or not they want to care about the story. Many games like God of War and Spider-Man have a core story where if you dislike it, you dislike about a third of that game. Fro an example done poorly, as much as I love Monster hunter World, you have this really, really bad story told through unstoppable cutscenes that bog the pacing of an otherwise excellent game. If you don't like the story, you're gonna be sitting there bored as fuck waiting for characters to finish vomiting exposition for at least a few hours of your experience with the game. With Dark Souls, if you don't like the lore, it doesn't impact the gameplay at all! There are skippable cutscenes that only occur during extremely important events or before some bosses, the aforementioned opening cutscene and endings, and that's about it. The game focuses more on environmental storytelling, introducing settings and enemies and item flavor text that begin to clue you in on Dark Souls’ larger story.
The atmosphere of Dark Souls is-well-Dark. It's usage of drab grayish color gradient and a general lack of brightness lend to the image of this Age of Fire collapsing in on itself in an attempt to prevent and Age of Dark, so when you find those brief moments of light and warmth and color with the bonfires you breathe a sight of relief.
Another excellent worldbuilding technique that Dark souls uses is by actually connecting the standard gameplay mechanics, such as healing, checkpoints, and respawning into the overall story. Where some games are content to just keep “respawning” as a game mechanic, Dark Souls goes as far as giving a canonical reason as to why the player respawns when they die. It's not “respawning at a checkpoint” in this game: it’s a curse of undying, where the souls of the curse-bearers are drawn to Gywn’s fire only to repeat this cycle until they go insane from Hollowing. This is one of the many, many examples of how Dark souls allowed me to get lost in the world of Lordran and attempt to piece together the fragments of lore supplied by flavor text and dialogue.
Another aspect that really helps set the mood of the game is the music, which the game uses very sparingly: Aside from boss fights most areas are silent, so when you do come across an area with music it’s usually to set the overall tone. The only two areas that have background music utilizing Motoi Sakuraba’s excellently epic and melancholy music are Firelink Shrine and Ash Lake. The former’s music is that iconic, soothing, string-heavy, sorrowful track, insinuating that this is the one safe place left in this broken world. The latter uses the intense chanting vocals of the Everlasting Dragon in order to emphasize that the Ash Lake is a truly majestic and ancient place, a forgotten memory of a bygone era. Despite these two outliers, music only ever kicks in during boss fights. This restraint in how Dark Souls uses music allows bosses to feel more important and grandiose, especially with how intense they are. The boss themes of this game also perfectly encapsulate boss personality or how the fight plays out. Ornstein and Smough have this regality to their theme, as well as a sense of pride and power. The Four King’s theme is intense and filled with dread, further escalating the dread the player feels as they’re overwhelmed by more than Four Kings. Seath’s theme is a strange, zany piece with ear-peircing violins and an off-beat xylophone, highlighting the bizarre and grotesque nature of the Scaleless dragon. Knight Artorias has a very subtle and sad theme, contrasting the intense, face-paced battle while emphasizing the “fallen warrior” feel of the lost knight. The final boss of the game rather unexpectedly has this somber, beautifully depressing piano piece, which has become the iconic Plin Plin Plon of Gwyn’s theme. Even the first boss in the game has this intense, bombastic soundtrack, perfectly setting the tone and pretext for this game as the dread seeps as you realize that you have this hulking demon in order to progress.
This brings me into my next point: the unrelenting difficulty (or rather challenge) of the game. Right off the bat, right after giving you a starter weapon and some basic tips, you’re thrown up against the Asylum Demon, which you need to fight in order to continue. No buffs, stats or equipment: fight this fat-ass demon with what you’re given. Almost every encounter is designed to test your skill and deepen your understanding of the game, and due to the sheer amount of tools at your disposal and the variety of enemies, the same encounter can play out completely differently between each player. The stamina bar and equip load are also a genius way to introduce difficulty: every action consumes stamina, so the player must think carefully about their next action in order to manage stamina effectively. A limited equip load means that you must think about what you’re wearing: a light armor set or weapon gives you more mobility but sacrifices defense or damage, while heavy armor sets or more powerful weapons will sacrifice mobility and iframes. Two-handing, blocking, backstabbing, kicking, and parrying also bring more depth and nuance into the combat puzzle, as you slowly master these mechanics. Two-handing does more damage and makes swings faster, but at the cost of shielding and more stamina usage per attack. Kicking can break a guard against defensive opponents but has a long startup and insignificant damage. Parrying is a high-risk, high-reward mechanic that encourages a player to learn their opponent’s moveset and punishes over-offensive players. Backstabbing, in my opinion, doesn’t really fit into this puzzle: with such a low-risk, high-reward mechanic it undermines the point of parrying or kicking opponents in favor of running around them, fishing for backstabs. Despite this, the combat is very nuanced and rewards intelligent players, and the sheer amount of equipment and stat allocation possibilities really adds to build variety and player preference.
As a player, you’re not shoehorned into just “attack with sword.” Sorceries , Miracles, and Pyromancy are high-damaging ranged attacks, but usually because of the extra stats you have to invest in such as attunement, intelligence or faith you have to sacrifice equipment load, health, and strength just to use these powerful spells, resulting in many “glass cannon” builds. There are a ton of options for melee as well: Most weapons have certain stat requirements, scale better with certain stat, or give you a buff, so if you find a couple that you like, upgrade stats accordingly. Maybe go in on equip load and midroll your way to victory with even the heaviest armor sets. Between starting classes, rings, weapons, armor, and spells, there are so many ways you can approach the game, which brings me to my next point. I like when games allow me to express myself and play the way I want to, but also restricts me from being too crazy with builds. In Dark Souls, if I want to invest in one stat, because of the genius way leveling up works I'm sacrificing what I could've spent in another, so it' sa constant management of which stats I want to prioritize, or which stat is the best tor most "fun" option for me.
I feel like most of the difficulty of Dark Souls isn't from “bullshit” or “unfair” mechanics: it’s that you know nothing and are told nothing. It’s up to the player to find out what to do or where to go, and the game guides you on the right track rather than outright helping you by... well, killing you. For example, the Firelink Shrine has multiple different areas to go to, a few of which are late-game areas that you could explore early if you want to. But if you enter the graveyard by the shrine early, seemingly unbeatable skeletons will swarm you. If you go down the lift at the base of the shrine, a bunch of unkillable ghosts will swarm you. This is the game’s way of telling you, "bro. You’re not ready for this yet. Try another place." And eventually, you’ll find yourself at the Undead Burg. But, if you persevere, and you do go through these areas, you’re rewarded with some neat stuff: go far enough into the graveyard and you can find a VERY good sword that can be used very early if you two-hand. Go even farther into the Catacombs, you’re rewarded with a Pinwheel fight that’s actually challenging due to low-level gear, and have access to Rite of Kindling early.
Dark Souls encourages you to experiment, explore, and learn the game. Having a tough time with a certain area? Look around: maybe you can find a shortcut somewhere. Is a boss killing you over and over? Explore the area for better armor or a ring, find a route back to a blacksmith to upgrade your regular gear. Maybe the boss has a weakness to magic or fire or lightning, find some resin to coat your weapon with. Maybe find an NPC summon. Or, just leave. Come back when you’ve fought some other bosses and gotten better equipment.
Sen’s Fortress is one of my favorite places in the game for this reason: for some fucking reason snakes are everywhere and they use lighting, as the sounds of clanking machinery and the grinding of boulders rolling through the castle. Why are there a bunch of lightning snakes? Fuck if I know! If I wanted to I could look into it, but what matters is that it's FUN! It tested my limits as a player, testing me if I had remembered the lessons the game has taught me, and whether I was ready for the next half of the game. Dark souls is a difficult game if you're not paying attention, but rewards players for figuring out it’s obtuse mechanics and puzzles.
Another good example of Dark souls subtly teaching you these mechanics are with boss fights. Ornstien and Smough was my first wall, as it was with many players. So I decided to look for better gear, and I found the Ring of Favor and Protection and Havel’s Armor, which with Havel’s Ring allowed me to mid roll with the armor equipped, allowing me to secure a victory after multiple failures and breeze through the rest of the game with a tanky Strength build and a +15 Zweihander, to the point where I deleted the Sanctuary Guardian and beat Artorias first try.
Boss fights are a highlight in Dark souls: so many memorable and intense fights, like the Four Kings, Ornstien and Smough, and Gwyn. These fights act as a rite of passage for the player: overcome this wall, and you can overcome the challenges ahead. By having these well-designed bosses kick your ass over and over again, the game encourages experimentation: maybe try a new set of armor, use an elemental buff or spell, learn boss patterns to know when to dodge. Most of them are fun fights, are excellently designed in gameplay and visuals, and serve as challenging yet mostly fair battles. The DLC bosses especially are brutally challenging and excellently designed. Kalameet and Manus in particular destroyed me over and over with how ridiculously large their movepool was.
Although Dark Souls harbors some mediocre fights (such as the Moonlight Butterfly and the Firesage Demon and… well, I’ll get to that soon), and a handful of endgame fights are a bit boring or too easy, Dark Souls also boasts some of the most memorable and incredible bosses of any game.
Despite its interconnected and vertical world map, despite the great bosses and level design, Dark Souls also harbors some of the lowest lows the series has to offer. For one, there are a lot of weird jank moments and, for some reason, a lot of platforming for a game with fall damage and no dedicated jump button. There are annoying enemies such as the Basilisks and the Wheel Skeletons, and occasionally the game can be bs. Crossbows are also laughably weak and bows are a niece tool rather than a viable weapon to use. There are also a few rings that are so good that it’d be stupid to not use them. Finally, some of the late-game content ranges from mediocre to dogshit. Later areas are very linear without any shortcuts or branching pathways unlike the amazing early game, because at that point the player would already have the Lordvessel. Some of these areas are still great, like the Tomb of the Giants and the Duke’s Archives, but others are just…. Meh. First off, the Crystal Caves. It’s fine. It's a linear walk with annoying invisible pathways. There are like 4 clams and 2 golems to fight and that’s it. Then there’s Chaos Ruins. Ugh. It’s a huge area that hurts to look at and is annoying to traverse due to the sheer amount of copy/pasted enemies, bad pacing, and 3 mediocre bosses, one of which is literally the third Asylum Demon. There are like 14 Taurus Demons and Capra Demons, 2 enemies that were early-game bosses, that are a chore to take out because you need to take them out one by one. The only other enemies are these ugly, fat fire demons and these really annoying worm things that break your weapons. (Also, weapon durability really isn’t a huge deal in the game and more of an annoyance unless you're using a crystal weapon.) Chaos ruins is definitely a low point in the game.
Then there’s Lost Izalith.
Hoo boy.
The entire place just screams “We ran out of money.” So, the moment you enter this place, you have to deal with this annoying mechanic where you have to use a ring to walk on lava, except there’s still a huge danger of dying despite “protection,” and the sound it makes when you walk on lava is really annoying. As you walk across this lava, there are about 2 dozen of these giant, ugly… things that are just chilling there that look incredibly out of place and just copy/pasted there. They’re like, the bottom half of a dragon, have insane amounts of health, and can one-shot you. Once you get to the temple, all there are are these weak, uninspired fat fire demons once again, and the Chaos Eaters… are actually pretty neat, but there’s not alot of them.
And what do you get for getting through this boring slogfest? Oh, only the worst fucking boss in the series. Seriously, Bed of Chaos is the jankiest, most unfair, uninspired boss I have ever had the displeasure of fighting, to the point where even FromSoftware realized it was bullshit and threw the player a homeward bone, so that the boss has “checkpoints” and you don’t have to slog through it longer than you need to. In all, Lost Izalith is just an ugly, boring experience, and represents the worst of the Souls franchise.
Souls is a special game, one with an extreme amount of jank and some really low lows, but the highs of this game are some astronomically high that no other games in the series has quite recaptured yet, and set a precedent that changed the face of gaming forever, with the help of it’s older brother Demon’s Souls. I for one am glad that I got to be a part of this community, with so many incredible content creators, animators, artists, and modders, and I hope that this convinced others to pick up this game and experience the magic for themselves, because I feel like I haven’t done this game justice with words alone.
Psychonauts 2
2021
Psychonauts 2:
Developing videogames takes much more effort, time and resources than it ever did; keeping up with modern graphics, sound design, established trends and alike is getting harder and harder for a lot of smaller scale studios. This is why we have a lot of indies nowadays, breaking those traditions AAA games are setting each year with their ultra realistic graphics, trying to be their own thing. Another thing is that we see much less AA games nowadays because back then AA games were pretty
much alternative games to AAA titles, having less budgets and less people working on them but with similar aim and mostly with more creative freedom. Psychonauts 2 was one of those AA games that spent whole lot time in the oven because of the rapid growing industry and after countless doublefine updates, varying release dates , the Microsoft acquisition; I can safely say the wait was worth it for this AAA game.
As a fan of the first Psychonauts, I have to say I both had a lot of hopes and worries for this game, the potential for a game about exploring people's minds is massive and if we're talking about the presentation just wow... This game is beautiful, from the animations to the surreal visuals to the UI everything is delightful. The world Psychonauts 2 takes place in is believable and highly immersive with a lot of details like the various interactions you can participate in with your abilities and just talking with people in general. It's easy to get lost in it's world and do a bunch of side activities in the packed hubworld and suffice to say I loved exploring, platforming all over the place in it's quirky and sometimes surreal hubworld and various minds thanks to incredible presentation and great level design.
The biggest thing I and other people were looking forward to were easily the minds / levels of the game. The various and distinct themes, gameplay mechanics and visuals they can pull of with a more modern Psychonauts game was straight up hype and I'd have loved to say I adore it but I think I kinda feel mixed on it, well not entirely. Okay let me preface it like this: The original Psychonauts had clunky platforming mechanics and so this led the team to change the gameplay a lot with each mind, you had your fully action based mind Lungfishopolis, puzzle based mind Milkman's Conspiracy, exploration based mind Waterloo, platforming based mind Milla's Party and even bosses were like this. In Psychonauts 2 however since we have a much better feeling gameplay on our hands most minds are just a mix of puzzle/platforming/action and some exploration rather than being their own thing gameplay wise and so this led to mind's proggression feeling samey and made them less distinct,(I won't refer to minds with their name to avoid spoilers so it's safe to read the whole review) in one mind you need to get 4 coins so you play 4 level gauntlets, in one mind you need to get 3 seeds so you play 3 level gauntlets, in one mind you need to get 2 books so you play 2 level gauntlets and so on. Of course it isn't all like this for example the seeds one has more exploration, each one offers new mechanics and they have their own visuals and presentation so that's why I have to say I still like them a lot but the minds in the original felt more distinct both in a good and in a bad way, it felt like they played it safe here to avoid pacing issues and I am not the biggest fan of that but it's a thing I can get behind since these minds still offered a lot of narrative/mechanical things not many 3D platformers or games of this scale offer these days.
If there was one thing Psychonauts 2 surprised me with, it would be the game's story. It's about the Psychic Six and the origin of Psychonauts so we learn about how they've formed the Psychonauts, what they've dealt with and such, it's also about Raz and him getting new friends, the story is engaging with a really fun cast of characters from Raz's family to his new Intern friends to Psychic Six. The story provides a lot of twists and turns that I mostly didn't expect and adored for what they were. This game felt personal in many ways with a lot of emotinal beats while maintaining it's quirky nature, I have to say though I might prefer the writing in the original, it's still great here however. It also has themes of memory implanting, killing the past and identity disorder just saying ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).
Although I wished levels felt more distinct gameplay wise Psychonauts 2 is still an amazing journey from creative level design, game mechanics to the incredible presentation and charm to the surprising and engaging narrative, I loved every bit of this journey and I don't think I'll forget this game anytime soon. I highly recommend checking out both Psychonauts games they're some of the most unique takes on 3D platformers that are inspiring and just very enjoyable in general.
Developing videogames takes much more effort, time and resources than it ever did; keeping up with modern graphics, sound design, established trends and alike is getting harder and harder for a lot of smaller scale studios. This is why we have a lot of indies nowadays, breaking those traditions AAA games are setting each year with their ultra realistic graphics, trying to be their own thing. Another thing is that we see much less AA games nowadays because back then AA games were pretty
much alternative games to AAA titles, having less budgets and less people working on them but with similar aim and mostly with more creative freedom. Psychonauts 2 was one of those AA games that spent whole lot time in the oven because of the rapid growing industry and after countless doublefine updates, varying release dates , the Microsoft acquisition; I can safely say the wait was worth it for this AAA game.
As a fan of the first Psychonauts, I have to say I both had a lot of hopes and worries for this game, the potential for a game about exploring people's minds is massive and if we're talking about the presentation just wow... This game is beautiful, from the animations to the surreal visuals to the UI everything is delightful. The world Psychonauts 2 takes place in is believable and highly immersive with a lot of details like the various interactions you can participate in with your abilities and just talking with people in general. It's easy to get lost in it's world and do a bunch of side activities in the packed hubworld and suffice to say I loved exploring, platforming all over the place in it's quirky and sometimes surreal hubworld and various minds thanks to incredible presentation and great level design.
The biggest thing I and other people were looking forward to were easily the minds / levels of the game. The various and distinct themes, gameplay mechanics and visuals they can pull of with a more modern Psychonauts game was straight up hype and I'd have loved to say I adore it but I think I kinda feel mixed on it, well not entirely. Okay let me preface it like this: The original Psychonauts had clunky platforming mechanics and so this led the team to change the gameplay a lot with each mind, you had your fully action based mind Lungfishopolis, puzzle based mind Milkman's Conspiracy, exploration based mind Waterloo, platforming based mind Milla's Party and even bosses were like this. In Psychonauts 2 however since we have a much better feeling gameplay on our hands most minds are just a mix of puzzle/platforming/action and some exploration rather than being their own thing gameplay wise and so this led to mind's proggression feeling samey and made them less distinct,(I won't refer to minds with their name to avoid spoilers so it's safe to read the whole review) in one mind you need to get 4 coins so you play 4 level gauntlets, in one mind you need to get 3 seeds so you play 3 level gauntlets, in one mind you need to get 2 books so you play 2 level gauntlets and so on. Of course it isn't all like this for example the seeds one has more exploration, each one offers new mechanics and they have their own visuals and presentation so that's why I have to say I still like them a lot but the minds in the original felt more distinct both in a good and in a bad way, it felt like they played it safe here to avoid pacing issues and I am not the biggest fan of that but it's a thing I can get behind since these minds still offered a lot of narrative/mechanical things not many 3D platformers or games of this scale offer these days.
If there was one thing Psychonauts 2 surprised me with, it would be the game's story. It's about the Psychic Six and the origin of Psychonauts so we learn about how they've formed the Psychonauts, what they've dealt with and such, it's also about Raz and him getting new friends, the story is engaging with a really fun cast of characters from Raz's family to his new Intern friends to Psychic Six. The story provides a lot of twists and turns that I mostly didn't expect and adored for what they were. This game felt personal in many ways with a lot of emotinal beats while maintaining it's quirky nature, I have to say though I might prefer the writing in the original, it's still great here however. It also has themes of memory implanting, killing the past and identity disorder just saying ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).
Although I wished levels felt more distinct gameplay wise Psychonauts 2 is still an amazing journey from creative level design, game mechanics to the incredible presentation and charm to the surprising and engaging narrative, I loved every bit of this journey and I don't think I'll forget this game anytime soon. I highly recommend checking out both Psychonauts games they're some of the most unique takes on 3D platformers that are inspiring and just very enjoyable in general.
Since I wasn't a huge fan of RE 7 I'm still surprised I ended up loving 8 as much as I do, but it's easily the best mainline RE since 4 for me and it honestly feels like 4 through a modern lens.
Let's start with a small spoiler free synopsis of the story. It picks up a few years after the events of RE 7, Ethan and Mia Winters have now moved to a remote location in Europe, have a new 6 month old daughter Rose and are finally starting to rebuild their lives after their traumatic encounter with the Bakers, but that all changes when the very man who saved them years ago, Chris Redfield, attacks their home, killing Mia and kidnapping both Rose and Ethan in the process, however the transport Ethan was in gets destroyed, Ethan is now stranded in an unknown village seemingly overrun by monsters and is on a quest for vengeance to rescue his daughter and get answers from Chris. All this happens in just the first 20 minutes of the 10-15 hour journey. Avoiding major spoilers I'll just say there are plenty of twists and turns which marvelously play on the world-building set up by both the entire over-arching story of Resident Evil and especially RE 7, alongside a charismatic main cast of characters which will compel you to reach the end of this mysterious journey.
Speaking of characters, they're all great. This game did something I didn't think was possible, it actually made me like Ethan, so I have to dedicate a whole paragraph to that alone. I am admittedly a sucker for the trope of a father who will do anything and go through hell and back to protect his family so that alone makes me like Ethan more here and sure Ethan is still nowhere close to classic RE action heroes like Leon Kennedy, Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine, but he now feels more experienced and confident after the events in RE 7 which makes sense especially considering in the lore it states he took military combat training courses before the events of Village to better be able to protect his family. It feels like Capcom also tried to give him more of a personality both by giving him more dialogue and even some one-liners, his one liners don't feel like cheesy action hero one-liners like Leon, they feel more like a normal dad trying to be cooler than he actually is so he makes stupid jokes and it's just so fitting for his character.
Aside from Ethan, all the other characters are quite interesting and I strongly believe they will become just as iconic as some of RE's past characters. Chris Redfield of course has a big part and this game helps expand his character in many ways, but aside from that the main villains are especially fantastic. Everyone knows the elegant, yet sadistic vampire mistress lady Dimitrescu, but there's also the deranged and childlike Donna Beneviento and her doll Angie, the grotesque, hunchback fishman Moreau, the theatrical and cheesy mad genius Karl Heisenberg (My personal fave, who is basically like Nicolas Cage with Magneto's powers), the cold and calculating religious cult leader Mother Miranda and last but not least, the merchant, the Duke who is the ultimate bro and helps Ethan at every turn of his journey, which leads to the next segment of my review.
The gameplay, it's so damn good. A good way to describe Village is the smooth and fluid first person combat of RE 7 mixed with a lot of DNA and core mechanics that haven't been present in the series since RE 4. The inventory Tetris system is back, there's also plenty of treasures to find all over the village and what do you do with those treasures? Why sell them to our good friend the Duke of course! The Duke acts much like the iconic Merchant from RE 4. Providing inventory suitcase upgrades, crafting recipes, weapons modifications for the various guns you'll find throughout the Village and more. I also have to mention how great the crafting menu is, it might be a bit more casualized, but it's so much more efficient not having crafting materials take up inventory space. Oh and puzzles are slowly making a comeback to the series, it's nothing super complex, but there are some riddles and classic switch based puzzles and it's certainly a start.
Good level design is mandatory in RE and from the Spencer Mansion to the Raccoon City Police Department there's no short of iconic locations and Village's well...Village is just as memorable. From Dimitrescu's Victorian gothic castle to Moreau's Lovecraftian swamp and Heisenberg's industrial factory along with the main Village hub, there's so much variety to the design, it has a strong metroidvania feel with lots of backtracking and shortcuts that open up later after getting a key item, plus finding all the treasures gives players extra incentive to explore.
Enemies and boss fights are just as well designed as the levels, the lycans are much more wild and aggressive than zombies or ganados of the past so you in turn need to have quick reflexes and while all the bosses (except for one) are "hit the weak point for massive damage" in typical RE fashion, all their designs are killer and the locations you fight them are very memorable.
Graphics and sound design are even more spectacular than RE 7 and that was already the best RE had ever been on those fronts so you can just imagine how beautiful this game looks and sounds.
Village manages to be both one of the most legitimately terrifying and action packed entries in the series, but does it in such a natural way. One minute you might be defenseless, being chased down by Dimitrescu and her daughters and the next you could be mowing down hordes of enemies and fighting a boss controlling a literal DOOM like tank machine, but you never have an over abundance of ammo on your first playthrough, even if you thoroughly explore, you'll have just enough to make it from location to location and this is why Village has such a tense atmosphere. It's a perfect marriage of survival horror and Hollywood blockbuster action that the series hasn't had since RE 4.
Anyone in the RE community will tell you all the best RE games are some of the most replayable games ever made and Village is no exception. Once you beat the game you'll unlock an extra content shop where you can purchase some special weapons and infinite ammo mods using currency you make from challenges you complete in game which can range from killing so many enemies with a certain gun to beating the game in a certain timeframe or on a specific difficulty, so it'll make a lot of players adapt their play style and try many things they wouldn't prior, especially if you're going for the 100%/platnium trophy.
Mercenaries mode which hasn't been in RE since 6 also makes a comeback and while it's kinda undercooked with only a couple stages, it does incorporate a lot of elements Raid Mode from the Revelations games introduced, like abilities, enemies having health bars, seeing damage counters, being able to purchase weapons and not just having a set loadout and I really like this new Raid Mode/Mercenaries hybrid. It's just unfortunate there's so few stages and you can only play as 1 character.
I honestly have almost no complaints about this game. Resident Evil Village is a modern classic that hits the mark at every turn, it tells a compelling story, manages to flesh out a protagonist who really needed it, has an interesting cast of characters, the combat, exploration and crafting are all some of the best the series has ever had, level design is well crafted with plenty of variety, enemies and bosses are both designed well and fun to fight, the game also looks and sounds better than ever and has hours worth of replay value, this truly is peak RE and it's more than worthy of being released as a celebration of RE's 25th anniversary.
Let's start with a small spoiler free synopsis of the story. It picks up a few years after the events of RE 7, Ethan and Mia Winters have now moved to a remote location in Europe, have a new 6 month old daughter Rose and are finally starting to rebuild their lives after their traumatic encounter with the Bakers, but that all changes when the very man who saved them years ago, Chris Redfield, attacks their home, killing Mia and kidnapping both Rose and Ethan in the process, however the transport Ethan was in gets destroyed, Ethan is now stranded in an unknown village seemingly overrun by monsters and is on a quest for vengeance to rescue his daughter and get answers from Chris. All this happens in just the first 20 minutes of the 10-15 hour journey. Avoiding major spoilers I'll just say there are plenty of twists and turns which marvelously play on the world-building set up by both the entire over-arching story of Resident Evil and especially RE 7, alongside a charismatic main cast of characters which will compel you to reach the end of this mysterious journey.
Speaking of characters, they're all great. This game did something I didn't think was possible, it actually made me like Ethan, so I have to dedicate a whole paragraph to that alone. I am admittedly a sucker for the trope of a father who will do anything and go through hell and back to protect his family so that alone makes me like Ethan more here and sure Ethan is still nowhere close to classic RE action heroes like Leon Kennedy, Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine, but he now feels more experienced and confident after the events in RE 7 which makes sense especially considering in the lore it states he took military combat training courses before the events of Village to better be able to protect his family. It feels like Capcom also tried to give him more of a personality both by giving him more dialogue and even some one-liners, his one liners don't feel like cheesy action hero one-liners like Leon, they feel more like a normal dad trying to be cooler than he actually is so he makes stupid jokes and it's just so fitting for his character.
Aside from Ethan, all the other characters are quite interesting and I strongly believe they will become just as iconic as some of RE's past characters. Chris Redfield of course has a big part and this game helps expand his character in many ways, but aside from that the main villains are especially fantastic. Everyone knows the elegant, yet sadistic vampire mistress lady Dimitrescu, but there's also the deranged and childlike Donna Beneviento and her doll Angie, the grotesque, hunchback fishman Moreau, the theatrical and cheesy mad genius Karl Heisenberg (My personal fave, who is basically like Nicolas Cage with Magneto's powers), the cold and calculating religious cult leader Mother Miranda and last but not least, the merchant, the Duke who is the ultimate bro and helps Ethan at every turn of his journey, which leads to the next segment of my review.
The gameplay, it's so damn good. A good way to describe Village is the smooth and fluid first person combat of RE 7 mixed with a lot of DNA and core mechanics that haven't been present in the series since RE 4. The inventory Tetris system is back, there's also plenty of treasures to find all over the village and what do you do with those treasures? Why sell them to our good friend the Duke of course! The Duke acts much like the iconic Merchant from RE 4. Providing inventory suitcase upgrades, crafting recipes, weapons modifications for the various guns you'll find throughout the Village and more. I also have to mention how great the crafting menu is, it might be a bit more casualized, but it's so much more efficient not having crafting materials take up inventory space. Oh and puzzles are slowly making a comeback to the series, it's nothing super complex, but there are some riddles and classic switch based puzzles and it's certainly a start.
Good level design is mandatory in RE and from the Spencer Mansion to the Raccoon City Police Department there's no short of iconic locations and Village's well...Village is just as memorable. From Dimitrescu's Victorian gothic castle to Moreau's Lovecraftian swamp and Heisenberg's industrial factory along with the main Village hub, there's so much variety to the design, it has a strong metroidvania feel with lots of backtracking and shortcuts that open up later after getting a key item, plus finding all the treasures gives players extra incentive to explore.
Enemies and boss fights are just as well designed as the levels, the lycans are much more wild and aggressive than zombies or ganados of the past so you in turn need to have quick reflexes and while all the bosses (except for one) are "hit the weak point for massive damage" in typical RE fashion, all their designs are killer and the locations you fight them are very memorable.
Graphics and sound design are even more spectacular than RE 7 and that was already the best RE had ever been on those fronts so you can just imagine how beautiful this game looks and sounds.
Village manages to be both one of the most legitimately terrifying and action packed entries in the series, but does it in such a natural way. One minute you might be defenseless, being chased down by Dimitrescu and her daughters and the next you could be mowing down hordes of enemies and fighting a boss controlling a literal DOOM like tank machine, but you never have an over abundance of ammo on your first playthrough, even if you thoroughly explore, you'll have just enough to make it from location to location and this is why Village has such a tense atmosphere. It's a perfect marriage of survival horror and Hollywood blockbuster action that the series hasn't had since RE 4.
Anyone in the RE community will tell you all the best RE games are some of the most replayable games ever made and Village is no exception. Once you beat the game you'll unlock an extra content shop where you can purchase some special weapons and infinite ammo mods using currency you make from challenges you complete in game which can range from killing so many enemies with a certain gun to beating the game in a certain timeframe or on a specific difficulty, so it'll make a lot of players adapt their play style and try many things they wouldn't prior, especially if you're going for the 100%/platnium trophy.
Mercenaries mode which hasn't been in RE since 6 also makes a comeback and while it's kinda undercooked with only a couple stages, it does incorporate a lot of elements Raid Mode from the Revelations games introduced, like abilities, enemies having health bars, seeing damage counters, being able to purchase weapons and not just having a set loadout and I really like this new Raid Mode/Mercenaries hybrid. It's just unfortunate there's so few stages and you can only play as 1 character.
I honestly have almost no complaints about this game. Resident Evil Village is a modern classic that hits the mark at every turn, it tells a compelling story, manages to flesh out a protagonist who really needed it, has an interesting cast of characters, the combat, exploration and crafting are all some of the best the series has ever had, level design is well crafted with plenty of variety, enemies and bosses are both designed well and fun to fight, the game also looks and sounds better than ever and has hours worth of replay value, this truly is peak RE and it's more than worthy of being released as a celebration of RE's 25th anniversary.