The glorious return of AA good-but-not-great. It's hard for that to sound like a sincere compliment, but I swear that Stellar Blade has the extremely endearing quality of playing like something you'd rent at a Blockbuster Video. It's too short, lacking in ambition, and structurally flawed, but the minute-to-minute experience is very pleasing.

A large reason why that is lies in the design of the game's combat. There's a focus on parrying attacks over tanking or dodging them that demands a constant focus from the player. Even minor encounters cannot be auto-piloted, and the need to always be "locked in" creates satisfaction when overcoming any obstacle.

After finishing some of the longer boss fights, I'd find myself out of breath from how much mental energy had been consumed paying strict attention to the boss's move set. It made the victories feel noteworthy even if the bosses themselves weren't so difficult.

It's intrinsically fun to engage with Stellar Blade's combat system, and because of that I can forgive the fact that the game is disappointingly easy. Any difficulty experienced in the game came from a variety of poorly designed "set pieces" that take place largely out of combat.

A key example would be one of the few turret sections in the game in which the player must run from and avoid rocket fire in an enclosed area. The projectiles cannot be blocked or parried, and they can unreliably be dodged, so the dominant strategy is just to dart from cover to cover. But the movement of the player character never felt precise enough for this to be a worthwhile exercise, and at several points I had to eat frustrating deaths that felt more-or-less random.

Other poorly designed areas that spiked the difficulty curve include most encounters with several basic enemies at a time. The combat system of Stellar Blade does very poorly in handling multiple enemy combatants at a time. The player can get stun locked and comboed out easily; the camera isn't very responsive in switching between targets; moves are often impossible to interrupt into a parry given an unexpected move from a second enemy that was off-screen. One often feels at odds with the game engine itself when trying to deal with multiple enemies at once.

The pace of the game is another glaring issue. The way the player accumulates upgrades and resources seems way too rushed in relation to the progression through the story. Paradoxically, several key skills for basic combat are for some reason locked through the first few hours of the game. It never feels like you are at where you're supposed to be. Either you're lacking in the ability to access a counter for a key type of attack or you have hundreds of thousands of dollars with which to buy everything you could ever need.

It's not only the pacing of player progression that is under-cooked but the pacing of the level progression as well. Stellar Blade includes two types of levels: linear corridors that largely indoors, lack a map, and are more tightly designed, and vast, wide open spaces with enemies more or less plopped out anywhere without much regard.

The open levels take so much time to thoroughly explore but do very little to move the game along. The linear levels are the opposite in both regards. The end result is hitting plateaus that stop the game and its story in their tracks after a period of smooth progress. I enjoyed both types of levels, as they succeed at offering different experiences, but more care should have been made in unifying them into a complete package.

Other flaws include the soundtrack, which was a complete miss for me. The music chosen to overlay much of the game was not only forgettable, but extremely jarring with the tone of the environment's design. In the abstract I can appreciate a bold stylistic decision but this one did not land in the slightest.

The voice acting is another issue. I generally like to play games in a language I both A. understand, and B. can expect good performances from. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I found out that the North American version of the game lacked a Japanese language option. It had a bevvy of other European languages, and the game's native Korean, but Japanese was left out. I chose English, and was quite disappointed to hear some of the worst voice acting of my life from all of the minor characters. The three main characters, luckily, were performed well. But every side quest begged me to skip the voiced readings of the dialogue. Shout out to the mechanic loli whose sister died; absolutely terrible work.

Given the discourse that surrounded this game's release, I'm going to give a straight comment on the character design: I enjoyed this game more due to Eve's sex appeal. I enjoyed this game more because great care was put into her design and the design of her optional outfits. Since the beginning of art as a concept human sexuality and sex appeal have been key to many works, and that remains true here. There is no reason to deny or downplay what this adds to the experience.

Is there a lot wrong with Stellar Blade? Yes! Of course. Hell, the logo does a better job spelling out Stettar Blade than anything else. Did I have a great time while playing it? Naturally. In a world of bland, bloated AAA releases and soulless games that live as a service, one has to appreciate a game with a vision that exists as art artists wanted to create. Warts and all I value Stellar Blade.

I'll probably rent it again in a few months to try a damage-less run over the weekend. Pick up some Nestle Crunch while I'm at it.