it's a playable modern martial arts movie
the kind that you'd see everybody never shut the fuck up about when action movies are brought up
it's got the style, it's got the choerography
it's a GREAT time, a must try of its genre
but it's got all the hang ups that action movies tend to have - mainly their simplicity in the face of trying to be something more
that bit of insecurity about what it is when what it succeeds at is so frequently engaging and brutally cathartic that when it tries to be "elevated" it just
fails, but it's not a spectacular failure
the first john wick has a lot of "i'm sad and miss my wife" moments that make sense on paper but in execution is just the part of the movie that nobody REALLY cares about
it's just obligation, the part of the plot that deserves the focus it got but really should've been left out if the execution is gonna be relatively boring
it's not BAD, i can accept that it's there, but it's still lessens the product
except with sifu it's goofy shit like "hey i'm gonna beat the shit out of you and make you think i'm gonna kill you but i won't, which will make you stop fighting and make me out to be the better person even though i straight up murdered five hundred people before i got here" that john wick never had to deal with
so i guess it is worse and kind of a big problem when you think about it i guess
because the story, in spite of all its presentation, is extremely simple and feels almost patronizing at times if you do the recommended second wude playthrough
and dude, i don't think it's nearly as rough as it could have been but you can definitely tell that
while the devs have a profound love of martial arts cinema
the devs were mostly, as far as i can tell, white people
i applaud (lol) slo clap for their reverence, and i won't go any further than that given that i am also extremely white
they consulted a lot of people who did know about this shit
but when your game ends with the protag among chinese dragons in a stereotypical depiction of the after life i think i have some ground to stand on

but man
i'm gonna aplogize for my aforementioned paleness and say that in the moment, when i'm actually playing the game, i can't find it in myself to care
this is one of the coolest games i've ever played
i love this shit man, this is my DMC
my godhand
my game that i play over and over again just to get better at, just to do cooler shit in, just to completely dominate
that's not to say the game is easy or that it doesn't frustrate: it's the opposite
this is easily one of the harder character action games that you can play, arguably one of the harder rouge lites
the immediate comparison that comes to mind is sekiro, not just because of its posture and takedown system that incentivizes aggression and speed to overwhelm your opponents
but the hyper focus on extremely punishing game design that forces the player into doing exactly what the game wants you to do
you WILL get good at parrying, you WILL learn to avoid sweep attacks, you WILL learn how to weave through a group fight, and you WILL learn all of its systems or you WILL fail and you won't see the credits even once
deaths are quick and punishing, with each one adding onto a counter that multiplies with each death (you can clear these multipliers but it can snowball very quick)
you reach the limit, your run is over
there are many elements of the game that try to smooth this over somewhat, but with things like the game's shrine system, you are very much encouraged to not take those shortcuts (figuratively and literally)
this is a barrier for most players, i imagine, but unlike sekiro (a game i also put an obscene amount of time into at launch because of very similar reasons - again, the comparison is more than surface level) this game actually has an easy mode
which wasn't there at release, it's a conscious choice that the devs have made post launch to help ease people into this experience
it's still difficult, it still enocurages the same things, but it's now way easier for somebody not as good at the game as me to find out how utterly satisfying it is to duck punch push light push again heavy sweep ground attack and do the overwhelming majority (if not all) of the structure damage of that one bitch that killed you a billion times before you figured out you can just parry the cunt and obliterate the fucker so efficiently that fighting two at once is what feels like a fair fight
what elevates this game into the territory of a game like the aforementioned godhand is the sheer power you can obtain just by simply mastering the game's mechanics
every enemy has a weakness, even the ones that seem like they don't, and while you will definitely want to fully unlock that upgrade tree
and do it asap, the game really doesn't feel complete until you do
that knowledge is still more important than any skill you can obtain in game
i fucking love when games manage to do this and i'm actually able to engage with it, because rarely do i actually want to put in the time to master a game like this
but i think this one truly deserves that dedication

this is a MUST play, it fits in with some of the best rouge lites out there while appealing to an entirely different demographic
namely me, somebody who's not the biggest fan of them
but IS the biggest fan of this kind of shit
i want more games specifically like this god dammit