I think it’s this, yeah. Having borrowed Sekiro from a friend for the week, I’m immediately struck just by how much faster and freer this game feels. From what I’ve played (just brought down Gyoubu), the character is equipped for an extremely aggressive playstyle, moreso than anything in Souls. No shields to hide behind.
Dash in, hammer them/deflect to break stance, and finish - seems to work on most mooks. When that doesn’t work (and it usually doesn’t once you’re past the first few areas), swing wide and wait for opportunities for hit and away attacks to chip away at HP so their posture breaks more easily.
Monsters seem to be the most challenging opponents as they don’t seem to have any posture, so they end up being big stompy damage sponges. That said, a few of them are vulnurable to a skill that lets you grapple to them and do some spinny blade bullshit, so I’m wondering if there’s any more stuff like that to give you more of an advantage.
It’s definitely frustrating (“I PRESSED THE BUTTON, MY MAN”) but I’m definitely getting the same tension-and-release feeling I got out of Demon’s and Dark1; a feeling that was definitely muted from Dark2 onwards.
it’s clear that you were at least as turned off by a (rare?) bad build in one or two of these as I was by trying to get the hang of sekiro, which is fair enough! I still basically have them in my head as “all builds work and levelling up is really trivial if you ever feel like you want to”
leveling up is never not tedious work in any game and you have to know what to put points in anyway, dark souls 2 is the only one where all weapons are actually viable or close to it, and all builds being viable is not true in any souls game if it’s your first souls game, only when you’re on new game plus or know the game backwards
I never even bothered to finish demons souls, the march across that bridge to the 2nd boss fight was fucking miserable and I’d already played every other souls game at that point
genichiro is the only part of serkiro that’s felt like a souls game to me in that I felt like I learned nothing, just eventually got lucky with the zigging and zagging and if I’d had summon help available I would of just done that and moved on feeling vaguely unsatisfied.
A bunch of Sekiro bosses definitely felt like fighting CPU Gill insofar as I had most success manipulating the AI into doing a more predictable sequence of moves
i feel like i remember people saying that all weapons in bloodborne were basically viable as long as you’re willing to farm the right gems from chalices. i can’t confirm as i never went that deep.
there’s something cool to me about the idea of players mining into an unknown procedural abyss (especially with the occasional discovery of some new, bizarre creature variation), sharing discoveries which could then inform the base game in new ways… just not sure how well it all came together in practice
I’m probably going to start another Bloodborne playthrough and maybe I can kill more than just the Cleric Beast this time. What’s the best starting loadout for Easy Progress?
(I think Tulpa basically laid this out but explain it to me like I’m 5 years old)
Hunter axe & hunter pistol, lone survivor (high VIT) or violent past (high STR, moderate VIT and END)
The axe is absurdly good. It has a bonus to regain so you can get “orange health” back faster when you take damage. the basic state is just a solid weapon with a good balance of speed and power, and the transformed state is a halberd with excellent reach for crowd control. The fully charged halberd R2 hits twice for really heavy damage and can knock down most human-sized enemies, it’s great if you just want to cheese a tough encounter.
The pistol has better range and speed than the blunderbuss, so it’s much easier to learn how to parry with. Dash in, dash out to bait attacks and shoot while your opponent is in the middle of a swing; if they stagger, you can dash up and quickly hit R1 to visceral atttack and basically 1-hit kill anything in Central Yharnam (also if you take damage while trying to parry, visceral attacks completely refill your “orange health”)
Anything that looks like a werewolf is weak to fire, so using molotovs and oil can make early bosses like cleric beast way easier. You also unlock the other weapons pretty early on, so don’t feel like you’re stuck using the axe and pistol if they don’t do it for you. The saw cleaver is also a really good early weapon (serrated weapons get a bonus against beasts too); the threaded cane is cool as hell but i wouldn’t recommend it right away, it’s tricky to use.
You should put most of your level ups into VIT until you get it to 20 or so and END to at least 15 before you invest in other stats. i like making numbers go up in general (including the rest of this series) but when it comes to Bloodborne i agree with Parker and Tulpa’s takes upthread: it’s really boring, you’re basically shooting yourself in the foot if you don’t inmediately put a bunch of points into health and stamina, and beyond that it’s just raise whatever stat your weapon scales best with until the end of time, zzzzzz
The Saw Cleaver is also very solid. Just don’t go with the cane, it kinda sucks (source: I did an entire playthrough using the cane). Not enough range in the collapsed mode, not enough speed in the whip mode, and not enough DPS in either.
yeah my one playthrough was cane and I was still using it by Ebrietas because the blades of mercy didn’t have the range and I didn’t have the burial blade yet and there aren’t that many dex weapons
I did beat big G pretty effortlessly with cane + shotgun which is apparently the worst loadout (but can’t you get all the others before him anyway?)
Everything I’ve read suggested the difference in parrying between shotguns and pistols is negligible, or perhaps favors shotguns – specifically, the timing from button press to shot is identical. I always felt like I got better results with shotguns.
the cane can hitstun enemies but the timing on how to do that is tricky and often involves doing the transform attacks.
Surprisingly, its a good weapon for cheesing your way through the game but you pretty much need to have already figured the game out before you can use it like that
Oh right, transform attacks, I never learned to use those on any weapon. For me, the game sort of lacked any moment where it comes to mind as a thing I might try to deal with a particular situation, so I just forget about it and never get around to learning how it can be useful.
at a certain point you’ll probably be tempted to spend currency on heal items rather than levelling up, and while that’s fair, if you have the DLC it might be worth playing through at least the opening area as there’s a spot before the first boss where it’s quite generous with handouts.
also, there’s a rune somewhere that restores bullets upon visc attacks which come to think of it sounds like nuDOOM
they hit hard as hell and for certain weapons they’re just as fast as a normal light attack. spamming the saw cleaver one just wrecks any beast enemy
also yeah every weapon is viable. some are just harder to use than others and 3-4 require odd hybrid builds that only really work with that weapon. the axe & cleaver are both easy to pick up and do really well til the end
I used it on my first playthrough of the game. The whip version of the cane has excellent reach and can easily get you through the first run. I honestly like it better than most of the other weapons, due to its consistency.
i chose the whip cane thing because it seemed the most thematically appropriate but i don’t think it was the best weapon for me, a beginner
eventually switched to some type of sword i think because it was cool. i never really liked the axe-type weapons.
there is still one area in a really useful blood echo farming location that i kept switching back to the whip for, there are two werewolves that try to go inside a house and you can stand just inside the house and whip them from afar and they cannot hurt you
obviously later on this is trivial, but i had a hard time not getting my ass beat by those guys in the early game
yeah the cane is probably the hardest to use well of the starting 3 and it’s bad at regaining health (unlike the axe.) plus you only get serrated damage out of the whip form and nearly everything menacing in the first third is weak to serrated weapons.
(also lol i think part of my brain will forever be occupied by bloodborne monster weaknesses because i played an arcane build. kind of neat that being a Battle Professor requires doing research tho?)