You should really turn it down to normal; you’ll gain stunlock on normal targets, and you won’t have to spend your entire life canceling out into blocks, evades, parries. You’ll also gain time to experiment with state-setting on enemies, which is the key to harder difficulties – finishing a chain to get an enemy into knockdown, or pushed away, and reevaluating most important target, or chaining a Stun kill into other stun kills. Focus on the reactivity of the enemies and extending your stunlock against groups.
I won the combat after realizing that spending twice as long brainlessly wailing on the winter miser rather than doing a finisher gave me enough meter to win, then uninstalled it for wasting my time
I would say it’s a relief that between this and sekiro I apparently don’t like tough action games anymore but DMC5 was great so
although, unlike sekiro which I think is basically good but succeeds on masochism to a degree that I find mildly depressing, I think this one wayyyy overcalibrated the number of distractions you’re supposed to have in combat to the point where it feels really rote. those fire throwing guys are just … sludge. what if Valve but too much
Once you get both weapons you can basically cycle cooldowns between the two to have effectively 100% uptime between all your abilities. That’s around when I stopped playing!
I’m not sure if I was more bored by the game or the plot at that point tbh.
I feel like every minute of this game is spent actively cycling the player through any of several activities (storytelling, pixel hunting, climbing, etc) and that philosophy is brought forward to every part of it, and every single thing you do is a slog so the only enjoyment comes from the false novelty of incessant context switching
it’s like everything bad about Sony’s design philosophy distilled down to a tar
like I enjoyed the first one as it felt sort of like a modern interpretation of classic belt scrollers but then every subsequent game just felt like being force-fed gamer content without any real sense of purpose of design beyond the bare functional basics
and it’s really hard for me to get excited about this game because it seems like it’s just cynically grabbing modern narrative/design trends and grafting them on top of the god of war brand with more or less the same ethos
it is! to a more significant degree than I thought possible given how much the rest of it had changed!
I got it for $20 after very studiously ignoring it for a year and change, and the idea of all the different permutations of combat it puts you through, where it really does take its encounter design very seriously, has kept me from feeling totally willing to put it down but I hate it so much, I hate it in a very unique way for circumventing my critical faculties
anyway I finally got to this god damn lake after six months so let’s see what the fuss is about
the last game it took me this long to make even the most basic progress in but which I insisted on playing anyway because it was so popular was gears of war. I hate musclebros so much, tell me any other story
it’s also like, genuinely perverse the extent to which Sony’s big titles share animations and unlock structures and so on at this point
like obviously it would be ridiculous to not use the same engine across all of these massive projects in this day and age but when they’re all presented as these totally unique marquee titles and then you get kratos doing the uncharted climb and the TLOU buddy boost and unlocking spiderman’s skill trees and using aloy’s aiming reticule it leads to some very depressing conclusions about what these videogames are taken to have in common
the VR side of the house is still doing 2009-2015 caliber work but idk how long that’ll last at this rate
