Souls-likes
- Thread starter jro
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I think I'm gonna be pretty much all-in on Another Crab just as soon as I finally f'ing finish Stellar Blade. SB has a really nice combat system and character growth system combined with terrible level design and somehow even worse platforming that's just goddamn everywhere in it. I think I'm about 90% through it so I can't really see not finishing it but it's just really bad overall and not recommended. Crabs gon' be better I think.
WTF is with South Korean Souls-likes? Between this and Lies, it's like they nail 80% of the game and then just massively fuck up the rest enough to make the game pretty meh overall.
WTF is with South Korean Souls-likes? Between this and Lies, it's like they nail 80% of the game and then just massively fuck up the rest enough to make the game pretty meh overall.
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I bought it on Early Access on Steam a few days ago. Put about 20 minutes into it on my Legion Go to make sure it worked but then I stopped, as per my usual if I have another lengthy run going on something similar that will screw me up on dodges and/or attack inputs.
Seems good so far, and given Moon Studios' pedigree I expect that it will only get better.
So far I can say for sure that it runs well on Legion Go and seems to have the basics in place, should have Stellar Blade finished up in a few days and then I think I'll get much more into it.
There aren't a ton of devs that would get the benefit of the doubt from me but Moon, I think they do.
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Okay so it's somewhere between Devil May Cry 5 and Sekiro-like, but I just want to comment briefly on Stellar Blade. It's awful. I got through the very grindy first 3/4 of the game, then got to the levels that have just utterly inane amounts of platforming. Mind, Eve is completely terrible at platforming, she grabs the rails of runways she's on (which mostly tends to make her fall to her death) but not lips of surfaces you have to jump to. She will very, very easily fall off of things when you're just trying to see where things are, causing HP loss and progress reset. Most of the hazards are one-hit kills in these areas, and there are a fucking ton of them. Honestly, there's at least 6-8 areas where you do bad platforming and die in one hit if you miss anything.
Oh, and there are several sections before that where your ability to rest at bonfires is taken away until you finish climbing Ubisoft towers, second of which means finding a guy who tells you to find four whatsits and then you finally get to the tower and fight a miniboss that's stronger than any main boss to that point. Yeah, nice.
Anyway, the main combat was good enough to keep me going, and also the fact that I hate quitting a game I think I should be able to beat (Metal Gear Rising Senator Armstrong still haunts me), and I then reached the Unidentified Naytiba boss fight. I turned the difficulty to Story Mode, and dude still took me at least, I dunno, 10 minutes each time to get his HP bar to around half, at which point he starts using a one-hit kill move, which the game actively acknowledges as such (there's no such thing before this point, almost feels like the game is apologizing for the bullshit it's about to introduce). It tells you you have to use ranged attacks to hit the charge points, but not what the charge points are. Or what to do if you're out of ranged ammo (guess what, you're just fucked). So then it proceeds to charge up four little weird guardian spheres that have hitboxes that are not their actual graphics, and if you don't kill all four in about 20 seconds it fires a massive AOW laser that automatically kills you.
I tried it three times, got absolutely nowhere on the lasers part, and was more than happy to uninstall it.
Utterly horrid design decisions in a lot of places. That's not so weird coming from a first-time "triple-A" dev, but Sony publishing it as a first-party title is bizarre. Either help fix the many very obvious issues or let Shift Up self-publish as a $30-$40 game instead of a marquee first-party PS5 game.
Honestly one of the most bizarrely bad releases I've played in quite a while, just so many own-goal mistakes that made a good foundation into a fucking mess.
Oh, and there are several sections before that where your ability to rest at bonfires is taken away until you finish climbing Ubisoft towers, second of which means finding a guy who tells you to find four whatsits and then you finally get to the tower and fight a miniboss that's stronger than any main boss to that point. Yeah, nice.
Anyway, the main combat was good enough to keep me going, and also the fact that I hate quitting a game I think I should be able to beat (Metal Gear Rising Senator Armstrong still haunts me), and I then reached the Unidentified Naytiba boss fight. I turned the difficulty to Story Mode, and dude still took me at least, I dunno, 10 minutes each time to get his HP bar to around half, at which point he starts using a one-hit kill move, which the game actively acknowledges as such (there's no such thing before this point, almost feels like the game is apologizing for the bullshit it's about to introduce). It tells you you have to use ranged attacks to hit the charge points, but not what the charge points are. Or what to do if you're out of ranged ammo (guess what, you're just fucked). So then it proceeds to charge up four little weird guardian spheres that have hitboxes that are not their actual graphics, and if you don't kill all four in about 20 seconds it fires a massive AOW laser that automatically kills you.
I tried it three times, got absolutely nowhere on the lasers part, and was more than happy to uninstall it.
Utterly horrid design decisions in a lot of places. That's not so weird coming from a first-time "triple-A" dev, but Sony publishing it as a first-party title is bizarre. Either help fix the many very obvious issues or let Shift Up self-publish as a $30-$40 game instead of a marquee first-party PS5 game.
Honestly one of the most bizarrely bad releases I've played in quite a while, just so many own-goal mistakes that made a good foundation into a fucking mess.
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Finally found Mohg on this run and proceeded to beat him on the first try... a bit anticlimatic.
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As is tradition, I re-installed and continued to beat my head on the wall of a game I coulda sworn I was not playing anymore.
Finally finished Stellar Blade, tried to make the decision to get the bad ending and the easier boss fight but managed to pick the wrong one, still beat the little remote controlled mech lady, happy to just put that one in the rearview. Post-credits promise a sequel, just like Lies of P, kind of interesting to me just how confident devs can be when others are getting shut down left and right, but... honestly, even though I still definitely do not recommend SB, I also still do think Shift Up could make a really good follow-up if they get some decent QA from a big publisher, i.e. the one they had that did nothing to help them this time. Just, no idea how Sony didn't go in and delete about 90% of the endgame, it was just awful, no changing my opinion on that.
Of note, the trophy for getting that ending on SB is 2.8% as I'm typing this. A From game would be at 30+ after the same amount of time.
Also that one boss I mentioned that irritated me, I tried turning on action aids to see if it would show me where to shoot, no, it doesn't, I just ended up using a one-time total revive item to get around it that costs a ton of the in-game currency. Just bad design that could have been so much better with a little bit of fixing.
IMO Round8 is the better dev overall and I am much more interested in seeing what they do with Dorothy than what Shift Up does with EVE 2, but I'm not mad at either come to think of it, which is an improvement on where I was with SU a minute ago.
edit apparently South Korean devs are the new From Soft and Team Ninja up in here.
Finally finished Stellar Blade, tried to make the decision to get the bad ending and the easier boss fight but managed to pick the wrong one, still beat the little remote controlled mech lady, happy to just put that one in the rearview. Post-credits promise a sequel, just like Lies of P, kind of interesting to me just how confident devs can be when others are getting shut down left and right, but... honestly, even though I still definitely do not recommend SB, I also still do think Shift Up could make a really good follow-up if they get some decent QA from a big publisher, i.e. the one they had that did nothing to help them this time. Just, no idea how Sony didn't go in and delete about 90% of the endgame, it was just awful, no changing my opinion on that.
Of note, the trophy for getting that ending on SB is 2.8% as I'm typing this. A From game would be at 30+ after the same amount of time.
Also that one boss I mentioned that irritated me, I tried turning on action aids to see if it would show me where to shoot, no, it doesn't, I just ended up using a one-time total revive item to get around it that costs a ton of the in-game currency. Just bad design that could have been so much better with a little bit of fixing.
IMO Round8 is the better dev overall and I am much more interested in seeing what they do with Dorothy than what Shift Up does with EVE 2, but I'm not mad at either come to think of it, which is an improvement on where I was with SU a minute ago.
edit apparently South Korean devs are the new From Soft and Team Ninja up in here.
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I'm playing Jedi Fallen Order for the first time. Almost at the end and it's definitely got some Souls DNA in it. I'm playing on normal difficulty and it's still pretty damn challanging.
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Sewer Mohg or Palace Mohg?
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Speaking of things that happened at Mohgwyn Palace, if Miquella were posting here he'd have to use your avatar.
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@jro yeah coomer blade falls short. Boring overworld, eve looks like a pretty mount and blade character. Big TT sora rule 63 Lily tomboy is way cooler. FF10 esque upgrade circle thing is nice and atleast gives you a reason to do sidequest. Game got censored to both the costumes and violence when the developers were waving their dicks around adamantly saying it woudn't be censored.
Enemies have some bad hitboxes and bad telegraphs/delays all weaved together. So much so you can get punished for doing some of the counters like burst or blink. Game drops inputs from what I've experienced too.They don't really interact with you and are pretty stupid to a fault. The bosses are all bullshit and just repeat shit like a npc with no regards to how close or far you are unlike souls games.Basically you are playing simon says and its their turn all the time deal with it.Dealing with multiple enemies is just garbage and bosses do have way too much health.
@Lagduf I would make sure to level up Health first. Then level up ADP to increase Agility so it increases your invincibility frames. Without leveling it up dodging sucks big time. In any case the dlcs sucked for this game and I say that as someone who loves Dark Souls 2.
Enemies have some bad hitboxes and bad telegraphs/delays all weaved together. So much so you can get punished for doing some of the counters like burst or blink. Game drops inputs from what I've experienced too.They don't really interact with you and are pretty stupid to a fault. The bosses are all bullshit and just repeat shit like a npc with no regards to how close or far you are unlike souls games.Basically you are playing simon says and its their turn all the time deal with it.Dealing with multiple enemies is just garbage and bosses do have way too much health.
@Lagduf I would make sure to level up Health first. Then level up ADP to increase Agility so it increases your invincibility frames. Without leveling it up dodging sucks big time. In any case the dlcs sucked for this game and I say that as someone who loves Dark Souls 2.
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