last night I started my "very hard" game, it's a little sad but I think this is the first time I've been truly forced to play the game right. That insanely easy parry that pretty much means I can never get hit unless I'm not paying attention at all is now mostly just a block and at best will only let me get a hit or two in on the real enemies that you have to beat up before you can chop em to pieces, I now actually have to pay close attention to patterns so I can get the tighter timed parry that results in a counter attack to do any worth while damage! I actually got beat up by mistrel(awesome boss wasted by brain dead difficulty levels before)... a ton of times! I even got frustrated and doubted the games balance a few times only to eventually get by when I got my skills up. Enemies don't just let you beat them up and finish your combos, they actually parry and counter attack you, some even bloody counter your counters! Because you really have to work to get to that blue spine, completely refilling your health is not so overly effective and actually makes alot of sense now.
Point being, on normal and hard the game is cool but you don't really need to play it... you will get to the end just by mashing combos and parrying every now and then. You don't actually need to give a shit until it's on very hard. I questioned a few friends about their decision to start on hard first in this game, but in this games case...I think hard is likely platinum's intended normal mode. I have to assume because this is a mainstream metal gear licence game they had tone down the default difficulties, which is understandable but I think in a way they did a bad job at that because I really questioned the depth of the game up untill now and was honestly slightly disappointed, it was a great game to me and I really enjoyed the play through, but being platinum, I was hoping for more of a godhand than a god of war kinda direction. Now I see the hardcore is in there, it's just all concentrated near the bottom! The balance is slightly questionable still however, it would have been nice if more of the risk reward gameplay awesomeness revealed itself more strongly even in hard mode, as very hard really is.... very hard... I don't even wanna imagine revengeance mode....
TLDR: game not as shallow as I though, play very hard mode and be forced to use the games mechanics properly.
