izigame.me

First, to get it out of the way, this game is great. I love it. It's a lot of fun, the story is engaging and memorable, it is *mostly* very polished. I've played through completely several times, and got 100% of the achievements.
That being said, the FLAWS in the game are very irritating a best, and stroke-risk levels of infuriating at worst. Starting with minor gripes and "feedback".
Most of the crafting materials are able to be purchased after a certain point. There are a couple of materials, however, that MUST be farmed, at least one of which has a terrible drop rate and amount, only drop from ONE enemy type, and those enemies are not only very few, but they aren't really set up along a "farming route". I'm talking about the withered silk-worm. Luckily, you only need it for two medicines, and they aren't super important, but it IS irritating. You only get them from these annoying stone worm things that basically knock you off of your feet, and take a few hits to kill, even with top tier, end game gear. Either making the enemies drop more of the item, make them drop from more enemies, arrange the enemies along a route that is efficient, or MAKE ALL CRAFTING ITEMS PURCHASABLE ONCE YOU BEAT THE GAME AND CONTINUE BEFORE BEGINNING A NEW CYCLE.
Respect the player's time, please. Doing things like this may pad out "play time" in some way, but these are the types of things that irk me and a lot of other players.
In the same vein, end game crafting materials should be abundant by the end of the second or third play through. I shouldn't have to play through the game 5 times to fully upgrade all of my weapons and armor because one or two crafting materials are only available in specific, limited amounts per play-through. During the first run, that makes sense, but by the end of the second or third, it's ridiculous.
This is highlighted by the fact that beyond a certain point, there's nothing you can really do with the excess of "will" (the in-game currency) that you do NOT drop upon death (like in souls games) and have hundreds of thousands of in the end. And while we're at it, it's really dumb that you can't sell UNNEEDED crafting materials that don't "convert to will" on additional play-throughs (which only seems to happen with key items). My inventory is cluttered with BS I can't do anything except watch the stack number raise.
Another minor gripe is the fact that there are unskippable cut scenes, either fully rendered or scripted "in-engine" scenes, even in NG+ and beyond. I understand making certain things unskippable during NG, because you want the story to be experienced, but I should have the option to skip ALL cut-scenes from NG+ and beyond. Again, PLEASE RESPECT THE PLAYER'S TIME. I am an adult. I love playing video games. I only have so much time to play them though, and having to sit through repeated, unchanged iterations of the same scenes over again takes away from my enjoyment.
The last *minor* gripe is that for some reason, probably the fault of the localization process (maybe?), certain mechanics are poorly explained and unclear. I shouldn't have to google what "seeing through and enemy" means in practice when it's a fairly core mechanic of the game. Or what exactly "might" and "qi" are while playing. And that's aside from the fact that there's no direct way to aquire them, even being impossible without certain items in your build.
More aggravating gripes:
While the game plays well most of the time, and this may be more of an engine problem, but the game seems to suffer from the EXTREMELY common trend of being under-optimized and assuming that anyone playing the game will have a machine new/powerful enough to compensate for heaving processing. While I NOW have good machines, I didn't always, so I can readily put myself in the shoes of someone with an older PC that wants to enjoy this game, but has to suffer through sudden frame rate drops. While I mostly play games on my desktop PC, I have been traveling with my laptop and playing on it. With a great processor and a 2070 super, I have to use throttlestop and MSI afterburner to overclock things enough to get the game to play decently, using TPFancontrol to lock fan speeds at max in order to keep things cool enough to not thermal throttle. And even then, for some reason, the dialed back settings seem to be overridden in the pause menu, dropping the frame rate from 60 to 8 and often crashing the game, if not my driver. I know most people aren't going to OC their machine, but hasn't been a problem with other games like Lies of P, Elden Ring, RE Village, etc.
Next, I don't know about anyone else, but I HATE runbacks to bosses in general. This game mostly doesn't have them, but the few that do exist are OBNOXIOUS. The battle with Giant Shigandang is a good example of this.
And speaking of Giant Shigandang... The auto-target system NEEDS WORK. Really, the camera placement needs work. When fighting this GIANT boss, you really need to stay in one area to avoid one-shot kill attacks, while also being close enough to run in and attack when you have the opportunity. For whatever reason, even with auto-target and all associated settings turned off, in that specific area, as the boss moves around, auto-target STILL automatically kicks in but switching, losing, and targeting different parts of the boss, whipping the camera around and often away from where you need to be looking.
That also brings up how often the entire screen gets obstructed by the enemy you're fighting, often resulting in taking an outsized amount of damage. This wouldn't be a HUGE problem, except....
If you're going to have a game that is based around dodging with no blocking or parrying mechanic outside of optional skills, you'd better make the timing on those skills AND dodging VERY CONSISTENT. It simply isn't here. The "seeing through" mechanic, for example, requires timing based on where THE ANIMATION is in the middle of a combo, relative to the enemy's attack animation, which is also affected by frame drops. A delayed parry can be fine, like the special parry skill with the sword in Lies of P, but it is consistent and there is an alternative parry/block with that weapon. The timing here is worse than the parry mechanic in Code Vein, which was so bad I just never tried to parry since the parry was delayed, varied in its effective window, and just sucked. However, the other two games had practice dummies, with Lies of P even having one that attacked with consistent timing so you could practice parrying and get used to the timing without needing to go through loading screens to respawn enemies for practice.
Now for the MAJOR gripes:
This goes for MANY games, most of which I love, even though I hate these things:
INPUT READING, ROLL CATCHING, AND UNBLOCKABLE/UNDODGEABLE ANIMATION TRIGGERING ATTACKS ARE NOT A GOOD WAY OF INCREASING DIFFICULTY FOR BOSSES! IT IS JUST LAZY AND INFURIATING.
Make the boss faster, more responsive and punishing for button mashing or mistimed healing or dodges, but input reading especially is just infuriating. With the loong dragon in the webbed hollow, you can have the boss entirely stunlocked by your gang of monkey doubles while you charge your heavy attack, and the boss will block your attack every time. This is clear input reading. And don't get me started with the first "final boss" monkey in his final stage. I can be in cloud step, yet get parried EVERY SINGLE TIME if I use a heavy attack. INPUT READING IS LAZY.
As for roll catching, the Yin Tiger fight is the worst about this that I can' think of right now. He also pulls the unavoidable, animation triggering brutal attack, but not as bad as Non-Able. All of those things suck, and feel unfair during the fight, like they're just cheating. All of these "difficulty measures" do.
In general, the game is great, but it's not perfect, and all of these things make the balance feel off and could be improved upon.