izigame.me

It seems everyone is singing praises for this game, as if it's the second coming of Miyazaki. However, I cannot in good faith recommend it in its current state. Initially, I was enamored with it, but my appreciation quickly waned as I progressed. Mechanically and in terms of design, there are several issues with the game. Fans claim it’s a love letter to the Souls genre, but it lacks the essence of Souls games. Fromsoft's Soulsborne series, along with Sekiro and Elden Ring, offer challenging experiences that provide myriad ways to conquer challenges. This game does not really do that. So often in this game you feel like you are shoehorned into a situation and the game does not provide the means for you to solve it other than banging your head against the wall that the game built for you. I think some of the design are seriously flawed in this game, like Dark Souls 2, it's an immitation of the essence of Souls game but missed some major marks.
Mechanics - Firstly, I feel like the devs cannot decide if they want this game to be more Bloodborne/Sekiro or Dark Souls or both. The character P is neither agile enough nor strong enough for either playstyle. Enemies frequently outpace and overpower P, making encounters unbalanced. P's perfect parry window is exceedingly tight, and some of the bosses' combo has an interval of like 0.5 seconds. Unless you have perfectly memorized the bosses' movesets, I don't know how you are really supposed to perfect parry them. Enemies also do not react to being perfect parried, they do not cancel their combo, they do not get staggered, making this mechanic extremely unsatisfying and unrewarding. Often times in elite/boss fight, you feel like your character is no where as strong as the ginormous enemies but no where as fast either. P cannot raise up his weapon fast enough to parry a lot of the time due to recovery frames on so many of his action. What's worse is that P has no poise, or hyperarmor. Poise is simply not a stats in the game, no amount of gear or any weapon changes that. So P with no poise and cannot dodge/block fast enough resulting you just often get combo'd to death in a corner by a ramnpaging boss or stunlocked to death on the ground (more on this later).
Second of all, weapon design. I played through the game using a strength build, I started with heavy weapon and let me tell you, the heavy weapons in this game are pathetic and woefully ineffective. Heavy weapons in Dark Souls are some of the fan's favorite. They are slow and cumbersome but they have long ranges, very high damage, and very high poise damage, so as long as you know what you are doing, you can keep the enemies at bay by killing them at range or stagger/stun them. However, the heavy weapon's reach in this game is laughable and their attacks are so slow with super long recovery frames that stop you from dodging or guarding. What's worse is that for some reason the geniuses at NEOWIZ made it so even when you "stance break" an enemy, you have to do a fully charged heavy attack or fable attack(they are just as long to cast) to be able to do a fatal/visceral/execution attack. Enemies also does not react to being "stance broken" whatsoever, they will continue their relentless combo and overlong delayed attack combos. Perfect parry was hard enough already, this just makes it all the more unrewarding. Especially good luck doing it with the pipe wrench becase the charging heavy is a two-hit combo and the first hit doesn't count, only landing the second hit allows for the visceral attack. Well, it also wouldn't be so so bad if our ultra heavy and slow weapons have any amount of poise or hyperarmor so we can trade health for a visceral attack. No, your character has no poise or hyperarmor regardless of what weapon you use, so if you are almost done with your super long charging heavy attack and even the weakest of the trash mobs look at you the wrong way, you are fucked. I also don't understand why the game devs thinks that an vital information such as stance bar should be hidden, in Sekiro, the stance bar of both you and the enemies are clearly shown.
Third of all, enemy design in general. Every enemy in this game has an ungodly amount of delayed attacks; pretty much every elite and boss enemy uses overly long 6-7 hit combo, spinning attack, "drunken master" style delayed attack combo that is really really poorly telegraphed. Some of the grab and slam attack also look too similar. Almost every non-grunt enemies also have furious (perilous) attack that you cannot dodge (unless you want to wear a 21 weight late game amulet) but only perfect parry. Most of the regular elite enemies that you encounter throughout exploration are so so so tanky and do so much damage. When I think of an elite enemy I think of Black Knights or Chained Ogre. However, for the elite enemies in this game, if they had a little bit more health they might as well be regular bosses. Most of the enemies are also so very aggressive that they leave you with little window to punish. Like they would repeat their 5-hit combo three times immediately one after another. Coupled with the fact that even if you "stance break" them with perfect parry, you still cannot punish them because, again, you need to land a charged heavy. The camera angle is seriously awful a lot of the times too, a lot of the enemies are so much bigger than you and have so many overhead attacks, the overhead attacks already barely gives out any visual cues to begin with and coupled with the close-up camera angle it's just so hard to dodge/parry them.
Bosses, I always look forward to fighting bosses in Dark Souls but I absolutely dread fighting bosses in this game. All bosses in this game bar two are either multi-healthbar bosses with multiple phases per healthbar or absolute shitshow gank fights. It's not just difficult, it's "exhausting" and "annoying". Especially the gank fight, I'm not getting into the Dark Souls 2 debate again on why both design wise and mechanically Artorias and Gael are some fo the best bosses and are "what the game is vessel for". Combo'd with P's relatively slow movement, honestly half the boss fight reminds of Malenia, like my character is in the wrong game.