One-off notes as I was playing:
- Updated ui elements + loading screen aesthetics look really nice.
- Advancement of the tutorial fight against Jin is a little unclear. I found myself pressing the prompted buttons, parrying when it told me etc. and it would not advance to the next prompt. I'm not sure how I ended up defeating him. I was spamming jumps and then he suddenly got knocked down and I could finish him off.
- Speaking of spamming jumps, if you spam dodge roll + jump along a wall you can sometimes do a really weird long jump. In Nia's boss room you can basically float along the ceiling if you spam jumps.
- After I died against Jin I respawned behind the invisible wall so I couldn't reach him. Had to quit to title and start a new game to re-fight him.
- In the mountain region leading up the Jin fight you can run up the side of the mountain to get around said invisible wall.
- If the fps displayed in the top right corner is accurate, the game doesn't seem to obey the fps set in the settings unless Vsync is explicitly turned off. I tried setting it to 60 and 30 but it would only use the full 144hz unless I turned vsync off.
- After dying to Louise once her battle music stopped playing.
- I was able to cheese Louise by essentially spamming kick with E to stunlock her. When her poise bar is set to max I would just jump away and the jump hurtbox will knock her down, giving you a free finishing move. Definitely felt like cheating but I'll take it because I know my scrub ass is not beating her legit. The good news is this strat does not work on Nia at all lol.
- Might want to increase the height of that small japanese-style house in the hub world. It's easy for the camera to clip through the roof. Or just make the roof turn transparent when the camera is over it.
Overall thoughts on the gameplay:
Maybe I'm just playing it wrong but this game feels a little too punishing. The bosses do a fuckton of damage while it feels like every attack the player does barely scratches their hp bar. I also don't like how bosses never really give much breathing room. They will throw out an attack and then throw out another a few seconds later regardless of where the player is. It would be nice if they would also move around the arena bit or run up to the player before throwing out their next attack. My only reference for similar arpgs is the Kingdom Hearts series and I appreciated how those games will always let you get at least one full combo in if you strike an enemy during an opening. In those games an enemy's retaliation timing is determined by a "revenge value". Here it seems like I can get in at most 2 hits in consistently before the enemy starts striking back, despite Kimiko's basic combo being apparently 4 hits total.
Parrying, blocking, and dodging feel a lot better than I remember. I also like how recovering from a downed position feels a lot snappier than the last time I played.