Yeah, this was a fairly incomplete experiment. There is a lot more that could be done. At least I managed to try a few things that had been on my mind.
One thing I tried in the week was a more direct two-stick control, where you move with one stick and swing the sword around with the other stick. It was surprisingly cumbersome compared to pressing a button to swing the sword. Another thing I tried was having enemies control space more aggressively; kind of a “battle lines” thing. That turned out to reduce the possibilities for engaging with them by a lot; reducing a 2D space into a 1D space, in a way.
I ended up falling back to some of the combat style from my day job, where I’d been working on combat for “Ghost of Tsushima.”