The one thing I hate about the Yakuza series is how much it has ruined other open world games for me.
Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghost of Tsushima are games I should be enjoying, but just the complete lack of variety in non-main quest stuff just turns me off.
Sounds like we reached the same conclusion, just from different perspectives.
You know what, it's kind of a mean game that doesn't want people to like it unless they're really into the core mechanics.
That's the impression I got from Sekiro as well, that it's just a mean game.
Almost all spoken dialogue can be described as "Extremely serious and sober people speaking their lines at eachother in order to give the player the bare minimum amount of information they need."; it just belies an absence of a sense of humor, like the game was written by self-serious edgelords.
I can dig stealth, but here it seems that stealth is required in a lot of situations, as enemies are very mean and are hungry to dogpile onto you at the slightest mistake. I mean, yeah, that's the smart thing to do if there's an intruder you've found, but ideally I'd want fighting groups to be as fun as sneaking and fighting solo, that's just not the case as the enemies are programmed to fight like assholes.
I was also very disheartened when I THOUGHT I was being clever one time, as just outside the Flaming Bull's arena there's two guards talking about "The bull disregarding friend from foe." and I thought this was my clue as to how to fight it. So what I did was aggro as many enemies in the zone as possible, which includes two big hammer guys that I thought would make great unwitting allies, and lure them into the Bull's boss arena, believing that once the Bull is loose they'd all gang up on it and help me fight it, or atleast help distract it... cue the Bull AND enemies completely ignoring eachother to try to gang up on me and me alone. Talk about asshole game design; if you're not fighting the boss 1v1 in the way the devs intended, I guess you can go fuck yourself.
Oh yeah, and the boss fight just, you know,
starts once you're in a certain proximity. This contradicts the Souls boss design I know and love, where the boss is behind a fog door, and will wait for you to prepare and go fight it. Here in Sekiro though, too bad, you should've been ready and any money you lose as a result of entering this boss fight unprepared is just too bad so sad. Money is not nearly as important as souls are in the Souls games, but it still feels rude to just get kicked in the nuts and have my money stolen from me, with no way to get it back besides grinding for it. I would say that that's Mean Game Design as well.
There's also the actual absence of ways to practice against hard enemies in any safe way. You have a immortal training dummy-man, but he's a peon and barely any help at all because he doesn't emulate the harder AI's weapons and movesets. If Wolf could survive more than two hits, it'd be a different story, but he can't, and his health upgrades only just barely keep up with the increasing damage the enemies are doing, so it always feels like you're playing a character with glass bones and paper skin, so it's very hard to get in anything resembling good practice against a tough enemy before he just kills you; and then you need to go through the 10+ smaller enemies all over again just to set up the area and fight him again, just to repeat the process. That feels very mean from the game designers.
Oh yeah, and enemies that just suicide bomb into you like they're Sengoku-era Al-Qaeda. That's mean game design in a game that is purportedly about skillful swordsmanship.
There's like one audio track that plays when in combat, and it plays in basically all circumstances. When I stealth kill someone, it plays the same music as if I've been discovered by everyone. This track includes a horn that it *sounds* like someone is blowing to alert everyone for miles around, but in reality I stealth killed someone so the music is just playing this spazzy music for a few seconds before returning to stealth music. That's not mean game design, it's just really irritating.
SO yeah, I was very miffed about a lot of things in the game. It really does feel like the game was made to be a love letter to the specific kind of toxic Souls-player that bragged about 'gitting gud' and being a tryhard and never using summons or cheese strats. Only here, it's like the self-imposed challenges from the Souls' games are now mandatory.
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 15845575 times)