The art direction of this game is sensational!
the music is peak and varied, gameplay gives a bit of a challenge for a turn based veteran like me, and there’s still plenty of humour and light-hearted moments in a game full of melancholy, sadness, and struggles.
I can understand it’s not for everyone though, the parry system is quite a bit tricky to get a good timing.
I’ve recently been playing it and I’ve been blown away.
I find the parry system not too bad actually. I’m more than half way through the game and I’ve only recently started properly learning how to parry, but I love how easy the game makes it to learn. Context for anyone who hasn’t played the game: when you successfully dodge, you see the words “dodge” rather than damage numbers. When you do a perfect dodge, you see the words “perfect dodge”. The window for parrying is smaller than for dodging, but this dodge system meant that when I started noticing I was somewhat consistently getting perfect dodges, I decided I should try parrying more often.
I find the overall difficulty tuning to be excellent. Even on normal difficulty, it’s definitely challenging at points, but it feels extremely fair. You won’t be able to defeat all enemies that you’re able to access at any given time — there’s so many times that I’ve tried my chances with a big guy just hanging out on the map, only to get my team wiped in one hit. However, the open world and much to explore means I can go away and come back later. Upgrade materials are scattered all over, so exploration is super powerful.
I agree with you that the highlight of the game is how beautiful it is. There have been a few times where I’ve had to stop for a moment and just take in the scenery when it was so soul achingly beautiful that I could scarcely think.
If I remember correctly, parries and perfect dodges have the same timing window. It’s just that messing up a perfect dodge still leaves opportunity to regular dodge, which is safer than parrying by far.
Yeah, exactly, that’s what I was trying to convey. I’m not good under pressure, so I’ve spent most of the game opting to dodge, given it’s much safer. What I like is that the “perfect dodge” notice is a subtle, helpful prompt that’s basically saying “hey, if you’d tried to parry this attack rather than dodge, you’d have succeeded. Back yourself, bro.”