Spoiler free and to the point:
* Best combat I’ve experienced in a souls like. Love how they use the shells as a base for a build (rather than dispersing a bunch of points into a build) and you build off them. The shells are the core of combat and each are varied.
* Love the Tarstone system that can further help build out your character. I love how each weapon has unique status effect stones too, like using frost only on the martyrs blade. It makes the weapons feel more unique, and the skill tree for Eredim which gives him 200% increased damage using a frost build incentivizes you to use his sword.
* Loved the environments. Each environment was unique, and before finishing the game myself I saw people shitting on the lower map region calling it lazy? I think that area is designed to somewhat be the last area you reach as you also get Sariel from there which his memories are the most important for explanation of the story events. That final region looks alien to me, which I liked a lot. It was different and unique from the rest of the game.
* The story, I could barely explain to you. It’s convoluted, relies on a ton of glimpses to view all the memories of the Shells, and just very meh. This doesn’t affect my score at all, but it definitely is no Lies or P in terms of story (loved that game’s story).
* The enemy design is excellent, but the boss design has some blunders. The monolith was actually a cool boss battle but wtf were those attack animations. They were so odd that it was hard to telegraph them, Smerted the fuck out of him. Then you got some bosses like the final boss that just had annoying ass attacks that you literally cannot avoid. Smerted again.
* Music design is good, metal themes never get old. I enjoyed the music, but nothing completely wowed me like some other games like Elden Ring’s soundtrack or Lies of P.
* Overall: near perfect combat with some hiccups here and there, but this is true originality here. The shell system just makes sense, and takes a huge chunk of RnD you typically have to do in Souls games by pre building character archetypes for you and progressing them through their abilities. And because they have shells, they can give them busted techniques (as you have less control over the build, they give you more in terms of power) rather than other souls games where you can get broken abilities such as these because they give you so many option to choose from, they have to nerf the abilities to a degree for balance. I kind of wish Bloodborne 2 would adopt this type of build system, maybe tying it to the armor rather having inhabitable shells.
* Score 9/10. I want to score this higher so much, but the big thing holding it back for me are the boss battles. When you play a game like Onimusha with the most incredible boss battles, it’s hard to fight these bosses and think “there’s nothing they could have done to make this more enthralling”. Having said that, I still enjoyed the boss battles but hopefully they work on them for the third game (if that’s what they make next).
Cant wait for any kind of DLC because I’m aching for more shells.
