A few weeks ago, I heard about an indie action game from VashTheShellBullet that I thought looked interesting. I did some research and it seemed like this is the kind of game I'd like the play as well as make. So I'm going to do a bit of a rundown of my time with this game.
Bearing in mind, my playthrough to this extent is as follows, I booted up the game, went on Normal, and faced the fifth and second-to-last boss, that being Suzuka with an extended movelist. As far as that playthrough was concerned, I wasn't dealing enough damage and I didn't have enough health to get her down to half health. So, I used one of the features to restart the game with the progress I've made on the stats and moves and went down the difficulty mode to Easy. In that time, I completed the Easy Difficulty and am now working my way through Normal after having defeated the first boss for the third time since purchasing the game.
So I'm calling this a first impression because I don't think I can call this a proper review until I get one hundred percent completion and am able to do a no-damage run, something that's going to take a lot of time and practice. So for now, I'm just going to go over my experience as it is.
The star of this game is a blade Templar by the name of Misa. Her job was to protect the Demon Blade and prevent anyone from using it. Her best friend and former Blade Templar, Suzuka, got a hold of the blade and is now possessed by the demon inside it. It spawns demons to get in your way, for reasons that are not made clear, until you fight and defeat Suzuka. When you defeat her for the first time, she escapes and one of her demons regenerates and fights you again. Then you fight Suzuka to the death and as she dies, her body is resurrected and deformed by the demon within the sword, transforming into what I can only describe as Alpha-152 if that character had a sword arm.
That's the entire plot of the game. If that seems bare bones, that's because it is. One of the reviews I saw previously stated that there's probably two minutes of cutscenes in the entire game and, speaking from experience, that number is probably closer to 1 minute. The game is very light on story which, for me, is actually a positive.
We have enough of a premise that we know why Misa is fighting demons, the identity of the one we have to kill, and whether or not that goal is successful. For a game focused exclusively on action, this is all we need.
In terms of the mechanics, we have a moveset that I think is best described as "Vergil from DMC3 if he looked like a typical anime shrine maiden, and could use Yamato and Beowulf at the same time."
The game's overall mechanics seem to be a light, minimalist mixture of some Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry mechanics. For your face buttons, you have three total attacks. Bearing in mind, I'm on PS4 so you know the drill by now. Square is your bare-handed attack. You use that to build up a meter that you can use to attack with your sword. Triangle is your regular sword attacks. Though this is your standard combo, using it still spends meter, so you want to mix in some barehanded attacks whenever you can. And Circle is your Holy Moves, and this is where we start to get to those comparisons to Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden.
In Devil May Cry, you have one attack button for Firearms and one for Devil Arms, for Dante, Square is the Guns and Triangle is the Melee Weapons. Misa works similarly to this, except instead of Square being firearms, it's fist fighting instead. So, this is sort of like if Vergil had Yamato on Triangle and Beowulf on Square instead of the summoned swords. The Holy Attacks, however, are actually more similar to the Ultimates from Ninja Gaiden. You have the level one, which is just a really powerful sword slash, then you have level 2, which is using the Ultimate Attack Mechanic but, in essence, is actually a Judgment Cut that travels forward.
Of course the Judgment Cut is probably the most obvious thing Misa shares with Vergil but she has other moves of his as well. She has a repeatable Iai Slash Strike and Vergil's Dive Kick. Granted, all of the series I've mentioned so far are of Japanese origin and Vergil may be the most famous Iaijutsu Fist Fighter in Gaming that I'm aware of but, in terms of fiction as a whole, especially Anime, he's not exactly the first or only one.
Of course Misa does have moves that Vergil doesn't, such as her basic fist fighting combo and the aerial slash that I'll get to in a moment. Likewise, Vergil has a host of moves that Misa doesn't, particularly the ones related to the Force Edge. I just found these similarities striking even if I am reading too much into it.
Now, in terms of the Ultimate-Versus-Holy moves thing that I mentioned earlier, Holy Moves function very similarly to the Ultimate mechanic in Ninja Gaiden. If you charge long enough to get the first air aura, you just get a really powerful single attack. The best comparison I can make is with Ryu's Dragon Sword, since they're both Katana. Ryu's first level has him travel forward somewhat, while Misa stays still for the slash, so hers is a bit harder to use in regular combat when enemies are not just right in your face.
Alternatively, both of them have mechanics that speed up the charging rate. If you hold the charge button to the Level 2, you get a full blown Ultimate, Ryu has a regular, and Misa has the Judgment Cut. In Ninja Gaiden, if you killed some enemies and there's essence floating around, Ryu can absorb that essence to get rid of the charge time while altering the attack animation somewhat. Misa's mechanic is to hit R1 to spend some of your blade meter to instantly max out one level of charge. If you have enough Blade Meter, you can get from Zero to Max in the span of a second. There's no way to alter the attack except by upgrading it to give you more to do when you use it but that's that.
One thing that is somewhat different from these games is the Bleeding Mechanic. In this game, enemies can go into a Bleeding state where they glow with a Red Halo and Blood will spew out of their necks when you hit them. When they're in this state, you can hit R2 to sheath the sword and deal a set amount of damage to any enemy that is Bleeding. Generally, if you do this while the sword is sheathed, you'll have a long input delay but a way to bypass this is to hit triangle to draw the sword, then hit R2 to sheath it again to deal the bleeding damage. However, one thing to note is that you do not want to spam it. Even if every enemy on the field right now is bleeding, that does not mean that using the Sheathing Attack is a good idea.
You see, the Sheathing Attack can only be used on Bleeding enemies but there's another modifier. Your Combo Meter. The Combo Meter determines two things with the sheathing attack: the first is how much damage it deals, and the second is how much experience you gain when you kill an enemy with it. If your combo is low, usually below 20 hits, you'll have to do it a lot to get a kill and that kill will give you very little Experience. If you have more than 20 hits on the combo but below thirty, you'll gain medium experience and the attack will deal significant damage. If you get above 30 hits, you'll gain large amounts of experience and the attack will generally be strong enough to instant kill anything that it hits.
Generally, I've seen that having more than 30 hits on your combo is only a benefit to your character's growth and damage. However, in terms of experience gain and overall damage, I don't know if there's a cap. I do know that in terms of damage, over 30 hits will usually result in everything dying, so whether it caps or not is pretty irrelevant except for boss fights, but the experience gain is worth thinking about because, if you're a new player thinking of starting a brand new save, knowing how high you want to get your combo before using the move is worth noting before you actually use it.
These mechanics generally work together in a give-and-take kind of way. Using your sword and Holy Moves will drain your blade meter but Melee attacks and the Sword Sheathing attack will refill it if you get in a kill. So this game is not only about killing everything that gets in your way but you also want to have the highest combo meter possible to gain the highest amounts of damage, experience, and regeneration orbs out of every kill, and it's also about managing your blade meter to maximize damage output.
There is one strategy that I found for dealing with tough enemies that wasn't really an exploit but did make managing certain fights easier. What I would do is I would perform a blade combo, usually consisting of around 3-5 hits, then before the attack animation finishes, hit Square to sheath the sword without dealing damage. This will cause you to reset your recovery animation so you can dodge and attack when necessary, and it will also give you back a good portion of your blade meter so you can keep using sword strikes.
Something else I found noteworthy as a bit of a strategy, if you want to maximize your damage a bit is to max out your blade meter so that hitting R1 twice while charging the holy move will max it out. You also want all enemies to be in front of you, fairly close, and preferably somewhat damaged by previous attacks. Then use the Judgment Cut to hit every enemy, which will build combo if you manage to hit every enemy with every strike, that will instantly get your combo up to the higher low double digits, around 15-30 hits in a single moment by itself. If you've done this right, you'll also cause some or all the enemies to go into a bleeding state. So, as you use the judgment cut, while the sword is still out, hit R2 to perform the Sheathing attack to damage them considerably, possibly even kill some or all of them, regain health and meter, and that should put you in a better position.
And a third thing I found out that, again, makes things a bit easier is to jump into the air, and press Triangle as much as possible on a single, large target until he enters a bleeding state. Do this over his head so that the enemy auto-step will reset your combo time and allow you to do infinite hits. If you do this right, you can get a single large enemy into a bleeding state while staying out of range of other enemies.
Now, remember, these strategies don't work on every enemy. The Power Armor Guys, in particular, which you meet in Stage 4, are a nasty combination of tall, damaging, and fast, which makes them hard to dodge, hard to predict, and hard to get hits on since they're the only mook-type enemy that actually knows how to block. Unlike other enemies, these guys have a greater height on their attacks, which means staying in the air is not always going to keep you safe against them.
Performing the Judgment Cut Bleeding Attack Method generally doesn't work that well against bosses because you always fight them one on one and, in general, for them to have a bleeding attack on them at all, you need to hit them enough and, because there's only one of them, if you're unfortunate enough to get hit close to them beginning to bleed, even if you use the Judgment Cut, it's not likely to increase your damage output enough for it to matter. It will still help, it just won't solve the problem.
Likewise, the Endless Aerial Hit Attack won't work on regular sized enemies because they will automatically be juggled when you hit them. This is also true of Giant Enemies and Bosses but only while they're bleeding and, if they're bleeding, chances are you're moving on to the next enemies anyway.
And the Sheathing Non-Attack at the end of most combos is generally pretty effective against everything, but if the opponent blocks your attack at any point, you'll be staggered and won't be able to perform the strategy. To my knowledge, however, the only enemies that block are the Power Armor Demons, Suzuka, and the Alpha Demon. That said, because larger enemies don't stagger, the big black Oni things with the giant Dot Hack inspired swords are generally not safe to be in front of at any given time while you're attacking. These guys, it's just safest to be behind them whenever possible so they don't harm you.
Now, there are a total of six boss fights in the game but only 4 actual bosses. Two of the boss fights, the first and fourth fight are against the same demon, just with a slightly different moveset the second time now that it has two sword arms instead of one, and another pair of fights, the third and fifth, are Suzuka. Suzuka does have an extended move list in her second fight but it's still Suzuka.
So in total that makes the Sword Arm Demon, the Fist Fighting Demon, Suzuka, and the Final Boss, making a total of four unique enemies. Out of all of them, the Fist Fighting Demon was my favorite because it was the most fun. The Sword Arm Demon was okay, though it got into a relatively repetitive pattern when I found out that it will never attack you directly if you run behind it and stay at a distance. If you do that, it will impale its sword(s) into the ground for a beneath your feet attack and, if you can effectively dodge that while staying behind it, you can get in a good three hits and get out before it feels the need to attack you. The Final Boss I don't have much to say because I only fought it once and only got to it on easy so I don't know much about that demon's moveset. For what it was, it was okay but I hope I have something more definitive to say when I beat the higher difficulties.
Suzuka was probably my least favorite boss. In a lot of ways, she's a rival boss, which would give her potential but there are a bunch of problems with her moveset. Firstly, a lot of her moves are poorly telegraphed. Her combo has no windup on the start and, if one hits you, you can't escape it. I found that jumping over it will generally keep you out of her range but whether you can or not is a bit tricky, you have to be a bit specific with the timing.
Two of her attacks, the jumping downward strike and the side slash have the same charging aura around them which, now that I think about it, those might actually be her Holy moves. Which means, predicting what she'll do may be a bit easier depending on how long she charges.
One of her moves, though, is a forward dashing slash which has a wide reach and long distance, you have to perform a dodge roll right as she's heading toward you to get out of the way, but the only windup is her raising her arms. It only lasts for one second and, if you're watching her body instead of the sword, it may not be enough.
I found using a mix of the three previously stated strategies will help go a long way in beating her. However, predicting her moves is a bit hard. Or maybe I just suck at video games, I don't actually know yet.
The Fist Fighting Demon was fast enough in its movements that it felt nice to dodge it and fast paced enough to have fun but the hit box on its attacks is small enough in comparison to its body that avoiding the attacks felt fair and not particularly punishing. The only problem was that it was the second boss in total and was only used once. If it were used a second time, I wouldn't have minded but part of me thinks that a lot of the stuff I run into in this game is non-canon.
What I mean by that is, if we were to take what is canon based on what gets a cutscene, we know the Blade Arm Demon is a canon boss, we know Suzuka is a canon rival, and we know the Final Boss is also canon. However, Misa never properly comments on any of the mooks she fights, and the second boss, the Fist Fighting Demon, is also the only boss in the game that does not get a pre-fight or post-fight cutscene. I wonder if that means it's a filler boss or if there are one or two cutscenes that didn't make it into the final game for whatever reason.
It might be a filler boss, given how little content there is in general, though having five boss battles overall really isn't that different from six. If there were more bosses, and those bosses also didn't receive cutscenes, I could see the filler argument being more applicable.
Personally, I think there might be some cutscenes that the game had during development that just didn't make it into the final game for some reason.
I also want to praise the developers of this game for how few of them there were that managed to complete the overall game. I checked the credits and, not including the localization section, which is primarily a bunch of companies as far as I can tell, the game was made by only six people. One Programmer, One Musician, Two Voice Actors, and Two People who did literally everything else.
That said, if there's one thing I could cite as a problem that absolutely needs fixing is the lock-on. First off, the fact that I even know there's a lock-on at all is the fact that, when I hit L1, the camera would start to rotate to focus on one particular enemy and the directional input would always go toward the enemy that I'm locked onto regardless of what direction I'm facing. The problem is two fold.
First off, there's no targeting reticule to indicate whether or not you're locked on or who you're locked on to. For bosses, this isn't as much of a problem, since there's only one enemy on-screen and locking on to them is simply a matter of hitting L1 once or twice. But when fighting waves, this is absolutely detrimental because you need to know who you're locked onto at any given time so you know where your attacks are going to go and what move you're going to use next, especially the directional attacks.
The second problem, which is less of a targeting problem and more of a general problem, is that there's no controller options. Even factoring out the fact that there's no way to rebind inputs, this game doesn't even have a list of what each button does in the options menu. There is something like that in the Tutorial Section but it's incomplete because I don't think it goes over the lock-on or any other mechanics that I'm not aware of.
It does go over the basic attacks, the holy attacks, dodging, blocking, and the blade meter. However, none of these, with the exception for possibly the blade meter, would be things that I couldn't figure out from just generally experimenting with the controls. The Lock-On, however, does require a visible element to indicate who you're locked on to and it should also be stated somewhere in the game what the lock-on is so that players know to use it and how to use it.
The problem isn't just that the Lock-On is poorly implemented. It's also the fact that the Lock-On seems to be an esoteric mechanic when, by all rights, it shouldn't be. An update could possibly fix this but I don't know if there will be an update. However, if there is an update that adds a targeting reticule, let it be known, the lock-on is not a new mechanic, it was just poorly conveyed prior to that update.
That's all I have to say. I may revisit this topic at some point in the future. Have a wonderful day.
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