Continuing on from: https://hexbear.net/post/6064592
I have been neglecting my work and playing anyway. Probably 10 or so hours in at the moment.
I'm curious how your impressions are changing as you play? I've unlocked a new moveset that seems to knock enemies back more with wider sweeps which has gelled with me better, and I'm struggling in combat less.
Overall I would still say I'm really mixed. The game seems to get easier the more I play which is a curious decision, the music is still very much taking a back seat which seems tragic to me given how strongly the HK music shaped my impression of zones. I have discovered a handful of tools but would say that experimenting with them seems actively discouraged, I'm always out of shards and a combination of the enemy types and level design mean I'm just not getting many anymore.
Emptying my set in a boss fight is about 80 shards, which to stock up for would be ~20 minutes of traversal and farming. Consequently I'm mostly just sticking with the "safe" set I'm used to. Bummer.
The world is beautiful, maybe a bit spread out. Hornet is more expressive than the Knight, something which shone in a particular involuntary sequence (if you know you know). Still very minimalist though.
Boss difficulty seems to swing wildly around, my experience is that the final phase often comes down to a DPS race and luck, particularly when ads are a feature. There's just so much on screen and enemies move in more complex patterns, I get mind-flooded something I rarely felt in HK where almost every boss fight felt like a careful dance.
How are you finding it?
The spears move as one object. I'm not sure if you are being deliberately silly but:
It's the visual parsing to determine that which is difficult lol. It's why it's done to increase difficulty, and why overstimulation becomes torture eventually. Sorting good info from bad doesn't happen automatically, you have to use your brain.
It's extremely easy to tell in that encounter, all you need to know is where they start and you can tell which ones to ignore. You need to learn how the projectiles behave to make this judgement, but the end result is much easier than tracking them constantly.
What's silly is acting like these encounters are DPS races because "well unless you can dodge literally everything every time forever, there is a DPS value you can attach to it" because fundamentally you aren't helpless to getting damaged nor do you have a time limit (e.g. Four Kings in Dark Souls has a soft one), nor do any of the bosses I've seen so far heal (idk about later, though perhaps none do since there's no health bar anyway). At worst, you can just pick certain scenarios to play in a purely defensive manner if you feel overwhelmed, and you'll most likely get habituated to it over time and in any case can just win by only attacking some of the time. You don't need to play that way, of course, but the very fact that you can means that it's clearly not a DPS race in any meaningful sense of the term. For many bosses, even being on the defensive also typically still leaves a lot of room for attacking if you're using tools like the throwing knives or are willing to spend resources on the spear skill.
I suppose I'm wrong about my experience then? Thanks for clearing that up for me.
What I'm saying is that these games have a learning process because you aren't really intended to sight-read encounters, and once you have learned them they become much easier, with some of your description just being factually untrue because you don't need to actively track 3 - 4 things most of the time, you have brief moments where you are presented with the tells for attacks/projectiles and you can determine the possible paths (of which there are at most two but often just one in the case of Bell Beast). This has nothing to do with your subjective experience of being overwhelmed, which could be true even if it was just 1 thing on the screen (and that would be fair enough, there are encounters that will do that), and everything to do with the objective fact of how many things need to be actively watched at a given time, which again is only rarely 4 in the case of that boss (if you get especially unlucky with your positioning relative to falling bells).
Like, it's fine if Moss Mother is too difficult for you, people who moralize about video game difficulty are the most miserable people in the world, but that's not the same as justifying Moss Mother being too hard by saying that she deals 4 damage per hit, which just isn't true.