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Backlaugust 2022: Round 3 so we can break our backlogs and be free.

<< < (20/20)

Khushrenada:
Don't worry about it.

Order.RSS:

--- Quote from: Mop it up on September 01, 2022, 12:14:53 PM ---The gameplay itself however, feels a little shallow. For some reason I was under the impression that this was more of a dungeon crawler, but it's actually just a series of rooms full of enemies that must be defeated to open the entrance to the next room full of enemies. The camera doesn't do a very good job of keeping enemies on screen, instead showing a focus on the protagonist and often making visible far too much of the out-of-bounds areas. Each weapon has few moves at its disposal. With how many runs it takes to complete the story, much less everything else on offer, it starts to feel repetitive sooner than it should for this type of game.

--- End quote ---

Just out of curiosity, did you try playing with the various Pact of Punishment/Heat levels? Those change up the gameplay considerably, and I don't think the game does a great job advertising them. For instance, the Extreme Measures condition completely changes all the major boss fights, giving them entirely new phases, weapon load-outs, altering their arenas, and adding entirely new storylines for those bosses to unravel over subsequent runs.

I felt using the Heat levels greatly extended the longevity of the game, since the higher you go, the more radical you need to be in upgrades. From Heat 32 onwards I would play with zero boons for instance, relying on the Keepsake from Sisyphus to double strength of moves without an attached Boon. Likewise there are points at which you have to start sacrificing your Mirror upgrades, which in turn leads to characters remarking on that.
Another fun challenge is to only collect the Revenge Damage boons, and stack those. You can absolutely finish boss fights by standing still, doing nothing, and watch your quintuple stack of thunder/poison/drunk/pain/infatuation wreck them.

You do need to make your own fun at some point, though, and the game doesn't do the best job in my opinion to incentivize taking those restrictions - unlike the Predictions Scroll which clearly maps out combinations to try. But a lot of it is still rewarded in the same melding of gameplay and story you find in the first 50 runs.

Mop it up:
Of course I was using those, I wouldn't have played through the required ten successful runs just doing the same exact thing! Plus I needed those to keep getting more rewards. Unfortunately, I was on a bit of a time crunch due to the game leaving Game Pass, so I didn't get to try out some of them such as Extreme Measures. Even so, a majority of the game is the regular enemy encounters so I'm not sure that would have changed how I feel.

The reasons you mention are why I rated the game an 8.5 to begin with; if I were just scoring based on gameplay alone then it would be much lower.

Mop it up:
There was something else I was delayed in posting because I didn't want to double, and then I kind of forgot about it... It's probably way too late to matter now, but here it is anyway: my rating for each game I played!

Hades - 8.5 / 10
Pokkén Tournament DX - 8
Mega Man X2 - 7.5
Mega Man X4 - 7.5
Mega Man X3 - 7
Mega Man X - 7
Katamari Damacy Reroll - 7
Castlevania II: Simon's Quest - 7
Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse - 7
Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge - 6.5
Mega Man X7 - 6
Mega Man X8 - 6
Chex Quest HD - 5
Super Bomberman R - 5
Castlevania - 5
Mega Man X5 - 4
Castlevania: The Adventure - 3
Mega Man X6 - 2

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