Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week?
mohab@piefed.social 3 days agoYeah, I think what helped me get into it is I didn’t really care for anything other than combat, so I skipped most of the cut scenes except anything I felt important.
I also never bothered doing well in the mini-games. They were just not that interesting and poorly put together overall.
These long stretches without checkpoints felt fucking impossible at a couple of points throughout the game. I had to take a couple of long breaks to make it through on my first playthrough.
Unlocking shit definitely makes the game way easier. Some parts don’t feel doable without grenades, for example.
I did end up having a lot of fun in the last stages and on a subsequent playthrough though. Unlocking everything + figuring out guard cancels to increase mobility + tactically using grenades/weapon pickups made it all click in my head.
Guard canceling into gun at close range in particular made minibosses a lot easier, especially when combined with grenades.
It’s definitely one of these games that get better after the first playthrough. Issue is the first playthrough can be so rough it kills any desire to revisit the game for most people.
I only spent much time with the crane game, as that is the source of thousands of skill points and I wanted to unlock the skill tree faster. It’s weird that the rest of the minigames don’t give much in terms of rewards, but I’m not complaining.
Grenades are definitely important, and in an attempt to copy Ninja Gaiden it feels like those long gauntlets are meant to test routing and planning. You’re often punished for using grenades early, as there will come a later encounter before the checkpoint that almost require them, and sometimes it feels like it’s intentional to force you to redo these a couple of time until you’ve seen enough to make a plan.
There is some stuff you can do in the combat, even gun cancelling and alternating between the two combo trees, and the slide slash is pretty good for staggering, as is the running kick. But I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like there is enough juice here to make me want to do a second playthrough. I’d rather fire up any of the 4 Ninja Gaidens. Well, maybe not NG3.