The I just beat the game thread

[Grey Acumen]

I just beat Blood Omen 2, played it using Gametap and a mapped PS2 controller. The storyline and characters were fun once you got past the "Vampires R teh awesome and misunderstood!!1!1" vibe. the thing that pissed me off were the controls, utterly horrible. No strafe option, which by itself wouldn't be that big of an issue, but the pathetically loose turning radius made it absolutely unforgivable.

I had to have died about twice as often from randomly running into water because it was impossible to turn properly as i did from actually getting killed by enemies, which was usually tied into the second problem; crappy uncancelable button lag. I press the attack button 3 times, Kain attacks once, the enemy winds up for an attack that has to be dodged, I press the buttons to dodge, Kain attacks a second time, the enemy finishes charging the attack that should have already been dodged, I growl in frustration and press dodge again repeatedly, Kain starts to attack the 3rd time and gets the shit knocked out of him while I shout expletives.

It was nice to go through once, but I'm not even considering playing through it again. It was incredibly linear, and the enemies and upgrades were all very cookie cutter. The controls were actually the main source of challenge for the game, not any actual inherent difficulty of the game, and that caused no end of frustration.

One good point to the game were the minor puzzles that required the dark gifts to solve. After playing Zelda for close to 20 years though, most of the puzzles were barely even consciously registered. However what I did notice was that the visual cues that let you know you needed to use a power were much less apparent. Even though the puzzles all solved very easily, I still felt that I was figuring it out on my own and not having my hand held the whole way through.

The thing I enjoyed most were the boss battles, which actually required a decent amount of thought, and a teensy amount of skill on top of that. It was kinda refreshing after hours of threshing through the small fries to have to use your surroundings to attack in the boss battles, rather than just brawling with them directly.
The Final Boss was actually a bit of a letdown though. I died a couple of times trying to figure out the first phase of attack, but once I got past that, I had him down in 2 tries, which is actually a fair bit less than almost all of the other boss battles.