I can't stop thinking about getting bavk to this game. It is like a drug addiction, I'm physically in pain being away from it.

Choosing a mob and grinding them till you are skilled at them and can destroy them easily is even more fun that any FromSoft game I've played including my GOATS in bloodborne and Sekiro and the bosses are the same, there are maybe two bosses from Sekiro that still are more fun to learn but here it is every boss, no exceptions.

It's so fun that I have upped the difficulty to Expert so I don't get OP and can still have fun, practicing and experimenting with skills, pictos and Lumina is also the best of the genre. I tend to find myself getting frustrated with Turn based games (asides from Xcom cause that game needs the high stakes) and even my GOATS in Divinity OS 1&2 which I don't count as being the same, I find myself dropping the difficulty at some point due to frustration of failing a 45 minute encounter by one mistep. I've never found myself actively looking for more difficulty in turn based games.

Finally.l after what feel like an eternity, getting on for a session now to fail at this boss I'm on, I'm so excited to have him kill me so I can return to be killed again and then finally get that perfectly solid run and feel like a God after figuring out his timing. I want to go into one of those danger zones and test my look and I have a few mimes to kill after realising they aren't hard once you break their wall.

I have but one complaint, the jumping is not responsive enough for precise parkour to be implemented on these optional beach platforming stages. Lune makes it a bit easier cause she floats but it's still not great. First real complaint I have with the game but a very minor one, it's competent enough to get it done and it's fair just would have preferred needing slightly less precision cause of the way jumping works in the game. I very much enjoy the parrying mini game though, hope there's more of that. 

Anyway, I need a way to be able to repeat these boss, I find myself purposefully getting wiped when they are on their last hit cause I wanna to beat them on my terms where I achieve a really solid run and I know I'll miss fighting them later. A boss gauntlet Sekiro and Stellar Blade style would be nice. A turn based game having bosses better than the vast majority of action games or even Soulsborne/Sekiro is something I never thought would happen and expert difficulty is no joke, the timing on parrys is insanely tight, you will miss them and the game is very punishing for it. 

Nah, I can't belu3ve they done this game on a budget half of FF16 with 30 people, Microsoft must have funded them massively in advance for gamepass. There is just no way they could make this, this is big budget level stuff and not the work of a 30 person team that doesn't have ample funds and contractor work. This isn't 6th gen, this is an age where games like this take significant recourses. Perhaps they put their life savings into it, I'm very curious how many people will show up in the credit and if their is other dev work paid for outside of the dev team, I'd reckon a few hundred free lancers.

And YES! There is New game plus with extra content unlocks, I'm so going to enjoy destroying enemies that haven't been seen since I got good at them.  

I might have to play this game twice. I'm currently playing in French because it's my native language and it's pretty rare that the "original" version of a game is in French but looking at the cast for the English version, that's quite the lineup! Andy Serkis, Ben Starr and Charlie Cox! Damn!

Plenty of other reasons to paly NG+ asides from the cast also, new stuff and extended progression plus it will be so cool to play this game through knowing the parrying timings for enemies and bosses. 

I can't believe I'm getting up at four o'clock in the morning to get a session on this game but here I am, I feel like shit but it's so worth it.

Edit: Progress has slowed down on Expert difficulty (A great thing) and I'm recked tired but it's worth loosing sleep over, this has become among my top games of all time, high on the list and I'm only half way through it and apparently have like 25 or so more hours of side content and a NG+ which I'll def be doing. Omg, it's so good. I have to wonder was this a fluke or talent, seems like a fluke cause it's unbalanced but that imbalance just makes it even better and when you break the game you still want to change your build and synergies even at the cost of being OP and they did lock damage numbers up til a certain point so they know that it can be broken with the pictos and how Lumina is extracted with the only limit being points which is a genuis system but the senergies and how characters play is the best there is, no bloated nonsense like Atlus games where you won't ever use all the spells and personas/archetypes and no using the spells you start the game with, it makes you want to upgrade and experiment without forcing you into a certain build negating the freedom of an RPG like the press turn system. It has to be a fluke cause if not I sure hope they know what makes this so exceptional so they'll get the sequel right and others can extract from this to make more special games akin to it. 

The critics scores are underrated for once, The user score of 9.7 is far more accurate than 91. 

Oh, and there is a reason to grind party members you aren't playing and they don't level up without playing them, they get sent in as bavk up if you fail, another resemblance of Sekiros design. It's genuis like most everything else in the game and encourages swapping party members in and out and since they all of their own unique styles to learn it is just bonkers fun.

There's not a bad character either, no one who ticks me off and I want to spend time with all of them and up the relationship unlike Atlus games and no teen drama or anime...ness. albeit, the system is less intrusive and better spaced out than something like Persona, it's kinda dressing but the writing is impeccable, dialogue is stellar and all so very interesting. Unlike Metaphor I amn't skipping through relationship sequences of characters I don't care for and you're not forced into it or getting lectured on what it means to enjoy a fictional world in an on the nose pretentious way, it's all completely natural and completely optional, paced perfectly and there if you want it but there are rewards like Metaphor. I've never liked overworld maps either but I love the one in this, it's fantastic, I love how it narrows and then opens up again and is kinda metroidvania esque. 

I've been reading and apparently they made this with pre bought assets from UE5, they didn't build from the ground up and have been open about it. This is a great lesson to the industry, start giving tighter teams smaller budgets and a clear goal, get games out quicker and for AA prices like this and you'll make money, maybe not all the money or have a GTA source of revenue but you won't die from one big failure either. 

I know I keep slurrping up this games dick with no shame but the worst thing about the game is I'm too tired to play it. Since 2020 I have felt this way exactly twice, Elden Ring and Stellar Blade, the latter being a fraction of ER and Clair Obscur. This game is on par with TW3 for how perfectly it does what it sets out to do on all fronts, no drops in some areas, hell even TW3 had two or three weeks between 1.0 and some of the patches where it was shoddy technically and didn't really reach perfection until the first DLC, unless something happens with CO: E33 in the latter half this is a perfect game at masterpiece level, but all I see is the quality increasing while the minute budget issues fall away to mean nothing at all. Slurp, Sluuurp. Oh, tastes like pineapple.

The game is excellent. Right now I'm going up against the Lampmaster. Not necessarily hard, but if it hits you during his 2nd phase, you're basically done for. I almost had it beat, but missed one dodge and he took out everyone with one attack.