It's hard to judge the difficulty from a coop session, but this looks less like Nioh / Dark Souls and more like Kingdom Hearts combat to me. Attacks don't seem all that weighty and the healthbars are long enough that you don't seem to really need to find that one timing window where you can get damage in.
It seems very unlikely for someone to have genuine problems with a 1v1 against a goblin, while a 1v1 against pretty much every enemy in Nioh could potentially end up with you dying.
Hmm.. i actually think this game graphically looks nice, but maybe i'm just a sucker for pretty green trees and blue skies :D
As for the constant barrage of characters speaking, i'm not opposed to it but it reminds me of those japanese bullet-hell games where characters are constantly being triggered to speak against you, but the gameplay itself is way too intense to really follow the conversation. I feel like this game is the western version of that.
Oh and whirlwind attacks are always fun. Good on this game to include that.
there's an element to Caius that pines for Siefer and Kuja.
It's Seifer :P
Sounds like this Caius character has quite some boss-battles dedicated to himself, only for the game to be like AHA! It was an illusion / different timeline / robot! The real one is in another timezone castle!
Big fan of the Dunk a toddler performance. That was great.
Also, what kind of retail business does exclusive partnerships with one particular creditcard company? That sounds pretty destructive to their bottom line to me? Isn't the USA fully on board with creditcards to the point where it's extremely unlikely that they'll have cash or a debit card on hand?
Tony Chocolonely has a pretty fascinating background story.
Here in the Netherlands we have a long-standing TVprogram where a cast of hosts dive deep into a question regarding a common household item or product. This particular time the host & journalist Teun looked into the background of the chocolate-bar and decided to sue himself for chocolate-crimes because that industry is rife with slavery on plantations. The court eventually decided that he couldn't prosecute himself because that would mean every chocolate consumer should be prosecuted. He went to Nestle asking them to create a slave-free chocolate bar, but they weren't all that interested, so he pursued the goal himself and that's how Teun became the titular Tony Chocolonely. He no longer works for them & now is often critical on their moves and how they are losing sight of the objective.
On Fromgames:
I think part of the gatekeeping that the Souls community does, comes from a place that is afraid their beloved games will eventually change design and become streamlined to go over better with a mainstream audience. These games have pretty much already hit that mainstream by now, but they're still pretty much marching to it's own beat and unlike other AAA-games. There's a fear that eventually the gameplay starts to resemble something more akin to Assassins Creed, which makes the amazing world design and monster design of Dark Souls approachable to a wide audience, but makes the gameplay less special to those that were coming to the games for that.
It kind of reminds me of the story of MGS4. The MGS fanbase had never cared for the left, right trigger shooter gameplay and didn't see an issue with the triggers being bound to item & weapon selection. But to open up to a wider audience, MGS4 opened up those buttons to 'modernize' the gameplay. There comes a point where a series becomes so popular that the old guard gets nervous that the game will stray from it's roots to try to attract a new audience and that in that transition the magic gets lost.
I'm of the mind that if you care about Dino Crisis, you should be happy that Exoprimal doesn't carry that name. This seems to be more akin to Left4Dead, Back4Blood, WorldWarZ and Vermintide than it is to Dino Crisis. At that point, why would you want that association to be there? It's not like coop shooters are known for their excellent worldbuilding or great storymoments to tie this thing nicely to the Dino Crisis games of yore. A new name will let us judge it on it's own merits, without having to be a satisfying 'follow-up' to ancient games that played nothing like this.
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