RE5 is a game that plays drastically better with a second person because the AI ranges from decent to bad, and simply can't look after itself on the harder difficulty, and it doesn't do an "AI knocked out" type of coop where the AI gets downed temporarily but can't be actually killed (or ignored). At least in Resident Evil 4 Ashley will just stay behind you and behave or hide in a crate. Unlike something like Obscure (the first game at least) or Resident Evil Zero, you also can't optionally choose to go solo. Really fun with a second person in splitscreen and probably the best way to experience the game.
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Secret of Mana's combat is slowly beginning to click with me. One of the major points of confusion in the combat for me makes sense now: in addition to an evade animation when an attack connects with them but their evade stat kicks in,
normal enemies have two kinds of stagger animations when they take damage, one where they're standing, and one where they're knocked down. Hits will not register during the normal stagger, but any hits you make when they're in their knocked down animation will be queued up and the damage will take effect when they stand up.
Learning what animation for enemies is their knockdown vs the normal stagger is pretty important for knowing when you can follow up an attack or if you have to wait for them to move again. This is probably one of the most important pieces of knowledge you can have since I would bet money this is where the majority of the complaints about the game's combat and hit detection come from;
enemies have full invulnerability on one of their two damaged animations, the standing one, whereas the knockdown one is susceptible to followup attacks but does not show the hits registering until the knockdown finishes. This was something I discovered while playing and had a kind of "eureka" moment when I realized it. I'm surprised the SoM fans here did not think to explain this important detail in response to complaints about the hit detection since it's a subtle but absolutely crucial piece of information in understanding the game's combat and how hit detection works. It's not that the game's hit detection sucks, it's that the game appears to randomly pick between two different damage animations on normal enemies and one of them has full invulnerability, which leads to confusion as to when attacks will successfully hit or not until you realize what's happening.
Similarly, some status effects allow you to repeatedly hit enemies as if they were knocked down, while some such as the snowman one do not. Petrify and engulfed in flames both seem to allow hits to connect, making Gnome and Salamando's weapon buffs vastly more useful than Undine's.
Bosses do not appear to ever be knocked down and often spellcast immediately after being hit, which is why spamming melee on bosses generally does not seem to work and you have to deliberately wait for them to be a) moving and b) not casting a spell. Offensive spells ignore all this and simply do immediate damage when they hit so long as the enemy is onscreen when the spell hits, which is why they're so damn useful (it's possible for some bosses/enemies to burrow underground and such before the spell resolves, but this is rarely an issue).
I doubt I'm ever gonna sing the praises of the combat compared to other more action-y top-down games since I still don't particularly like the pacing or feel of it. There was an MS-DOS adventure RPG game called
Genie's Curse that I highly recommend, you eventually unlock two levels of melee charge attacks but your movement isn't affected when charging, so you can run around and explore without feeling like you're moving at a snail's pace whenever you want to use the charge attack (and the game encourages the charges with them being wider and stronger, with a blazingly fast charge speed). That and Brain Lord's magic system where you charge to use magic without movement speed being affected, both those felt more fun since you could run around using your charge attacks without feeling like you were compromising movement speed to do so (something that detrimentally affects both combat itself and exploration). Still, I think I mostly understand SoM now except what triggers knockdowns. I don't know if it's just a 50/50 chance on a hit to choose between a normal stagger or the knockdown where you can follow up attacks, but there seems to be some luck involved and it's not a basic normal attacks stagger, charge attacks knockdown kind of thing? Also, I might be wrong, but I think enemies cannot evade attacks when knocked down.
Still surprised I generally don't mind playing with the AI. Their positioning can be dumb at times in boss fights which is where local co-op helps if the boss tends to be a physical attacker, and they're definitely better with ranged weapons (chakram, whip, javelin, bow), but they function pretty decently in normal encounters, especially given AI-controlled teammates in a real-time action game was a relatively unusual thing at the time the game was made. I do find it a bit difficult trying to herd them along if I want to just go past enemies since regardless of AI setting they love stopping to target each enemy I pass. The run button seems to be the key here, it seems to cause the AI to ignore enemies as long as they don't get hung up on terrain.
I'm slowly "getting" the game but even with the combat feeling like some of its rough edges are smoothed out, it's still distinctly not for me, alas. The plot doesn't feel particularly interesting to me when I compare it to other RPGs I've played that were made before SoM's release, and the Dwarf Village and spooky temple music are ear-grating to me and repeated in multiple areas early on. Currently in Northtown and dreading how many more times I might have to listen to those.
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