BareKnuckleRoo wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2024 3:14 pm
To Far Away Times wrote: ↑Sun May 12, 2024 8:22 pmBut boss quality varies quite a bit. Some are great, and some are terrible.
Honestly this sounds like the opinion most people have of From's games. Are there any as bad as Bed of Chaos? Because if not it'd sound like generally a good time.
I'd say they're bad in a different way.
There is a gimmick mini-boss on the last chapter, but it's not as bad as Bed of Chaos. One thing I think From's games do really well is that they are very honest with their traditional bosses and I almost always felt they were fair, and the animations would have tells in their attacks. And I think Lies of P was very uneven in that regard. Sometimes it's as good as From's bosses, other times the animations seem a lot less thoughtful. Also, nearly every boss in the back half of the game features an immediate second boss battle. After you see it a few times, it loses all suprise and you start to expect them to pull the same rabbit out of the hat again and again. Sometimes, the first boss is very tanky, like Laxasia or the Swamp Monster, and you're looking at like five minutes to down the first phase to quickly die on a mechanically unrelated second boss. For example; the first boss might require you to block and parry a bunch, the second boss might be focused more on dodging and attacking, but it'll take several deaths to figure that out. From's double bosses build on the mechanics of the first one, so it feels like a much more fair progression for the fight.
Also, this game does the whole boss spinning on a stick thing that Dark Souls 2 does. Some bosses can even spin in a mid air jump if you try to walk around some vertical attacks that the developers really wanted you to avoid in a different way.
IMO, Lies of P is more difficult than From's games in general, except for Sekiro. I kind of think the difficulty of the Soul's games is a bit overstated. That's not to say they aren't difficult, because they are, but they demand a deliberate style of playing carefully and that's where most of the difficulty comes from. Lies of P takes the Dark Souls difficulty memes and runs with it with more challenging boss battles. In Dark Souls 1, the difficulty was from the stages, but the bosses were easier since you were expected to arrive with lower resources. In Dark Souls 3 it was flipped, where the stages were made easier, and the bosses were harder. This is like the next tier of even harder boss battles while keeping about Dark Souls 3's level of stage challenge.
One thing the game does much better than From's games is the flexibilty in the weapon system. The weapon blade/handle customization system, easy respec'ing, and abundance of weapon upgrade materials is super refreshing. I stuck a long greatsword blade on a rapier handle, allowing for quick long reach attacks and the ability to punish things even with push block, but there is tons of cool stuff you can do. By the end of the game you can buy an entire weapon's worth of upgrade materials from the shop for about the cost of one level's worth of souls. Once you unlock the tree that let's you respec there's no real penalty for trying things, and I would say frequently switching weapons is even encouraged.
