Sheesh.
Highly disappointed with this game, simply because of how much promise it had to be great.
I won't lie, I didn't finish it. I played up to just after Odur, which was an incredibly designed boss in teaching you the games mechanics. Once you understand the wound system though, it basically trivializes the fight (beat him pretty easily by doing chip damage, waiting for him to hit a cooldown period and hitting him with a charged heavy; rinse and repeat, and you probably won't have to heal once). I quit the game finishing up the chapter 1 side missions because the way the mechanics are designed are pretty much unbearable. Here's why:
Poise is a much bigger issue than it should be: basically, the way the game is designed, you have no poise while enemies (like, literally even the shittest of shitters) have infinite. I wouldn't even consider this a flaw, if it weren't for:
Because of this fact (the fact that means that enemies can just continue to combo through all of your attacks, outside of a very poorly designed, Bloodborne-ripped-off feather mechanic), you have to employ stick and move tactics. It fits the character's build, sure, but what DOESNT is the fact that you absolutely have to master the wound/claw mechanic in order to be able to dispatch enemies fairly quickly. Having to stop in the middle of a combo and use a charged heavy, well, that's not something you would expect to see from an assassin type build. An assassin that has to stop, pause, and leave himself open to enemies outside the target in order to be effective is no assassin at all.
To be successful in this game, you need to put those two ideas together, which makes for some really fun combat when you're fighting bosses. Not when you're fighting every other enemy in the game. While I appreciate the idea, and see how it can shine, it really feels like they blew their budget on this idea alone, making it the centerpiece of the game, rather than making this style of play an option. There is no room in this soulslike for traditional combat, unless you actually enjoy spending ridiculous amounts of time fighting the most basic of shitter enemies.
The game is packed with artificial difficulty. Because of how small the game's environments are structured, it feels like enemies are just packed in and placed capriciously. There's an "elite" around every corner, and they are going to take time to erase. Like, lots of time. Again this sort of thing would be fine if the elites actually felt like mini bosses. But they don't. They're basic enemies with a ridiculous amount of health. Poise is the same as the shitters though; after all, infinite is infinite.
It really feels like they did that to compensate for the lack of exploration, lack of creativity on the devs part in attempting to create an experience similar to the souls games, lack of design originality (literally feels like I'm fighting different variations of the same enemy, at all times), lack of consistent mechanics (if you record a bunch of parry attempts and examine them, you'll see exactly what I'm talking about), and a slew of other problems that make the game barely tolerable.
I deleted the game, again, after finishing Odur basically. When I read that a lot of people consider him to be the toughest boss of the game, I immediately decided that checking out the other bosses isn't really worth the effort of navigating the other chapters, if the first chapter was anything to go on.
I love challenging games man, when the challenge is fair. Sekiro was hard, of course, but I think most of us can agree it was fair. I never once felt like the parry mechanic was inconsistent, and when it was inconsistent, it was because I sucked. I HATE games that try to create difficulty with unfair mechanics (mostly when there are multiple unfair mechanics that contradict each other), packing in enemies to fill in other gaps in the game's design, etc etc, fucking etc.
This might seem harsh, but I paid $30 for this game, which is half the price of the AAA entries in this genre. What I received was not half the game those other titles are, not even close, hence the irritation. I don't feel like I got what I paid for. I'm irritated that I supported these devs, and now I feel like they owe me by correcting a lot of these mistakes in their next entry. Thymesia could have been great, but instead it's a bit of a dumpster fire.
sad sigh