Narinder and his lovely child Woolter who he is still unsure what to think about. He’s just a tad confused why he and the lambs child is a little weirdo.

experimentalmusiclesbian

i played dw7 a lot and the harder difficulties get really challenging from like having extremely high execution requirements tho like i found it dull after a while bc the mechanics are so simple there's usually a single optional strat for a character,, and you just constantly have to do that

Yeah I get you. Thats kind of a problem inherent to all action games w/ combo systems; the combo system is ‘solvable’, theres always going to be one combo that does the most amount of damge in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of commitment and players will eventally find it and lose any reason to use any other combos.

[I talk abt how different games I’ve played/seen try to solve this problem under the cut, it got to be pretty long so...]

DMC got around this by preventing moves you’ve used too much from adding to your score, so when playing for score you’ll always have to change up your combos and explore the system, which is cool, but it doesn’t really help if you’re not playing for score. I was able to get through Normal difficulty on DMC3SE with more or less just Stinger > Attack, Attack, delay, Attack > High Times > ebonyivoryebonyivoryebonyivoryebonyivoryebonyivoryebonyivoryebonyivory > Helmsplitter - I made the effort not to use Rebellion at all on my Hard playthrough so I’d have to learn some different strings but I wonder if the higher difficulties would have eventually knocked that out of me?

You can see them trying to encourage changing strategies with the way they designed their enemies, though: you have the exploding guy in 3 where if you try to hit him you’ll always clash (so you have to shoot him), the cat shades in 1 where you have to shoot them until they turn into a ball that you can hit, the reaper guys in 1 with big scissors who only take damage to their heads (so guns work best), and the enemies that go through walls... The problem is all of those make you change your strategy by using guns instead of melee combos which isnt really expanding on the combat system - its really kind of a retreat from the melee combat and those enemies are all boring. I also really dont know how they expect you to handle the enemies that go through walls - they’re just a pain in the ass. But its still interesting that they recognized that problem and tried to engage with it as early as the first game.

I haven’t played Ninja Gaiden yet but from what I’ve seen it does a lot more to encourage difference in strategies through enemy designs and encounter designs. In some missions they have guys throwing exploding kunai friggin everywhere so you cant just get an enemy cornered and pummel them, making you select moves that have good mobility, carry you & the enemy farther away, have invincibility frames (which some attacks have), or just drop the combo and get away. They have enemies on horses that you need to knock off their horses, you have spellcasters who teleport and cant be cornered, you have flying fish that swarm you and try and grab you, you have bats that explode... I’ll be able to say more about it when I actually play it but I’m very impressed with the encounter design in that game. I’ve been watching some guys tutorial series and hes always talking about how this-or-that weapon or attack is good for this-or-that enemy and thats a level of depth in terms of enemy design that you dont see in a lot of 3d games.

A game I’m playing atm, called Bujingai: the Forsaken City, from 2003, has four types of enemies I’ve seen so far. Two are both melee guys that I cant really tell apart except for visually and are basically just punching bags for your combos, DMC style lol. You have some ranged guys who fire rockets that die in a couple hits, who so far havent been a threat at all but dodging the rockets is fun. But then they have these BIG guys with a HUGE weapon who are kinda slow but have decent tracking, so you kinda gotta make sure you’re not locked into a long attack animation (which this game has TONS of) when it starts attacking so you can dodge - the dodge is also sort of bonkers, it sends you way up into the air and has a ton of i-frames but also has a super long recovery. Anyway, they’re easy to manage on their own but the first time I died in that game was when they put one in an encounter with a bunch of regular enemies; I wanted to take out the regular guys before dealing with him, but I wasn’t paying enough attention to him and got caught in the absurdly long attack animations. It doesn’t really change up how you use your attack options (which are pretty rudimentary, anyway) but it does put pressure on you in an interesting way, you start thinking about which of your moves is the safest instead of which ones will connect the most hits. Theres a lot to be said for an enemy design thats just ‘a big ass guy who hits really hard’ lmao!

Anyway, I have my own little system for a pipe dream indie character action game that solves all these problems lmfao so watch out in uh 20 years when I’m ready to make it :P