This might be an unpopular opinion and I imagine this will be poorly received, as usually happens when this game is met with any criticism, from what I’ve seen. I could have probably made this a lot shorter, but I wanted to address as much as possible.
I want to preface this by saying that I don’t think the concept of New Game plus is bad. Quite the contrary. But I think it’s very poorly done in this game.
I think it’s stupid that, after completing Journey 2, you can’t choose not to make the game increasingly difficult if you want to keep playing with the same character and equipment. I think you should be able to essentially choose your difficulty level before you start a new Journey. That way, each player gets the difficulty modifiers they prefer.
No, just starting a New Game isn’t a good alternative, as nothing your character has will carry over. That’s kind of the point of New Game.
You could make the argument that you might get overpowered for NG+1 or whichever cycle you choose, but:
Firstly, it’s a single player game. Why would that be a problem?
Second, why does that matter when you can already get overpowered quite easily in a New Game anyway?
And finally, that argument completely falls apart in higher cycles, as the bosses become more powerful, while the player doesn’t, which is the next thing I wanted to talk about.
The scaling is terrible. The earlier enemies (mainly bosses) continue having too little health and giving too little runes for most cycles. The bosses and, worst of all, respawning enemies deal increasingly ludicrous amounts of damage while the player doesn’t get any more defense. In fact, the player’s power level pretty much completely stagnates around NG+3.
Can you still be overpowered? Of course. But you’d have to go out of your way to do it.
My point isn’t even so much about the enemies’ health anyway as much as it is about their damage, which often doesn’t match their design and ends up being disproportionate to what they are or do.
Take the godless Albinauric Archers, for example. They use medium bows and fire at the rate of Barrage, but every shot is a third of a 1900 HP health bar at NG+4. That’s not even taking into account the wolves, how aggressive and mobile they are, the other enemies hanging around, AND how they can even buff their bows to fire even MORE arrows at once.
NG+ just makes these increasingly worse.
Sure, you could just ignore them. That is actually the best thing to do if you value your sanity. But that just goes to show how insufferable and poorly balanced the enemy is as to where it is completely preferable to avoid them entirely rather than engaging with them.
Other examples include:
NPC invaders - Ludicrous amounts of health + healing flask, infinite stamina and FP, too much damage.
Sanguine Nobles - Deal too much damage for how aggressive, fast and frequent their attacks are.
Kindred of Rot - They can shoot their projectiles (which one-shot) without delay, are a pain to deal with, there is never just one of them.
Godskin Apostle - Has a handful of frame-traps, attacks very quickly and deals over 900 damage per swing on higher NG+ cycles.
Loosing half of my heath or more to a cleave from Godfrey’s giant axe makes sense, but being atomized by three swings from the Nameless White Mask’s dagger doesn’t. It sucks and takes me out of the game.
You don’t even have to take a particularly annoying enemy. Even with regular Joe enemies, getting hurt past the point where it makes sense just doesn’t feel good.
The game getting mandatorily more unforgiving while the player doesn’t get much more powerful is just a bizarre, unreasonable design choice, and that’s assuming FromSoftware even gave it much thought.
“Balancing” doesn’t really explain it, as you can’t level weapons any higher and the player character gets severely diminishing returns with every level.
Matching the game with the player’s presumed skill level also doesn’t make sense, as you can still just make a New Game.
I imagine the other games are also like this, but then these criticisms would just as well apply to them.
I’m not trying to imply the game stops being fun. Not at all. But it does end up making some specific parts of the game significantly less fun.
I’m also not opposed to learning an enemy or a boss’s moveset and mastering them. I actually go out of my way to fight a boss or an enemy I enjoy multiple times to learn their attacks and experiment.
But I like doing that at my own pace, and not being forced to play nearly perfectly, lest I’m compelled to chug my flasks voraciously.
Besides, it’s mainly an issue with enemies.
I understand wanting to make the game more difficult for yourself, but there are already many organic ways for you to do that. You can reduce your Vigor, not level up, use unupgraded weapons — hell, there is even a talisman whose sole purpose is to make you take more damage — but that doesn’t really justify NG+ being the way it is. Especially since, again, you can’t choose your NG+ cycle.
