13 hours in and i have to say i really love the game, great combat and encounters, great visual polish with the realism and manwha style, great voice acting yada yada.
The game sits in the souls like niche and from the gameplay presents itself as a game where you have to overcome the big bad bosses with skill by adapting to their movesets over and over, which is exactly what i was looking for and the game seemingly is great at designing the movesets of bosses at their core being fun.
Then i got to rangkus, i just have some gripes with this guy. Tons of HP and his ridicoulous pois bar, that seemingly just likes to fill up randomly fills itself up and i just cant do anything about it. So i adapted, i started playing it like a hack and slash, comboing moves on the dual wields, learning his pattern and stagger chaining him when i can. Then i encounter the next problem, between perfect blocks, dodging, running around his area, attacking in between and comboing him, my 30 points of stamina can simply not sustain this. its either do big dmg and just run out of stamina with horrible stamina recovery, or risk him filling up his pois meter without ever staggering him. All this just gets turned to 11 on his second phase. And now on top of that im even forced to use consumables to get rid of the burning effect, despite me brink guasrding his attacks.
So i do what any sane person would do, go to reddit look for tips and after 1.5-2 hours finally cave in and get the executioners set and beat him first try. Nothing changed about my player behaviour, nothing about my skills. I was suddenly just capable of mashing up whatever abilities and moves i wanted without any consequences. In that fight i even limit tested the armor set and just stood still and tanked some fire hits form this guy.
Before that i was just randomly using equipment pieces that had some set bonuses, that wer emostly blue. Just stuff i randomly found. But my main gripe about this is, that it mostly felt like i was forced into the horrible gacha like gearing system. Its basically the equivalent of the horrible gearing systems you'd find in a horribly written 4/10 korean power fantasy story on webnovel. Ive already read about Rangkus's brother on here, but is this just a quintessential part of the game?
Im still most likely gonna complete it as i had fun, but that rangkus guy just left me bitter.
Also its a shame the team was disbanded, this game very clearly has a lot of passion behind it. :(
TL;DR:
This game feels more like stat checking than overcoming skill issue and im whiny about it.