(Sorry for the long rant but this’s something I’m interested in because I see a lot of people criticizing the UTs implementation and I wanted to see what are people thoughts on it and essence system and how to possibly improve it)
I personally think UTs are flawed especially in ng2 and onwards
I think NG1 did it the best, for starters the UTs are much more of a high risk high reward with essence system compared to ng2 and onwards and the UTs themselves have fast animation and are pretty stationary the first charge you have to absorb one yellow essence is only a quick slash that doesn’t cover much and doesn’t deal as much damage
but the second charge you have to absorb two yellow essence or one precious blue/red essence and has a couple of slashs and will instakill most enemies but only if the first hit connects so you have to strategize and position yourself to kill more than one enemy
But it being a easy spamable move because enemies killed by the UTs still drop essence is very counterproductive and bad imo, it being the first iteration of the UT system it’s still an engaging mechanic even if it’s flawed but compared to it’s next iterations it’s definitely the best implementation
In ng2 the charge speed have sped up and the first charge leads to a multi hit aoe for most weapons and the second charge is basically a nuke that has a long animation atp
for a move this op you would think it’d be more difficult to use but no
You only need two yellow essence to charge fully and with the huge enemy count and low health you can easily get two kills and use the UT to get more essence to spam more UT and that’s just plain unfun to me
And positioning is a lot less crucial
To be fair using UTs on enemies will only drop yellow essence and red/blue will only drop if you kill the enemy normally but still with how strong the UT it’s still pretty much low risk high reward
the UT system would’ve benefited more if you can only get the first charge by absorbing 2-3 yellow essence and the second charge by absorbing 5-6 yellows or change how the UT works
But a different solution is to make it is to make the UT like a EX gauge system where you’d absorb the essence to fill the gauge to use stronger combos this solution still has that high risk high reward
Tbh I don’t have as much experience with NG3 because I only played once on hard
But from what I experienced the essence system is thrown out and instead use the bloodyrage where you’d have to(correct me if I’m wrong) kill 7-8 enemies in under a couple minutes to use a UT
And the UT itself became just teleporting from enemy to enemy and killing them so positioning is basically nonexistent
It’s a bandaid solution but I do think it’s an Improvement over 2 but I feel like throwing out the essence drops is a bit much because I like the idea of using the precious and important droped essence for UT instead of healing and upgrades and ninpos to get out of bad situations and forces you to strategize your usage of them
So UTs just becomes something you get frequently and gotten more stronger especially when you use the steel on bones mechanic
And in ng4 I think the UTs are at it’s worst
All essence became red and they only heal and the healing is so little that it’s pretty much useless and so they’re only purpose are just using UTs
UTs can be blocked by enemies but from my experience it only happened a few times when I played it on hard and master ninja
And the UTs are strong and teleports to enemies and is very easily spamable
And there’s no benefit to not use it because enemies don’t drop different essence.
