Recent reviews by Lain

Gameplay is solid and they cooked with the bosses, OST and visuals.
However, this game is lacking content, diversity and randomization. Only a handful of weapons, talismans, enemies and bosses from the base game. No DLC weapons, talismans, enemies or bosses (besides Golden Hippo 1st phase) at all. Many of the passive buffs are quite frankly useless or pointless. There's only a single map, with its only real randomization being the enemy camps. There's also 4 "Shifting Earth" events but that's about it.
People were also hyped about bosses from older Souls titles returning, but at the moment there's only 6 (Gaping Dragon, Centipede Demon, Smelter Demon, The Duke's Dear Freja, Nameless King and Dancer of the Boreal Valley).

Solid foundation, but definitely needs some more content and randomization.

Give me the full soundtrack

Nioh-like Lite

The only mention of the EGS account requirement for multiplayer is under "System Requirements". How is that a system requirement? Not to mention there is no way to opt out of crossplay so you are forced to have an EGS account if you want to play online. Also why does this not have a fat label like Ghost of Tsushima?

Also, performance on AMD GPUs is horrible. It gets to the point where the game will simply crash, making it a slog to get through missions with a lot of enemies (that is to say, some missions are borderline unplayable and you won't be able to get past them).

Unironically one of the worst DLCs I've ever played.

Truly awful. ♥♥♥♥ combat and ♥♥♥♥ performance.

Quite frankly one of the worst and most unpolished games I've ever played. How do you release after Elden Ring and still suck this much?

♥♥♥♥ performance, ♥♥♥♥ level design, ♥♥♥♥ design choices in general, too little Vestiges and ♥♥♥♥ the seedling system, only a single blacksmith in the entire game, when you decide to keep playing after you finish the game you'll still be left without certain important NPCs depending on the ending you chose, broken hitboxes on some bosses, delayed combo extenders suck ♥♥♥♥ still, some bosses have stupid amounts of hp (though tbf I basically played the entire game with a +7 Angel's Axe as I killed off the blacksmith a bit too early since I was aiming for the Umbral ending), Umbral is an interesting concept but implemented quite poorly or at least in an inconveniencing way, the background noise is quite frankly headache-inducing (hello Umbral) and the soundtrack is mediocre at best.

Additionally, this game tries reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally hard to be a spectactle. Does every boss need a second phase? A third phase? Why? They are just gonna be a normal enemy 2 minutes later. Should have put some more spectacle into the game's areas and music.
I had more fun running from point A to B to finish a quest than I had fighting bosses.
The one thing this game got going for it is character design (by which I mean deranged and psychotic women that could kill me at any second). Ong these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ can come bounce on this ♥♥♥♥ any day.
Anyway, this game has surprisingly good-looking armor sets and weapons. Very good-looking indeed, just sucks that it's in a game this bad.
This game starts out as "teehee, here a few pikemen and marksmen" and before you know it you get spammed with enemies that can two shot you.
Bosses look good but most of them play like a slog.
Vestige system is complete garbage. Never leave Skyrest without a Seedling. They give you a single Vestige at the start of a level and then expect you to always carry around Seedlings to create temporary Vestiges. Don't have a Seedling on you? Tough, either first try this boss or run another 5 minutes. What? You want to backtrack? Good luck with that :)
Sometimes you get stuck on either invisible objects or just bad geometry.
Being in Umbral is a genuine pain because you'll have to deal with both real enemies and Umbral ones. Also ♥♥♥♥ these retarded bats or whatever that just bomb you off a cliff.
Some levels genuinely just have confusing or convoluted layouts. You'll be running left and right and opening doors and shortcuts everywhere, it can get pretty tedious. ESPECIALLY if the shortcut is to an Umbral Flowerbed (small flowerbeds that indicate where you can plant Seedlings) that you used 20 minutes prior and you'll most likely have placed your Seedling somewhere else already. What is the point to that?
Also, you better make sure to watch out for levers because you will definitely miss them and they will be necessary to progress (they blend in with everything else).
Most pickups and drops in this game are borderline useless.
For some reason the password settings for multiplayer is in the settings instead of.... the multiplayer menu? What?
On the topic of performance: I had to run this game at all low graphics with AMD FSR enabled to even get above 60fps. Not too mention all the random stutters and crashes I had. Unless you desperately need a player summon (which you will never get unless you go out of your way to ask for one on Discord or whatever) just turn off EAC. No more stuttering, no more crashes.

At the very least it was a mostly bug-free experience. The only bug I ran into was heals not registering despite using up a flask (I ain't spelling that word) when using them during a boss' phase transition (cutscene transitions to be specific).


In conclusion, Griefbound Rowena best girl (what that mouth do)

endless turn 2

Unironically one of the worst games I've ever played (right before Elden Ring)

Edit: all achievements done, ezpz would never do again 1 Sep @ 12:33am 56.5 hours

Edit 2: input reading the game

Masterpiece