I was quite consumed with Lies of P up until I discovered The First Descendant. I've still been playing it a bit on the side even if I haven't posted much about it. There haven't really been much to post about and I feel like I've mostly said what's been needed to say up to this point. It's a linear souls game with a lot of cool areas and bosses. That's still true even now that I've reached what appears to be the end.

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Long and linear

When I exited the game yesterday evening I was standing in front of what I'm expecting ot be the last boss arena. The journey to get me here has taken me 28 hours. That is quite decent for a souls game in my opinion. During this time there has been a good amount of exploring, secrets to find, bosses to defeat and choices to make. They've stitched all of this together in a really good way because it's quite rare for me to still be interested in a game that's as linear as this after playing it for 28 hours.

Linearity is probably the games only weakness to me. For it to reach peak level design it would have had to have a bit more exploration, longer side paths that lead to bigger secrets and interconnection between the different areas. This is the spoiled long time Dark Souls player speaking again by the way. I won't try to hide that. If you're interested in another game that did this really well I would recommend checking out the Surge. That game probably has one of my favorite level designs outside of the original Dark Souls.

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I guess I could also bring up the difficulty level as a weakness. Again, this is the long time souls-veteran speaking. The enemies and bosses aren't that hard. In my previous post about Lies of P I mentioned Romeo who was a challenge for me. He's also been the only real challenge I've faced so far. I'm saying so far because I expect that the last boss will be hard. It should be. Then again, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot if they made their first game to hard.

Still, even if the bosses aren't that hard to defeat they are very fun. Most of them have really cool design and a really cool moveset to dodge and parry. I'm very sure that I wouldn't be enjoying the game as much as I have been if it wasn't for the parry system. It takes precision timing to get a perfect block and a parry in but it's so satisfying when it hits. It negates all the damage you'd take while slowly breaking the enemies weapon and dealing stagger damage to it. I've heard it's somewhat inspired from Sekiro so I'm growing even more excited to give that a try soon after playing this.

The most fun boss must have been Laxasia the Complete. She's the last boss I fought and her moveset was just amazing to play against. She hits really hard but she hits fair. All her attacks are perfectly fine to both dodge away from and parry. Even her 10 attack long combo she does. Perfect parrying all of those attacks is one of my finest moments in this game by far.

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The wrap

I'm excited to see how this game wraps up. There's been a good deal of mystery and lies throughout the game which shouldn't be surprising since this is a game about Pinocchio. It'll be fun to see is the choices I've made and the lies I've told end up having any consequences for the ending. I hope it does because that will instantly add replay-ability to the game for me. I can definitely seeing myself going through the game again to see what outcomes will come from doing different choices. Maybe not right away since it's a 30 hour journey but probably at some point.

Wish me good luck as I head in to fight the last boss. I hope I'm going to need it. I'll be very disappointed if he ends up being a pushover.

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^{All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.}

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