Hello hi I asked my cousin (who has little to no experience with fighting games) to play this build to see what he thought. It’s probably a bad idea to introduce someone to these games with this unfinished build and I don’t even know what kind of players you’re aiming for with this game but on the off chance it might be useful, his thoughts were that he felt constantly overwhelmed.
*Hi, the cousin here. I’m reading the whole thing to add on stuff that I might wanna add. If I’m speaking it’ll be in “**” symbols.*
He spent the first part of his time in training mode trying to build combos for himself with the sword and Momiji. I asked him how he felt about this, he said he was neutral about the experience. He said he wanted to find something new specifically to spite me as an fg nerd and he wouldn’t have entered training mode at all if he were playing on his own. *While the training mode did seem interesting after getting into it, the gameplay sounded much more interesting at any point.* He built his combos entirely without the use of special moves because while I did teach him he had trouble hitting them consistently. *He showed special effort to make sure that he didn’t affect my experience so while I knew how to do the special moves, I did not see value in adding them in as they were too hard on my old man hands*
Then he went out into the world, ready to try out his new routes, and was immediately humbled. While he didn’t lose every encounter or anything, having to focus avoiding and dealing damage WHILE focusing on his routes made him overwhelmed and he ended up focusing on neither and just kind of running into the opponent swinging. *I had no idea what was happening and the little gremlins were beating my ass. Just them being able to block made them a much harder enemy to deal with than the little pillow* This made the game not very interesting. *That’s partially wrong. The game was still very interesting but it made me feel inadequate. My mental stack was full and I was getting stressed out pretty fast* The first time he encountered any real friction with the bridge fight, he gave up at the Gashadokuro. Even after I showed him how to beat it he decided to call it a day. *Up until there I died many times because I had no idea what was happening and I was just scraping by via yolo’ing buttons. When the big skull guy came, he felt so much more intimidating than anybody else and I was already worn out from prior enemies. So I just gave up.*
One thing he pointed out was that his brain defaulted to trying to beat these enemies using more traditional action game logic i.e. waiting for a reactable attack and trying to punish. *I have played games like hollow knight or dead cells before. As you might know, in these games, enemies do their attack once in a while and then just sit there taking hits. Being forced create these windows instead of just having them made it very overwhelming as I already didn’t know what I was doing* As he put it, he kept trying to look for openings where the opponent would give up and let him hit them instead of trying to create his own. This led to him being really confused by how to approach enemies that were constantly putting out unreactable, seemingly unpunishable hitboxes. It also meant he wasn’t trying to parry or jump out of strings or anything else the game was trying to teach you how to do. He also ended up ignoring the blade sight mechanic most of the time, even after I pointed it out to him. * Since I had no idea what I was doing and was having a hard time even trying to understand what’s happening. I had no space in my mental stack to look for the card and use it.* Sometimes he would incidentally break the opponent and he would still play neutral as normal, acting as though the opponent could still defend (I had explained the break mechanic to him).
He said that it felt like the game was constantly throwing way too much at him to understand. I asked if he would like it better if the game had a progression system wherein Suu’s abilities (weapons, gfs, parries, blade sight) would unlock over time and he enthusiastically affirmed. *What felt like the biggest reason I was so overwhelmed was, there was so much to learn and so many combinations that could be done when I couldn’t even use the basic move set properly. Even blocking was not a button but walking backwards which made things difficult for my brain. I had to think about all these things and the game was not giving me the time to think. Combined with the fact that the game was not giving me free windows to hit the enemy, this made it hard to even exchange health. It drained my stamina really fast.*
Despite all this, he’s actually pretty excited about the game lol. *The game looks mighty interesting and if I was given enough time get used to the move set where I don’t have to think about whether to use light kick or heavy kick but choose and option instinctually, I feel like I’d be much more drawn to it. The art is beautiful and depth of the game looks promising. I hope this experience of mine is useful for you and wish you great rest of your day*