Have your taste in video games changed over the years?

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

The thing about Easy Allies is that Ben Moore is the surrogate for gamers like you and me whereas Michael Huber is the surrogate for all modern gaming journalists. He's very much impressed by the flashy spectacle stuff over really delving into the mechanics of games, whereas Moore is all about the latter. Hence why Huber is the one behind that Nu God of War review stating it to be a game that all humans should experience (which I cringed at). To be fair, Moore would probably review it positively as well, but he'd at least have the sense to sing it for it's limited combat and repetitive design.

As for that Sekiro comment, not sure how Moore would respond to ot but I'd be surprised if he actually agreed. I'm up to the final two boss fights in Sekiro, and I can say with certainty that it's a genuinely great game with a very interesting take on the concept of combat mechanics in an action game; one which lays the foundation for a great combat system. For the type if game that it is, the combat works and flows very well. That said, it is far from the best combat system of all time. It comes nowhere close to the heights of Ninja Gaiden, DMC, or Bayonetta, and it's not even the best within it's own genre, with Nioh not only beating it to the concept of posture-breaking but arguably even doing it better in some regards.

So, yeah-no, Huber is way off the mark in that regard. Nothing against the guy personally, of course. He seems very nice, up-beat, and clearly just wants to have a good time with the games that he plays. Nothing wrong with that at all. I just can't really see my interest in gaming ever really lining up with his.

[Foggle]

Basically, Nu God of War is trying to be some sort of deconstruction of it's franchise in the same way that Nier is for action games and JRPGs, except, you know....bad.

One key difference is that, despite its criticism of violence in media, Nier is still made with love for its own genres and medium as a whole. The first one lives and dies by its homages to the team's favorite games, while the sequel is mechanically sound and has a lot more depth than the typical action RPG (though the weird balancing fails it in this regard). The main draw is the story but the gameplay is part of the storytelling, and both narratives can only work as video games. Dad of War, meanwhile, comes across as embarrassed of its roots, and though this worked for Spec Ops: The Line in the past, there's a world of difference between being one of the biggest, most beloved action game franchises of the modern era and being a forgotten military shooter with virtually no notability. The whole "camera angle never changes" thing is a neat touch, but I fail to see how critics were calling it innovative when games like Half-Life have existed for decades.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Alright, I usually hate to bring back a dead discussion, but I recently just replayed the final boss fight with Dante on Son of Sparda difficulty, this time opting to master the use of Royal Guard in that fight, and I was instantly brought back into how fucking amazing this game's mechanics are. I died over and over again trying to beat the boss using a method that I'm generally pretty bad at but it felt incredible to get better and better and anticipating and timing my parries for his attacks, and releasing those perfectly timed Royal Releases in my DT state for dealing out insane amounts of damage to him. In my attempt that was actually successful, I fought him almost perfectly for the first two phases of the fight, and then came down to just a sliver of health as he got me in one full combo that nearly wiped out my entire health bar. It came down to both him and I having just a few pixels of health left with the next attack from either being instant death, and I managed to finish him off with a perfectly timed Royal Release parry which looked so goddamn bad-ass  in slow motion as the finishing blow of the fight. I managed to clear the battle with an S rank. It's easily the best boss fight in the game, one of the best boss fights in the franchise, and IMO easily trumps even the best Souls-esque bosses (and there are quite a few that I actually enjoy in games like Bloodborne and Sekiro).

This game is far and away the best thing to come out of this console generation, IMO. Granted, I can understand why some might be underwhelmed by the beginning hours. Nero starts out with a limited arsenal and the game's base difficulties don't really push you to get all that much better, so it's easy to miss the brilliance of it's combat design, even in it's most base form. That said, the same is true of Nero in DMC4, and even the older DMC games had Dante starting out with a relatively shallow array of mechanics available to him at the beginning of his main outings in the series. It's really nothing new for the DMC series. The thing is that, in this modern age of high-spectacle games, where even the more hardcore titles like the Souls games have satisfying deathblows and easy to grasp gameplay right from the get-go, the DMC series has never been about instant gratification. These games are arguably easier than other hardcore action games on the surface level of just getting through the game (even DMD mode is nowhere near as punishing as Ninja Gaiden's Master Ninja mode, IMO), but by the same token it's way harder to actually get good enough at the game to really play it on it's own terms, which the developers clearly intended. Truly learning the ins and outs of the game by unlocking new abilities, experimenting with those abilities, and replaying the game on a more challenging difficulty really opens up just how diverse and free-form the combat in this game really is. Perhaps this is why it was important for the older games, particularly DMC3, to be more challenging from the out-set. In a way, it forced players to realize that there was far more there than on the surface in order to progress through. While I'm all for accessibility, it's also easy to just play the game, find it slow and clunky, especially with the initial lack of abilities and mobility options for Nero, and then see it as less interesting than anticipated. However, just the sheer amount of unique and different ways in which you can approach each and every scenario in a way that specifically suits your playstyle really makes this game worth revisiting more than any other action game in this console generation, IMO.