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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Also playing this on PC currently. It’s good fun, but I feel like it is far less polished than the first. Sometimes completely janky.

    Performance is pretty much fine, with some stuttering here and there that nothing will fix. But not a huge deal.

    Here’s a tip though: always save at a meditation point before quitting. There are a few auto-saving checkpoints around story beats, but reloading these can cause issues - I recently got completely stuck by relying on one.

    Basically, there’s a moment where you can force pull a door open, but then end up going a different way and acquiring a new ability. Then you come back through the now open door. I had to quit the game after getting this ability, and on reload, the door was closed. Nothing I could do to open it from this side, and no way back up and out in the opposite direction.

    I tried everything, and if I was on console I think I would have been completely screwed, at almost exactly halfway through the game. I had to download a mod to get to a debug menu where I could expose and load a previous ‘backup’ save. No idea why they don’t just expose a couple of these saves in the ‘load game’ menu…









  • The first Headless I encountered in Sekiro. I was seeing enough progress and understanding what was being asked of me just enough to be stubborn as hell and kept trying to fight it head on, without having any knowledge yet of any helpful items that make the fight less rage-enducing.

    Outside of Fromsoft, my NG+ encounter with the green swamp monster thing in Lies of P seemed SO much harder than the first time. So I’m not sure if this boss is considered easy or hard, but I didn’t consider it to be very hard going in for a second time and got quite stuck for a while…



  • Yeah I feel like it would be a nice in-between option for ya, as you mentioned the second phase troubles in your edit. It really is harder to learn a second phase when you’re only getting through the first on every 5th try or so (Laxasia was a pain in the ass for this, I never really got a good feel for phase 2, just managed it somehow on a lucky run with wild and terrified inputs haha)

    I think having Sekiro as my first soulslike taught me that there’s a big gap between surviving a phase and really nailing a phase though, so I try to take that with me and get phase 1 to point of just warming up. And looking for more and more windows to inflict damage - it’s amazing how quick some of the fights can be when you find more of them


  • My only soulslike games have been Sekiro and Lies of P (some bloodborne years ago but didn’t finish it).

    Like others have said, play the way it feels right to you. I get that you’re saying it’s somewhere in between - getting frustrated solo, but too easy with summons. If you get to that point again, maybe try using summons to learn the boss (EG get to the second phase every time to then learn the second phase) but don’t allow yourself to complete it during that round. Then when you feel ready, back to solo.

    Personally, what I enjoy about these games is the design of each encounter. I feel like I only experience the full intended design of the fight if it’s 1v1, hitting a boss that is attacking some other npc isn’t engaging to me. So I don’t touch summons.

    If the game is well designed, even a really hard boss should feel fair - when I die, I should be able to understand what I did wrong and what I still need to learn, and once I’ve seen it all I need to hone my reactions to each tell and pattern. Then it doesn’t matter how many tries it takes, as long as I’m still enjoying that process (yes it’s still frustrating at times but that usually just means the win will feel even better).

    If I’m not enjoying the process, I’ll put it down for the day, and play again when I’m into it. If it’s so bad that I don’t ever feel like playing it again, then that’s that I guess. Hasn’t happened yet (except Bloodborne, but I wasn’t as much of a fan of the genre back then, will play it again at some point. Remaster when?)