I’m in the very end game of Lies of P (Neowiz Games/Round8 Studio), and I want to talk about how a good boss fight goes. And why the boss fight I just fought is ultimately, not a good one. Here is my last post about this game. As usual:
*SPOILERS*
First off, this area was the culmination of the direction in which this game was going. As is very obvious, this game wears its FromSoft inspiration on its sleeves. It’s laughable that they said they didn’t think about the From games as they created this one (the devs, I mean), because there is a one-to-one comparison for nearly everything in the game.
And, the one thing this game has gotten consistently wrong is that the difficulty of From games*is not the main point, but a side effect of several other things. In this game, the difficluty is at the forefront all the fucking time. You can’t cross a single rafter without facing HOW HARD THIS GAME IS.
In the area I’m in as I mentioned before, there are artillery shooting ballistae at you as you’re facing the enemies. There are gaps you can fall into as you try to run by said enemies. There are corners you can get stuck in that once you’re there, you cannot get out at all. And there is an enemy that has basically a bowling ball on each hand, and it can bend in any direction to hit you–and it tracks you and can stretch to hit you, and it has no poise. It can literally keep on hitting you five or six times in a row. And take about a quarter of your health per hit. So while it’s not a hard enemy, it’s frustrating as fuck especially if there are two of them attacking you at the same time.
The thing about From games in general is that they are tough but fair. Really. That’s what everyone says about them, so it must be true. I’m being tongue-in-cheek because it’s mostly true–until it’s not. In general, the combat is tough, but fair. There are windows when you can attack, and you have to know when and where they are. Poise is a thing, and you can break it.
In Lies of P, poise does not exist. It just does not. The game likes to tout a mechanic in which you get an enemy (or a boss) into a groggy state (their health bar is outlined in white). You hold down RT (charged heavy attack) and hit the enemy. It stuns them and then you follow up with an RB for massive damage.
Which sounds great except the enemy (boss) can keep attacking while its health bar is white. Which means that if you try the charged RT at the wrong time, you get creamed. And since the enemies have no poise or stamina, they can keep attacking you. So while the charged RT/RB combo sounds good, well, I rarely bothered trying to do it in practice. If I happened to get the white bar, I would look for my opening (with a boss, it’s an orange spot on the ground after the charged RT), but otherwise, I’d jkst ignore it and continue.
This is a common complaint about the game, by the way. The fact that there’s no pause in the enemies attack pattern after it reaches stagger/the groggy state. And that if you parry, you don’t get anything, either. In fact, with a boss, you get pushed back when you parry, so why bother? The idea I think is that it adds to the combo in order to get to the groggy state, which as I said, I end up ignoring more often than not because the enemy/boss is still attacking.
People say the combat is more Sekiro than Bloodborne. I agree with this, but it’s not as good as either of those games because it’s simply not fair. Yes, if you have lightning reflexes, you probably can parry this game into oblivion. But at least with Sekiro, you could win by whitling away at the health bars, even if it wasn’t fun.
Look. I knew going into this game that I would not be parrying. I don’t parry. I can’t parry. I have found ways around it in every From game that I’ve played. I hate parrying, and I don’t like that it’s such a big part of the whole genre. But for this game, Stephanie Sterling said she got on with the parrying and she is not a parry person. She quit playing Sekiro for that reason. And she loves the rest of the From games. So much like me. Except she loves Bloodborne, which is my second-least favorite game.
Anyway, she said she was able to do the parry (but that there were very uneven difficulty spikes), so it gave me hope that maybe I could do the parry. Nope. Not at all. Can’t do it. And the video I’ve included is about artifical difficulty, which is something I bang on and on about. He’s the YouTuber I’ve used to beat the last four or five bosses with his cheese guides including the one I want to talk about today. And he mentions in the video I included that it’s ridiculous that the bosses are so fucking hard–unless you use throwables. And then you can just melt the boss. Which is how I’ve beaten every boss since the fourth chapter.
He even mentions that FromSoft has fallen prey to the hype that difficulty is king. He specifically mentioned the final boss of Sekiro being artificially difficult–and he’s not wrong. He’s clear that throwing everything into the mix just because you can does not make it a good game.
I agree. Restraint can be key. He also said with Lies of P that for ‘normal gamers’ (by his definition, I am one), there is like a little quiet circle of hell playing Lies of P because we won’t quit, but we’re not enjoying it, either. I’m actually considering quitting Lies of P where I am because the boss I just beat is at the top of my difficulty ceiling–and I’m pretty sure the next boss or two (however many are left) will break me. The worst thing is with this boss, much like with the Archbishop, I got to her second phase in the first or second time I fought her. And then it was just sheer pain after that.
Also, I might have mentioned that I was stuck on seven heals until I realized that they switched from having additional heals be a main P-Organ level up and being in one of the sub-levels. Now I have ten and it feels like such a luxury. But I really hate that you have to waste your skill trees on heals. That is one thing that is different from the From games, and it’s a change made for the worse.
Anyway, this boss is the character I mentioned in a past post looked like Kirk, Knight of Thorns from the original game. There’s a flavor text before her arena that says she is the first puppet. I walk in expecting it to be, well, I don’t know. Sophia, the blue fairy, maybe, because that would have been amazing. But, no. It’s this character I’ve seen once but have no knowledge of. As this is very late game, I know it’s supposed to be a huge character, but who the fuck is she? No idea.
She has a huge shield on her back, which means you have to hit her from the front or side. And you want to get this phase done as quickly as possible–which I did with throwables the first time–to get to the second phase with your Specter still alive and hopefully two heals.
By the way. I hate the heal system for the specter. I don’t mind having to use the Star Fragment to summon the specter, though I do think that’s a bit bullshit. They drop often enough that when I’m grinding for other materials, I can get those as well. But having the Cube for the heal and having to use two gold fruits per heal item, that means I’m wasting four gold fruit per run. You can get eight gold coins in 9 1/2 real time minutes. But you have to go back to the hotel to the actual tree to ‘harvest’ them. And the time doesn’t pass if you’re not in-game. that’s bullshit, to be honest. I had over 99 fruit before this boss. Using four fruits per run means that twenty runs later, I now have about 70 gold fruits left. Which is 35 runs. For however many even harder (I’m sure bosses).
It’s just weirdly tedious and one more thing I have to worry about. Once I leveled up the cube at the P-Organ chair, it should just dispense that mane heals per run under the use of one wishstone.
I have more to say, obviously, but I’m done for now.
*Excpting the second Dark Souls, as always.