Ok. I’m hoping this will be my final post on Lies of P (Neowiz Games, Round8 Studio). I want to put it to rest so I can move onto other games.Like Mineko’s Night Market (Meowza Games), which was released a few days ago. I had been looking forward to it and bought it immediately.
But goddamn it. This game. I stand by everything I’ve said about it, but it has its hooks in me. In part because I hate to be bested by something. I’m contrary like that. Tell me I can’t do something, and I’m going to do it. Unless I clearly can’t do it and I won’t touch it. Look. I contain multitudes. It’s impossible to know what will hook me and what won’t. And even that is a lie. I know myself fairly well. I know if I won’t like something before I go into it, and I rarely am wrong. One notable exception was The Royal Tenenbaums by Wes Anderson. I was convinced I would hate it before I saw it, but Kathleen wanted to see it and I said why not? Much to my surprised, I really liked it.
Other than that, though, I’m right way more often than I’m wrong. I dated a guy who loved Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino). L-O-V-E-D it. His favorite movie by a mile. It came to the midnight theater near us years after it was released. I hadn’t seen it because I knew I wasn’t going to like it. Look. I know my taste in pop culture. I know what I will hate. I watched the trailer and hated the hell out of it. I vowed never to see it.
My ex explained earnestly whi it was a brilliant movie. He reassured me he would warn me about the scene that I most emphatically didn’t want to see. I went to the bathroom during that scene, but I should have just stayed in there. You probably would not be surprised to learn that I hated the movie. From the first hypercut moment to the last, I thought it was terrible. Hyperviolent, hypermasculine, hyperedgy…it was everything I hated in two hours or however long it was. Interminable! I found it pretentious, empty, and just horseshit. I can’t emphasize enough how much I hated it.
When my ex asked me what I thought of it, I naively believed that he actually wanted to know. Readers, he did not. I did not say it the way I wrote it here. I was more diplomatic, but I did expound on my feelings. After I was done, he looked at me in silence for several seconds. Then he said, “I can’t be with someone who has that point of view.”
That’s right. He broke up with me because I didn’t like Pulp Fiction. I can laugh about it now, but it really bothered me at the time (obviously). I also felt as if it was a trap. He had said he wanted my honest opinion when he actually hadn’t! It was only in time that I realized he had been so convinced that I would like the movie despite me saying I probably wouldn’t that anything other than a completely raving positive review would have stuck in his craw.
Anyway! I know myself well. This is both good and bad. When it comes to this game, I was right about the game. I knew from watching the trailer and playing the demo that I would get frustrated with it–which I did. I also knew that I would compulsively play it–which I also did. I knew that I would think it was not a great game in part because of the insistence on parrying–also true.
This is perhaps my biggest gripe about this game–it so desperately wants you to parry, but unless you can do it every time, you don’t get any reward for it. As I’ve said in many past posts (and here’s my most recent), the enemy doesn’t even get staggered when you parry them, so it’s not worth going in for the riposte. At least not for me.
*SPOILERS*
I was talking about the last two bosses I killed and why they were difficult for different reasons. The true last boss is where I’m at, and I don’t know if I want to bother trying to beat it. Starting with Laxasia, I knew I was hitting my ceiling. There is now a myth that anyone can play these games–which is not true. Even the people taking into account disabilities seem to have glided over the fact that they are difficult for the vast majority of people. I think it’s the acclimation process. If you love these games and play them all, of course they aren’t going to be as difficult for you. When a new game comes out, you’re starting at a level five instead of zero. Out of ten.
I was wary about the parry, as it were. I can’t parry. That’s not a “won’t” or “don’t”. I have tried over and over and over again in every single one of these games. iIsimply cannot do it. In this game less so than in the others. I was able to get by with throwables, which was my equivalent to magic in this game. My tried-and-true method of beating a boss. Fight them normally in the first half/phase of the fight with the help of the specter and then throw everything at them in the second phase of the fight. But then, Laxasia.
I have to say. As much as I hated fighting her, she was probably the fairest of the fights if you don’t have the issues I have (spatial issues, poor reflexes, no pattern ecognition, and just unable to do anything really quickly). She has combos for days, but that’s every boss. The thing with her is that if you can do pattern recognition, her patterns are clear. And distinctive. Unlike other bosses.
In fighting her, I realized that the failing was in part mine. Or rather, I have changed since my medical crisis. Before, I was willing to battle with a boss for many minutes, whittling away until I won. That’s how I beat the final boss of Sekiro and it took a good twenty minutes to do so because I could not master the deflect.
Here’s the thing about this game. Much of it blurs together. Someone in the RKG Discord (in the Lies of P thread) was talking about the boss of the chapter he was on. The levels are callled chapters by the way, which I liked, and I was like, isn’t that this other chapter? But no. he was right. It’s not that all the chapters are the same. They’re not. It’s that the levels don’t really matter, and they are not as nearly intricate as in a From game. Also, the enemies are bland as fuck and the placement is puzzling.
I knew I would struggle with this game because of my issues. I didn’t know I would struggle this hard or that the only way to mitigate it (on bosses) was to use throwables. It shouldn’t be like that, but it was. It wanted to be Sekiro, but it’s not. I get why people love it. I’m not trying to rain on their parade, but this game is not great. It’s a good first attempt, but it could have been so much better.