Regular enemies: burn your specials, they melt, do coup de grace as necessary. You win.
Bosses: cycle through specials to perform max stagger damage and r1 any major attacks. When staggered, limit break to increase basic attack dps and heal, spam square while your specials refresh. When stagger finishes, cycle through specials again to re-stagger. You’ll typically have full limit meter again by the next stagger.
That’s about it. There’s not much asked of you in terms of timing, reactions, learning patterns, or execution. It can be handy to do the wind counter or heatwave projectile counter at times but you can easily ignore that and burn all your specials whenever they’re off cooldown to get the same result.
It’s mechanically too simple. The bombastic major boss battles are cool because of how cinematic and dynamic they are, which elevates them. But the systems are not nearly as good as they need to be for a character action game, and the RPG systems are too stripped down to make up for it.
I disagree on the overall combat take.
For starters, using counters properly results in their cooldown timers being significantly reduced. This allows you to use them more frequently, especially if you equip the rings that further curtail their refresh times. Cutting Rook’s Gambit cooldown by 2.7 seconds with an accessory doesn’t sound like it’s worth it when the refresh cooldown is long on its own, but when you pair it with using that counter skill properly, it transforms that move into something you can use a lot more frequently
. The long cooldown is essentially a penalty for using it wrong. Then there’s the fact that for some enemies, your follow up attacks can miss after a perfect dodge due to them charging across the screen quickly, even if you use the magic ranged attack! A perfect skill counter is a 100% guaranteed hit with tons of stagger bar damage because all action freezes as you execute it.
Then there’s using Garuda’s embrace, which will pull a partially staggered enemy to the ground, which you can only pull off during a short window right as you hit 50% stagger. While the enemy is vulnerable, all stagger bar damage is increased temporarily! You can take an enemy from 50% to 0% (or close) stagger really fast if you use the right skills, something you cannot do if you’re just spamming them on cooldown.
During the stagger window, attacking with limit break is nice and all, but you get a lot of damage in the stagger window if you save certain skills for that moment when your stagger damage multiplier is built up. If you are doing effective counter attacks, the cooldown times of your skills generally line up to be used during those stagger windows.
Fights are much shorter when you master the combat. You can beat the game just fine by spamming, but you can beat the bosses much faster than the way you’re doing it. I think the dev team made a bad choice by putting hard mode behind completing the game first, as I think many of the conversations we’re having about the combat would be different if the option was available at the start.
In short, counter skills are a much more effective way to get a boss to 50% partial stagger quickly, embrace to pull them to the floor for increased stagger bar damage, use high stagger damage skills to bring them to full stagger, get multiplier as high as you can during stagger window, then use high damage skill(s) to maximize the 140-150% damage multiplier.
Agreed on the RPG systems, the weapon upgrading is tacked on and may as well not even exist. The side quest gameplay design is basic MMO gameplay from 2004 and is shockingly bad to include for a single player game. I’m also getting tired of various faction leaders giving me tokens to carry around and display so that I’m recognized as an ally. It’s like I’m some kind of Eagle Scout collecting merit badges, it’s incredibly contrived.
. Why even code that? Whats the logic of that design decision. They should have just made an emoji of the middle finger pop up. Exact same outcome but at least it would have been funny.
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