As from dlcs go I actually had a much harder time enjoying this one over the others. Areas felt incomplete and empty, lots of main game copy paste content or even dlc copy paste content like the stupid hippos. The tedious easter egg hunt for skibbidy fragments and weird power scaling. And the atrocious final boss.
Overall I still enjoyed it and the map was beautiful to look at and fun to explore but it feels like a concentration of all the main games flaws. There’s very few fun things to find in the world lots of crafting trash and upgrade materials, surprisingly few useful spells weapons or armor some just flat out worse than whats available in the main game. The skibbidy level scaling felt strange, i struggled with the dlcs bosses until i hit skibbidy level 17 and suddenly they melt within a few hits, i don’t really know how many i need for each fight.
The boss fights that are there are solidly enjoyable, messmer is probably the most fun one to fight. The furnace golems are the STUPIDEST thing from has ever made, painfully tedious and very frustrating copy paste trash thats just a waste of time.
Final boss i had to respec cos no matter what i tried i got minced in the second phase. What worked? Fucking fingerprint shield and pokey stick. The most unenjoyable gameplay method of sitting behind a shield and its really effective. If i don’t use that i need frame perfect dodges and perfect focus for 10 minutes or longer with bo opportunity to make mistakes. First phase was fine but wtf am i supposed to do in the second phase? Be perfect?
Divine Beast Dancing Lion part two and the Scadutree Avatar are the best new music. Metyr’s also really fits the fight but it’s not one I’d listen to outside of it.
The new weapon types are really cool but I hate that you can’t get any of them until the DLC, and you can’t start the DLC without doing some end game shit. I’d love to use Milady with wing stance, or some backhand blades or a dueling shield before the end of the game.
Great finally having a reason to use Malenia’s great rune though.
For so many of the bosses, the run that finally beat them didn’t really feel like I had mastered them, or even that it was a close fight, their AI just sort of decided not to do any of the hard attacks and just stood there being hit a lot. I don’t know what was up with that.
Enjoyed it for the most part, but I didn’t like how exploration was handled. So many places to go that had absolutely nothing. Fully exploring the finger ruins or frenzy woods felt very bad for how much area there was to cover vs amount of rewards for exploring.
Idk how they would fix this though as then they’d either have to make even more unique dungeons to avoid the copy paste complaint of the base game or litter about even more crafting items.
Fuck furnace golems as well
