Was going to post a lengthier review in here, but someone linked me this post and honestly it sums it up. I started off really liking XVI, started to get bored with it during a Final Fantasy mode playthrough, enjoyed Omega and then really disliked this. It feels like they leaned into all the worst parts of XVI for this DLC, the only thing it has going for it is being a visual feast for the eyes.
As I said, I initially really enjoyed it, but the more time you spend with the game the more limited it begins to feel. You scrape up against the very small number of possibilities in the game. The characters use paragraphs where a sentence would do, dragging everything out with needless verbosity that feels self-indulgent to a fault. Sidequests seem designed to actively waste your time, somehow deteriorating from even the sorry state of those available in the base game. The only meaningful thing to do in the game is fight, and 95% of what the new region has to offer is palette swaps on the enemies you've already fought. The new abilities do the same thing all of your old abilities did, but they're water now. Combat consists almost entirely of poking an enemy with a toothpick while weaving in the three cooldowns you use to stagger, then blasting them with the three cooldowns you use to actually kill things. It's like filing paperwork after a while, just the same thing over and over. Characters you hope finally get a chance to breathe tag along on your new adventure to just stand in the background with a blank expression, then piss off for no reason to do nothing.
All in all, I hope their next foray into a singleplayer title learns a lot from XVI, because they have a long way to go.
Posted some updated (well, mostly the same) thoughts after finishing it fwiw.
Finished. Like echoes of the fallen it ends a good bit stronger than it begins, but it has basically all the same issues as the base game with little in the way of fixes. That said there are a few things they did better than I was expecting.
- Difficulty. Bosses hit harder, patterns are more complex. Sometimes verging on maybe a bit unreasonable with the game's issues with visual noise but it makes for a much more engaging experience. Timekeeper is an amazing fight, as it half of Leviathan, issues with giving your character the attack speed of a dark souls character notwithstanding (kind of a nitpick with all the eikon stuff). All of them are maybe a bit too tanky, but I wasn't using mastered abilities or anything. It's still a bit annoying how dodge solves basically everything and how they didn't try to experiment with alternative mechanics really all that much.
- That said there are some glimpses of this. DOT puddles, things that almost approximate freeze/stone, poison DOT, etc. Of course there are no actual RPG elements to leverage these things further, but it makes even the palette swaps a bit more memorable.
- The eikon feats are like Odin in that they are full moveset replacements, this should have been the standard for the rest of them tbh, and they feel different to the others.
- The action stages are probably some of the better ones in the game. While there are good other action stages, they often were kinda bland. Some of them were just random bit of forest, or city street or something. This has a decent sense of progression through areas and a sense of place at least. That said, they never really leverage the action stages to their fullest. If you're doing entirely cordoned off zones, you should be leaning into cool shit, traversal QTEs, crazy structrual changes. Do some bayonetta shit. As it is it's just XIII hallways but worse. And some stuff is action stages which just...really shouldn't be action stages. Also they don't seem to all get added to stage replay so uh....idk.
- Relatedly the environmental visuals and vistas are just more interesting the the drab base game.
- There's a sword that you might need to think about equipping because of its stats. That makes, what, one in the game? But it's a start I guess.
- The main story and most of the sidequests aren't about bearer/branded/blight/bullshit thank fuck. Almost makes you wonder about a game that didn't make that the sole focus of most content to the point of exhaustion for a large part of the game.
Things that somehow felt worse than the base game:
- Cutscene direction is just gone, for the most part. Lipsync is bad at points (this was an issue in echoes iirc as well).
- Sidequests to unlock basic features you had that the game takes away from you.
- A bunch of eikon specific accessories that are now more of a hassle to deal with because the presets don't handle gear.
- Music felt kinda weak apart from the leviathan stuff imo.
- The eikon fight has an extremely jank first phase where it feels like they wanted to do something with you sliding on the water but instead just suspend you in space and distance perception is horrid, and a DPS check that is pretty darn tight and has no quick retry option and makes you watch a cutscene each time you fail it. Just frustrating with needless friction. Recommendation is switch to 60 fps mode for that section as failing a couple of the full combos or getting hit can ruin it
And then all the rest is sort of the same undesigned bullshit. Economies and itemization progression that makes no sense, QoL that should be there but isn't, too many words for a miniscule amount of information, lots of work put into flavor text for items but no work put into the items themselves, big and bold obnoxious lettering for sidequest completion to inform you of the garbage loot you got, slow animations and the same repeated camera angles over and over again, menus that have a surprisingly low information density while also being redundant, etc. Jill.
It's more 16. It's very marginally better than the base game for the reasons described but it really doesn't feel like they iterated all that much with this, compared to, say, Intermission or XV's season pass which was far more experimental and varied.
I think the thing that baffles me is that there are many extremely obvious wins that CBU3 could be taking, but just seem to flub at most opportunities, or do the most bandaid for a bullet wound type approaches.
Like all these accessories. You can break them down into the base game eikon accessories, base game non-eikon stuff, the omega gameplay style-altering accessories, and now this DLC's new eikon accessories.
But the game only lets you equip 3 accessories at once, and presets don't actually track gear so it's a hassle to switch things out and experiment. The slots also are filled by accessibility accessories so fuck you if you want to use those I guess, no interesting playstyles for you. Even that aside, some of these accessories are just substantially worse than others or ineffectual to the point of feeling like a junk waste of a slot. When you have more slots or more party members it's a different calculus but with one character the limit feels positively suffocating when many of the effects aren't that amazing to begin with.
The "easy win" for this would be to go to the ability grid, and add each base game eikon accessory's effect as a perk you can unlock in said grid (or to the inner clive circle). Make the perk nodes locked out until you find the accessory in the world so there's a reason to explore (you can even include cryptic hints on the nodes for where to look for them). Then take those omega accessories, double them (steal 6 more from Nioh's max set bonuses or something idk), and put half of them in the base game as progressive rewards for renown so there's stuff for the player to look forward to before the endgame. Make these the accessories that take up slots, and make the accessibility stuff a toggle. And make accessories that are direct upgrades to weaker accessories fully replace them to cut down on inventory clutter like how FF mode does it but in the base game and for all the other accessories. Those really shitty base game accessories though, throw them all into the clive perk tree and let players spend small amounts of AP on them, but perhaps make them non-refundable or sth.
Then take those eikon weapons the ones that are often weaker than another weapon you might already have equipped, and make these upgradeable to current strength, and give them the DLC eikon accessory perks while you have them equipped.
With these tweaks your game almost approximates an RPG, you've incentivized exploration, made sidequesting more worthwhile, given players something to think about when it comes to equipping weapons, encouraged more active switching of full loadouts, given something that feels like innate progression (beyond the game's 3-stat level ups) instead of just loot, etc.
While you're at it, if you're going to let players reallocate ability points whenever, don't make them do that. Rebalance the ability costs so that players can just unlock everything as they go, or actually make them lock in to a particular play style (if it's not clear, don't do the latter, the former is the way to go if you're all about giving the player options).
Another random thing -- the potion system. Why even bother with it during field exploration? Just refill them automatically outside of battle or quest series of fights. Elden Ring figured this out. If you want the player to explore, give them a means to refresh potions. Rarely you'll find one on the ground or sth but usually its just more beaver ass. They're not an economic constraint, but it's just additional friction that doesn't need to be there, same as the big sidequest completed messages.
The Eikon abilities basically boil down to two roles- will damage and actual damage. They have a lot of flashy animations and area of effects, sure, but this is almost exclusively useful on small, juggleable trash mobs. You could use these abilities to style on the enemies that can actually be launched, flinched, etc. Things like Ignition scooping them up can be fun, but their movesets are so narrow, their AI so bad and their HP so small I don't know why you'd bother. The meaningful encounters come from the elite enemies and the bosses, and the Eikon abilities for the most part have those two uses against them- stagger or hurt, sometimes both.
Yep the fact that bosses play by completely different rulesets for the most part ruins a lot of potential, and makes everything feel like dodge attack and dump whatever string of abilities you want. There's fun stuff you can do but shiva's dodge + lightning rod + will o wykes into dancing steel and zantetsuken kinda solves everything, and there are plenty of similarly powerful combos, but at some level you're just picking cooldowns that don't require skill to execute and you press button to make them happen, at least in boss fights. It's fine but wears thin over 60 hours or whatever. Chronolith trials show there's some consideration in the design but it's entirely orthogonal to the big challenges in the game. The usual objection here is "well play FF mode/Ultimaniac/arcade/some self imposed challenge run" and honestly, it's not my job to make the game fun for me when plenty of other games manage to do that out of the gate. I don't think the onus should be on a player to derive a pleasant experience.
Oh and all the eikon fights that are spectacular but play by another even more divorced set of rules with a worse feeling combat model than clive. I'm so glad that in the game's hypest moments literally nothing about how I've played the game so far matters and all choices are made for me.
