Christopher

joey thank you so much for reminding me Joey! I’m going to take care of it right now! Thank you, really!

I totally agree Joshua. As much as I love Ryu, maybe it would have been better as side content or free DLC or something. It's still fun for sure, but it does take a serious toll on the game's pacing.

One-handed swords are incredible once you unlock some good spells to use them with. I enjoy the Clash mechanic of dual swords...but there's no doubt I've used Longswords more than any other weapon! Once I unlocked deflect, I immediately thought...Wukong what...???

It just felt bland to me. There was some parts of it I enjoyed, but overall, I couldn't believe how much felt like simple copy and paste jobs. I know that has been a part of Bethesda games for a while, but they used to at least create unique situations within copy & pasted environments. Here, you could find the same item in the same POI on 20 different planets.

I'm only playing Solo right now because I don't have PSN. I can't believe how poorly balanced it is. There's still some fun to be had, but progressing is incredibly slow, like a crawl. I consider myself to be an fairly advanced ER player, and it's still extremely hard.

Right, but like Neerja is hinting at, had Roger not teamed up with Garp, that fight could have had a very different outcome. It's a bit of a catch 22. Could Roger ever become Prime Roger without teaming up with Garp to beat rocks? I think purely hypothetically, true Prime Roger could beat Rocks, just purely in fantasy land with the event of the story set aside.

I completely agree. The environment is absolutely a character in DS, and it looks to be even more-so in DS2. With the Chiralium heavily altering the environment, they look to be even more unique. I think of other games as well, Yharnam in Bloodborne, the island of Tsushima in Ghost of Tsushima - the environments play as important a role as any character. But DS' environments are unique in that you literally interact with them in a meaningful way, in ways no other game does.

I'm definitely more excited about exploring the world! I am very interested to see how they get around the combat deterrents from the first game (i.e. Void outs). It looks like the answer will be robots. I hope we won't be forced into combat too much - do you think it'll go MGS style, and we'll be rewarded for going non-lethal? I'm intrigued for sure to see how it fits into the overall lore, but I am far more interested to see how the Death Stranding has affected the larger world, and exploring just how much more insanely detailed the team at KJP has made the open world!

I think there are certainly room for both. Using recent games as an example, I actually really enjoyed Avowed for being a relatively basic fantasy-RPG that didn't worry at all about adhering to any kind of realistic rules. It was just about having fun, running around using magic and swinging swords. Then, you have KCD2, which goes out if it's way to feel real at every turn. There's no doubt that both have issues, i.e. KCD2 can feel tedious sometimes, and Avowed can feel thin. Overall, I think I do gravitate more towards the realism, because they can sustain interest over much longer periods, and feel far more rewarding when you do finally become powerful.

Absolutely! It's amazing how quickly this combination can absolutely destroy an entire enemy group in seconds. Remember before 2.0 when you could do it through walls??!! I miss those days lol. Thank you for the comment Viggie!

I want to (game) rant and rave about the price issues, and I probably will to some degree, but I'm still going to buy the thing. If Duskbloods was a launch title, I'd be way more excited. Has Nintendo ever been moved by public sentiment? It's been pretty bad this time. I'm hoping they may re-think certain aspects of the announcement, though I doubt they are going to budge on pricing. Still, as long as it's the only place to play Nintendo games, it's going to do serious business.

Thanks so much for pointing this out here, Dos! I've included a note near the top of the list to try to explain the system, but I may need to make sure it's easy for readers to see. Danny's correct in that it is possible for different players to find friendly monsters in different locations. Ultimately, if you visit each location on the list, you'll find every monster.