Quote Originally Posted by Rodin View Post
Congratulations, you have achieved enlightenment.

That's pretty much the experience I had with the game (and I've heard others on this forum and elsewhere are the same). The combat is a very different experience from the Souls games and you will absolutely suck at it at first. But when it clicks...
I killed the general guarding the door to the main tower in Ashina castle on my second try. The blue quick draw guy probably took me well over 10 times, but being such a very short fight, it didn't feel like much trouble at all. With that fight I felt that it was totally stupid, but with the respawn point right in front of the door I actually had a lot of fun with it.
Genichiro still lives, but I got him to the third lifebar on my second try, and the third one doesn't seem that much harder. With this one, I actually got the impression that he's really easy. I still might take more than 10 tries, but with these games that's not saying much.

I think there's really three things to know:
1. You can block almost everything.
2. While you have your sword in block, your posture bar resests very quickly.
3. Attack, attack, attack!

Lady Butterfly took me forever, though it didn't feel frustrating because I felt I knew what I was doing. I just had to get better at avoiding getting hit while slowly hacking away her entire health bar. But fights get so much easier when you keep attacking as fast as possible because you can interrupt most of the enemies strongest attacks. When I beat Lady Butterfly, she didn't even get to summon her illusions at all. And I still had three healing and a resurrection left.

I thought after having completed Demon's Souls, DS1, DS3, and Bloodborne, I thought I could play this game completely blind without looking up anything. Might not have been the best game to pick for that. I think my main problem was that I didn't have any confidence in being able to block Lady Butterfly's ranged attacks or anything by the horse rider. That you can even block that giant with his giant halberd charging you on his giant was probably the one hint I needed to get a grasp of boss fights. Holding block to get your posture back is also a very neat feature, that I don't remember the game telling me. At least there is now a combat trainer in the hub for practice. That really helped a lot.

At first I thought that there wouldn't be much fantasy stuff in this kung fu game. The giant snake was cool, but seemed like a random special effect. But now it starts to look like there is more coming. Already been to the Dungeon and went a bit into the Temple. At one point I was wondering if all the monks I was stealth killing were really that evil, but then I took a closer look at what the three monks in the first gatehouse are praying too. Stabbing it is! Stab everyone! Then set everything on fire!
What I think is really cool is the pop culture references that I am spotting. There is soo much stuff that looks like taken straight from Akira Kurosawa. I mean, Wolf himself looks like he's a Toshiro Mifune character. The bandits seem to be straight out of Seven Samurai. Not just the outfits, but even the animations. A few times I saw some of them kicking up dirt at my face and I know I saw that exact movement in one of the movies. Though Wolf also reminds me of Auron from Final Fantasy X.
Though my favorite so far is probably the cannon gunners. Those guys are the leper gunsmiths from Princess Mononoke.