Progress Report: Nine Sols
(At time of writing, I'm about to fight major boss #4 of what is presumably 9, so we'll be generous and say I'm about halfway done)
Every time I sit down and play a game in this general "soulslike" genre, I'm always like "This is the one. This is the one I'm finally gonna beat." It never is: I fell off the back end of Dark Souls 1 somewhere around the Royal Archives, Dark Souls 2 once all the opening paths converged, and 3 somewhere after the Abyss Watchers. Lies of P managed to get me all the way to the final boss, but Sekiro lasted a couple hours before I decided that I was neither good nor patient enough for what it was putting down. Only 2015's Bloodborne actually got me all the way to the finish line, and the DLC quickly put a stop to any further plans. Suffice to say that my tolerance for failure-based learning is not what it used to be when I was 12.
Which brings us to Red Candle's Nine Sols, a 2D Metroidvania cribbing more than a little bit of Sekiro's playbook as the backbone of its gameplay. When you're not running and jumping, the bulk of Nine Sols' time is spent in parry-based combat. You can get a decent amount of mileage out of your standard 3-hit combo and the charge attack, but the real good stuff comes from using your talisman. Every time you successfully parry, you get a Qi charge, and up to 3 can be detonated at once to do a huge chunk of damage to an enemy. And this works really well! Sekiro is a game that I really wanted to like, and this manages to distill both the bits of it I actually liked (the exploration and ninja gameplay), and the idea behind the stuff I didn't.
It certainly helps that the game is significantly more forgiving than Fromsoft's catalog - not only is there an easy mode available (which I haven't needed yet!), but HP, healing, and damage upgrades are regularly available. In addition, the jade system (which is a blatant copy of Hollow Knight's charms) lets you mix and match big chunks of your build, and I've made heavy use of the "heal faster" and "talismans stun enemies when applied" jades, among others. I won't pretend to be GOOD at the game, but I'm getting by and even managed to one-shot a small handful of the game's bosses, something I would have never guessed coming in.
Aesthetically, the game does its best to marry a hand-drawn traditional Chinese painting look with a cyberpunk society and it...only kinda works? There are times when it's really striking, but those are almost exclusively as a result of the hand-drawn stuff, because it sure as shit isn't when I'm wandering around the caves or a warehouse. Enemy design varies wildly between "dude with a sword in vaguely eastern-looking armor" and cybernetic flesh demons, the latter of which is basically the only place I feel like the whole cyberpunk part of the aesthetic actually works. Similarly, the soundtrack is mostly traditional Chinese-sounding tunes which sound fine in a vacuum, but don't always really fit the stages that they appear in.
Most of the major complaints I have are about the game's general map structure - Once you make it out of the opening area and reach your home base for the first time, you can teleport there from any bonfire, but you can only go back to the last node you rested at. If you want to explore elsewhere or do some sidequest that's opened up from getting a new ability, tough shit. You're gonna have to either hoof it there, or hoof it back to wherever you initially were. You eventually get full teleportation, but again, only from the home base. Moving from area to area is really tedious when you have to spend 15 seconds loading into the Four Seasons Pavilion, and then spend another 30 seconds immediately loading the new area that you actually wanted to go to. Additionally, root nodes double as your teleport points, and there's generally only one of them per area. This means you either have to make a decent hike to get to wherever you're actually heading, or you have to make a lot of progress in an area when you first arrive to reach the root node, usually the former.
And while I'm on the subject of root nodes, there are a surprisingly high number of boss/miniboss fights just on the other side of an area transition from one. While most of the major bosses thankfully avoid this, it feels real fucking bad to die and get sent back like 50 feet, but still have to sit through a loading screen before you get to try again. There was a boss fight in the 3rd major area that's immediately after an elevator, so dying hit you with the double whammy of having to load the previous entire area just so you could walk ten steps to activate the elevator, then reload the entire new area to get another attempt at the boss.
Finally, as a note on length, both a handful of reviews and HowLongToBeat say the game is 20-25 hours long, and I frankly do not buy that. Maybe if you're really good at these kinds of games (I'm not), and I've admittedly been doing a fair amount of the Metroidvania fucking around, but I'm already up to 12-13 hours. I'm not necessarily complaining, I'm definitely enjoying what the game is doing so far, but I don't see how the game wraps up any sooner than 30 hours at the current pace. It definitely feels closer in scope to Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and I liked that one a lot, even if it probably could have stood to be a little bit smaller than it ended up being.