WaltherFeng fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Mar 12, 2024

Bonus: Japanese Hard NG+ (Patch 1.12, No Commentary)

• This being Japanese Hard difficulty, the most obvious change from lower difficulties is the lack of recoverable gray health on attacks and finishers. You take damage, there's no getting it back without a stim pack. Playing through this on a fresh save is still doable if you know how to beat the game on Normal, but you'll need to take things a bit safer for the first half of the run.
  
• Even with the changes made to the first Ninja encounter, I still chumped that rear end in a top hat in a way that would've worked all the same on release. Use Adrenaline to stun, throw fire grenade behind, do a dashing strike to push ninja into flames, ping pong back and forth until dead. I cannot emphasize enough how those grenades are one of the best tools this game offers.
  
• Because I have all the skills unlocked going into NG+, the incentive to keep earning skill points is no longer there so I didn't mind taking the opportunity to go for gun kills in situations where it would've been more economical to set up a melee finish. I even demonstrate the new manual cover system added in the 1.12 update. Slow mo makes it more doable as you can tell when everything is frantic and enemies are moving in close range.
  
• Speaking of guns, I did play this run without the Aim Assist as its frankly too powerful to the point of locking your aim in a direction you don't always want it to go. Unfortunately, this means you have to deal with the downside of it being off, and that is overshooting your aim because I'm using an analog stick instead of a mouse. Maybe if 110 and Soleil understood that people have side buttons on their mice and want to map poo poo to that, I would have reason to go with KB&M for this.
  
• I mentioned in the LP the various ways one can deal with Riot Shields. What I did not realize was the case until watching an advanced tips video of the game and trying it, is that the Charge Attack for your sword can absolutely delete those things. Specifically the second hit at the end of the attack. Said Charge Attack is also useful as a near guaranteed form of delimbing enemies without the use of a deflect/counter attack.
  
• Going back to the lack of drive to earn skill points, the lack of a proper scoring system in the main game is still the biggest thing I wish this game could add (in addition to a regular stage select). It's difficult to really gauge what would count as most optimal play from a scoring standpoint, but based on notes I took at the start and end of the playthrough, I would base it on the amount of SP earned. My end result in that case was 57,400 points. With that in mind, I'm sure another player out there could take that as a reference and get a better score than me.