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Around the point where you're at in the game now, most of the bosses had the "I beat it but I don't really know how" syndrome. I cannot, for the life of me, remember any of the strategies I used.


I can see that. This is yet another of those modern games that, even as I progress further into, I still don't feel I "get". This isn't the first game I've played like that, but I'm getting less and less tolerant of it. As I've insinuated before: Developers, try to learn from the past!!

And much of the problem is that the game really doesn't have much of a difficulty curve. That's true whether the game will become easier or not. As you've said about some game or another (maybe this one), Ninja Gaiden X "starts hard and stays there." But if a game starts hard, that prevents it from having a part where you sort of have an idea of what the game is supposed to be like, and then when the challenges do come, they're built on that understanding.

And, once again, I have to say that I think much of the challenge of the game comes from having bad camera angles or control.

The last thing I did in the game (I didn't play much today) was beat the fire worm, and then run through the area after that to get back to the magma lake. That part was highly irritating. You have to jump from one cliff to another, but only one part of one cliff is close enough to the other to make the jump. The annoying thing is that it's almost (probably literally) impossible to tell based on visuals which part is closest. If the camera angle gave you an overhead view, you might be able to tell. And you can't even adjust the camera, because you're timed very severly there and don't have time to stop and go into first person view. I eventually figure out which part always allowed me to make the jump through trial and error. (You have to stand on the left side of a pillar, while it previously looked to me like the right was closer)

So, I guess I "know" what I did there to get through. But it is possible to get through without knowing. (I did so once, then got a game over before saving) But, yeah, there are other parts I don't know if I can say I exactly know what the best thing to do would have been. My strategy for the bone/demon creature wasn't that great. I didn't even have a great trick for dodging the fire worm's blasts (simply keeping moving didn't work, while it did before; neither did jumping when the worm blasted; neither did rolling, then jumping [it sometimes worked, though, so maybe I had to work on timing. Oh, well, I beat it without having to work on that timing])


I looked up a few strategies for bosses I've already beaten in a faq, and I'd say most of the strategies I saw there were worse than mine. For instance, for bosses that first seemed like a get in, attack, and get out strategy would work, when you really had to get in, attack, and then block, the mentioned strategy would be the get-in, get-out one.

"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."
-Orwell