Kid Icarus Uprising - why the game's design fails: Power Creep

Channel:

Master Knight DH

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Published on July 26, 2014 9:10:05 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxGB2bzKBG8

Game:

Kid Icarus: Uprising (2012)

Duration: 3:42

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5

The sad part is, I really wanted to like Kid Icarus Uprising. But the game proved to have power creep beyond ANYTHING acceptable.

This is one of the biggest offenders, and anybody who can prove me wrong when I claim that a minimalist Skyscraper run on 9.0 is not possible can be my guest, but they should keep in mind that certain sadists call me a masochist as it is. You'd be an actual masochist if you even consider the idea at this point. I can only do it on the first few chapters. For added fun, as you have to spend Hearts to even play any difficulty higher than 2.0, and you have to spend more for higher difficulties, repeating segments means that you better have TONS of Hearts saved up.

Here is, by far, one of the biggest roadblocks in an attempt at the entire thing, and it's such that doing it is practically implausible. The God forsaken Reset Bomb works by being a Timed Mission where failure to kill it in the 1 minute you're given sends you to the I'm Finished screen. This becomes BEYOND horrifying when you consider this key problem: those weak spots are simply too durable for how erratic they are in combination with your flight path REALLY botching your chances of hitting them efficiently. Too often, you're incapable of meleeing, preventing any sort of DPS from going on, limiting you to one attack type because clubs can't rapid fire. Even worse, with V100 Skyscraper, you deal only 109 damage per shot and require 1.75 seconds of chargeup, which makes your DPS only about 62 damage during these moments. That's if you can connect EVERY. SINGLE. SHOT. Yeah, with the Skyscraper Club. Have fun.

This becomes significant because of the weak spots' HP values, on 5.0 at that, which I am playing on in the video to emphasize how stupid this gets even on lower difficulties. I hit one of the weak spots 3 times with melee for a minimum of 120 damage total (likely more), and then hit it and 2 other weak spots with both bombs, adding on another 356 damage. That's a total of 476, and the weak spot lived through it. That's absolutely ridiculous. This means you need at least FIVE shots per weak spot, a total of 25 shots that consequently eats up over FOURTY seconds. You already spend enough unable to attack AT ALL thanks to that GD flight path. The only reason I get to the core *AT ALL* is because I was smart about my Bomb usage to hit 3 weak spots. No, you can't hit more because your flight path never gives you the chance. EVER.

If you even make it to the core, you better have enough time to work with. 5.0 alone I can be sure requires at least TEN seconds. There is NO reducing the needed time amount, because that would mean somehow saving the bombs for a SINGLE enemy rather than multiple ones, and Pit will NEVER fly near enough the core to melee either. That leaves, what else, the bloody shots. On 9.0, I know the core has more than 860 HPs, so that would mean EIGHT shots are now required, likely more. Add to it that 9.0 makes the durability of the weak spots even higher, and you can see that this whole thing has to be some sick joke by the developers.

This is actually more or less a side effect of clubs in general being underpowered junk. Giving them more power, since what they have clearly isn't making up for the lack of rapid fire, would actually help Solo's balance simply because they can't even clean up mooks anyway, which aggravates the problem that they desperately need to be able to casually handle combat with leveled play so that combat zones never slow them down, because the game is under NO threat of losing its fun factor--if anything, the challenge of handling a clumsy as sin weapon stops being so cruel. You could argue that yes, I'm intentionally using a weapon class that is without a core mechanic, but that core mechanic is supposed to be a privilege that clubs let you trade off for raw power. The game treats the bloody thing like a simple right. That doesn't work. The only thing it should EVER do to control armors is GRADUALLY chip them, NOT create some auto-win stupidity by outpacing anything a leveled play armor player can come up with, and to emphasize this point, I've come up with Grid Reading, the sort of thing should be rewarded with a chance to fight back, not shafted joke easy by something a 5YO who isn't even some hyper-intelligent anomaly could come up with.

But ya know. I MIGHT be able to live with all this except the last one, if not for one thing: remember how in land battles clubs can just do swinging and it won't even slow down their recharge? Well, in air battles, club swinging will RESET THE CHARGEUP. So when I need to melee, I can't even sneak in shots to add in damage. What kind of nonsense is this?

And remember: I'm doing this on 5.0, because 9.0 is already full of stupidity in and of itself, making it almost (though not quite) as bad as Fire Emblem Awakening's Lunatic+, which thanks to an RL friend I have played and I can tell you that that is saying something.

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