Game:

Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization (2016)

Duration: 14:35

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9

At least, as of now this is the most poorly designed enemy I've come across simply due to how its moves work, and you can tell how bad I find it given I bothered to make a fully-commentated and much more edited video than I usually do that breaks her down and goes into detail why I think the design is bad, considering that I bothered to go through all this to science her moves out for the purpose of making a vid about it. Was annoying because I had to keep redoing the fight due to Veiled Rider constantly stunning her when I needed to let her use that opening Snake Bite...

Having just gotten done farming an NM that used Snake Bite a lot, I noticed something was off when I tried employing the same timing to make her Weak after her Snake Bite, so decided to mess around with her and let her attack to see how those attacks work.

To be fair, Dutiful Knight's Lightning's second strike also doesn't exist, and you're meant to hit him during it. His saving grace is that the attack actually has a warning to it. Her Snake Bite will hit you 0.3 seconds after the first frame of warning for it appears, and the brain's fastest reaction time for thoughtless twitch reflex is 0.25 seconds, but is usually more so around 0.33 seconds. That's asking for a lot considering you can't simply twitch parry her attacks. You need time to think since other attacks can't be twitch parried. That's why it's best not to bother trying to parry at all. I'm really good at Dark Souls 3 parries. They have strict timing, but attacks have decent tells so you can see and process what's happening before it happens. Her Snake Bite and basic attacks do not.

Its phantom range is really bad too. I wish I had an example showing it. It extends its reach almost twice as far as it shows. It activates so fast that HNMs' fast-acting AoE attacks are far easier to react to. I've Banishment parried quite a few of them, and in the Nightmare fight against Dutiful Knight where I was using Yggdrasil, you see me reaction backstep away from him as he uses his fast AoE move. Those moves are FAST, but they give you decent time to clearly understand it's coming and react to it. If an attack does not do this, it is BAD.

And that AoE heart move is complete garbage. Even if you know she has it, you have to be ready to twitch back/sidestep the moment you see her do anything if you wanna hope to Exact Step it just in time. That's horrible. The player should be given enough time to assess what is happening and THEN react to it. This move only gives time for one or the other. You can assess it and get hit, or twitch Quickstep to avoid it. In fact, there's no downside to twitch Quickstepping any of her moves. It'll come out just in time to Exact Step her freeze or Snake Bite AoE, and get you out of range of her Horizontal Arc. I see bothering to try parrying her, even if I did it here, is a waste of time. I just SSC and it kills her fast.

And apparently there's a stronger version of her in DLC1. Upside is she doesn't have that freeze attack. She does have 2 new sword skills, from what a friend Takato said. She can use I think Vorpal Strike and Sonic Leap, and can Parry very fast. This can be dealt with by simply attacking her from behind, as her Parry will fail and only Snake Bite will hit you. She MIGHT have a fast AoE like other HNMs have, but considering her Snake Bite is by far faster, that actually makes staying behind her STILL seem like the better idea.

I think her Snake Bite is so fast that, even though I chain from Blazing Spin IMMEDIATELY into Veiled Rider, my Veiled Rider comes out just in time to i-frame through the attack. Considering how short of a skill Blazing Spin is, meaning I can use Veiled Rider very fast, that is a RIDICULOUSLY fast sword skill activation. Even Hollow Nightmare from Hollow Fragment did give you time to react and parry his sword skills. This enemy just feels poorly and cheaply designed, even if she's not necessarily hard at all to kill.

But then, this IS a duel/PvP type enemy. From my understanding by talk I'd see of it and how PvP was pretty dead shortly after it was introduced, duel/PvP fights in this game are kinda s***.

Overall, the way Aquria handled this game was just bad. That's not necessarily talking about this enemy, but their handling of the later content, updates, and DLC. The piss poor or annoyingly cheap enemies are just a byproduct of that incompetent design. At least the piss-poor enemies aren't annoying, even if they're equally as unengaging in their own way. Hollow Fragment wasn't terribly hard either, but it did overall feel more balanced. Here, enemies can have massive jump between one another, making them feel like night and day. Statistically, enemies in the DLC completely dwarf anything in the main game, and render them obsolete as you acquire the tools provided to take on the DLC ones.

You want your game's DLC to lengthen, enhance, and expand on the core gameplay of the main game, not kill it.

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