Stellar Blade - Hard Difficulty - Without Body Cores, Beta Cores or Omnibolts - Part 5
61Time to Challenge run "SekNIERo" using the following rules:
Hard Difficulty (Fresh New Game)
No Body Cores (Base level Health)
No Beta Cores (Base level Beta Energy)
No Omnibolts (Only a Single Gear Socket)
Additional goals:
No Tachy Mode
No WB pumps (No Resurrections)
For clarification: in this game Hard NG is significantly more difficulty than Hard NG+
For those unfamiliar with this game:
Stellar Blade does not play like a souls game but is more akin to Sekiro in a Nier style world using a skill tree rather than a leveling system. Mechanically it's much more complicated than a souls game but the difficulty might initially appear lower when playing on normal difficulty or even hard difficulty on NG+ due to having a large margin of error.
However on Hard NG your margin of error becomes very thin in some very tanky bossfights. And with these restrictions that margin or error becomes razor thin.
Short "review"
Pros:
Amazing combat system
Fantastic bossfights, especially the later ones
Killer soundtrack
Mechanically very sound (great hit-detection, controls, no glitches, etc)
Cons:
The story suffers greatly from bland characters (lore and world building itself is actually quite interesting if you do a deep dive into it)
Just like Sekiro you only have a single melee weapon (really hope they will change that in the sequel)
Minor cons or room for improvement:
Could do with a bit more enemy variety in the mandatory areas
Could do with a bit more varied loot
Early game areas are not the most interesting choices for enviroment (deserts, sewers, destroyed city, etc)
A lot of side missions consist of your standard fetch quest kind of stuff (I will be ignoring those anyway in this playthrough)
The Gun only sections lack meaningful challenge (would have worked better by making it survival horror-esque like Resident evil)
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