Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin | Chaos Advent (Part 2)
70:00 - Mission
34:55 - Vs. Chaos Advent
Our first mission of the game has us go kill Chaos...or attempt to. The game has a few situations to tutorialize the beginning for us to kind of ease you into things. They actually do some cool stuff on occasion where the enemies will show you what you can do to get a better advantage in battle, like have an enemy use a fire attack on something that's burnable to show you can do that. It's a lot less "bullshit hard" than Nioh 1 and 2 are at the start. In those games, the start is the hardest part.
There are two major problems with the gameplay flow that become pretty apparent early on however. The first is that this game is waaaaay too loot heavy. Enemies are basically piñatas that spit out gear instead of candy. If you wanted to play as efficiently as possible, you'd be spending ages checking gear. So you really just have to rely on the "auto-equip" function. Which means your outfit will be constantly changing, which can be pretty jarring. You can effectively "glamour" your gear, but it's really clunky to implement so I don't do it until later. Anyways, I found the inventory management to be really annoying and severely detracts from any chests or any reason to actually explore. Which is a shame when you're in a mission that has multiple paths forward.
Another annoyance is the job system. Not the jobs themselves so much, but the fact that you constantly level up the jobs instead of proper levels, but you have to go to a cube (i.e. bonfire) to level up and you just end up spending a lot of time opening menus at every cube to level, in addition to checking gear menus to change them out every 2 seconds. The game would feel soooo much better if none of that was in and you spent less time in menus and more time as Jack, in the world itself.
Anyways, our first boss of the game is Chaos Advent. Not particularly hard, very predictable moves. Most reasons I was getting hit for that fight was me still just trying to get used to the controls. Once we beat Chaos Advent, we get Neon as a party member.