Come on, God of War isn't a brawler, don't be ridiculous

Sorry there are more enemies in God of War than grunt and minotaur? They must've been hiding behind the sheer millions of grunt and minotaur corpses when I was playing. You haven't even gotten to the part where it's two straight hours of grunt fights ("the whole game lol!" no you don't even know). Pretty much everything about God of War's brawling is wrong, so starting from enemy variation is far too high on the chain. I think that's one place where it's bad, but not unforgivably so. The fact it's so noticeable is more a symptom of the failure of everything else.

Why doesn't combat with a single enemy work? The omnidirectional i-framed-up dodge move means position doesn't matter, so the game space is reduced to one dimension. Then the grab trumps everything (if you haven't already discovered), so we're in a volitional difficulty situation. Survival is only challenging so long as the player voluntary limits their options. Feedback on moves is near impossible to read because the chain is just a giant swath that hits eight enemies at once and conflates all their states (plus might have different effects based on distance). Who fucking knows how much damage anything does. Not to mention every combo looks like the exact same noisy mess. Then dial-a-combos for button mashing heaven, but also free interrupts (dodge) because it started to get hard. Stuff like "there's a launcher" is typical "we don't understand what is happening in the combat and why it isn't fun, what's something else that Devil May Cry has?" I couldn't tell you exactly from game to game within the series, but I believe the launcher is completely useless almost always. You can dodge to get out of combos, why would you need to be in the air? 1D game space. I think the toughest the game ever gets is when there's a boss that has an attack you're supposed to block, and you have to remember what button is block again.

But all that is totally beside the point, because God of War doesn't expect the player to take initiative and explore offensive capabilities within the combat. God of War is a game about having violent semi-realistic animations applied to spectacular mythological creatures. Everything else about the game flows from that. You can contend that Devil May Cry is a game about having a cool anime guy do stylish sword swings at demons; granting that this is of course wrong, the difference is that Dante's "style" is his offense, it is the sequence of moves he performs and that the player controls. God of War is centered on the baddies. This is why its primary novelty is extended cutscene kills, and why executions are the only thing it bothers to incentivize. It's why the boss fights aren't even beat-em-up style half the time. It even kind of explains why grab is so OP (it has a unique animation). The button mashing is just there to connect the dots.

I've played a few dozen 3D beat-em-ups at this point, and I can fairly confidently say that God of War is the worst. The only thing giving me pause is that I can't clearly remember the story mode from Tekken 6. But I don't think God of War wants to be compared to Devil May Cry - in its mind, it belongs to the same genre as Uncharted. To be clear, I don't think it's successful as a cinematic experience either. There's no excuse for filler, and it has especially arbitrary quick-time events (on part with RE4). Asura's Wrath is basically the same idea done correctly, though I think GoW2 and GoW3 are a lot better too.

A thought on strategy in Armored Core / Daemon X Machina

It occurred to me in considering Dick Terrell vs. Daemon X Machina that an appealing, if uselessly vague, way of describing strategy games is "puzzle games with statistics instead of rules". Decisions are weighted and evaluated in parallel rather than binary in series. 

Armored Core is in a sense the apotheosis of that idea, since there are so many decision points (equipment) weighted across so many variables (the stat sheet for a mech has a dozen or so parameters in the first game and probably 50ish by AC5), yet they are all codependent (since there's only one mech per mission). If you think about buying/loading gear as the fleet-building stage of Sins of a Solar Empire, with the choice of arm/leg/missile/etc corresponding to choice of frigates/cruisers/carriers/etc, I think they line up fairly well in terms of what the player ought to be calculating and trying to predict. There's more pressure in the action phase of Armored Core because the player is in full control of the mech, which is the advantage (design-wise) of unifying all the statistical parameters. The player needs to design a mech that they are also capable of piloting, and some decisions will be based on accomodating that (for instance, a novice might prefer a slow machine with higher armor because they find the controls clunky and can't take advantage of the ability to dodge). On the flipside, there's more pressure in the decision phase of Sins, because the entire game is played out in real-time. The action itself is almost completely automated, sheer number-crunching.

It makes me wonder what a mech game with real-time mech building would play like. Probably similar to a traditional RTS (StarCraft), since Sins and AC are kind of sitting at two extremes. StarCraft does have full unit control, it's just - there are so many independent elements that the technical bar for maximizing strategic efficiency is incredibly high, and the casual level of play relies on a lot of Sins-style automation. For the real-time element (in this theoretical mech game) to make sense, there'd probably need to be some kind of resource race, and the mech would need to be upgradeable on the fly (since there would be no additional/replacement units to build - otherwise resources would become irrelevant as soon as combat began).

Actually, if you took the standard RTS model (building drones and exploring a map to gather materials), this starts to look a lot like a MOBA. MOBAs after all were built from an experiment with WarCraft 3, asking what would happen if the player controlled just one powerful "hero" unit instead of a bunch of disposable little ones (the original Defense of the Ancients, if I'm not mistaken). MOBAs just tend to have really boring/convoluted combat, since they use an action model designed and for decades optimized for controlling dozens of independent units in parallel. They don't do nearly as good a job as Armored Core at taking the aforementioned advantage of unifying your parameters. The Dynasty Warriors/Musou games are somewhere in the middle here - only a few player units and combat more complex than League of Legends, but much simpler than Armored Core. They don't have much of a prep phase, though, and therefore play more like tactics-action than strategy-action.

Huh. So what really obvious game am I forgetting about that does exactly what I'm describing? What about if we add a metroidvania backtracking structure, roguelite procedurally generated encounters, and soulslike boss battles? Tune in tomorrow to find out. 

Back in the CCCR New Mario Revisited

you can turn off the jump/twirl dual mapping by holding in the left control stick for a few seconds on the title screen

what the fuck