Zangetsu and Randomizer Announce!

Zangetsu is actually pretty fun to play. Also I found a few unlisted moves!

Hold "up": Zangetsu taunts the enemy and goes into his counter stance. unlike the "Forward Forward Square" Input, this one costs NO MP, and you can actually hold up to keep the counter stance up for as long as you want. However, you have to deal with the incredibly long taunting animation, so it is not good for actually countering. not sure if the Taunt has any use yet.

If you use the right analog stick to use the Chain (most people probably forgot about it as soon as the game starts, since spamming "Up + L1" is a much more effective Way to get up and around, even at the cost of the MP) while you have an element active and hit an enemy, Zangetsu throws an elemental attack towards the enemy.

If you use "Up + L1", as long as the animation plays, you can press "R2" to cancel into a groundpound, similiar to "Down, Down-Forward, Forward + Square" or "Down, Down + Square", which means it will also unleash an elemental attack.
This is actually preferable to other inputs, because if you press "R2" immediately after "Up + L1", you want leave the ground and actually cancel instantly into the attack without any start-up animation. Yes, it costs more MP than the other Inputs (because of the "Up + L1 also consuming MP) but for having an instant elemental Attack ready this is totally worth it!

I hope some people find out more techniques like this =)
Also did anyone found out if there is an actual Counter Attack after you guard? It seems Zangetsu stops time (similiar to Miriam after her Katana Counter) but it seems you can only use to follow up with a regular attack, which is kinda useless =/
If anyone finds anything please let me know ;3

 I wonder if this is really the case 

Sorry but just because you state your opinion as a fact doesn't make it a fact.

Go and play your Fornite.

Dudes, settle it out in DMs. No need to argue in front of everyone. We’re all just people who like video games, so let’s try to talk about our views on the game (be they negative, positive or somewhere in between) in a civil manner

Like I said, I don’t care about about what you think of it, I haven’t played the DLC yet so it could be Artplay’s Big Rigs for all I know, but that Fortnite comment made me worry that this would just devolve into an online shouting match.

Sorry if I misinterpreted your earlier statement Yan, it’s hard to get tone out of plain text. And I don’t want to undermine jlgo’s struggles either, I’m sure he has perfectly valid reasons to dislike the DLC, I just didn’t want this to turn into a giant argument.

So just played the DLC... Zangetsu mode is kind of barebones lol
It's most comparable to Aria of Sorrow Julius Mode I think. You're super OP right at the start, begin with your full (but pretty cool) moveset, all story is removed. There's still levelling but since you're so ridiculously strong from the beginning it hardly feels like it matters much at all.
Personally I'd have preferred something like the Dawn of Sorrow Julius mode which actually played into the story a bit and had some gating (getting additional characters for more abilities) so the world wasn't quite your oyster right from the start, making everything feel like nothing really matters...
Before the DLC launched I was somewhat curious regarding what they'd do for the Zangetsu and Doppelganger fights (will they be swapped? etc) but they just kept the fights as they were, only that now they're less balanced. It just underlines that for this mode they didn't care about the story or any kind of logic one bit haha.

Yeah so the Zangetsu mode just kiiind of falls flat a bit for me. It's a fun stroll for the castle but that fun can be over in an hour or two. Keeps me wondering whether they couldn't just have spent a little more time on placing some of the more movement related abilities you have (the chain, the double jump, the upward slash) at certain key places in the castle to retain a little bit of progression and exploration, a little bit of that Metroidvania game design...

It's a different story with the randomizer mode which actually felt surprizingly interesting. This surprised me mostly because the castle layout is sadly still completely unchanged (except for the occasional save-warp room swap). And yet, with full randomization of key items and shards, it allows for some pretty fun and interesting combinations of abilities and gear that you'd otherwise never rely on so heavily. For instance, I got some waystones on the galleon, allowing me to skip Vepar. But more interesting still, I got Dimension Shift from a Bone Morte, allowing me to sequence skip into the water area, below the water even before entering the castle gates. This reliance on using frequent Dimension Shifts to avoid the comparatively strong enemies and get through sections of water without the diving ability, does surprisingly change up the gameplay a fair bit.
I still wish they would have added some kind of level layout randomization or even just enemy placement randomization (within reason) to make things even more intriguing and multiple randomizer playthroughs more worthwhile and explorative but oh well... At least it's giving me more interesting playtime than Zangetsu mode does and changes up my playstyle more than I thought loot table randomizations would do.

Overall, I'm disappointed on one hand (bare minimum Zangetsu mode) and pleasantly surprised (of course after the big disappointment that was the cancellation of roguelike castle mode) on the other hand.

This kind of Zangetsu implementation does make me wonder what they're going to do with coop as it makes it sort of hard to imagine that a proper multi-character coop (Miriam-Zangetsu-Tagteam) would make a lot of sense. Will coop just mean two Miriam copies running around on one screen for no valid story reason whatsoever? It does not get my hopes up for an awesome coop mode that won't feel tacked on but well integrated. Similarly it does not bode too well for that third character we're supposed to get... I wish they can somehow learn from this and make some choices to retain some Metroidvania Design gating for whatever other character we'll get but I kind of doubt it...

What I wrote in 1 paragraph in FACTS, you said it was my opinion, and you wrote a whole book about why the DLC is not as good. But anyways, Julius mode was OK in the DS, I still have my tiny little cartridge, and like someone said, "this is 2020", and a lot more could had been done on this DLC for an 2.5D game. Many, many people are dissapointed there are even gaming websites that are blogging about the DLC and calling it underwhelming.


I am not mad at anybody, is all good, we are just having kind off of an disagreement that is all.