random games

youef you gotta get this game

ok, so

After the bull, I took a left at the bridge and wound up on another bridge that I realized was from the prologue area. I got a key to a shed that would give me the horse boss's weapon, which sounded cool, so I went ahead to investigate. That put me back in the area with the tower where Kuro was being held at the start, and who is guarding the tower? Well, a bunch of dudes, first of all, but also Yamauchi of the Seven Ashina Spears. That dude hits really hard.

I didn't like the idea of killing all those dudes just for a rematch with him, so I did some more poking around and realized what I wanted was actually in a different building entirely. So I picked that up and then went back to the very start of the game where I was originally being held, and there's some guy there talking about hearing music, and in the well itself a Lone Shadow Longswordsman. This guy exemplifies one thing I really like about this game, which is there is a small level of selective difficulty. The case here is that you can get an easy plunging deathblow on this guy to take away one of his health bars. He still took me a lot of tries mostly because managing the camera in that enclosed space is a huge drag, which made it hard to learn his moveset. But I recognized that he was jumping around and trying to be all nimble, so I used the shuriken on him and hit him with the follow up a bunch. I felt like he gave me a good pattern on the time I beat him, though.

Beyond that guy is the Abandoned Dungeon, and there's some dude right there whose got purple fire all around him. I'm not really at the point where I want to fuck with magic people, so I skirted the edge of the cave to see what was on the other side (Another great thing about this game is that you can go around a good number of people if you're sneaky). There's the guy who's having auditory hallucinations again and an old lady that wants me to jump into an abyss. I told her I'd come back later 'cause I don't want to jump down somewhere that I can't get back up from.

Mostly because I still wanted another go at that Spear guy. I had an idea.

It was a good idea. I found a path along the border of the area where I only had to kill three dudes per runback to get to the boss. And the extra good thing about this is that it put me behind him for a free deathblow to start the fight.

He still kicked my ass a whole lot because I can do Mikiri counters, but the rest of his bullshit was wrecking me. I had gone back to get the spear prosthetic, and that was kind of doing some good, but not enough really. My computer crashed at one point mid fight because it overheated??? Probably something I need to be aware of moving forward. But then when I loaded up again, I was right behind the boss, so it was like a soft reset almost. And that's when I got him. This fight taught me the valuable lesson that sometimes you can dive kick sweeps that don't have the scary symbol, namely this dude's super armor windup attack. Everything fell into place after that. Almost. I got to the end of his posture bar and almost flubbed my button inputs, which turned into me executing an Ichimonji on him to put him over the edge, followed by a completely unnecessary vault over, followed by the deathblow.

In summary, he can take his seven Ashina spears and shove them up his ass.

So that gave me another health/posture upgrade. I'm now on the doorstep of Ashina castle, which is rather imposing. But I think tomorrow I will go pay Juzou a visit.