I began with a preponderance on dealing with the fishing; my adjacency to the project had informed me that such a thing was added in the final hour, and I was fascinated by the extent of my appreciation for this feature once I saw it for myself. There were a number of instances where a cutscene was initiated somewhat unnecessarily, such as the pan up toward the skyscrapers in the outdoor arena. There's an excuse for the Taurus Demon, making sure he jumps away from the upper platforms, but he does get stuck after I die and the cutscene no longer triggers; I'm confused why he doesn't just get activated once I enter the region more completely. Near the second save station as well as for the "infected" pair of stations in the boss arena, I felt an imbalance between their player function and the diegetic function, where it felt to be used as more of a cool object rather than an implied construction of intervals. Imagine, if you will, a telephone pole built a single foot away from another telephone pole; it causes me to ask angry questions instead of curious ones. I was sure that the fishing was somewhere immediately before the boss, but my surveillance turned up nothing. But there's always a bigger fish...? On that note, the voice of the tip dispenser has an oddly aloof tone, and the Star Wars quote was all I needed to be sure and play through the game once more. Alas, I had found the spot denoted by several glowing fish strewn about the floor, easily mistaken for fungus. The feature merely magnetizes you into a small animation and shows you an identical fish with a random color and name; after about two dozen fish I was hitting repeats. In conclusion, I have elected to render this satirical addition with a charitable read about crunch and over-scope, and not about fishing games themselves, or else I fear we have severely different tastes despite similarities on the surface.
The game is a well-paced Nerve beater from a team who seem to have a lot of ambition as well as consumed experience with the design of similar games; however, these boons in excess become a crutch without the requisite experience of development itself. In a recent review I had expressed that off-path oddities were as much as I needed to have fun, but I seem to have met my match with oddity maximalism, which ended up detracting from cohesion, a subtle but crucial property of the modern classics made by the team's namesake. In and of itself, the homage prompts an expectation of sensibility that is basically impossible for the scope and environment of development. I figure the longer I write about the game with a B is indicative of my efforts to enjoy it, so in spite of a dour review I commend you for swinging above your weight class.
It's interesting how many games took inspiration from Sekiro's posture mechanic, yet shifted it to critical hits rather than a full health bar wipe. Sekiro's system was captivating because it was brutally imbalanced; attacking enemies with the goal of actually damaging their health was only useful against the weakest chumps, requiring an all-or-nothing approach for most fights. The middling system used by subsequent games reduces one side to being an extension of the other, making failure and repeat fights more monotonous, as a boss can require up to three guard breaks before moving to another health phase with the same grueling pace.