#acts1+2 were fairly fun and pretty well balanced

[angrycasual]

Bound by flame is so frustrating because it could be such a good game if the devs had just played it a little before shipping it. There are so many little issues and the balance is, well, there's none of it. Nothing in the game was touched at all for balancing purposes. The dodge is a million times better than the parry and basically makes it obsolete. On console the fact that the parry is on a shoulder button that you can't remap makes that fact even more pronounced. The archers are so unbelievably overpowered it's insane. The arrows are aimed at you no matter how the enemy itself is positioned. The arrows go through walls and the archers themselves and enemies. The archers are always positioned in a fight so as to be impossible to sneak up on (and thereby take out before alerting the whole squad).

The shield guys are unbelievable overpowered. They are basically impervious to attack from the front and back, as well as the sides that should be undefended. Daggers cannot break shield, nor can your companions. Your two handed weapons can sometimes break shields, but the game decides when it wants to allow it. Most fights against shield guys goes --> kill everything else --> stand in place blocking while your companion kills it.

The companions are not created equal. Mathras and Rhelmar are literally zero help because not only can you not command them to block, but you can't tell them to fall back when they've taken aggro nor can you tell them which enemies to attack (ie archers and lower health targets) thereby making their impact nonexistent except in the most perfect of circumstances.

Every fight that's forced (mason's recruits, randval 1v1, captain 1v1) is needlessly frustrating because everyone does entirely too much damage and the terrain is specifically created so as not to help you. There's no cover, and in the captain fight the tiny tunnel makes the camera fight against you the entire time by making sure you can only see rock and wood. You literally have to use the meager sound cues or just guess to make sure you don't get hit, unless you make sure to stand on the edge of the cliff where there's no ceiling.

And then the perfect parrys and perfect dodges only hinder you, the absolute opposite of what it should do. In basically all the boss fights (the concubines and last boss especially) you need to try your hardest to not get perfect dodges, because the devs who must have played the game only on recruit, decided to have every perfect parry and perfect dodge have an instant counterattack. Which is so unbelievably not good (and actively is trying to kill you) because after most of all of the bosses attacks are followed up with more attacks, which you are immediately hit by because your character decided to get up close and personal when you desperately needed them not to. And god forbid this is an attack that knocks you down, making certain that your perfect dodge (which /should/ only be beneficial to you) gets you instantly killed. This means your only chance of not dying after accidentally perfect dodging is to increase your interuppt chance, and not only is interrupt chance difficult to get, but is in no world something that should be required after a perfect parry or dodge. During the last boss if I make the mistake of perfect dodging the dagger assault I need to face my character 180 away from the boss so the momentum of her attacks takes her out of the range of the boss, because if I allowed the counterattack I would literally, instantly, die. This is such an insane oversight I wonder at if this game was play tested at all.

And the end boss. Literally everyone agrees that it is absurdly difficult for no good reason. With 54% damage resist (plus her -25% damage due to poison), she halves my health in one hit. That's about 60 damage. there are no checkpoints, so don't die. Which means, don't get hit twice in a row, and don't let the dragon breath touch you for over 1.5seconds. You have no companions so not even an iota of extra damage or healing despite having a companion for the entirety of the game. When any game tries to emulate dark souls they always have the mistaken idea that difficult means unforgiving. And it is absolutely unforgiving. Stunlocks, wonky hit boxes, dragon breath having no visual indicator you're in its range, and absurd damage done by everything, is not only not a fun boss, but it's not well designed.

Any one of these issues would have been caught before release by people who cared, but because fun came second to trying to be stupidly difficult, nothing was fixed. And that is so frustrating when you can see the potential the game had. Basically, I think devs should always be forced to play their own game on their hardest difficulty before they're allowed to sell it, because otherwise you get frustrating, unfun experiences like this