#sidenote on the rgg thing but i think i understand the impulse to make the street encounters stupid easy more bc they interrupt your open

[skrunksthatwunk]

ok, again, grain of salt bc i'm barely into it, but i have a theory as to why.

dante's slash cycle w the sword doesn't change depending on the timing of pressing x, which is one of the things that most livened up the combat in dmc1, especially in the beginning when your moveset was very limited. it's also a bit harder to loop slash cycles into each other and generally feels awkward and slow

they opened the game with a decent range of abilities, but they often don't cohere well. the high time action description suggests you jump after knocking enemies into the air, but the wind-down animation for the high strike means that it takes quite some time to jump afterwards. By then, enemies have fallen to below your jump height, making anything but shooting at them somewhat useless. this is further exacerbated by oddities in the mid-air moves. dante stays in midair for a few hits if you're locked on to a target with rb, but does a ground strike when not. but the locking-on reticle is always present when enemies are nearby anyway. it's kinda weird

so far, the enemies have very little health. while i understand the impulse to make early-game enemies "easy", i think the actual solution is to give them a decent amount of health, even if their attacks aren't very strong or are easy to dodge. in a game like this with combos and moves changing based on various inputs, i.e. stick movement relative to dante's/the enemies' position, timing of button presses, etc, it makes sense to give early/new players room to figure that system out through experimentation. it's actually something i have a problem with in rgg's street encounters. it's really hard to get a feel for the breadth of your character's abilities if the enemies die/go flying out of range in only a couple of blows, whereas an attack sponge kind of enemy gives them more room to play around and familiarize themselves with the fight system. that way, players will have more tools to approach problems with, and your fighting system will be more fully utilized. dmc1 does this excellently with its marionette enemies. they take a decent amount of hits before dying, but they're not difficult enemies. you can manage getting an A or S rank combo reasonably, enemies are tightly packed so they're easily in range (as opposed to the dmc2 enemies, who're spread out in wide environments), and your moveset is far more limited, meaning the timing element of sword/gauntlet moves becomes apparent to the player without needing to be communicated explicitly. in a game like dmc2 that starts with more moves available, attack sponges might be even more important to have (though the timing-based x combos thing being gone does simplify things in a disappointing sort of way).

anyway i'm not That used to this kinda game, but these are my impressions so far

ok ive played 15 minutes of dmc2 and my current impression is that it's like dmc1 but if the combat felt bad