About 6 hours into it, and even with a fresh character it can be funny how much less intimidating the early game is when you're not in a constant state of curiosity and confusion. I think I picked an Astrologer? I'm carrying a basic wand firing Glintstone Pebbles (with the occasional Arc) and getting acclimated to very different weapons than my Samurai (Uchigatana for basically the entire game until I finally found the Moonveil and Bloodhound Fang with some Game of Thrones Greatsword tossed in for variety).

Turns out the basic dagger is INCREDIBLY cathartic fighting the stone imps in catacombs, I can just flail away at them and with its high Crit I'm guaranteed to stagger them. 150 hours of frustration taken out one by one by a thousand cuts. But I also happened onto the Reduvia blood dagger in these early hours (I didn't come across Patches' cave until after I'd lit the Forge of the Giants and was randomly looking up missed quests on Fextralife on my first save) and it's nice to already be back on that su-woo shit. The weapon art is a ton of fun and it's interesting, as someone with again limited From Soft experience outside of multiple Bloodborne plays, to engage in their style of combat mostly from a distance. It's both empowering and very different feeling.

I'm also not shy about Spirit Ashes at all, but it was hours and hours until I realized that icon in the lower left corner meant summons were available - I'm not sure I realized it until I felt helpless in some random open world sequence and frantically Googled why summons were restricted to boss fights only to realize I'd just missed the hint. So I beat Margitt and Godrick on first try which felt a little bizarre but...

Despite using the basic starter Glintstone magic because that's what I've got so far, I'm leaning heavy into Arcane (I haven't looked up or remembered what weapons scale with it or which spells apply so I'm ready to be disappointed, but that's what Rennala's for, right?) so even if I've been cleaning up things I spent hours struggling with the first time around (and in addition to knowing the game far better than back in March, I really do think a distance-based character makes much of the early game far less oppressive) I still feel a sense of pride about it because unlike the STR/DEX/INT build a lot of the early game discoveries are totally moot and I'm having enough success currently I'm not desperate to divert souls from leveling up to spells or weapons.

But more than anything, even in this brief dabble in a different playstyle it's helping to forget how often the last quarter of the game left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. The basic foundation of this game is really, really good, and I'm impressed how much fun I've been having without the pure sense of discovery every game only offers once.

It felt clear to me that for all its faults I preferred my time with Forbidden West when I was playing both in alternating sessions, but revisiting this game while being a little surprised the NG+ patch didn't have me scrambling back to Forbidden West has me thinking hard about why that is.

The early part of this alternate reality run is quickly revealing that for all the shit I talked about this game's unique approach to open world exploration and no matter how devoutly I still believe all those talking points...it doesn't change how clever the scenarios you stumble onto usually are in this game, nor how subtly everything about how its mechanics interact with its world design softly draws you into a play session until it's suddenly been two hours and even knowing how most of these quests start and end you have this uneasy feeling that you've either made some very significant progress or done almost nothing of note for your specific build at all.



~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz