Review | The Last Faith Transcends Being Just 2D Bloodborne
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- Опубліковано 5 чер 2024
- The Last Faith is a gothic fusion of Metroidvania and Soulslike. It thrives on mercilless and precise combat, with a formidable arsenal of weapons, arcane spells and firearms.
@FightinCowboy Weapon Showcase | • The Last Faith - Weapo...
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This is by far my best experience of the year (I played and loved AC6, Lunacid, Blasphemous 2, Lies of P, and just played Lords of the Fallen). I enjoyed this one so bloody much that it immediately became an all time favorite of mine alongside likes of Bloodborne, Symphony of the Night and Shadow of the Colossus. I know somehow it hasn't got too much attention, just hope the Studio makes enough to develop more games. Boy I can't put into words how much beauty I find in it, I'm sure one day many more will understand this like they did with Demon's Souls.
Same last faith is goated
@@don__clemenza lol why tell me? I'll buy it for you if you can't afford it. It's cheap tho.
I really want to get it, but I need to jump into Blasphemous 2 first!
Really? That’s high praise
If you are still craving for more give Moonscars a try
Needs button mapping.
The heal on the left trigger is a nightmare
Constantly pressing it by accident and wasting heals
Use the system settings and create a profile for your controller
I had so much fun with this game. I enjoyed it more than Blasphemous 2. Just my opinion.
My goty, best metroidvania to pull me in since og blasphemous
Good news, the latest patch gave specific gear to all the starting classes and insta-kill death zones are now shown on the map in red. But they nerfed the scythe's focus attack, smh.
They nerfed almost every melee weapon in the game Sadge
Great review! I’ve only played a few hours so far, but I am having a good time. I told my wife that 7-year-old me would have been all about this game. I feel like I’m back in the days of renting NES/SNES games from the video store and staying up all night eating cereal while taking turns at the game with my brother. I’ve tried a lot of “retro” games and modern side scrollers. They are great, but they don’t trigger the nostalgia quite like this one. I am interested to see what the dev would do with a sequel or their next IP. Part of me feels like modernizing would elevate the title, but I worry that then the magic would be lost.
So far, I think the voice acting is excellent, and I like how the dialog and cutscenes are presented. I’ve seen complaints about the writing, but it works for me. I really enjoy the subtle world-building, too. I don’t know what it is about this title that makes it feel more immersive than other side scrollers I have played. They’ve tapped into something I can’t quite put my finger on.
I am unsure what I would change for fear of ruining the magic of the title. I am uncertain whether I want smoother animations, more responsive controls, or higher-quality sound effects. I feel like the game's mood warrants a walking speed and running speed. I would definitely like more consistent music between rooms and longer tracks. I would have liked a little more content before the first boss. It would give people more to fall in love with before hitting a skill wall. It felt like, “Here’s less than five minutes of gameplay; now fight this boss ten times.” I started with the Stargazer, too, but I was too stubborn to change classes.
The Last Faith is absolutely amazing. I got the platinum.
For me this game is one of the top 10 in life. Srsly. Why it has so small attention. Its all about promotion, rly, so sad.
MUCH, MUUUUCH better than Blasp in every aspect. Man these weapons and spells just feel so good. Im amazed. Need ng+ desperately.
haven't tried this game yet and have only played Blasphemous 1, but, (if you have played Blasph 2), is this game better movement wise? I mean specifically movement and traversal wise, that's one of the few things that made me dislike Blasph 1 and ppl said they improved it in 2 but I haven't checked, and I'd like to buy one of these two games
@@Shireke01 sadly i didnt play blasp 2 cuz i couldn't make through blasp 1, so i didnt see a point, but moving around in last faith is painful sometimes. When you get specific abilities moving around is very satisfaying and you feel power in yourself but in terms of fast traveling they could invent something better actually than only bonfires. Eryk is a little too slow runner.
Second best MV of the year after Blasphemous 2. The bosses were all amazing. Biggest weakness IMO, level design was a bit repetitive (hit 4-5 switches to unlock big door, or find key to unlock doors), and using the map in the menu (as sluggish as a snail marathon).
I started as Stargazer so I feel your complaint. MIND comes online in the end game with the high end spells and mind scaling katana. There are plenty of small things the devs could learn from and adjust.
I really want to try this one but at this point I just want a souls inspired game that actually tells the story instead of being all mysterious and relying on you reading a bunch of items and wikis to make sense of the whole thing
You could try The Surge if you never played that. There is some “lore” stuff, but the story is pretty straightforward. The directional attack system is pretty interesting too. (Instead of light and heavy attacks, you have horizontal and vertical attacks)
As much as I enjoy that aspect of Souls games, I totally agree. There's nothing wrong with a more straightforward story, and it would be preferable over a poorly told obfuscated story, which really just sucks.
@@LoreHunter yes! Leave that to who knows how to do best. When I play a souls like game I’m looking forward more to the setting and what’s their own spin to the formula instead of the obscure storytelling 😂
@@mkv2718 I always wanted to try that one! Visually looks pretty interesting too!
Lies of P is exactly what you're looking for. Fair warning that it is generally more challenging than even the harder FromSoft games like Sekiro, and there are few ways to get past difficult areas/bosses aside from gitting gud due to the game's design, but if neither of those are a turn off for you then it is exactly what you're looking for. It's story is far more straightforward and has narrative moments expounded upon by its characters, most of whom reside in the hub zone and who are marked on your bonfire teleport screen when they have new dialogue anyway. It's also a fantastic RPG and (IMO) easily the best non-From Souls-style game. I personally think it's better than any of the three mainline Dark Souls games, though I personally don't like DS3 so if you like it then maybe Lies of P doesn't beat it. It's a fantastic game if you don't mind the challenge and you should pick it up if that isn't a turn off for you.
I really like what I saw. I have not heard of this game until now. I am going to pick it up right now. Thanks for the review: :)
Hope you enjoy it!
Oh Snap! Great review!
Thank you!
I'm curious as to your thoughts about the feel of the movement in the game. I've heard it doesn't feel very good and is often clunky or annoying, and a few shots in this video make me think that may be the case (accidentally shooting in the wrong direction because you couldn't spin around fast enough, a shot of you trying to jump and grab a ledge that took multiple attempts because it just didn't grab). You clearly didn't consider it enough of a problem to include in the weaknesses, but I'm still a little skeptical.
Yeah there were some minor moments like you mentioned that felt a little fiddly, and I factored that into the platforming. It didn’t particularly standout on the whole, probably because getting more of the metroidvania abilities largely shored up those issues, but especially the ledge grabs near the beginning of the game were a bit finicky
@@LoreHunter awesome thanks for the info!
@@xanathar8659 This is a little late, but I can expand on some of these movement problems. One of them is specifically to do with combat: the dodge sucks. Its i-frames are inconsistent against regular enemies (regular attacks can be dodged but most swipes and ground attacks can't) and you basically never have i-frames against bosses. IMO the game plays much better if you just ignore the roll button and pretend there's only a jump.
Aside from that, there's a very slight delay on most of your actions. It might be input delay, or it might be that your abilities work on button release rather than button press, but it was very noticeable when I started playing. Combined with the dodge i-frame issue, that was enough to make me refund the game when I first bought it, but I re-bought it a few days ago when it was on sale and after 17 hours I'm used to how it plays so it doesn't feel bad anymore. That being said, it IS something you're going to have to get used to. I especially found that the game was eating my inputs on item use after certain actions (rolling being one of them: more reasons to pretend it doesn't exist), leading to me taking several "bullshit" deaths early in the game when I would roll away to heal, not get my heal off, and then die to an attack. As I said, once you get used to it it feels fine, but there's definitely a learning curve during which time the game feels pretty unresponsive.
Lastly, parrying is extremely inconsistent. It's a two-button press rather than one (R1 + Triangle on PS), and should really be on L1 because right now nothing is bound to L1. Nevertheless, even disregarding that, it's not really clear when during enemy attacks the parry is active. Against the weak early game enemies with daggers, you can parry during the wind-up to their swing, but against other enemies, the same style of timing doesn't work and you eat a big hit to the face. Like the dodge roll, I would recommend completely ignoring the parry except against those specific weak enemies, because I tried for a while to get it to work and against most enemies it just always failed. I'm also 99% sure boss attacks can't be parried, though I also never successfully parried any enemies other than the weak dagger guys so maybe that's just me. Parries also aren't that powerful: you get back some HP and MP when you do it but the damage is very weak (substantially weaker than a regular attack), and after the first 2-3 hours healing and MP recovery items are plentiful enough that I never ran out. As an aside, because of this fact I'm not really sure why the devs decided to go with consumable healing rather than automatically refilled healing. It's so easy to get enough healing and MP healing to never run out that it might as well just be infinite.
Overall my experience has been that The Last Faith has a lot of very weird decisions when it comes to its movement and combat experiences. The core game underlying these weird issues is very good, IMO probably a 9/10 with a few areas being 10/10s, but the weird movement and combat decisions drag every aspect of the gameplay down. I feel like at $20 (what I paid on sale) the game is definitely worth it, and with a few patches to smooth out the major issues (assuming those patches happen) it will be easily worth it at $28 (the full asking price), but right now there are a lot of little things that, when combined, get large enough to drag down my score.
@@quintonhoffert6526hey thanks a lot for taking the time to elaborate! I had come to the decision to wait to buy the game until some patches and/or a major sale. Your explanation definitely furthered that decision. I appreciate the in depth explanation!
I picked this up over the weekend. I only have a few hours in, but I agree with the above. I would sum it feels about as responsive and snappy as what I remember NES/SNES feeling like.
While The Lore Hunter is, of course, entitled to their opinion, I find it surprising that they found the exploration middling (they said the levels were combat-focused) but thought the non-linear progression was great. IMO the two of those should be switched.
Looking over the game's progression path, you need certain abilities to get through most of the level. You have to go through the first two areas to get the ability to access more, and then while you do unlock the ability to go to two areas you can only progress fully through one of them. You can unlock a boss fight in the other (albeit it's higher level than you probably will be so killing it early is unadvisable) but you can't progress past that point until you have an ability that is gated behind a few others. Because of this, you first have to do a different area to get an upgrade that you then have to use to get two two other areas, to get the upgrade that lets you go past the blocked point in the earlier area. There is another area you can go through after that point instead of going back to the blocked path (it's a required area but it has no required abilities so you can do it whenever), but otherwise you have to go back to the blocked path and clear it out to get the upgrade that unlocks the rest of the game. Once you do that, the final areas are a linear path leading to the last boss. Overall it's definitely not bad, and you do gain access to a variety of areas at any one time, but in order to explore more than a token room or two of most areas you need abilities that are only found on a fairly linear path through the game. IMO it's like Dark Souls 3 in this way: you can kill Emma to sequence break Lothric Castle, and you can skip the Cathedral of the Deep to kill the Abyss Watchers and do the Catacombs of Carthus, but you eventually have to go back. You can't go to Irithyll until you beat the Cathedral of the Deep, and you can't kill the Twin Princes until you've killed everything else. It's definitely not bad but I wouldn't put it up there with the likes of Hollow Knight or Ori and the Will of the Wisps that give you a lot of freedom of exploration once you get past the initial linear bit.
On the other hand, I was consistently impressed by the in-level exploration. I don't agree at all that most levels are about combat; most of the levels had some kind of exploration puzzle (often finding switches to bypass a gate) that gave you good reasons to explore fairly open areas. Almost every area in the game had some kind of exploration puzzle like this, and even though the general progression is pretty linear a lot of these in-level exploration puzzles give you a lot of freedom in where you go and what you do to solve the puzzles. One level in particular almost felt a bit like a Zelda dungeon to me: you don't get a dungeon item to help clear it, but you have the same kind of sense of unlocking shortcuts that give you access to different routes and there are multiple major objectives required to access the boss, some of which are slightly off the beaten track. IMO the actual room-to-room combat was on the weaker side since most enemies only have 1-2 attacks and the game doesn't throw enough enemies at you at a time to make you really consider your options in combat. Once you learn how to respond to an enemy, you're basically guaranteed to have an easy time with that enemy from then on unless you make a stupid mistake. Because of this, while I didn't actively dislike the combat (and I thought the boss battles were pretty good), I definitely wouldn't say that the game's design was more combat-focused than in-level exploration focused. In fact, were it not for requiring a steady source of XP, I think most of the combat encounters could be removed entirely and the game would lose almost nothing. Most of the fun I had in each level came from avoiding stage hazards and solving the stage puzzles, not from killing the enemies. That's just my opinion though.
Great review, decent game. The Last Faith was a bit on the easy side, enemies were far too tanky for my liking, the abilities were too cookie cutter, i encountered several bugs (one which was gamebreaking and forced me to restart the game). Overall though, I had a lot of fun with this one. It didnt surpass Blasphemous (1 or 2) for me, but I'm looking forward to revisiting it if/when they release DLC or updates. It would propbably get a 7.5 or 8/10 from me. Thanks for the excellent review TLH
so much of this game looks like blasphemous reskinned? from the flask breaking animations, doors opening and enemy spawning animations, the bosses' death animation with the silhouette flash, and coincidentally complaints about clunky controls plagues blasphemous and return here. its so blatantly obvious and i dont think just sharing a few pixel artists across the two games can lead to this...
I don't really agree with this. It shares similarities of course, but a lot of this game is nothing like Blasphemous and some of the stuff that is would be more appropriate to attribute to the genre than just Blasphemous specifically.
@@LoreHunter EDIT: the animations are not ripped, they are similar but no art theft
@@galinickel5119blasphemous is a masterpiece and controls great 👍
@@galinickel5119 ok, chill. Blasphemous 1 is one of my favorite games ever, but you’re really making a huge deal out of some pretty minor details. These are a few animations that are very similar, and could fall as copying or a reference depending on how charitable you’re being. Blasphemous 2 uses almost the same death animation as Metroid, but that’s clearly an homage. You’re trying to say the game is basically a copy of Blasphemous when they share almost no core game mechanics.
It's not just blasphemous, they were blindly copying bloodborne, taking the worst mechanics of both games that no one liked and not changing or improving now that is a bad copying
So, according to this comment section, pixel art games started with Blasphemous and Gothic themes with Bloodborne. Before those, there were no such things in gaming.
I do think there is a lot of Bloodborne in the game, but I also got a chuckle out of this thinking about how Bloodborne has been referred to as a modern Castlevania successor.
@LoreHunter Yeah, that's the point. I can't deny that there's a lot of inspiration from Bloodborne and Blasphemous. However, people are acting like that's a crime, even when those games are not particularly original either
Yeah… I really don’t think it does. Everything in this game seems to be as it is because “Bloodborne did it,” and many of the enemies and boss designs have been bordering on straight up plagerism. One boss is a church giant, one is just Paarl with wings, another is Logarius but a lady, and the area designs… well, if I didn’t know they were from this game I’d think they were just pixel art illustrations of Bloodborne areas.
The gameplay is fine, and a few bosses have been ok, like the one duo you fight with the big zappy guy and the lady. It’s fine, not worth full price by a long shot though
Yeah the game is held back by it's bloodborne-isms. I'd give the next game another shot if they changed up somethings.
That’s pretty fair, I think the similarities in visuals will vary in how it lands for each person. Like the similar sound cues, which I didn’t really like. The lore is what surprised me as being more than just a copy, which I think probably helped differentiate some of the enemies for me.
"used the same sound effects" - well I doubt that - a game made by a proper company most likely ain't going to rip assets from another commercial game. Why not simply create a similar sound - professionals can easily do that and it ain't the same thing as "using the same sound effect".
I think that's all generally understood, I just don't think it was necessary to make some of the sounds so similar
@@LoreHunterwell I'd call it more like an "homage" than "using the same sound effect" then... Like Lords of the Fallen and many other "souls-like" games ain't blatantly imitating everything else related to gameplay and visuals from their source of "inspiration", so I wouldn't care about if someone puts a similar sound in such game :)
they literally ripped the flask breaking animation & wall climb animation using a blade from blasphemous so i wouldnt put it past em.
@@galinickel5119Yeah, it is obvious there is slight rotoscoped feel to main character - stance and feel of the main character of Blasphemous comes to mind pretty easily, and they sort of borrow the janky tiptoe turn from Symphony of the Night too in my opinion :D - either way, I still wouldn't call it using the same sound, unless I checked it somehow. I'd say it is a homage or imitation, but how blantant or shameless imitation is up to the viewer I guess :)
@@322ss fair enough! It is an homage, it’s just one that I guess felt a little too close to home, but it’s subjective.
So, Blasphemous has joined Hollow Knight in the category of "Soulslikes that inspired their own sub-sub-genre of -alikes."
There are certainly worse games to take inspiration from.
Symphony of the Night existed in 1997. This game is obviously inspired by that, even the movements new players say isn't snappy is mimicking that of the vampiric ghostly movement of SotN. Surely Blasphemous too is inspired by it in many ways.
@@rrm1903 I was talking more about the art style.
@@Sylocat yeah I was talking about literally everything, art style included; both are obviously taking their visual inspiration from that generation of 2D pixel art side scrollers, specifically Castlevania. Although TLF moreso than Blasphemous, since it also takes the Gothic themes and the edgy designs of Castlevania along with it. Ayami Kojima's influence is all over this game.
Good game I rate it 7/10
My problems are :
. Healing grinding ( never liked that in bloodborne and not in this game) and why do they get more expensive after killing bosses I did have an abundance of them at midgame and later but that's because I rarely died outside of bosses and falling off ( this game is easier than blasphemous 1 and 2)
. Weapons scaling making no sense and weapons upgrades being too expensive and both made worse by the other
. There is an unnecessary delay on every input especially the jump button that ruined platforming for me and caused me many deaths
. Insta death falls which made worse by the controls delay
. No pause button ( seriously its not even an online game the devs are just blindly copying)
Agree with you on the lack of a true class choice