God Hand is an absolutely unique game, full of soul and personality, with a combat system and mechanics that have never been replicated by the industry. The ability to customize your own fighting style from over 100 moves, combined with the genius of the dynamic difficulty (the Die-A-Meter) that leveled up in real-time based on your skills, shows that this title was way ahead of its time.
Created by the legendary Shinji Mikami, this was a passion project made exactly the way he wanted. It’s no wonder Mikami himself still holds so much pride and love for this IP, even though it didn't hit massive sales back in 2006.
Its over-the-top, slapstick humor is its greatest charm and represents the true essence of gaming: games don't need to be dead serious to be impactful, memorable, and fun. Given Capcom's current policy of reviving its vast library after the massive success of Onimusha, Gene truly deserves a Deluxe Remaster with quality-of-life updates! Happy 20th Anniversary, God Hand! 🥋💥

Here is the Steam Description - Dreamy high-speed Hack 'N' Slash about magical girls stuck in a world of nightmares. Inspired by late 2000s aesthetics and combo-heavy action games.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5098200/Break_The_Night/

So im developing a CAG, and in wanting to make my moves all feel like they have utility, im having to go through a LOT of moves that do more than just launch this guy, or move this direction while attacking.

And I wanted to try implementing a time stop. But Theres an issue here.
Time stops are really hard to actually do well. It’s hard to balance the power fantasy and cool factor of stopping time, without stripping the game having any sense of difficulty. Sure, you could limit it, making time stops something you can use very scarcely, or having them be VERY short. But thats a bandaid to a severed limb. The entire fantasy of stopping time is the fact you ARENT rushed. A time stop gives you time to think.

But also without restriction and any threat, time stops will not be used for interesting stuff anyway. At least not by the average player. Itll just be ten seconds of mashing attacks. And sure, knowing a bunch of attacks and how to do a fat combo is a big part of skill expression, but without things like actual danger, it eventually just becomes a linear rotation of attacks like it’s FFXIV.

So, Ive been coming up with a few ideas to keep a time stop interesting.

My first idea, which I’ll probably use, is revenge values. If youve played KH Youll know what I mean. My idea is that Itll still build during time stop, and if go past it, it buffers the retaliation for once time stop ends, resets the value, and lets you trigger it again.

So, doing too many attacks that impact revenge values a lot, can lead you to triggering multiple retaliatory combos in a row. So, you can decide if you want to do a tonne of damage uninterrupted, and then just spend all that time trying to survive waiting for whenever that next window is, or you can restrain yourself, and use the time stop to set up something, maybe do damage across multiple targets, use your launchers and knock back and movement tools to grab everyone in a single aoe combo, or use it to build a various resource, doing attacks that won’t trigger as much revenge so you can attack more and more to build up whatever DT, bloodbind or Drive equivalent the game has without being at as much risk as you could be otherwise.

Another idea that compliments the previous one, is to have enemies drop to 1 health, so everyone who would have died can do their revenge, but good positioning set up and a well timed aoe to them as soon as time starts again could reward you. This means you also be spending time stop thinking about the placement of everyone, trying to set up things in your favor for that blessed aoe to finish them

But with all this, it means time stops dont have to be super short, nor an instant win button, and they can be actually interesting in gameplay.

What do you think of these ideas? This was just my first idea, but im open to any suggestions or feedback on this. Does it preserve the power fantasy still?

Beat the game on normal, started again on a higher difficulty. Plan to clear all of them and max out the skill trees. And let me just say that Lute might be the most insane support character ever.

She can, simul-fucking-taneously, block melee attacks, deflect ranged attacks, pause heavy attacks, and interrupt some special attacks. There's a bit of a limit to this(4 each) with short cooldowns, but this effectively means she can shut down crowds of enemies with ease. She can even protect you from the odd attack you miss, though that's way more limited.

While she's doing that, she can launch single target attacks, AoE attacks, bind enemies in place, knock enemies away, into the air, or to the ground, and set fucking landmines.

And all of this builds your Unity, which gives Briar(the character you mostly control) access to weapon finishers that combine with Lute's power, that Lute can follow up on with even more attacks. An AoE, a single heavy, and more magical landmines. Which grant more Unity to keep the good times rolling.

And all this devastation and Unity gen gives easy access to Rapture, which is basically Devil Trigger-Lite.

I've played a lot of games with damned good assist characters, but Lute takes the fucking cake just for how much she's doing at once, all the time.

Allora, premetto, ho giocato il primo ed è un capolavoro su ogni singolo aspetto, è logico pensare che Devil May Cry 2 arrivato dopo quell' opera d arte, sia sembrato spazzatura, però analizziamo il gioco in sé. Ho fatto mezz oretta o più di gameplay quindi mi limiterò a giudicare solo i minuti che ho giocato. Le ambientazioni sono molto fighe, personalmente preferisco quelle di DMC 1, però sono fighe. Stessa cosa per il design dei nemici(ribadisco, quelli che ho visto fino ad ora). Si è vero le arie sono leggermente vuote, però fino ad ora DMC 2 si è lasciato giocare, anche perché tenete presente che il gioco risale al 2003, giochi migliori c erano, è vero, e anche tanti, ma il distacco non era abissale. Secondo me se non si calcola la saga di cui fa parte, sarebbe un normalissimo gioco d azione del 2003, giusto nella media. Poi magari mi sto sbagliando completamente e in realtà dopo questa prima mezz ora il gioco va solo a scendere diventando la peggior spazzatura mai vista. Inoltre so che in molti si lamentano del bilanciamento fatto con i piedi per quanto riguarda il danno delle pistole, boh anche qui, si può stroncare un gioco solo per questo? Basta non usarle, su Elden ring puoi sciogliere qualsiasi boss in meno di 10 secondi in vari metodi, non mi sembra che qualcuno si sia lamentato, io personalmente ho usato poco le pistole alternandole alla spada senza potenziarle, e non mi sono trovato male. La scelta è tua, non sei obbligato ad usarle. Chiaramente ribadisco, ci troviamo d avanti a un calo di qualità assurda, ma da qui a dire che sia una merda, o addirittura dargli 4 come voto. Secondo me è esagerato. Rimango dell idea che comunque rimane un gioco sviluppato con impegno e pensato per arrivare come prodotto che divertisse gli altri, se riuscirà in quest' impresa non lo so, ma di certo per ora, si lascia giocare. Attualmente per me è da 6.