The review nobody asked for!
Anon's Definitive and Objectively Correct Stellar Blade Review
>Positive
-Very fun combat, effective blending of ideas from games like Nier Automata and Lies of P. Extremely rewarding parry & dodge timings.
-Combat skills have neat and flashy animations, many different possibilities with abilities and combos
-Secondary combat items like the gun feel good to use, aim well and have some weight to the shots
-Game difficulty is pretty well balanced. Not a cakewalk but nothing feels arbitrarily or artificially difficult either
-Overall game movement is very fluid. There are multiple platforming sections that are fun to traverse, exploration works well and is normally rewarded with hidden resources or special items
-OST is pretty good and has a couple bangers
-Reasonable spawn points and travel system
-Boss rush mode accessible from main menu that's very well implemented
-In-game tutorials for combos and abilities are easy to access and work well for learning. Really nice QoL there
-NG+ further expands some skill trees and abilities, introduces an option for "hard" mode, and adds outfit color variations to discover
-Game performance is very good by 2025 standards, run smooth with no crashes. Developed in UE4 instead of UE5 from my understanding
-Voice acting is very solid for any language you pick
>To Improve
-Two major game sections are both deserts, and while they differentiate themselves with enemy type and what's available it does make the environments feel redundant (this is my biggest gripe as it just feels like a missed opportunity where they could have experimented with another biome)
-Facial and body expressions during some cutscenes can look a little dramatic/repetitive
-While overall body/combat movement is very good, I think some minor tweaks like a tighter turn radius and slightly less sensitive climbing may be an improvement
-Some rare random world textures were very low res, not sure why
-Story has some interesting points but falls into the same Nier problem of shoving it's head up it's own ass and going full chuuni
(Mild end game spoiler below, vague)
-The final boss fight feels somewhat out of place, and narratively insignificant compared to the boss fight that immediately precedes it. A simple solution I think would be to just swap the order and slightly tweak the story to present those last two fights in reverse order.
<ELABORATION ON ABOVE AND MORE BLATANT ENDGAME SPOILER
-Randomly fighting a generic looking robot that's never been seen in the story before that last chapter, that's an extremely difficult fight on par with (or even slightly harder?) than Raven is a disjointed experience as the entire game built up to the Raven fight before it - Fighting an equally difficult rando immediately afterwards devalues the Raven fight. As mentioned I'd simply swap the order of these two fights and make minor tweaks to the story for it to make sense. Encounter Adam -> Decision made -> Fight Providence -> Fight Raven.
Summary - The game isn't perfect but the faults are minor when weighed against everything it does right. No aspect of the game feels half baked or half assed, no problem is severe enough that it detracts from the experience. Very enjoyable, highly recommended especially to anyone who enjoyed the Nier series.
Overall Anon Score: 8.8/10