Finished my first playthrough of Lies of P.
Aside from my small gripe about having to walk back to a boss, I really enjoyed the game. A few points I particularly liked:
I adored the game's rally system; damage you receive while guarding can be regained by attacking the enemy. I equally loved how the game gives you the option of summoning a ghost to fight alongside you during boss battles, which was super helpful during one late game gank boss fight.
As a Souls-like game, Lies of P has items that grant currency and experience. I love how you can consume these directly from a vendor or the level-up menu, which really streamlines the process of buying or leveling up when you're a few points short. The game also clearly shows each item's worth.
Another great quality-of-life feature deals with losing your accumulated currency when you die. In many Souls-like games, dying to a boss means your points are dropped inside the arena. But in Lies of P, they're placed outside of the boss arena. While it's generally a good strategy to not take a large amount of points into a boss fight, I appreciate that the game is friendly enough to hand them back to you after a death.
Continuing on, unlike other games where your points are lost if you die before retrieving them, Lies of P halves the points, giving you another chance to get them. The game also gives you an item that can transport you back to a previous checkpoint without losing any of your accumulated currency.
I do feel like I did myself a disservice by not engaging with some of the game's core mechanics though. For example, I never used the weapon assembly feature, which lets you combine different blades and handles. Although I did upgrade blades to +9 as the materials needed for this can be bought infinitely from a vendor, I never bothered to upgrade a handle as the materials for this seem to be limited in nature ( I hate spending materials on something and then regretting it ). I also hardly used the Legion Arm, the special robotic arm that can be upgraded and swapped out with different abilities. Another thing I rarely used were the Fable Arts; special attacks that come with your weapon's blade and handle. The energy for these seemed to refill so slowly that it made me reluctant to use them, always saving it for when "I needed it".
On a final note, and this might be my personal misconception of the game before I started it, the game is perfectly doable without relying on the game's perfect guard / parry mechanic. It's a great way to cancel out damage and build up enemy stagger, yes, but it isn't as integral to the game as it is in Sekiro, for example. So for anyone out there who wants to try the game but finds the notion of perfect guarding everything daunting, you can play the game like other Souls games and just dodge around.
An obligatory "screw the final two bosses" here.
