All my Zero are belong to you.
First off, this game is an excercize in frustration. To anyone who reads these before playing, don't bother.
Now, I'll go into detail WHY the game is crap, and I'll explain how you could MAYBE fix it.
1: Controls. The controls are clunky, the avatar dude manuvers about as well as a beached whale. He turns around slow, he cancels out of swings slowly. The only thing he does fast is move, but when he even STOPS slow, that's not a good thing! The sliding is annoying and makes for awful precision work, fix it. The attacks are too slow and clunky, fix them. Make it so you can cancel a combo or combo from normal attacks into other attacks.
2: No jump. WHY is there no jump!? FIX IT!
3: The game de-emphasizes combat. From level 1 to level 5's ending, every SINGLE enemy is defeatable by using stealth. I only got hit ONCE. Then at the end of level 5, there's a guard doglizard. I can't distract him, so I reasoned "okay, I'll get him running at me then I'll climb down the stairs and send him sailing off the cliff so I can get to the flag". Nope; there's an invible wall. So I eventually manage to kill him, because he acts slow as hell.
THEN I get to the level 6 boss. The level 6 boss is crazy. He BUZZ-SAW WALKS with his sword in his hand (why can't I knock it out of his hand? That's an assinine thing to do with your sword.) I've never been prepared in this game for a fight like this. (Training the player to deal with tasks they'll have to do under stress, mother! Look into it.) Fighting this guy is an excercize in trial and error, as nearly as I can tell. you have to hit him three times before he gets his buzz-saw going again (NOT EASY). When he falls to his knees and "REcovers", you need to charge an overhead shot and hurt him. Except he DOES NOT DIE. I've had him up to 160-tic (they're certainly not seconds!) rcovery time, charging the whole time, and I hit him at around 10 - he DOESN'T DIE. I did this four times, then he BUZZ-SAW WALKED ME INTO THE SPIKES.
SO fucking lame. If you're going to make a stealth game, don't throw in unavoidable combat that the player is ill-trained for, unprepared for, and has not got the controls to do it anyway. It's not "arty" to zoom the screen in dramatically on the player getting his ASS KICKED because you can't design a boss fight.
