Aragami: Nightfall DLC

Best comedy game i have ever played was laughing the whole time. 420/69.

Super fun if a little short. Absolutely worth playing with a friend if you get it on sale.

I see that this has mixed reviews. I finished this campaign with my friend tonight, took the chance to get the medals/achievements I was missing afterwards since it's super short and I might as well, right? [h3]I mean I thought it was [i]fine[/i], but I can see [b]why[/b] it has mixed reviews overall...[/h3] [b]Nightfall[/b] is like this weird sorta prequel mini-campaign that gives a bit of extra context to the main story where you play as [spoiler]Yamiko[/spoiler]'s old retainers trying to do stuff to help on the side, eventually leading to the events of the main game. It's a [b]co-op centric[/b] campaign too, since it has two protagonists, so it's especially intended for that, but you CAN play it alone still. It's 4 chapters long. [i]Bit steep of a price[/i] for 4 chapters but me and my friend both got it on sale so sure, whatever. Honestly? It's alright. It's short, but these 4 chapters do have overall interesting locales (daytime village, forest ritual shrine) and neat gameplay ideas (enemies carrying important items that you can either steal off them or loot off their corpse, following a VIP without being spotted). And you have slightly different abilities from the base game. ...As in you have less, your invisibility is nerfed to not muffle sound, your kunai is mixed with the shadow bomb so now you're just throwing really really sharp C4, and you have a new ability that changes based on the number of players (it's either a long-distance kill or a teleport to the other player). Honestly, if anything being so short plays in its favor, since I feel like it would've overstayed its welcome if it was any longer than it is as-is. ...Which uh, ties into the other side of this DLC. The execution. Do they tell you about NPCs carrying important items? Do they make said items visible and "pop-out-y" enough for you to tell that they dropped something if you just kill them? Does the level design accomodate for objectives where they make you scavenge around for macguffins you need to get before moving on? No, no, and no. The level design is kind of mixed, varies between cool multi-path arenas where you have a bunch of ways to approach, and honestly questionable wild goose chases where you have to just go and gather a bunch of crap without any indication of where it's supposed to be. Layouts are also weird, where they make a lot more use of bushes as a universal hiding spot but also skimp out a lot on proper shadows to hide in (base game has a LOT more of that last thing). ...And this DLC's idea of "difficulty" is spamming enemies everywhere. [b]Hey kids, do you like [i]92 enemies in one stage?[/i][/b] [i]Do you like killing a guy, only for an archer to see it happening from halfway across the map, so you get swarmed and die, then on your next try you sneak further ahead to kill the archer, only to notice there was a second archer even FURTHER back watching that first archer, and then you get another alarm? And then that second archer has a THIRD archer watching that position? Okay now imagine that except every "archer" is actually like three or four archers in one guard tower. And also there's about a billion guards below. And I am not shitting you by the way, chapter 2 out of 4 has [b]92 enemies in total[/b]. We got the Oni medal and that's what the results screen showed. [i]In what way does that make level design interesting???[/i] It just makes levels drag on and on unless you're explicitly going for no kills and no getting spotted. And even THEN that's miserable because of the sheer goddamn amount of [b]people[/b] bunched up on every single part of every level. And to add insult to injury you don't even have the Banmoku skill from the base game, the one that marks enemies in a really big radius around yourself. So you have to mark every single one of the probably-around-a-hundred enemies in the stage, one by one. And if there's one around a corner, which there absolutely will be because this DLC loves doing that? Tough luck, you had no way of knowing they were there to mark them pre-emptively, so now you just got instantly spotted because you walked around a corner. It's like... [b]Wow. Damn, who hurt the level designers?[/b] Also this is weirdly buggier than the base game, we had online issues that we NEVER had in the base game. Like the game spawning extra enemies for my friend who weren't there at all for me, so he was just killing thin air on my screen and we were getting points for it anyway. Or respawning on the VIP follow segment and the VIP was facing us so he instantly spotted us and alerted the guards as soon as we respawned. Or the extremely weird and exploitable doorways that let you respawn the second player infinitely and are probably the single biggest unintended exploit they could've had on a co-op centric mode like this. Now, yes, I know I am unabashedly shitting fury all over this DLC. And I do stand by it, I think it's deserved because of the weirdly inconsistent execution of ideas and the genuinely [i]sadistic[/i] enemy counts and plcaement. But for a post-game hard extra campaign, that we got on sale, honestly we got what we expected. ...MORE than we expected honestly, given 92 goddamn enemies in one level, but still. We didn't have a BAD time either. [b]Just, uh... Get this on sale if you're interested. And temper your expectations, the story isn't even anything shakespearean or anything either.[/b]

This is like a bad copy of the main game. Don't by this if you liked the main game for the stealth part. But if you must, wait for a sale.