Recent reviews by virtualRefrain

Most of this DLC is good. Don't listen to the people that say the story is bad - the story is the best thing about the DLCs.

The reason I'm writing this review is because the final boss of the DLC is literally the worst boss I've ever fought in any game ever. I'm not exaggerating. Truly garbage games are capable of much more thoughtful and meaningfully designed final encounters. It's not a HARD boss, it's just a BAD boss. It's truly fascinatingly bad, to the point that it's worth dissecting just how many misses went into the design. I just want to talk about this masterclass of how not to do bosses for a minute.

First, let's talk about what it doesn't have. The final boss of The Ancient Gods: Part Two does not have any trappings of the Boomer Shooter genre, and removed 90% of the gameplay elements that makes up the rest of the game.

The final boss arena is about a 100-foot radius circle. It's completely flat and symmetrical. There's no verticality - no raised platforms or pits. There's no cover, obstacles, or environment of any kind. There's no distance to leverage - close-range only. The corridor shooter and tactical mechanics featured in the rest of the game are completely removed.

There are no fodder or low-level enemies. There are five stationary quick-spawning zombies placed symmetrically around the outside circle to allow you to refill your ammo, and several quick-spawning health and armor items. These are the only enemies that can be frozen, set on fire, or glory killed - the boss and the adds he spawns can't. Those mechanics and the mechanics around refilling your resources are, for all intents and purposes, removed.

As a result of these removals, any weapon, weapon mod, rune, or other build change that doesn't directly increase horizontal mobility or single-target damage is totally useless.

So what IS in the boss battle?

The boss is essentially a suped-up marauder. The core mechanic is to wait for him to swing with a specific punishable melee attack, signified with a green flash. AFAICT this MUST be done with the Super Shotgun. That puts him in a 3-second stun state, during which you must hit him with a more powerful stun using the Sentinel Hammer, which gives you about five seconds to pour damage into him while he stands still. There's no way to deal damage to the boss other than to punish his green flash attacks and attack him while stunned.

He has a very small handful of abilities: a punishable sword swing, a non-punishable sword swing, two different add summons, a point-blank knockback, and a shield charge. Other than that he shoots regular plasma shots.
There are a ton of problems with these abilities. First of all, they appear to queue completely randomly with no regard for your positioning or the state of the map. People say you're more likely to get a punishable swing if you're closer to him - after extensive testing, I'm certain that's not true. If you're within touching distance, he uses a knockback, and otherwise it's completely random.

Here's where it really starts falling apart:

1: The elephant in the room: similarly to the infamous Malenia in Elden Ring, the boss heals whenever he hits you. Any successful hit against you heals the boss by about 20%, meaning if he hits you twice in quick succession, he can heal almost half of his full health bar. His attacks are all 2- or 3-hit combos.

2: This is where it starts getting crazy - if you hit the boss, even when he appears to be vulnerable (such as when his shield is down), and he HASN'T just flashed green, your attack HEALS him instead of hurting him. This extends even to missing the timing window, so for instance, if the boss flashes green but you're late on the trigger pull and your attack hits him AFTER his hits you, he functionally heals an extra 20% off the attack. On top of that, the animations for a punishable attack and a non-punishable attack are identical other than the green flash. So if you recognize the animation and you're too QUICK on the trigger pull, you will also heal him.

3: Some attacks, especially the shield charge, also proc so fast that they're extremely hard to dodge. They CAN be dodged, but if you're playing on mouse/keyboard rather than using a joystick, the requirement to use one hand to both hit shift and the direction of the dodge means that you're limited to dodging in a single direction - basically left or right. If those aren't viable directions to avoid the attack, whoops, you just healed the boss.

4: The only way to charge up the Sentinel Hammer in order to damage the boss is to kill two dogs summoned in one of the boss' add-summon attacks. (Side note: these adds, unlike any other enemy in the game, drop no resources and can't be frozen, set on fire, or glory killed, and it's not made clear why.) This adds another several steps to deal any damage the boss: wait for boss to summon dogs, kill dogs, pick up hammer power-ups, wait for boss to flash green, stun boss, use sentinel hammer to extend stun, deal damage. And again these are completely random, so you can be waiting a very long time for this line up.

5: This is truly the cherry on top of this ♥♥♥♥ cake: there are five... IDENTICAL... phases. When you whittle him down, he heals back to full and the fight starts over exactly the same... FIVE times. The only difference between each phase is that they give you LESS RESOURCES, so you're waiting longer between punishable attacks and missing them frequently because ammo is too tight. Each one of these phases can take you, no joke, 10+ minutes. This is not hyperbole. There's a single checkpoint after phase 3, which is a godsend, because with every single game mechanic removed except for pure reaction time, you'll probably be needing a break after around 30 minutes, and that's just if you didn't die at all.

So to recap: The final boss is completely invulnerable except when he randomly performs his one punishable attack.If you attempt to hurt him while he's invulnerable, he heals 20-60% of his health, depending on context. You need the sentinel hammer to hurt him, and they only give you access to it when he performs a DIFFERENT random attack. There are no twists or curveballs to the fight, no environment at all, no other enemies, and 90% of runes and all weapons other than the SSG and auto-shotgun are traps. The fight can go on for an hour easily, if you never die, but to be fair dying is very hard because they replaced the resource mechanics with stationary items you can just walk into over and over again.

Doom: Eternal is great. The DLCs are decent. The final boss is probably the single most complete and total faceplant I've ever seen a game take in my life. It's almost worth playing just from a game design standpoint to demonstrate how important it is for a final encounter to pay off the mechanics and gameplay loops that built up to it. But it's not worth it, because it's also an exercise in pure self-inflicted tedium and irritation, and you would be better served playing literally anything else. If you wanna seee what happens, get to the final boss and then watch the rest on youtube.

What you have to understand going into FFXIV is that most of the game just exists to give more context to the Hildibrand storyline.

Glitchy and unfinished - but not as glitchy as Skyrim on release, not as unfinished as MGS Phantom Pain. A genuinely good time even with all bugs included, and will probably be remembered more positively than it was received.