The Last Faith

爽

excelente metroidvania, un poco tosco y ortopedico en algunos aspectos pero sin duda alguna está infravalorado

“No Mum, It’s not a phase, It is real me!” “Richard, for ♥♥♥♥ sake, you are 37 year old man, you will never be a big titty goth mommy!” “You cannot kill my dream!” Ekhm, anyway. The real title of this game should be: “The Last Faith: The Bloodborne: The Blasphemous: The game” Why, you may ask? Because there is nothing, LITERALLY nothing original and unique here. Everything, from artstyle, wordbuilding, through gameplay and mechanics are borrowed from those two games. I struggle to write this review without using the phrases “just like in…”, “similar to…” or “same as…” because of how uninspired this copy-cat of the game is. So, after long consideration, I decided that I will not hold myself back and beat around the bush. The Last Faith is pixel-art metroidvania heavily focused on lovecraftian and gothic horror themes — if you played Bloodborne, then you already know what to expect. Gothic cathedral, vampires, werewolves, victorian aesthetics, cthulhu and tentacles. In the graphic department we deal with similar directions as in Blasphemous — to the teeth, I may say. The looks of this game are superb and clearly made with passion and dedication, but we already see everything similar to that in other game. Which one is better looking is debatable, each of them do not hold punches when talking about pixel-art, but I think Last Faith have less sophisticated and worse animated basic enemies than Blasphemous. But again, this is more my subjective feeling rather than objective truth. Another similarity to Bloodborne and Blasphemous is how Last Faith handles the story. You know how in FromSoft games the story is vague and symbolic to create that feeling of wonder and mystery, and to reward more invested and inquisitive players with hidden lore and secrets? The Last Faith is using the same storytelling techniques as other games, but here this feels pretentious. It was created to hide behind vagueness how simple and straightforward the story is. It is especially visible with NPC dialogues — they all talk (game is full voiced BTW) with this Shakespearean, pompous manner, about literally the most basic, mundane things, that after some time I just started cringing like hell. It's vague for the sake of being vague, not to force players to look for clues and hidden meaning. This game also translated to my native language and for a moment I thought the localization is garbage, because I cannot understand anything, so I switched to English, and guess what? I STILL CANNOT UNDERSTAND ANYTHING. What the hell? And the story itself is meh — it repeats plot points directly from Bloodborne. Humanity discovered the presence of the cosmic gods, thanks to that they made many technological and occult developments, but then they dug too deep and now the population is infested with some otherworldly disease that makes them turn into savage beasts and everything is turning into gutter. And if you are still not convinced, picture this — there is an NPC called Aldrich in this game. And he suffers from uncontrollable hunger. Aldrich? Hunger? DS3, anyone? Anyway, enough about the story, it really doesn't matter in those types of games, let's proceed with more important things — mechanics. And I am forced to repeat myself: there is nothing unique here, not a single thing that differentiate Last Faith from other games. Well, at least in the metroidvania aspect I cannot blame the game entirely, because this genre is very rigid with mechanics and hard to innovate. Since releasing Symphony of the Night on PS1, metroidvania games are stale and repetitive — it's exactly the same mechanic with cosmetic changes, over and over again, in different titles. We have a 2D platformer focusing on exploration and collecting power-ups that make your character stronger and able to gain access to previously unreachable parts of the world. No difference is in Last Faith — you can unlock double jump, air dash, grappling hook, wall climb, and muscles… I mean ability to push stone blocks. And that’s it. The structure of the game world is also very similar to another metroidvania. You travel back and forth through areas, unlocking shortcuts and exploring unreachable areas with your new movement abilities. But there is no “Wow, that's neat level design!” Everything is serviceable at best. No better is the souls-like part of the game. If you played even one FromSoft game, you already know what to expect. You fight with enemies, you collect experience, if you die, you have only one chance to collect it back, you can dodge-roll, parry, there is limited healing (here you need to farm it, just like in Bloodborne), your character have attributes that certain number is required to use weapons or spell, weapons have scaling, you can upgrade them to +10 with materials, yada, yada, yada… But there and there are some quirks to combat, some of them I like, some I don’t. When you attack, you are locked into place, but you can cancel attack animation with dodge-roll, there is no fall and no contact damage when walking into enemies, but there is 2 or 3 second cooldown between dodging, you can perform parry or riposte only when special bar is filled, but you can fill it like two hits, so it's pointless, there is beast form that I literally used only one time. All of this is give and take, a real mix bag, none of this is particularly frustrating or game breaking, you should get over it all of those nuances pretty quick. What else? The game is not hard. You have limited healing, but your riposte also can heal you. Most of the bosses took me less than 4 or 5 tries, except the hidden final boss, because she loves to spam attacks in the second phase. But I also have issues with house spongy some bigger bosses are. Some of them — like Hydra, or ekhm, Manfred (yes, that is the real name of the big, towering beast you fight) drags and drags forever. I recommend focusing on upgrading your gear to the highest possible level before fighting some of them. Well, time for closure. It’s not like I despise this game for being generic and uninspired. There are plenty (one even say — majority) of games that borrow ideas from other games. Culture is like onion, it has layers, each one built on top of another. My problem with this game is that it does not even try to add something innovative and unique to the substance. It feels like devs played Bloodborne and Blasphemous and said: “Well we are going to take this, this and this from the first game, plus that, that and that from the second game, clump all of those ideas together and we have our game”! So, there is this simple question I could ask developers: why do I want to play Last Faith, when I can go and play Bloodborne and Blasphemous and have a similar experience? If you really, really crave some metroidvania/soul-like gameplay, go grab the Last Faith. If you are seeking for something new and unique, then sorry, 5/10 nothing new under the sun. Buh-bye!

Um indie muito inspirado em bloodborne e blasphemous, mas que possui personalidade propria. Ótima historia, personagens, arte muito linda, varias builds diferentes, trilha sonora espetacular, dlc grátis, boas horas de gameplay, consegue juntar soulslike e metroidivania de forma super harmonica. SUPER RECOMENDO

Steuerung letzter Dreck... Und warum auch immer mag es nur das Spiel auf meinem zweitbildschirm... Meh.

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