Enotria: The Last Song (2024)

Yeah, it's not a great game. It's got a strong art direction and setting, but everything else is slightly bad. Combat itself is clunky in many dimensions. Feeling-wise, the animations don't look right and movement is floaty; even the running animation looks strange, almost as if the character is more gliding through the terrain than actually walking or running. Random enemies are trivial to sunlock with light attacks and some stronger onces can be stunlocked with strong attacks. The couple of bosses I got to were fine, but between the camera that is a bit too close, the UI covering up the lower quarter of the screen, and the dust that some attacks kick up, sometimes it was hard to see what the hell was going on.

The loadout system is overly complex and not very meaningful. You've got masks and roles, and you can change between 3 setups at any time. But roles just give you stats and mask only add minor tweaks to combat; I don't really care that I can charge my spells a bit quicker when parrying attacks after killing an stunned enemy if all I need to to is mash light attack and everything dies.

There's also a complicated system of status effects that give you and the enemies boosts and buffs at the same time. Each status effect is also paired with elemental types with unintelligible names like "Vis" and "Malanno", which in turn work with a rock-paper-scissors system. So a special enemy might have a Fatuo affinity and be immune to that type of damage and their attacks build up the "Dizzy" status effect, that will decrease your defence but increase your attack. They will also be weak to Gratia, so you should prepare and infuse your weapon with that element. It's all extremely complicated and 100% useless because the parry window is so wide and you can dodge so far that you can easily just parry or dodge everything and kick their asses with any old stick.

It's also quite buggy. I got a crash to desktop the first time I died, some level collision seems to be badly placed so sometimes I would slid off platforms or get stuck in the geometry. Eventually I encountered a glitch that would respawn my dropped XP when resting at a checkpoint. So after a couple of minutes gathering free XP I got to level 300 and got all my stats to the hard cap. Eventually I decided to quit when a weird level geometry quirk made me jump sideways into my death.

This game's rough. It feels generally unpolished and clunky. In some cases it's hard to say why; is more like a gestalt thing. The way the animations are slightly floaty, how the menus lack juice. Sometimes is more obvious, like the bugs that crashed my game the first time I died or the one that drops free infinite xp if I rest at a specific checkpoint.

Enemy balance is extremely uneven. You can stunlock regular enemies, so most of the time you can bash light attack and get out of fights without a scratch. And then some enemies don't flinch with your attacks, but still do little damage so it's easy to tank them.. except when they get all supersaiyan and gain elemental damage, when they two-shot you.

There's an extremely overly-complex rock-paper-scissor style elemental system which I just ignore completely because it's impossible to understand and because just light attack and parry are enough. There is also the loadout system that I'm also ignoring because I don't see the point of changing weapons or stats.

Enotria: The Last Song tries to differentiate itself from other Soulsborne games by providing a loadout system that lets you swap on the fly, even during combat. It's a welcome thing, if not for the fact that the game itself feels like a clumsy rehash of ideas better executed in other games. It feels too much like a Souls clone and not enough of it's own thing, which is almost wild to say given it's distinctive setting and loadout system. Sadly, Enotria just isn't singing to me.