I’m not having fun anymore. Bosses now have the irritating habit of calling tanky reinforcements, and when my healer is able to heal about 80% of a single attack each turn and enemies are doing more than three times that much damage, the party is stuck in a “death by splinters” situation. The boss always has enough health that it takes forever to bring down, so prioritizing it isn’t a viable option and the only way through appears to be burning through items while hoping that I don’t die. It’s easy to envision a scenario where I use up all of my healing items and have to grind out more before I can continue. I’ve seen people claiming that this is an easy game, and that’s true of normal encounters (of which there are so many that the encounter rate in Sin Slayers feels like Lufia & The Fortress of Doom), but the cheap gimmicks in boss fights make these fights a chore.

And the tryhards out there are campaigning for more difficulty, which would be the nail in Sin Slayers‘ coffin. The sin mechanic that increases enemy levels as you investigate events already makes enemies tankier and is balanced in such a way that engaging with events is a lose/lose proposition. You don’t gain significantly more money, items, or experience when facing harder enemies. These events aren’t providing you with powerful equipment, either. You’re actively discouraged from doing anything in Sin Slayers other than wandering and fighting low-level enemies.

I’ve seen some people claim to have beaten Sin Slayers in ~7 hours. I’d love to know how, as I still have a couple of Sinlords left and have only died something like twice. Every time I turn around, I get hit with another battle tile (sometimes two in a row!) that wastes just enough time to add up. My archer’s ability to avoid battle requires entering 15 unknown tiles to recharge, too, and that doesn’t help when I’m hitting areas with three fights in four tiles. And that’s not even mentioning the general tedium and awkwardness of moving around; you can’t pan the camera, and events cancel your movement, so you’re forced to move in small chunks while constantly reminding Sin Slayers about where you want to go. And each dungeon has a condition that raises sin if you do something random, so you can get hit with a trap and then have every fight take longer because enemies are leveled up for something as innocuous as not having a trap-avoiding item available. Sin Slayers is undermined by its systems.

All right, I can now see how some people finished in 7 hours. If I hadn’t been stuck with so many meaningless fights, I probably could have also hit that target. Sin Slayers‘ difficulty curve is all over the place, and the last few bosses are among the easiest while two mid-game bosses are the hardest in the game by far. The key to winning is to invest in abilities (and equipment, if you’re lucky enough to find it) that restore your HP based on how much damage you deal, at which point you can go with a party of three damage-dealers and jettison the laughably useless healer.

Something fun I discovered is that you can miss attacks that have a 100% chance to hit, so the numbers are lying to you and can’t be trusted. Yay!

There were some good things here. Setting aside the wildly fluctuating difficulty and the number of meaningless fights that seem to exist solely to waste your time, the combat can be enjoyable. Your ability to click around the battlefield for items adds a little something extra, too. Events are a good idea in theory, but there are so few of them that are so rarely beneficial that they’re something you quickly learn to ignore. All in all, though, I don’t think all that much of Sin Slayers. It goes through the motions, but the poor storytelling and repetitive mechanics don’t suffice as a reason to continue playing, and there’s really nothing else here. Even Robothorium, for all its technical issues, came together into a more enjoyable product.

The post Sin Slayers gradual impressions: Sinlord Tedium, death of fun (#2) appeared first on Killa Penguin.