Greetings everyone, I can safely say that my journey through the Godmaster content is complete. With both the Void Idol and the Weathered Mask in my Hunter's Journal, I think it is time to put down my thoughts on the Godmaster update as a whole.
Obtained for clearing all 5 Pantheons with all Bindings.
So I guess I'll talk about the Pantheons first. The normal Pantheons are rough when you first encounter them, and they are a huge contrast to the main game when you first start trying to complete them. Personally, my biggest issue with the normal pantheons (As in you aren't doing any bindings and you have all the upgrades) is simply just how monotonous it gets to fight these bosses again and again. I don't hate the bosses in Hollow Knight at all, I actually like most of them with a couple of notable exceptions, but even a few of those encounters were among some of my favorites before having to constantly re-fight them in the pantheons. Pantheons 1-4 do a relatively good job at spacing out the fights in a way that keeps the player engaged without making the combat overstay its welcome, and I enjoy that a lot. It helps you to learn to fight bosses rather than engage in an autopilot mentality like QuickSlash + UnbreakableStrength to mash bosses to death. Pantheon 5 though is a huge mess. I found Pantheon 5 to be incredibly boring due to having to complete it multiple times to "git gud" enough to do multiple bindings on it consistently. It's just so long and tedious to go through without much that is new or interesting until the very end of the run (With the exception of Sisters of Battle in Pantheon 5, I love that fight and I think it is worth fighting them in Pantheon 5 and it doesn't take that long to fight them even with Bindings on). People frequently talk about spending hours on difficult content like Trial of Fools or Path of Pain prior to Godmaster and still today, but at least those were interesting and engaging in their own merits rather than mostly reusing already existing boss encounters in a row. The Bindings in the first 4 pantheons take getting used to, but you can do it. Bindings on Pantheon 5 though make it go from bad to atrocious. They are not too bad if you do them separately, but doing multiple/all bindings makes almost every boss turn into, hit them three times, throw shade soul or shriek, repeat. It was very boring to have every single boss turn into this in the run and I hated it after a while.
There are some bosses ((Namely the Nailmasters, Xero, Markoth, and White Defender to give a few examples) that break this mold by allowing you to use Charged Nail Arts to deal a majority of your damage. If there is one thing I will give huge props for Godmaster, it's the fact that it taught me just how good Nail Arts really are in this game. Prior to Godmaster, I never once used them. I would get them from the Nail masters and then never use them period. Hell I completely forgot that I even had them until I started doing Pantheon 3 All Bindings, but after that I started using them constantly and began fighting bosses with tools I never used before. That is what Godmaster should be all about, being able to learn these bosses and find new ways to take them on and beat them with knowledge of all your tools. Unfortunately though, this eventually turns into the problem where now every single boss in the game fights the same because now every boss is a Nail Art Spam, which kinda sucks because you just don't have many other good options for fighting bosses quickly without it becoming an absolute chore. Pantheons, great idea, but holy cow does it get tedious over a long period of time fighting these guys. Are the Pantheons hard? Yes, they are a challenge and it takes time to overcome them. However, making a fight "harder" by making the fights take 2-3 times longer in a bindings run, is not making it "harder", it makes it more boring.
I spoke badly of the Pantheons, but a lot of that just comes down to the fact that the Pantheons overstay their welcome pretty poorly in the grand scheme of the game if you plan on going for everything, so now I'll speak on the Hall of Gods.
For all intents and purposes, the Hall of Gods is effectively a practice mode for the Pantheons while simultaneously being a sort of New Game+ mode for fighting bosses with tools that you normally would never be able to have in the main game. This feature is incredibly awesome since there are a ton of encounters in the game that are really well done like Grimm/NKG and Hornet, but to re-fight them, you either need to commit to another playthrough (which can eat up several hours of real time depending on how far they are) or keep backup copies of saves (which some can theoretically prevent you from having certain upgrades or tools depending on where the save is.) I really don't have another way to say this, I am in love with the Hall of Gods. It is an incredible feature to be able to fight (almost) any boss at my beck and call with every tool in the game at my disposal. This is wonderful because there are a ton of tools like the Grubberfly's Elegy charm that you never get to use mostly because by the time you get it, it is so late in the playthrough that you have nothing to use it on since you will have explored nearly the entire map by the time you get it.
So now we get to Radiant Mode for these bosses. I gotta be honest with you guys, I actually like Radiant Mode. It encourages you to actually learn the fights and how to deal with the efficiently rather than using the mindless "Mash Attack/Face-tank Get it Over With" mentality that the Pantheons encourage you to do after a while. Radiant Mode is a burst of challenge that players can do and I love that. You can completely customize how you want to tackle each specific individual boss and even experiment with new setups here thanks to how Radiant works as a whole. I'm fairly confident I am not alone in saying that there is a certain kind of freedom in knowing you die instantly in a fight. Think about it, it means you don't get to use charms like Quick Focus or Baldur Shell sure, but you also gain access to more offensively based charms like Shaman Stone, Soul Eater, GRUBBERFLY'S ELEGY in particular is a favorite in Radiant fights, the list goes on. Combine this with the ability to overcharm, and you have a wide spectrum of offensive ways to go about these fights. Radiant mode is all about having a burst of challenge and no fight in Radiant overstays its welcome when you are in the actual fight. It'll take you a good while to get that run that does manage to beat a boss without being hit, but believe me, it is so much better than doing the Pantheon Boss Rushes.
In Short, I would gladly do the Radiant Fights again if I absolutely had to. To put this in perspective, I recorded every fight on Radiant and uploaded them before progressing to the Pantheons with the Bindings. Somewhere around Pantheon 4 I think, I genuinely wanted to re-record all the Radiant fights because I had learned so much more about how to take advantage of different boss openings and options like Nail Arts. That has never happened to me so strongly before in a video series. The extra customization from the environment of a 1 hit death is actually extremely refreshing and is interesting because it completely changes how you look at fights if only because you cannot mash a boss to death with your nail and win. The Hall of Gods and Radiant Mode are amazing, give some Radiant fights a shot, you'll be glad you did. The Pantheons though, they need work. I would be completely fine with only having the base completion for the Pantheons and not having the bindings on top of that. It isn't fun to fight every boss exactly the same every time because the alternatives are far too slow and boring otherwise.
Sincerely,
Sir Knight Surefire Tactics.
Submitted September 16, 2018 at 07:11AM by AwreLeven https://ift.tt/2pawwT2
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