AI Limit

Recently I had a friend recommend AI Limit, which was a Chinese souls like with a pretty cute girl. It was on sale for pretty cheap so I decided to pick it up.

Now for a bit of background, I’ve played all the souls game including Bloodborne and Sekiro. I wouldn’t exactly call myself a souls veteran, but I have played them all so I’m familiar with them though I haven’t played that many souls likes. One that I did play however was Code Vein, which I thought was very very very average.

This game to me was a bit more interesting than Code Vein simply because I think the setting and NPCs were more fun to interact with. It helped that there was an actual main character, and questlines were similar to souls like progression where you interact with them in several locations before progressing. Now I will say that I found the questlines a lot more straightforward, which if you’re familiar with souls questlines isn’t that big of a surprise. For the most part there’s not a lot of backtracking, and each bonfire equivalent is teleportable to so even if you need to go back it’s not too difficult.

One thing that I thought was nice about the level design (at least early on) was that the maps felt pretty connected. In the sense that while there were some level transitions between the big areas, there was a nice use of shortcuts and “loops” that made the areas feel tighter and more connected. It was nice to see how different paths connected back to the beginning and it was something that I felt was usually lacking from other games in this genre. Additionally, exploration/path splits helped each area not feel very linear (again, with the exception of areas closer to the end of the game).

Now as is usually the case with souls likes, I feel like they all try to stand out in some way. AI Limit does a few different things that I found… interesting. The first is their “mana” equivalent. There is a bar that fills up the more you deal damage and reduces the more you take damage. This bar is a resource that you can use either for spells, or weapon art equivalents (special moves to each weapon), or the higher you keep it, the more damage your weapon does in general. There’s also some other equipment that benefits from the sync rate (the level the bar is filled with).

I liked the idea of the system, though I found that I ended up opting to only use the bar for damage. The reason is that weapon arts usually drained a large portion of the bar for some amount of damage, and spells felt similar. Though granted, I didn’t spec into this so I won’t fault the game for that. That’s just how I usually play these games. I did like how it at least let the player use their abilities because they could actually get it back.

But to me the most interesting decision they made is that normally in these games, there is a stamina meter. In AI limit, there is no stamina bar. This means you can freely attack/swing/dodge/run as many or as much as you want. I think the idea is to keep the player always on the move and not have to worry about a stamina resource, but I felt this was actually a detriment for a few reasons. It introduced a new kind of balancing issue with (I’ll just borrow the term from souls) poise. If an enemy had no poise, there was no threat because you could just spam an attack without fear of them retaliating. Now, some enemies DID have poise, and it led to weird situations where I honestly never understood when an enemy actually broke poise or not. Bosses also had weird poise meters where it felt like sometimes I would be able to break it, other times not.

This was my biggest issue with the core of the game. Poise felt weirdly inconsistent, and the infinite stamina led to weird combos/situations where I could just freely wail on a boss until they died.

The other issue I had was that weapon variety was very very low. They had the idea to make each weapon unique with their unique weapon art, but the base movesets for a lot of them were very similar. R2s also didn’t have proper follow ups, and while switching weapon attacks were cool, I found myself rarely ever needing to use them.

The parry system implementation I have similar gripes with most modern parry implementations. I’ll say that it’s nice that it feels like at least it’s not a “win all” button, but it did feel like some bosses you pretty much had to parry in order to get a true punishable opening, most notably a lot of the other Bladers.

Now, this experience is HEAVILY contrasted with the fact that very recently I just finished an archipelago run of Dark Souls 1, which is my personal favourite souls game. For context, archipelago is sort of like a multiplayer randomizer where items are between other people’s worlds. It’s pretty fun and I’ve done a few runs with friends.

Playing through DS1 made me realize how much the sort of genre of souls likes has changed since its conception. It felt even more real coming from something like AI Limit and going straight to DS1 because there were a lot of times playing where I thought “oh right, not every enemy needs an instant reaction or you need to perfectly memorize the boss pattern”. A lot of enemies in DS1 were slower, more deliberate, and the weapons also had a satisfying weight behind them too. Your attacks could be slower because bosses had longer openings and/or more telegraphed attacks.

Not to say that “oh I’m so good at souls” but it made me wonder how Dark Souls 1 really got that reputation of “this game is so hard!!!!”. It’s a punishing game for sure, but most of the game is in my opinion, rather balanced and fair. The later you go the harder some bosses get of course, and healing/attack windows are smaller, but even then bosses never felt like I had to instantly react and understand their moveset.

Of course, there are some exceptions. Bed of Chaos is still terrible, and Lost Izalith as a whole still sucks. But I loved the world design in DS1, I loved walking around and seeing all the different areas, I loved how interconnected each part felt, how you could see different parts of the world from other parts, (most) bosses felt fun to fight too!

Personally speaking, the increase in faster and faster bosses and more and more damaging bosses feels like it came from a need to meet customer expectations of “oh these games MUST be hard” but that’s a whole other can of worms. This post was really just a way for me to say that DS1 is still near and dear to my heart, and that I think more recent souls (elden ring included) and other imitations fall flat in a lot of ways. Of course there’s a lot I wish was in DS1, and I wish Lost Izalith was finished as well, but I really had a lot of fun playing DS1 again.