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"Master" has a very attractive setting: you are a martial arts master who is bent on revenge, and you have to overcome unparalleled difficulties and achieve a task that is not impossible in a short life - hand blade enemy. But you have a secret weapon: after each death, you can be resurrected. But after the resurrection, the protagonist in your hand will also become more old and weak, and you will have to race against time to complete the mission before you run out of life.
It's a novel concept, so I'm very sorry to see that developer Sloclap hasn't been able to unleash its potential. "Master" is full of confusing, inescapable, and irritating shortcomings, all of which are inseparable from its superpower mechanism.
But before we talk about the disadvantages, let's talk about the advantages: the "becoming a martial arts master" part of the selling point is very well done. "Master" is a very good action game in its bones, which can satisfy all your fantasies about Hong Kong kung fu movies.
Light Attack and Heavy Attack have sophisticated animations that string together beautiful combos, and each time you hit an enemy, it is accompanied by refreshing hitting sounds and comic-style speed lines. You can use brutality, speed, and execution techniques from the surrounding environment to end stun enemies, and every time you use execution techniques, I can't help but marvel. From the very beginning of the game, you are a strong man to be reckoned with.
But your enemies are by no means weak. With just a few attacks, they can bring you down, and they know how to use their numerical superiority to surround you and subdue you. In this world where Batman: The Arkham Trilogy is over, we're used to the "polite" miscellaneous soldiers in third-person games, but the miscellaneous soldiers in Master are by no means like that.
They don't play turn-based games with you, they don't wait for you to finish fighting and then fight back, and they don't use flashing icons to remind you of what they're going to do next. So keep moving, sliding over tables, jumping over furniture, disrupting enemy formations, dividing and conquering them so that they can't take advantage of their numerical superiority.
If the enemy catches you, you still have the tools to resist – maybe a little too much. In Master, the resource you use for defense is called the "system", which has the same effect as the "posture" of "Only Wolf: Shadow Death Twice". You can counteract attacks with blocks, but your System slot will rise. When the "system" is full, it will shatter, leaving you unable to defend for the next few precious seconds. But conversely, if you can perfectly grasp the timing of the block, you can make the enemy's "system" slot rise.
Master also has a mechanism to increase the complexity of the operation called "avoid" by holding down the block key and then flicking the left stick up or down depending on where the enemy is attacking. If you have the timing right, you can avoid getting hurt and restore some "system" values.
Each of these defensive mechanisms requires a lot of effort to learn, but these efforts will not be in vain. It's a really cool feeling when you dodge a bat attack with a perfect dive, causing the enemy to miss and hit another enemy behind you.
When you're at an overwhelming disadvantage and need to make use of offensive and defensive mechanics, that's when Master is at its best. You can push an enemy into the crowd of his allies and walk through the crowd like a stream of water, enjoying the battle with parry, disarming, attacking, dodging, and sweeping legs. I'd love to tell you that that's all Master is all about, and I'd love to tell you that it's a game that's immersed in dynamic combat.
Unfortunately, this is not the case in reality.
There's a bunch of other stuff to this game. After I watched the first trailer for Master and learned about this novel mechanism of "getting old every time I die," my reaction was, "Oh, interesting, how are they going to do this concept?" How can we gracefully translate it into a game system?" Unfortunately, the answer to this question is, "They didn't do it." It's a very confusing, very clumsy mechanism. Its internal logic is particularly difficult to understand, making the whole game less interesting.
Let's talk about its problems.
At the beginning of the game, you are a 20-year-old white-browed master. You must sweep the hideouts of the 5 bosses in a fixed order. After each defeat, you can be resurrected with blood, but you will also become a few years older and have a few more white hairs. The age increased after each resurrection is a Fibonacci sequence, which becomes 21 years after the first resurrection; 23 years after the resurrection; after the third resurrection, it becomes 26 years old, and so on. (Note: This is not actually a Fibonacci sequence, here is just a metaphor.) )
Hopefully, you haven't been confused yet, because this is just getting started.
Every integer multiple of 10 (e.g., 30 or 40) is a milestone. Attack damage increases with each arrival, but the health cap decreases. It's not that, risk and reward coexist, as you get older, you will slowly become a "glass cannon". Each time you die, you will enter a shop and can use experience points to buy very useful combos or skills, such as grabbing thrown things, anti-bouncing, and sliding shovels that can kick down enemies. Very good, very simple and clear.
But! Each skill has an age limit and cannot be learned at a certain age. Probably as the English proverb says, "Old dogs can't learn new tricks." You can also repurchase skills that have been unlocked in this game, and repeated purchases cannot upgrade skills, but if you repeat 5 times, you can unlock them permanently, and then you can use them directly in each game. Tut.
The system has a lot to work on, even the interface is very unintuitive, with a bunch of black, gray, and pink dots on it; experience points to consume; skill descriptions; and terms and conditions. Smashing experience into skills that have already been unlocked is not at all cool, there is no sense of satisfaction at all, it feels like paying off a school loan.
You can also increase your stats in shrines, which are scattered around and can be found several in each level. The previously mentioned skill shops are basically active and combo moves, while the shrine offers passive effects such as increasing weapon durability, increasing the amount of health returned after defeating enemies with executions, and even resetting the number of deaths.
There are 9 specialization skills in the shrine, each with 3 levels, and in each shrine, you can choose one of them to upgrade, but only once. So what currency does it cost to unlock them? It depends on which you want to level up, some are unlocked with experience points, some are unlocked as long as you are not overaged, and a few are required to use a very abstract currency, the "Level Score".
You might ask, "Why are you talking to me about this?" Many games have obscure upgrade systems. I'm a Dark Souls player." You're right, a complicated and tricky upgrade system can also be very interesting, but only if it's elegantly combined with gameplay.
But "Master" is not like this, not at all.
I haven't said anything about the boss mechanism, and I haven't said that as long as the protagonist reaches the age of 70, there is only one life left. I have spent a lot of time analyzing the vague rules and systems of Master, and I want to save my dear readers from the same suffering. Believe me, no matter how much energy you put into understanding the underlying logic of Master, there will never be a time when you will suddenly be enlightened.
Like Hades and Reincarnation of Death, Master is a run-based game, which means trying multiple games repeatedly, and each new game is a new opportunity to go further than the previous one. But unlike those games, Master has a lot of unnecessary complexity, and it's hard to determine if you've grown forever.
In Hades, weapons and the blessings received in each game have obvious graphical cues, and you can always confirm your status through icons and weapon effects. In Master, there's nothing in the frame to remind you of which skills you're equipped with.
Several times, after rubbing the combo, I found that I had not yet unlocked this skill in this game. Unless you spend time and effort unlocking a skill permanently, you'll never be able to train muscle memory. In short, the Master's system is particularly winding, and its visual language doesn't help in the slightest.
Similarly, the specializations unlocked in the shrine are reset after each game, so it is difficult to plan in advance how to add points, and it is difficult to inherit the knowledge of skills generated in the previous game to the new game.
"Master" is a difficult roguelite, and players naturally have to go out of their way to replay the same level over and over again. However, it should be mentioned that the map and enemy position of each round will not change, and it is not procedurally generated. I've played games like this before and I love it. In Dark Souls, a great game experience is finding shortcuts, returning to bosses in the most efficient way, and avoiding unnecessary battles.
But in "Master", there is no way to do this. Battles have mandatory trigger scripts, and the door certainly won't open until every straggler is knocked down. To remake a boss, you may have to spend 10 minutes to 15 minutes running back to the boss, but that's when all goes well.
Each game doesn't bring surprises, but the good thing is that it brings a feeling of "I've gradually mastered everything and become a master". But watching the same script event too much will definitely be boring, and listening to the same dialogue that can't be skipped will definitely be annoying, and then the game will become like chewing wax and becoming a chore.
It's a shame, because there are several really beautiful shots in this game, and you'll wander through the colorful, ethereal, dreamlike scenes, which are really beautiful – but only for the first time.
With each re-look, I became more and more irritable and felt more and more incredulous. The level designers did a great job, but no one told them it was a roguelite? No one told them that players would pass by those artworks again and again, and then be hit by an enemy on the other end?
Master is a particularly frustrating game because, even though it has a lot of messy, clunky design, underneath it, it's a great action game, a game that I really, really want to play. But "Master" scrapped its martial arts and lifted a stone to drop itself on its own feet—its high-concept design pursuits ruined the fun in its roots.
Compile | Tony