u/wouwouwouwou

I’ve played through a hefty chunk of side content. All of the main story. To me, it wasn’t quite as bad as a lot of people say it was, but that’s likely because I went in with such low expectations. But yeah, the ending of the main story was the biggest nothingburger I have ever experienced from any game ever. The finale level of Angry Birds 2 hits harder than whatever that was.

That’s not even what this post is about. I learned shortly after finishing the main story about the bonus Templar/Observatory quests. I started playing them and I was having a good time. It felt like real effort was put into these. More than about 95% of anything else in the entire game.

As I played through, I eventually got to the 2nd Nirmala boss fight. Wow. What a mood killer. Awful. While it may not be impossible if you know what you’re getting in to and you’re also a sweat when it comes to these things in games, it is impossible for me. I play casual. I play on normal. I don’t mind something challenging but I’m not looking to get legitimately stressed when I’m sitting down to play a game on my day off work.

But here’s the REAL problem. I have a couple loadouts, that I figured would be good enough for anything as I’ve never had anything close to a problem with them prior to this fight.

So I attempted the fight, died over and over for about an hour. On top of all of the strategies I saw online that didn’t work for me, that whole time I was switching up my loadouts, trying different weapons and charms from my inventory, even switching up my skill tree. I was not considering that this was taking up all of my autosave slots.

My most previous manual save was about 3 hours ago shortly after I started playing, but before the dud finish of the main story.

I am out of options. I can’t beat Nirmala. I can’t exit the fight to come back to it later. It won’t let me change difficulty. I can’t even cheese the fight. Either I lose hours of progress or I just give it up. After the disappointment this game was to the franchise, I’m just not willing to give 3 hours of unpaid time back to this game.

It sucks because there were some things I enjoyed. I enjoyed exploring. It’s funny, I’m actually struggling to think of more things as I type this. I enjoyed Yasuke, and I enjoyed the stealth for the most part. But I’m kind of forced to be done now. It’s unfortunate that they decided to design this awful boss fight in the middle of a pretty decent quest line. One of the only quest lines that feels like AC.

Edit: I beat her. Finally. I’m 99% sure the quest was bugged as she was taking zero damage from the floor traps the first night I tried. I reloaded the game completely and then I began to actually see her health drop. I still think it’s a horribly designed boss fight. It wasn’t fun to beat, I did not use my weapons whatsoever besides one tanto ability to stun her. Running in circles and stepping on glowing symbols on the ground should not be the solution to any boss fight in any game ever. It’s boring and not rewarding.

This is my opinion. I’m fairly young, I sort of grew up with The Getaway so there will always be a slight bias.

Every album beforehand though is great. Josh or John it doesn’t matter, they all have something special about them. You can tell that real effort is being put in to create something with a cohesive (or purposefully abstract) vision.

For me, Unlimited Love and Dream Canteen are utterly awful. Each album has about 2 good songs, and the rest feel either like demos, or songs made by a soulless cloned version of RHCP.

I understand some of the reasons why people aren’t a fan of The Getaway, Chad’s signature drumming really just isn’t on display for about 80% of the album, It’s a lot more heavily produced and streamlined than any of the classic RHCP albums. But it has soul to it! You can easily grasp the “vibe” that’s being communicated by the band.

I just feel so much less of a “vibe” or vision with the last 2 albums than I do with any other of their albums. I understand it’s not the 90s or 2000s anymore, everyone has their peak, but they were still going so strong through the 2010s.

This might have came off as me glazing The Getaway more than I intended it to but I think the discussion point still stands.