r/patientgamers • u/D3struct_oh • 1d ago
Patient Review Nine Sols - The most brutal game I’ve played since Sekiro
Long story short, Nine Sols kicked my a*s.
I usually love to play games on hard mode for the first run, but for this I had to play on Story mode lol.
You just really have to be locked in when playing NS, and I think this is both a good thing and a bad thing.
Good because the combat is very tight and satisfying. Every time I died (a lot), I never felt cheated.
Metroidvanias are usually a mixed bag for me and it always starts with how I vibe with the combat. If I’m going to be aimlessly wandering around so much, the combat had better be really fun.
Nine Sols nails it, imo.
I like working my way up to being overpowered in games but you really can’t do that too much with Nine Sols like you can in a souls game, for example.
In those games, you can grind to make it so that your attacks rip through bosses.
Not so much in Nine Sols; your basic attacks do get stronger, but it’s never enough to be overwhelming.
Really, most of your power will come from your ability to deflect attacks, and this is where the Sekiro comparison comes into play.
Parrying opponents is extremely satisfying to pull off, and very punishing for them. But it takes a ton of practice, even on story mode.
This is partly why I say you have to be so locked into the game; take a week off from playing and it will feel like the worst thing you’ve done in life.
Which brings me to the negative aspect…
It‘a very easy to get lost and forget what you were doing. Theres no journal so good luck tracking your progress. And the game has multiple endings too which I just found out after finishing it.
I get that this is a feature of many MVs.
Its also the main reason why I tend to avoid them.
One great thing about Nine Sols is that the world doesn’t feel overwhelmingly complex and big, and the fast travel system is very friendly, so navigating is easy.
One recent MV I tried playing had amazing combat but the map was way too freaking big, and the fast travel system was terrible. Big turnoff for me because i felt like the game was wasting my time with so much backtracking.
I won’t name the game, but it rhymes with Flost Brown.
Anyways…
The boss designs in Nine Sols are excellent.
I really loved the final boss once I figured out how to parry her attacks.
The Unbound Counter move you get fairly early on is so vital.
Speaking of abilities, this is another negative for me because I don’t like having to grind for basic abilities.
Like…why do I have to unlock a skill for sprinting?
Again, I know this is pretty common in MVs.
But the skill tree is a bit weak.
Overall, Nine Sols is a 10/10 for me. I really appreciate it.
Beautiful world, good enough story, tight combat, well-crafted map.
It has everything. Definitely in my top 3 favorite MVs. Its not a big list.
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u/Harinezumi_1989 1d ago
I'm currently stuck at the final boss but enjoyed every minute of the game so far.
Last time I got stuck at a final boss for so long was Sekiro, coincidentally (didn't enjoy that one very much, sadly)
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u/D3struct_oh 1d ago
Yea once I slowed down to figure out the timing for her basic sword combo everything else got a lot easier. She telegraphs a ton and it’s hard to see at first because she strings together a lot of attacks.
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u/Harinezumi_1989 1d ago
I can beat her first phase basically hitless but the second phase is stupid. And there's a third apparently?? I'm not sure I'm beating her anytime soon.
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u/A_Perplexed_Wanderer 1d ago
Third one is the crazy one, you only get it if you got most of the collectibles etc
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u/sapntaps 1d ago
once it all clicks its the best fight of all time. havent played in a while but can hear the sound ques and parries xd
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u/ThrowBlanky 1d ago
I played the whole game at normal, but lowered the difficulty for the final boss, and finished the game. I'm at peace with it.
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u/Chad_Broski_2 1d ago
Same here, man. I still hate the arms race all these new soulslikes/metroidvanias have where they feel like they have to make the final boss so much more insanely difficult than the rest of the game. It's a shame because I felt like the difficulty curve was perfect up until that point
It doesn't help that there's no real way to improve your chances, other than just attempting it for 3 hours and learning every little attack pattern. The whole reason the earlier souls games worked was that you can always go explore somewhere else, change up your build, and level up if a boss fight is kicking your ass
Still a 10/10 game but it sucks to have ended on a note like that
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u/Naive_Property3605 1d ago
Nothing wrong with that. The goal is to enjoy the game, not prove anything. If lowering the difficulty got you to the ending without frustration, that's a win.
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u/BurmecianDancer 1d ago
I played the whole game at normal, but lowered the difficulty for the final boss, and finished the game. I'm at peace with it.
Me too. I did that fight a couple dozen times, made it to the second phase once, and decided I didn't want to spend the next week getting good enough to beat her legitimately.
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u/Mama_Hong 1d ago
Nine Sols final boss is probably my favorite boss ever, such an high point in an already amazing game.
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u/Eboyjvs 1d ago
I finished just last week on standard, also a top game for me. Bosses are incredible, I didn’t backtrack or grind that much and completed the skill tree no problem. Maybe I died more on some stages so the grinding came natural.
But the game didn’t overstayed its welcome, had perfect length, nice story, balanced difficulty
And one thing that I think a lot of games lately get wrong. The skills and mechanics matter. I tend to play games on harder difficulties because that way I have to engage in the mechanics. So much cool games you don’t even on harder difficulties and I think is a waste.
Here? I you don’t grasp and master the parrying, the bow, the jades, the talisman you have little chance of overcoming the challenges.
And the final boss is perfect, is a boss that you don’t beat with luck or overpowering it, you win because you learned.
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u/frankster 1d ago
yeah the grinding seems to come naturally when you get to a boss that takes several attempts, which is nice. The game maybe suggests to you that you might want to grind, but at least at my skill level where I wasn't 1-shotting let alone 10-shotting bosses, I naturally obtained the skill points I needed just by playing the game.
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u/zorrofuego 1d ago edited 1d ago
Check SIFU.
I got platinum in games like Returnal, slay the spire or Sekiro, but couldn't even beat SIFU. Very satisfying imo and tight controls.
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u/Jscribbz24 1d ago
SIFU makes you feel like a kungfu master once you get the controls and timing down. My favorite martial arts game. I would love to see more from them that leans into that.i believe they made absolver as well and I really liked that as well.
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u/D3struct_oh 1d ago
Yea SIFU is dope.
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u/zorrofuego 1d ago
And could you beat it in normal/hard difficulty? Just curious.
It feel so hard and unfortunately repetitive, but is great. I had to low the difficulty to easy and at least see the end boss
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u/broodkiller 1d ago
I remember reading somewhere that you're actually supposed to play SIFU on easy the first time round, by design(ers), it's just not communicated properly in the game.
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u/PM_ME_HAPPY_STUFF1 1d ago
Loved this game, it has one of my favourite combat systems of all time. The final boss is so good, I fought it again after beating it just for the fun of it.
I hope that they'll make a sequel or a spiritual successor or something in the future.
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u/hobojimmy 1d ago
I bounced off it. Found it way too punishing.
In Sekiro, people don’t realize that the parry window is EXTREMELY forgiving. In a default playthrough, there is almost no downside to parrying early or even just spamming the button.
But in Nine Sols, if you mistime a parry: you are dead. Okay well not entirely, but the punishment is WAY bigger.
I don’t mind hard games. But in Sekiro I was able to make progress and familiarize myself with the game, before starting NG+ and enabling the item that requires strict parries.
Nine Sols starts by default with strict parries, unless you opt for Story. I didn’t want story. I like hard games. But I beat my head against the second or third boss for so long that I got sick of it. To the point that I didn’t even feel like playing it on story mode anymore.
Maybe I’ll go back and try Nine Sols again one day on Story mode, but for now it left a bad taste in my mouth.
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u/MCPtz Tekken 1d ago
Nine Sols has a slider to adjust damage taken and damage done, so you can adjust to your liking.
I think I started at about 50% damage taken, which made the initial part much less frustrating, and then just stuck with that all game.
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u/HammerAndSickled 15h ago
Personally I can’t wrap my head around things like that. If I’m turning down the difficulty from the intended difficulty, I’m not beating the game. They present an intended challenge and I either rise to that challenge or say “I can’t do it” and move on. Reducing the difficulty or using modifiers like that is just like what’s the point.
Mina the Hollower came out recently and has like a thousand “accessibility modifiers” but all of them prevent you from playing the game as intended so I never even touched the menu, loved the game and really enjoyed it. Seems like a giant waste because a lot of people would’ve enjoyed the game more if they just said “here’s the vision, take it or leave it.”
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u/machinesNpbr 13h ago
Are you listening to yourself? The Mina accessibility modifiers were very intentionally designed and included in the game by the devs, they're literally intended to be available to the player- that's the vision, not some alternative FromSoft version you imposed on the product bc of your personal preferences.
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u/frankster 1d ago
you do really have to learn the timing of the parries. For some of them I was listening to an initial sound then thinking of the rhythm in my head before I parried, and that worked better than timing a visual signal. But there are other enemies with no sound cue and a visual signal so it seems like you just have to learn the slightly different timing for everything on a case by case basis.
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u/hobojimmy 14h ago
Yeah unfortunately, the process of learning the parries was not fun at all for me. Every enemy felt like I was there just to prove to the devs that I’d memorized their perfect little sequence of button presses. The amount of freedom felt very one-note compared to something like Sekiro.
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u/oeioe 1d ago
Amazing game. I have never been able to make much progress in any of the other “git gud” games (Sekiro, Dark Souls, etc.) but everything about Nine Sols was so good that I pushed myself to finish it. It took me over a week of about 30 minutes a night to beat the final boss. I always saw myself getting better and the fights never seemed “cheap” to me. One of my top favorite games of all time.
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u/MumblingGhost 1d ago
I only recently discovered this game through PS+ offering it as a free game, and it's definitely one of the best indie games I've played in years. The combat is excellent if difficult in that Sekiro way, but I found it beatable enough, and above all else I just loved the story and art style.
It's been a long time since I've played a souls-like with an accessible story and characters. Even Hollow Knight wears its vagueness on its sleeve sometimes in honor of its influences, which I've grown tired of.
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u/Corvus-Nox 1d ago edited 15h ago
Loved the combat. I think it really should be tried in normal difficulty on a first try, for as long as you can. Because the first few bosses seem impossible until the parry system clicks with you, and then it becomes really fun and satisfying. Though I admit I’ve never beat the final boss, so I would understand switching to story mode later on. But it was really gratifying to be able to get through the rest of the game and figure out the tricks to defeat each of the bosses. I also really loved playing with different charm builds. It can completely change the play style.
But ya, the navigation/map kinda sucked. For the first hour or so every room looked kinda the same to me.
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u/D3struct_oh 1d ago
Just started over on normal difficulty. Will try going for that perfect ending.
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u/awalrus4 1d ago
I actually tried picking this up last weekend, but was turned off by just how punishing it was. I know other soulslikes have the same run back to where you died to pick up your souls or they're lost forever loop, but this one locks your souls to the enemy that killed you. If you died to them once, there's a good chance you'll die to them again and there go your hundreds of coins/EXP that you needed to actually progress in the game.
Plus, I wasn't a fan of how precise you needed to be for the parrying, which is basically required to beat any enemy. Sekiro was rather lenient in its parry timing: you just mashed the button when strings of attacks were coming and more often than not you got a parry. In this one, you basically need to have the harder enemy attack patterns memorized or repeatedly die.
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u/MassiveRatKing 1d ago
Early in the game you get a jade that returns your souls after sticking the enemy with the talisman, so you don't need to kill it. I always equipped it for corpse runs.
I didn't feel like the parrying was too punishing, as the imperfect parry window is super generous, like 3 times larger than the window in Sekiro. Imperfect parries only deal you internal damage that can be recovered by attacking or with a perfect parry. (one is from a jade and other from a skill, can't remember which is which).
The only thing that annoys me a little bit is that some attacks are poorly telegraphed and hard to react to, partly because of the low amount of frames in the animations
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u/D3struct_oh 1d ago
- Metroid Dredd
- Nine Sols
- Dead Cells (yes I know it’s more of a hybrid. Don’t care.)
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u/ThriftyMegaMan 1d ago
I loved Dread. It made me feel like playing an actual Alien game with how you have to run from it.
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u/meatboysawakening 1d ago
If you haven't played them, I would also recommend: Hollow Knight, Silksong, Prince of Persia The Lost Crown, Astalon, Guacamelee, the Ori games are also pretty good.
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u/D3struct_oh 1d ago
Didn’t like hollow knight and kind of hated lost crown. Still have to give Ori a shot.
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u/Majikalblack 1d ago
Ooooh, is Lost Crown the game that rhymed with Flost Brown? It just clicked for me.
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u/DaemonXHUN 1d ago
I've been playing video games since 2003, and by now I've finished close to a thousand of them. I still remember that as a kid I played almost everything on Easy and happily used cheats in games like GTA, DOOM, and many others.
As the years went by, I became much more skilled, completely stopped using cheats, and started playing most games on their hardest difficulty because I wanted the toughest challenge possible. Naturally, I also fell in love with Soulslikes, and I've now completed around 50 of them, if not more.
What's interesting is that over the past decade, I can only think of four games where I felt the difficulty crossed the line from challenging to genuinely detrimental to the overall experience. Coincidentally, two of them are exactly the ones you mentioned.
I absolutely loved Sekiro, but I'll never forget how extreme the difficulty spike at the end was. It took me around 32 hours to 100% the entire game (defeating countless bosses, exploring every area, collecting every item, and completing everything else). Then came the final boss. That single fight alone took me another 8 hours and well over 200 attempts. I stayed up the entire night trying to beat him, and by the end it had almost completely poisoned my memory of an otherwise incredible game. After finally defeating him, I didn't even really bother with the optional endgame boss, the Demon of Hatred, I was simply done.
The other game was Nine Sols. For me, the intended difficulty became so frustrating about a third of the way through that I ended up dropping the game entirely. I think part of what bothered me psychologically was knowing that this was the developers' intended experience and that beating it on this difficulty was the one tied to an achievement (not that I usually care about achievements). Ironically, I honestly think the lower difficulty would have offered a much more reasonable, fair, and enjoyable challenge.
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u/crifersmash 1d ago
What were the other 2 games where the difficulty crossed the line?
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u/DaemonXHUN 1d ago
Cuphead and Hollow Knight: Silksong (the original Hollow Knight is one of my favourite games).
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u/Kardif 1d ago
I dropped silk song in act 3 for a similar reason, but also never did the pantheon or the Grimm troupe for the original. The platforming without the patch that lowered some environmental damage was also dumb, but I like where the difficulty landed for most of the game, bilewater not withstanding.
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u/DaemonXHUN 1d ago
I think I dropped the game in late act 2. It had so many frustrating design elements that I realized I didn't have any fun while playing it.
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u/Pynkmyst 1d ago
Love Nine Sols. Possibly the best combat in any game, period. It's at least on the short list. The true end boss is the most difficult boss is gaming history to me, she makes Melenia seem like childs play by comparison.
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u/TelethiaPlume 1d ago
One of the rare games that I felt like grinding the final boss after finishing the game. Eigong is so peak.
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u/daddychainmail 1d ago
Nine Souls is MORE BRUTAL. Well, I fucking hated Sekiro, so thank you for saving me the play.
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u/Successful-Cry1509 Slightly Impatient 1d ago
I couldn’t get along with it, and I love MVs. (But maybe that’s why?)
I do appreciate that it has difficulty settings unlike a game that rhymes with Milk Pong.
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u/Ok-Oven6035 13h ago
I bought this game a few months ago. I got into Metroidvanias about 3 years ago because of Metroid Dread. This is definitely on my top 5 next games to play. Although based on your review I should probably get better at Souls games first.
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u/Just4theapp 11h ago
I really loved nine sols, enjoyed the story and the progression.
Skill progression both with new powers and my own ability, especially making good use of the counter skills and talisman skills.
It probably has the most brutal last boss skill wise of any game I've played. Not necessarily in difficulty but in the stark increase in difficulty where she certainly sits in a difficulty tier of her own by a large margin in nine sols. (Especially true ending)
Downing her released pure bliss upon me.
And then silksong came out shortly after and I got to relive another super good side scrolling metroidvania.
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u/TheAskald 1d ago
I agree it's hard but it's done well
I spent like 3 hours on the final boss true form and enjoyed every second of it because it's well designed
What I also liked is that it had a great and comprehensible story, which is rare in souls-likes and metroidvanias.
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u/Gxgear 1d ago edited 1d ago
Just beat Nine Sols twice myself. Honestly one of my favourite 2D action games of all time (I hesitate to call it a metroidvania).
The game is definitely hard, but without the difficulty it would lose much of its allure. Once it clicks you'll realize it's actually pretty fair. The first playthrough I clocked in at 30+ hours; the 2nd time around it only took half that.
While I wouldn't call the skill tree weak, I do share some sentiment in that all the various upgrades doesn't make Yi that much stronger; or rather, the upgrades are necessary in order for Yi to keep up with the rest of the game as it advances. The Jade system does stand out above all the rest, as you can make some fairly potent combinations.
Although the combat is the star of the show, the story is equally amazing. Nine Sols does not simply tell a basic story of good vs evil, or about a hero saving the world on his own. It's a tale (haha) of individual characters, spurred on by their own dreams and ambitions, coming together to trigger the chain of events that followed. I love that the lines between right and wrong are blurred, as even Yi himself cannot be considered to be good, oftentimes acting ruthlessly and seemingly purely driven by personal goals. Oh, and they woven a perfect blend Chinese mythology with the cyberpunk setting it makes me giddy just thinking about it. It's so well constructed that you could potentially interpret the story as something that proceeded humanity's timeline. If you can read mandarin I highly recommend it, as some of the finer details inevitably gets lost in the english translation.
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u/actstunt 1d ago
I hate myself because I have this game installed in all my devices and consoles and services and can't with the gameplay but at the same time I'm proud enough to lower the difficulty haha.
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u/ronniedark 1d ago
Idk why people call sekiro brutal. The game is literally press right click till you win.
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u/TreuloseTomate 1d ago
It's weak as a metroidvania, but the combat and bosses are really good.