Why Iga 7 has fucked up game design
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Point 1: The Glyph system broke the boss fights
When the team added the glyph system, they thought in their minds it was a great new addition to CV gameplay. But then with all the possible attack options of different elements, weapon types, combined with stat boosts and accessories, they ran into the problem of how do we balance this?. If one player who has all the right stuff equipped can do 1000 damage per hit and another player who doesn't have all the l33t stuff is doing 12 damage per hit, how do we balance a boss fight? Their solution? Give the bosses a ton of HP and balance it towards the gamers who have the right setup. Unfortunately this meant that for everyone who didn't know the exact right weapons to use, the bosses took 10 mins or drawn out fighting while chipping away little damage by little.
Point 2: The Glyph system (more precisely the elemental dependency) made fighting normal enemies not fun
Making every enemy strong against certain elements and weak against others definitely changed up normal castle progression fighting. Instead of fighting just being about the skill of learning enemy patterns, dodging them, and retaliating back. The fights became about equipping the right elements for each enemy. Even with the Glyph Sleeve, this meant if you walked into a room with a catgirl and a holy flying monster attacking you, you'd have to switch your sleeve to physical attacks for the catgirl and then switch to darkness attacks for the flying holy monster. While this might add a layer of strategy, it just bogs down the pacing of a normal CV where you dodge and counter and keep moving. It's cumbersome and slows down your progression (not to mention makes you cycle through menus way more often than other CV games, and being in the menu in battle is the last place you want to be in an action game).
Point 3: Dual Netisco is broken and ruins the last third of the game
After players are annoyed with point 2 above for 75% of the game, they'll find a lot of relief when the get the dual Netisco laser beams that have a huge range and can be spammed for like 4-6 hits a second. Once those are obtained, elemental affinities don't even matter because you can spam so many beams per second every enemy dies in 1-2 seconds anyhow. The problem is not the damage but the range: When you have the Netisco, for the rest of the game you are standing safely 10 steps away from every enemy and none can even reach your foot before they die. Suddenly the tension and the skill of castle progression in CV disappears. Normally castle progression is challenging and rewarding because you have to learn the enemy patterns and retaliate correctly in order to take as little damage as possible. Once you get the Netisco though you don't have to learn a single enemy pattern for the rest of the game.
Yet, even with the flaws Metroidvania still works and exploring new areas is enjoyable. Ecclesia has some cool looking areas, some great boss patterns, and is pretty meaty in length. It's definitely a weaker game than PoR which had the same great challenging action but with far less grievances, but it's still better than some of the GBA games or even DoS.
8/10 in my book.
