Why must we collect?
Completely petty angry rant after playing the Kunitsu Gami demo, a game that's not even really for me which reminded me how sick I am of collecting, opening & activating shit in action games, particularly out-of-combat. It's a barely-engaging activity with the most bare-minimum amount of depth possible (wow you might collect this instead of that in the allotted time! RoUTiNG!!!) which gets boring almost immediately on repeated playthroughs or punishes mistakes with boredom & tedium instead of say frustration (DARED to get hit in God Hand? Run around breaking boxes hoping for RNG to bless you before moving onto the next level, c00l)
About 60% of this game's demo is just running around picking shit up, I know it's time based but there are more economical ways to do it like having everything be really quick but then just depleting the timer directly or something like that. What's more is that everything has obnoxious lengthy animations & "hold to do/skip" for god knows what reason. The "hold to skip" mechanic is assssss.
Peep this bullshit - this is the intro to a boss and the boss fight itself. Here you have to grab the goddess' chest, she'll give you a bunch of ballz which you use to power up the homies. Then you walk forward & hold to skip a cutscene. The player here was particularly slow but even if you do it quickly that's prob like 20-30 seconds of downtime that should not exist. Granted the boss might as well be a free win cause it's so easy so the avg player won't go through this more than once, but now imagine what happens if you, like me, wanna use this boss to mess around with the game mechanics and quick kill it without relying on upgrades/special attacks (it tracks your time!). Or imagine what happens if you run into a difficult boss like this that'll take 2-4 hours of repeated attempts to beat.
It's so pervasive too. Almost every fucking game needs some shitty collection element for people who LOVE ticking boxes on 1st playthrough. Even some of my favorite games have that crap like the Resident Evil games and God Hand - why are we running around breaking boxes? Why does Mercs have to start with a fucking resource treasure hunt instead of say dropping in resources based on timers? Why does DMC have a fuckin orb requirement? In fact, Capcom's brain damage stretches way back - look at Tower of DOom and Shadow Over Mystara, these games make you pick up individual fuckin coins and a bunch of junk constantly. It's a completely pointless slog. Why is it like this? I know why, but WHY.
At this rate I might start defending Nioh's loot because as shitty and full of junk it is - it's standardized. I can ignore an entire level's loot, then go to the next level, kill a bunch of enemies at the start and get appropriate gear then continue playing like normal. It makes the loot truly optional in a real sense.
I dunno if this is just first playthrough bias, carelessness, or if it's something more malicious like devs deliberately building anticipation by making everything slow as fuck for those sweet sweet dopamine releases even as nothing interesting happens. Either way it's gotta go.
Kunitsu-Gami itself is kinda interesting I suppose, def has an anti-bog layer but if they ramp up the difficulty & level design way past what's seen in the demo (even the extra stage was devoid of any kinda strategy) and have some scoring (instead of the meaningless checkbox criteria present atm) then I could see it clicking with some people. Especially since it could have some big brain micro strats with your units or something. Demo's very easy & barebones though so it's hard to know what to make of it.