Nine Sols review

**Note: dw about spoilers here, there aren't any, unless you count character names or whatever**

I've reviewed last year but I just finished replaying this shit for like the 10th time and I honestly feel like I didn't do it enough justice, I don't mean to dickride anything or whatever but this is genuinely like one of the best games I've ever played in my entire life dude it's so good and it needs more attention. This was like the best impulsive buy I ever made in my entire life cos I just randomly saw it on steam and thought it looked fucking awesome so I pirated it. Which yeah it's a bit of a dick move especially when it's made by an indie game company in Taiwan BUT in my defense when I was close to the end I just deleted everything, kept my save file, and bought the full thing on steam cos I felt bad especially since there was a ton of effort put into this project. 

Gameplay
This game plays a lot like Sekiro, well what I think Sekiro plays like cos I never tried it before but you get the point. The combat focuses a lot on parrying, and overtime the game will add more ways of parrying attacks, so if you don't try getting good with your parries you're basically fucked for the rest of the game, which isn't a bad thing I love it for that. The game encourages you to take advantage of these moves as much as possible and if you do you'll see that they're EXTREMELY powerful. The way I worded it might've made it sound super hard but trust me it's on the easier side of soulslikes. The game is super fair throughout, enemies and bosses telegraph their moves clearly, and you have an option to adjust damage in the settings if you're too much of a pussy, the only downside is that you won't get an achievement for beating the game normally but I'd say it's a fair payoff, it's called an achievement after all. The only boss I'd say that isn't really fair is Goumang but thankfully she doesn't have a lot of health and the fight isn't that bad especially if you take the time to explore each area. Speaking of exploration, this game is a metroidvania, and it handles those elements really nicely. Each of the areas are really memorable so if you ever end up having to backtrack (which isn't all that common and most of the time it's for something minor), you can find a bunch of stuff around and these will typically fall into the following categories.

1. Cash and scraps
Kinda self explanatory, you find money that you can use for upgrades. Scraps can be recycle for more cash too. They're just nice to have since you won't have to grind at all. I forgot to include this beforehand and I'm too lazy to rewrite the entire section above but you have a bow with different types of arrows you can swap and upgrade, but you have a limited amount of shots. There's also a pipe you smoke out of to heal and you can also upgrade that.

2. Poisons
There's an npc in your house who is immune to poison and if you give him a bunch of poison you find around the world he'll give you alcohol (that's implied to be made with his own puke) so that you can get blackout drunk and increase your health. You can also buy some of these poisons from a separate character but they tend to be expensive.

3. Sidequest items
Also self explanatory, there's only like three quests and only one of them is needed for the true ending. One of the other sidequests is pretty fun you just go around looking for secret minibosses that drop some items you need to complete the quest. The third sidequest I won't lie is really gay, they build up the ending of it and it's just really disappointing, I can excuse it though since the developers wanted it to end differently and include some other bossfights but they weren't able to gather enough money. Overall a fun way of exploring the other characters and taking advantage of some older areas. 

4. Materials
Alright remember how I mentioned that you can upgrade your bow and your pipe? Yeah well to do that you need some other things first, that's what the materials are for.

5. Tao fruits
Aight these are super important, there's a leveling system in the game with a skill tree. The skill tree is pretty good for the most part although some upgrades shouldn't even be there and just be part of your default moveset like geez I don't know BEING ABLE TO SPRINT? and also skullkicker ig but that's such a useless move that it doesn't even matter. Anyways point is, one of the ways you can attack enemies is with a talisman, which will blow up on them at the cost of using a qi charge. You get these charges by parrying attacks and you have a limit to how much you can get. Anyways point is, you can basically upgrade nearly every aspect of your character and one of the most important things you gotta go for is upgrading your qi charge limit and your talisman. These can completely change the way you approach fights and usually fit different playstyles, but there's one small issue. You have a limit to how much you level up and in turn how many skill points you have, which means you won't be able to get everything in the skill tree. This is where the tao fruits come in, they don't level you up but they increase the amount of damage you deal and give you extra skill points, on paper this sounds like you can get ridiculously powerful but trust me you'll need them especially if you're struggling with a bossfight. 

6. Lore drops
These aren't really items but you can find them around the map and they just give you lore about whichever area you're in and while I'm not really a geek for lore anymore I still think they're really cool since they're fucking great for world building.

7. Jades
Also really important, they work like hollow knight's charm system but the difference is that the jades aren't gay. They're a lot more balanced compared to the charms and they're very versatile, you can find a build for pretty much any situation. They're especially useful for fights and can be the difference between you getting buttfucked and you buttfucking. You can also buy these from npcs ofc, some of them aren't that useful but those usually work better in the early game.

8. Artifacts
You're also gonna need to get a bunch of these if you wanna get the good ending, by themselves they're basically fucking useless but they can lead to cool events happening at your house which can give you some really good items. All you really do with them is give them to Shaunshaun and you'll have some dialogue go on, and that's that. I personally think it's cool and I like the character interactions a lot, I know some people don't really give a shit and just wanna try to get the good ending as fast as possible like me, so thankfully if you wanna skip the yap sessions you can. 

You don't need to get the stuff I mentioned above, but they make the game easier and they're just really fun to go through. Usually the best stuff will be locked behind certain challenges in the game, some of the puzzle based ones are solid, they're not the best but they're not the worst either. I personally think the combat ones are the best but the parkour challenges are a close second since the controls are fucking great and make it super fun to just go through them. Again there's some other types but quite frankly I don't think anybody is willing to going through a list again and I think you get the point, the gameplay is GOATED and I could just leave it at that.

Music
The ost is on spotify I'm not even gonna bother with writing this part, I'll just send a separate review for it.

Artstyle/Animation
Holy shit it's great dude, it's beautiful and really eyecatching but won't be distracting enough to get you fucked over when you're fighting. The character art is pretty good I'm not too crazy over it but it's definitely pretty good, what I wanna talk about is the aesthetic dude. The game calls its aesthetic "taopunk" in its marketing and yeah they're not wrong but the name doesn't really make sense unless you see the art for yourself. It's basically just a mix of cyberpunk and chinese culture, it's really good bro and the game takes full advantage of it with its atmosphere and ambience. Each of the areas usually leans towards one of the aspects, some areas are much more industrial and futuristic, while others have much more Asian influence in their design. The foreground already looks amazing mind you but in my opinion the background tends to be so much nicer a lot of the time, you tend to see these really imposing run down structures in the back with a bunch of overgrown plants or some futuristic shit glowing. There's actually a lot of exceptions to this of course but I don't think I can fit all of it here, there's just a lot of variety so each area is really memorable in that sense. There's a handful manga panels, usually taking place before/after each bossfight, those also look great but it's a bit of a shame that you don't really see them often but again, the devs were on a budget. The animation is also great throughout, they're really clean but there's a few times where the smear frames can be a little noticeable and make for some goofy screenshots, and also the animation starts to lack when it comes to larger enemies but it's not that bad.

Story 
Listen this might be pushing it or whatever but I don't think there's any other story out there that involves alien asian space furries, cavemen, robots, and zombies. Listen it makes a lot more sense when you actually sit down and play the game, I'm not gonna do a full on deep dive into the story since I don't wanna spoil it to anybody but it's like if the matrix and star wars had a baby that grew up to be an esoteric heroin addict who was REALLY into taoism. Much like everything else I said about Nine Sols, the story fucking SLAPS, there's a lot of themes on religion and moving on from loss, I'm not gonna say anything else outside of that if you wanna know more, there's probably a video going through it or whatever but I ain't doing all that. I've mentioned that was some lore involved too, and if you're into that you'll probably be wayyy more into the story than I am especially since there's like an absurd amount that you can find, actually most of the items I've mentioned beforehand in the gameplay section has some in their descriptions. There's a bunch of stuff that takes place before the events of the game too involving a bunch of wars, dynasty's, and technological advancements that the manga goes into. The manga is really short, it's only like 3 chapters but again the art looks great and the story surrounds a character that you talk to every now and then but has like a huge ass role in the game's universe so there's that. Oh yeah also there's an arg, I lost track of it so take my words with a grain of salt but it mostly has to do with any cool announcements for Nine Sols like a discount or an event, but every now and then there's a lore drop or some secret messages found in the source code. Yknow the usual arg stuff, the last thing I remember from it was a video of 2 guys breaking into a building and stealing some shit, but I can't tell if that was an actual incident or if it was actually planned. Hopefully it might lead to some new dlc.

Overall this is a DAMN good game and I love it to death and I'd sell my fucking kidney for some new dlc, it runs well and the devs are doing a good job with patches. The only thing I really have an issue with is the lack of replayability, like yeah there's a boss rush mode, there's like a couple of mods, and you can always do challenge runs but I feel like they really fucked up by not adding anything else, idk maybe if they ever end up making dlc there might be some nice extra replay value for it but damn shit is so good and then just expects me to do nothing else with it once I did everything. Still goated as fuck though.

Rating: 9.7/10