I never buy these games full price, and they're rarely full price even at release. With DW I always wait for the Empires edition because I like the strategy layer to those, so maybe that's why they're usually a bit cheaper, but I somehow expect this to be sensibly priced aswell.

Love me some co-op slashing, and this seems to have a lot of self awareness and fun charm to it.

I personally prefer DW to any other game in the genre. It's less to do with elaborate combat - though that has a hypnotic, addictive quality aswell - and more to do with focusing your efforts in certain areas of a battlefield. The sweeping strategy of your approach in DW puts them high above similar games for me, and Empires in particular have a great sense of persistent campaign management and light tactical elements aswell.

N3 I straight up think is too involved for its own good, I didn't like that game at all.

I find it satisfying, but not in an involved combaty way. It feels more like Geometry Wars to me, you sorta "herd" groups of enemies together and then wash over them with your musou attack. I find DW games immensly addictive, but when you say "combat" I kinda picture elaborate combos and stuff like that, and that's not really what DW does.

And that's not really what I wanna do in a game like this, as little as I want elaborate flight combat tactics to be part of Geometry Wars.

More elaborate animation, more focus on each individual attack would just ruin it. It's meant to be this pulsating, rythmical, hypnotic thing. Really, it is GeoWars or Smash TV more than anything. In those games you push a stick to keep attacking, in DW you dish out virtually the same button presses over and over.

Winning in DW isn't about whether you defeat each individual enemy, it's about whether you can handle each enemy type and survive each boss wave. It's about concentrating your efforts in the right places in order to turn the tide of the battle. You collect powerups and health items, twin stick shooter style, and instead of a screen clearing "bomb" you have your musou attack.

DW has nothing to do with what you call "good combat", as little as GeoWars or Smash TV are about anything resembling a typical shooter's feedback. It's not an emulation of a physical thing, it's all gameplay layer. Japanese game design is often abstract to the point of having little in common with the visual representations on screen.

If this game is bogged down by strict dial-a-combo systems and fussy, sticky animation I'll prolly find it as frustrating as N3. Jim Sterling - self professed DW lover extraordinaire of Destructoid - played this at E3 and is stoked about it though, so I trust that it's a good time.

Also; mental character designs!

Well, N3 and DW are very clearly divided in stickyness I reckon. Sticky is when I feel like you're kinda sticking to an action through animation. N3 had a lot of that, specific combos that did specific things, and it just felt like they complicated what should've been a straight forward task within the overall game.

In fact, any kind of dynamism in a game like this where the addictive nature of a repeated action is key, is a bad idea in my opinion. The same way having elaborate combos in Diablo or headshots in Command and Conquer would be terrible.

DW is very floaty, you kinda just sweep through enemies and there's never the feeling of an interrupted flow to it. Sorta the way GeoWars has you "painting" over enemies and they die without interrupting your shots or doing anything too fuzzy in the way of animation. It's all very pattern like, and built on a degree of predictability.

I could be attaching the wrong meaning to your description of "good combat" here, but with your complete disinterest in DW I can't but imagine the difference is significant.

But as a summary; in a game like this I need each encounter to be elaborate in proportion to its importance and frequency. I don't want a more complex combo system, I don't want fussier hit detection that somehow makes each slash of a sword or impact from a club feel more uniquely significant because that just works towards a shattered sensation on the whole for me. It would be as if Tetris had you physically lifting the blocks out of a bucket, lowering them down with a crane, and making sure they fit into each respective slot by nudging them ever so slightly left and right.

Sure, that'd feel more like building a tower, but that's not *really* why I play Tetris.