Nine Sols

An essay in which the author recalls that this substack was supposed to focus on video game criticism

It’s been a while since my last essay and I’ve had a lot going on, I fell and hurt my foot and had a really bad cold. As well, my band Shrift was playing a lot of shows although this slowed down for the holiday season. I hope this essay doesn’t come across as too negative as I was really impressed by the game it is about.

I’m also trying to do this essay with less images because while I liked having a flashy magazine-style layout, the reality is I may have to source artwork if this substack gets bigger so for now, it’s text only.

Nine Sols: being a review of the Taiwanese action platformer as well as an account of the dangers facing the modern metroidvania

One of my recent annoyances about games criticism is the way that gamers and reviewers alike mistake verbs of play for complexity. I recently was listening to a gaming podcast that I enjoy and was shocked that the reviewers didn’t want to play the new “UFO 50” collection. Their reason was because “UFO 50” was doing a pastiche of NES games they considered too simplistic for their refined palates. (Yet the same podcast spent multiple weeks covering the mediocre new “Dragon Age: Veilguard”.)

Not only is this annoying to me from my own experience of having grown up in the era of NES games, but it’s fundamentally untrue. Lots of older games have interesting and complex mechanics but they’re not spelled out for the user. For example, the first “Castlevania” has a counter damage system that most people never notice or engage with. What these games lack is more complex verbs to clue in the player of what’s going on under the hood. But that doesn’t mean the complexity isn’t there….

Nowhere has this equation of verbs with complexity caused more damage than in the metroidvania which has become infected with platforming challenges and parry mechanics. This infection has metastasized so severely that the problem is present even in “Metroid Dread”, the most mainstream of metroidvanias. In this game, Samus Aran, a woman who runs around with a cannon attached to her arm has to parry alien fauna in order to do damage to anything. Not to mention that the basic gameplay used the Switch so unergonomically that it was a recipe for carpal tunnel.

These weird choices placate people who need the complexity of a game spelled out for them through multiple inputs. The same people are the type who think that Hollow Knight’s combat was too simple because you don’t start out with an air dash.

But the cost to “Metroid Dread” is that it slows the entire game to a crawl. Rather than exploring the environments freely, you have to stop and engage with a parry mechanic every screen.

Modern Metroidvanias are falling into a pattern established by “Blasphemous”, this was the first 2d soulslike which had the mechanic of only being able to do damage by parrying enemies. Rather than being able to muddle through a combat encounter like I did when I first fought a black knight in “Dark Souls”, you basically are required to perform a parry in order to continue with the game.

Hollow Knight is a game I love and a partial template for many of the newer Metroidvanias but it approaches platforming challenges in a similar way to the way “Blasphemous” approaches combat.

When you first start playing Hollow Knight,it seems very charitable that when you fall into a pit or hit some spikes, you don’t just die. Instantly you instead respawn at the beginning of the platforming section minus a chunk of health. But this starts to feel less charitable when you were presented with long platforming challenges that must be completed flawlessly, or you are returned to the beginning to try again. (Compare this with some NES games where platforming challenges could be gotten through while still taking damage.)

If the entire game had been like this, it would have become one of those Kaizo-style platformers rather than the masterpiece it was. But fortunately, most of “Hollow Knight” is platforming, exploring and discovering secrets without consequence. The rock-solid mechanics you need for the endgame also allow you to traverse the world enjoyably.

Many newer metroidvanias take the wrong lessons from both Sekiro and Hollow Knight and only are interested in the inflexible aspects that the games had and none of the freedom. A game such as “Grime” is largely platforming challenge to parrying challenge and few moments when you are just exploring a new world.

These “Sekirovanias” have an annoying emphasis on the player having to be perfect and it’s often said that the perfect is the enemy of the good

There are certain kinds of pioneers that are admirable, but their achievements are impossible to repeat. It may be to soon to decided if “Sekiro” is one of these but the Sekirovanias to me suffer more by comparison to “Sekiro” than most soulslikes do in comparison with the Souls series. The problem becomes that “Sekiro” disciples have a dogmatism that was refreshingly absent in the original.

A good example is that in games that followed “Sekiro”, there is no validity to blocking. A block is only a failed parry instead of an action on its own. This to me seems to miss the mark of what was great about the combat of “Sekiro”. In “Sekiro”, you could block for as long as you wanted to and not take damage. Ultimately, your posture would break, and you would take damage, but you were allowed to fail at the combat for a long time. Fromsoft understood that players would not just want to block indefinitely. They would start countering bosses and attacking of their own free will.

In “Sekiro”, you needed to counter enemies, but the game didn’t kill you immediately for failing. The game let you exist for a long time in the area between failure and success before you learned the game’s combat. The newer sekirovanias instead insist on a binary choice between parrying correctly or dying.

This is to lay out the issues I have with this sort of combat before I get into my specific issues with “Nine Sols”. But I want to talk about what a great game “Nine Sols” is before I talk about my issues with it.

Nine sols is a very well- made game and incredibly impressive considering that Red Candle games hasn’t made a metroidvania or soulslike before. I was only made aware of them due to Steam delisting “Devotion” because of threats by the chinese government. I’ve only played “Devotion” and my memory was that of a slow-paced horrific first person game centered on story. The Taiwanese developer seems interested in telling unconventional stories in a variety of ways.

“Nine Sols” is being story-focused as well, in fact at times the game feels more like a 2d character action game than an actual metroidvania. While there is some looking for optional items in hidden areas, there’s very few moments where you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing. Most of the time you are headed to the next boss who each has their own biome.

But for a company’s first attempt at this style of game, the fluidity of the movement and platforming feels great. The combat is also fantastic, it feels satisfying to execute parries and when you master a boss’s timing you feel like a badass.

The art style is beautiful and it has an anime cuteness which is often utilized for graphic and disturbing situations in a offbeat way. The story of “Nine Sols” is fairly subversive in a way that is also pretty standard in the bleak world of souis games. There’s a sense of things unravelling and coming to an end brought on by the folly of wealth and technology destroying the underlying ideals they were meant to serve.

In the opening scene, your character, Yi is murdered for unknown reasons and gradually recovers in a small village. He is clearly a different species than the human villagers and seems to know more about the ceremony in town where villagers are ascended by the gods.

Without spoiling too much of the story, it is of revenge and follows a familiar soulslike formula of having to take on various powerful bosses in order to take the power that they have. In the fashion of a Fromsoft game, the main character’s revenge turns out to be more complicated and less morally pure than it at first seems.

So “Nine Sols” while not a masterpiece, is an incredibly accomplished game that has come totally out of left field. But why is it not a masterpiece? I think it is an issue with the parry-centric combat which becomes grating in a game of its length. That being said, I think the game is one of the best released this year.

It would be stupid to claim that the combat in “Nine Sols” is bad. “Nine Sols” combat is great, in fact most metroidvanias do not come close to the sort of depth that the combat that this game has.

Parries feel tight and rewarding and each one done correctly adds to the amount of damage done by the riposte. In a touch reminiscent 80’s Hong Kong horror, the ripostes are handled via attaching a Taoist talisman to an enemy. These talismans then detonate, blowing the enemy into gory chunks of viscera

But this satisfying combat is also a lot less flexible than the game it is patterned after ; “Sekiro”. Rather than being able to block as long as you want, you are instead forced to counter attacks perfectly or die. You can often regain your health by counterattacking or pulling up perfect parry, but the basic formula will often have you dying because you parried a too early or too late consecutive times. This to me, like many other Sekirovanias seems to focus on the worst part of “Sekiro”.

There’s also a lot less flexibility than there is in other 2d souls games. In “Nine Sols”, the game is designed around parrying attacks rather than dodging through them. if you are effectively parrying, the sometimes questionable hitboxes aren’t going to cause you a problem. But the fact that you often can’t engage with the combat in other ways that speaks to the flaw in the game system.

“Sekiro” again discouraged dodging for the most part but you still had the option to dodge without taking damage. Even though this was the wrong decision you were given the option of making it. Although “Sekiro” is a lot more rigid than most Fromsoft games in terms of build variety, there is still way more flexibility in terms of player agency.

“Hollow knight” also had superior flexibility in how you wanted to approach combat with a ton of different abilities through different badges. You acquired badges and could slot them in to change your combat abilities. “Nine Sols” tries for something similar calling the badges instead “jades”, but it’s clear that they didn’t want to allow different play styles. I did find some of the jades useful such as the ones that regenerate health, but the majority seem to make a negligible difference.

Overall the game seems steeped in the increased difficulty of later Fromsoft games like “Elden Ring”. Like this game, “Nine Sols” boss fights are incredibly hard and made more so by denying you windows to heal. In “Elden Ring”, you often had to choose whether to heal or to try attacking because there was rarely time for both.

Denying the player opportunities to heal means that each boss encounter must go nearly perfectly in order to be overcome. This also detracts from the more flexible difficulty of the older souls games where you could slowly learn an encounter and make a certain amount of mistakes because you had opportunities to heal. There’s a demand for perfection in the player which seems to have sacrificed better game design for higher difficulty.

A pattern can be learned but if you’re not giving me more than a single chance to learn it each time than you’re creating a high stress environment that makes learning less forgiving.

“Nine Sols” like many late period soulslikes tends to rely on weirdly timed attacks which can make first attempts at a boss very frustrating. I eventually realized that if i wanted a counter to land that I needed to press the block button at the very last second. The bosses started out as being fairly manageable, and I particularly liked the fight with the villainous Jiequan which had a tricky but satisfying timing to learn.

But in the endgame, my enjoyment took a nose-dive as bosses use a lot of quick, nearly overlapping attacks. The pattern was started by the third phase of Lady Ethereal and continued by the second phase of Fuxi

Both fights are incredibly cool, but ultimately outlast their welcome by having to prove their difficulty. Obviously, many players love this ramped up difficulty so I’m probably in the minority but I found the use of multiple attacks coming from different directions and characters cheap rather than fulfilling and wound up detracting from my overall impression.

Lady Ethereal’s section is a long platforming challenge that lets you explore her virtual reality world. What started out as a paradise has become a nightmare she is trapped in with the results of her actions. The Fuxi sequence has you invade the inner sanctum of the elite where the siblings are putting on a theatrical drug crazed party. And the first phase of the fight unfolds with the rhythm and grandeur of the Chinese opera. But both fights end in a frantic and disappointing way with you having to juggle multiple parry inputs as you are distracted from the main boss’s attacks by either their virtual clones simultaneously attacking you or Fuxi’s sister sending some sort of energy projectiles in the background.

Many players use the idea of RNG as an example of something unfair in a game. I played the fights enough times to know there was little random in them. (An embarrassing amount of times on Fuxi, almost giving up for a little while.) But I think the way that the later phases don’t feel considered in terms of where the damage is coming from left me with an aftertaste of frustration as well as accomplishment. We could say this might be where Red Candle Games is showing their inexperience in designing these kinds of games but Fromsoft has also been erring to the side of unfair difficulty in fights such as Consort Radahn.

Another problem “Nine Sols” shares with Fromsoft is the lack of checkpointing in boss fights. This is a tradition that’s really become obtuse in its lack of response to technical advances. It’s also something that’s defended by the souls fanbase because it makes the fights more difficult if you have to go through the entirety of a phase you mastered each time in order to get to the phase where you die in 2 hits. But what’s ignored is that it’s not really making the fights more challenging in an interesting way, it’s relying on the player becoming bored during the first phase and doing worse than they did the first time they beat the boss phase.

I would have enjoyed the Lady Ethereal or Fuxi fight a lot more if I didn’t have to redemonstrate each time that I remembered the first phase. But this is a fairly small gripe.

I think that while “Nine Sols” shows that Red Candle games are a force to be reckoned with both in the soulslike and metroidvania space, it also shows the dangers both genres are facing when they give in to their most hardcore fans.

Certain hardcore fans constantly demand higher difficulty and more complex mechanics and are sometimes even disinterested in the story or world of the game. The problem is that combat or platforming mechanics was not what made “Dark Souls” or “Bloodborne” or “Metroid” or “Hollow Knight” immersive experiences, it was the loneliness and moving nature of the worlds they created.

This is not to say that “Nine Sols” doesn’t succeed in telling a moving story or involving us, it’s just that for me the inflexibility of how you are forced to enter that world detracts from the narrative. I want to stroll, I want to wander, I want to engage with a world besides having to parry it.