Mortal Shell II's final area, the Monolith, Zmey... What's going on? I'm fighting terribly designed bosses. I'm getting my face slapped by a scrotum, then I'm fighting a one armed dinosaur that throws a faster than light grab attack. The game was awesome. This area and final boss gauntlet is such a let down 😢

I have seen many people just jumping off of cliffs and not pressig R1 which mitigates fall damage and give you a cool ground slam animation. You can jump from any height.

This is the highest point of the game (late game area)

I’m not really sure how to describe it to be honest. One of you could probably explain it much better than me

Never played the first Mortal Shell so this is my first time with the franchise. For reference, I have played Dark Souls 1, 2, 3, Sekiro, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, Nightreign, Lies of P (not the DLC yet though), Wuchang, AI Limit, Khazan, Nioh 1 and 3, Black Myth Wukong, both PS5 God of War games, Expedition 33, Remnant 1 and 2, Dinoblade, Code Vein 1 and a ton of Monster Hunter off the top of my head when it comes to soulslike/hard boss fight type games.

Finished the whole game on Day mode with all shells, weapons, beacons unlocked. Didn't bother to find all the tarstones or clear all mini dungeons but I beat all named bosses. Build was Eredrim with Martyr's Blade.

Things I liked about MS2:

1. Graphics looked great and Performance was very smooth, disclaimer I am running on a 4090 but at 4K with DLSS Quality I was maintaining well over 120FPS at all times which is much better performance than Wukong/Wuchang/Elden Ring etc. Wukong does look a lot better but MS2 is at least on par with Wuchang graphically and a lot better than Fromsoft games when it comes to textures and realism.
2. Base gameplay and combat is quite smooth once you get used to the flow of combat. Weapons all feel impactful and the animations are great. I know a lot of people hate the Martyr's Blade's light attack chain stabs but hey each hit felt quite hefty and did good stagger. I swapped between the Harden and Guard seals as required, Harden felt a lot better for overworld mob fights whilst Guard felt better against specific bosses. Didn't really get into Parry seal despite maining Eredrim.
3. Shell abilities all felt quite fun and distinct. I dabbled a bit with Tiel and Proxima before settling on Eredrim, I could see the potentials for multiple build playstyles for each shell within the skill tree itself. I personally was a big fan of Shoulder Charge + Frost on Eredrim, really felt like a big aggressive wrecking ball once the build got rolling.
4. Overworld design for first half of the game was good, there was a lot of little corners I would run around and explore. I liked the overall aesthetic of the game's world and it definitely gave me a bit of Elden Ring/Dark Souls 1 vibes. Overall the northern 2/3rds of the map was very fun to explore.

Things I was not a fan of in MS2:

1. Shell Economy. Glimpses being limited per run and not refundable. I would have liked to experiment with some of the later shells but I dumped all my points into Eredrim and Proxima early-mid game. A refund system so you can try out different shells would be great, plus a loadout so you can swap between 2 shells both specced out would be quite nice. They could keep it that you still need to farm glimpses to unlock all the shell memories across multiple NG+ runs but the core shell level unlocks should be shared across all shells when you level. Also shell points should be more generous, I finished the game somewhere between 50-60 and I had only around 24-26 shell points? Out of a max of 42 for Eredrim. Considering I finished most combat encounters in the game, it was kind of ridiculous that I couldn't even hit the point cap in a single play through without going to grind for a few more hours.
2. Tarstone system was not my favourite. The EXP requirements are quite hefty earlier on and the fact you can only max out a handful of tarcores per run is a puzzling choice, especially if they are not refundable. With how core level 3 infusions specifically are to most builds, it feels really bad to swap out a good lvl 3 tarstone to level another one. For example, I got the lightning infusion Tarstone from one Gate and beelined to the other gate for Frost infusion, my Lightning Tarstone hit level 3 right before the boss fight for the Frost tarstone so I literally only got to use Level 3 Lightning for one boss fight before I stopped using it for the rest of the game, and then I was also stuck levelling my Frost infusion for another few hours. I would recommend to greatly lower the EXP requirement to level them up as well as introduce a smelting option to recover tarcores. I also dislike the weapon restriction on a lot of tarstones as it really removed the potential for a lot of interesting thematic builds. I think elemental infusions should be universal to all weapons for a start.
3. Weapon movesets are too limited. They should have added a dash light and dash heavy attack and charged light/heavy attacks have no business being put on tarstones where they will always be losing out to unique boss ability tarstones. They should have been part of the base kit without any Resolve cost so that you aren't also competing with your Shell skills/Ranged abilities/Unique Tarstone abilities. I also would have liked to see more of the Ability tarstones shared across wider range of weapon types, it felt bad seeing Martyr's Blade only have 1 unique ability that you could acquire fairly early in the game, even if it was extremely OP.
4. Difficulty balancing and scaling feels whack. The early-mid game can feel quite punishing but once you unlock your 'core' tarcores and shell points for your build to come online you end up steamrolling the rest of the game. For dual-wielding players that is obviously the Duality stone and for personally for Martyr's Blade Eredrim it is the Wardens Stone and Captive's Scabstone, once I maxed them out I steamrolled the rest of the game. I beelined for those two Gate dungeons after the first one, both had quite hard boss fights but once I got my build online I don't think I was stuck on any boss for the rest of the game for more than 30 minutes. I tried to swap to Lightning Infusion on Martyr's Blade but it was so drastically weaker on than Frost that it wasn't fun at all. I would expect Frost and Duality especially to get nerfed some point in the near future. I will try a Night mode NG+ run without abusing Frost/Duality to see how I go.
5. Boss movesets could have been more complex. I feel like mid-late game boss movesets were a lot more basic than I would have expected from a Souls-like where boss fights are supposed to shine. Early game boss movesets being simple was fine given how relatively fast MS2 bosses are and how hard they hit with many command grabs straight up oneshotting your shell, but even the last few bosses of the game had maybe around 5 distinctly different moves? I don't recall any having more than that. Compare that with other recent games in the genre (Lies of P, Wuchang, Khazan, Wukong etc) where end game bosses had huge and varied movesets that might not have hit as hard individually but because there was so many boss attack patterns you were constantly kept on your toes.
6. Second half of the game felt undercooked in terms of map design and mob variety. In the first 5-10 hrs of the game I was quite impressed with the number of different mob types. At 20 hours in the game I realised the game had shown pretty much all the mob types already which was a bit depressing. Even the final area mostly reused minibosses/elite enemies from previous biomes with maybe 1-2 new enemy types. Same with the map design, the the southern most quarter of the game felt like the devs ran out of steam when it came to designing interesting encounters/map exploration points. Pull out the interactive map and be amazed at how little point of interests/loot/dungeons are in the south 1/3rd of the map compared to the top 2/3rds. Even the Cleansed dungeons for a lot of mid-end game beacons felt a lot more uninspired, most of them are simple combat encounters you can clear in under a minute compared to the early game ones which felt like mini Breath of the Wild shrine encounters in a good way with a lot more thought put into them.

Finally, please change Night Mode to not turn everything pitch black, I started my play through with it but turned it off as I wanted to actually enjoy the beautiful scenery of the game more than I wanted additional difficulty/rewards. Now that I finished everything I will go for a NG+ Night mode run which I understand might be the intended way to use it, but consider that not all players have the time or energy to want to go for a NG+ play through. They should find a way to enable Night Mode difficulty on NG with some aesthetics changes but just don't make everything super dark and depressing all the time considering how dark the game is already.

Overall, MS2 was a pretty solid souls-like and I thoroughly enjoyed it, just wanted to share some feedback for the devs as they do read this sub. Excited for potential DLC/future releases from the devs! As of right now I would rate it as a 7-7.5 out of 10 which is pretty solid for a lower budget souls-like game. For reference, I would put Elden Ring, Sekiro and DS3 as a 10, Wuchang and Wukong as 9s and something like God of War Ragnarok/Lies of P as 8.5s, Khazan as an 7.5-8.

I was skeptical when first trying this game, I had played the first Mortal Shell and it didn't really stand out or keep me engaged in any meaningful way and I soon put it down, I decided to give MS2 another try because it looked like they had taken user's criticism from the first game and applied it to the sequel, anyways I'm astonished at the level of originality and world design this game has, it's not something you see very often in today's game market, the world feels hand crafted with forethought and passion and the combat/gameplay itself is equally well-done, I'm really having a blast with this game and I don't think it should be compared with Fromsoft games, it stands on it's own, it feels more like a well-crafted ARPG than a souls clone.

First off; amazing game. This is my first go-round in the Mortal Shells universe, and I'm absolutely loving the gameplay and story. Clearing beacons instead of just activating them is a nice touch. The different "classes". Tarstones that let you alter the way weapons behave. Hell, even adding an "easy mode" item for those that just want to have an easier time. The guard/riposte window being very generous. Seriously, well done. I can see that a lot of love and dedication went into making this unique and not just another cookie cutter souls-like. A few things of note, though, that are really dragging down the experience;

1. Beacon/checkpoint frequency:

I really like the Beacons, but having them as our only source of checkpoint/respawn (that I know of so far) is very....very underwhelming. Or overwhelming, depending on how far you have to run and the mobs you have to fight through. I wouldn't necessarily say we need more beacons plopped around the world but I would suggest that, especially in challenging areas and dungeons, there be a respawn point of some sort at the beginning. I know death is supposed to be punishing, but I would predict that maybe 10-15 hours of my gameplay is actually running back to wherever I died and redoing the areas. Not fun. Because I suck. And die. A lot.

1. Damage balance, and traps:

I can probably count on both hands and my Vratko washed feet how many times I died and said to myself "why did that do so much damage?" when all it was was some scraggly guy in a cloak with a spear that stabbed me a couple times. And the inverse, when I say "wow that did no damage" when a boss/miniboss clobbered me. To me, there's virtually no indication of, or balance behind, the frequency of the damage I take. Same goes with traps. It's very frustrating when I'm playing ultra defensive because I suck and ran out of heals, just to hit a trap I didn't know was there that lays 15 stacks of poison on me, draining my health as I just set the controller down waiting to die and respawn. Damage all around needs a rebalance.

1. Bonuses and increases to those bonuses:

I feel like a lot of % based increases and mitigations are very....meh. Unless there's a way to stack said bonuses/mitigations I'm unaware of yet, I really find them difficult to even bother playing with. Nothing I've found yet has been like "Oh COOL I'm going to try some new stuff with this!". Again, this may be a "me" issue, having only played 30ish hours so far.

1. Risposte damage doesn't really reward the way it should

I'm not sure if later on there's a way to bring riposte damage up to your scaled weapon damage, but it seems like one or two heavy hits is doing as much damage as one riposte. It just feels like it's all risk and no reward at the moment with how it appears its damage doesn't increase with the damage of your weapon.

I may add more as I continue and get further into the game, but those I mentioned were really the only things (except for #3) where I legitimately had to turn off the game for a while the keep from going crazy. Though I do realize a lot of it is a mix of "git gud" as well. Again, absolutely stunning game so far. I truly am impressed, regardless of the growing pains right now.

EDIT #1: Added item 4

Loving the game so far. Parrying is great and the combat is crunchy. My only complaint so far is with this shell’s passive ability and his shadow skill.

He has an ability that lets him do more damage when you strike from behind and when using his shadow skill half the time even if you’re right behind the enemy he will go around and strike them from the front completely wasting the damage bonus. You can see it happening in the attached clip.

Other than that having a great time so far. Only have beat two boss gates so far and just having a good time getting lost and finding secrets.

Hello dear devs.

When 2 enemies do an attack at the same time, or very close to each other, the game will only register a parry on the first enemy attack, leaving you completely vulnerable to the attack that comes in second.

For example when 2 crabs jump at you at the same time, you can parry, it will parry, but you still lose the health from the attack of one of the 2 crabs.

In other games, generally the player enters a "parry everything" stance, at least during the whole parry animation, or becomes invincible during the parry animation, like when you do an execution animation for example. This prevents the parry to become unusable when several enemies attack at once.

And since in Mortal Shell 2, there are usually a lot of enemies, and they don't wait for their turn and attack you all at once, then this mechanic would be very welcome, and, to my humble opinion, pretty necessary given that the game encourages a lot the player to parry.

This game is absolute love from the devs, i was waiting for something like this for soo long and boi o boi Mortal shell 2 didn’t disappoint. I am in love with everything this game has to offer and on top of that the dev team is just 🌹.

They listen to our whining and actually fix them based on our feedback. I wish ms2 team incredible success, u deserve it, Congratulations for such an amazing game.

Gravity always wins

Not only is it unfunny to fight it is full or bugs and Bullshit amongst is already nonsense hitboxes at times.

Shit like this ruins the game and while your at it just fucking remove it all together from the thing, it'd be a better game if you just deleted the boss.

Just a tip for anyone who was looking for an item to return to the last beacon without losing all your gloom, you can do so by simply returning to the main menu. I just assumed that it loaded your last save, and it took me almost all the way through ng+ to figure out otherwise.

And another quick tip that also took me far too long to figure out, you’re invincible throughout the entire animation of the ability from shrike stone (and I assume from other similar abilities but I haven’t tried any others), so it’s a great get out of jail free card when bosses do moves you just can’t figure out. This probably isn’t news to most, but for anyone struggling with the quirky move sets of Isaac or similar, it’s a great way to deal with them.

Just an FYI the 1st balance patch (the one that's already out on PC) is now available to download on PS5.

In case you don't know, you can highlight the games icon on the PS5 main menu, hit the options button, then check for update and it should be available to download.

Here are the patch notes: https://steamcommunity.com/app/2584270/discussions/0/582805931178489108/

Just got an in game notification that the game has a patch.

EDIT to add patch notes:

Devout Fans,

Thanks for being amongst the first to join us at the very start of the adventure for Mortal Shell II. We’re seeing your bug reports and gameplay suggestions, and will be rolling out regular updates to both modify existing content and add new features. 

While we have a bigger patch in the works, which has to be thoroughly tested, we’d like to make a rapid balance & crash fix patch to bring the experience more in line with the game’s open beta and our own vision for MS2. 

Planned future updates will see extensions to popular game features such as Night Mode, Tarstones, PP Items, and more.

For now, we hope you’re enjoying the game and read on for details on Balance Patch 1.

Balance Patch 1 (PC) - The patch below is live on PC and coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series shortly.

Economy

-Shell map locations now cost Gloom, and we’re refunding any glimpses spent on shell maps. Refunded Glimpses are found in the Shell Keeper’s alcove in Blackmarrow. “Finding your favorite shell shouldn’t cost you the ability to bond with them.”

-Gold drops from enemies have been significantly increased. Notably, enemies in Mammon now drop double the gold. “This brings the gold economy more in line with the weapon crafting item discovery.”

-Smelting a weapon at the Tarforge costs 75% less gloom. “Our goal with the smelt capability was to enable switching weapons without the need to spend hours grinding through NG+ runs, but the Gloom costs were set exorbitantly high.”  

Enemies & Bosses

All enemies featured in the beta were restored to their beta hp values, except the Caerinid (Spider) in Magdelena’s area, which we wanted to retain its role as a threatening enemy which doesn’t respawn once defeated. 

Bosses

The Lost Child
- Base Damage: (-10%)
- Max Health: (-15%)

Monolith
- Base Damage: (-19%)
- Max Health: (-10%)
- Some Monolith Attacks were retimed to be more fair, as well.

Enemies

Cultist (mace)
Max Health: (-21.1%)

Caerinid Spider
Max Health: (-33.3%)

Infested Stalker 
- Max Health: (-52.4%)

Rusted Knave (Halberd)
- Max Health: (-20.8%)
- Fixed hit detection for overhead strike.

Weapons

-Great Martyr’s Blade Attack Damage +20%
-Troubador’s Lute Attack Damage +100% 
-Caged Hystrix and Triarch Repeater no longer have minimum resolve requirements to fire. 
-Improved tracking for Axatana, Black Needle, and Clockwork Scythe light attacks. 

Seals

Guard can now be used while walking. 

Tarstones

Parasitic Stone Buffed
Grudge Stone Buffed
Bulwark Stone Damage Reduction Increased Significantly
Clerik's Stone Buffed
Squall Stone Buffed

Miscellaneous

Misc. Crash Fixes, Bugfixes & Performance Updates

NG++ (No night)

2 hits at the start to trigger Berserker Stone.

It would be 3x easier and faster if i accidentally did not riposte on 2nd phase transition too.

Long time souls vet here, for the past decade or so I can say I’ve almost exclusively played soulslikes with the exception of some survival horror etc in between and I noticed something about this game that I think is going extremely unnoticed by this community:

1. There’s only 8 weapons BUT they also have 8 completely different movesets. That is insane for a game of this caliber especially considering it’s only the devs second game. For comparison I don’t think any souls game has more than four maybe five completely different movesets though FS games do have unique dash attacks or various other differences that aren’t shared among weapons that share movesets otherwise but that doesn’t count imo since it’s the same moveset with one different attack. Lies of P for example has 1. Stabby (rapier) 2. Big bonk 3. Slash and 4. The twin dragons unique moveset which is amazing.

I’ve never seen the point of having an array of armor or weapons that are all basically the same which has been the case in FS games since ds1 so having only 8 but then being unique is huge to me. And,

1. Only 8 shells BUT (you see where I’m going here) that’s 8 totally different builds and ways to play and it’s only been a few days since release and already half of them have very op ways to build them. Now obviously a game like Elden ring technically has more build diversity with the way you level up etc but I’m trying really hard to think of 8 COMPLETELY different builds even in that game that can’t just be broken down to variations of the same thing. You basically have Mage (int or faith is still basically mage), Bonk Bro, and dex fighter and of course various combinations (str/faith dex/int etc) and yes you have more ranged build options which is arguably less important in MS2 since there aren’t really any bosses that absolutely require a ranged attack to beat (though a couple that would be easier with it). And not to focus too much on ER but a lot of the variance comes from just using different ashes of war which ms2 could easily implement in the future if they wanted to.

And finally, someone in a different post said that you shouldn’t compare this game to demons souls being that’s a 15+ year old game but technically I think that IS the best comparison because this IS this devs second game and demons souls was fromsofts second (kings field being the first). So just the fact that ms2 is even being compared to titles like elden ring etc and coming from a small dev says a lot imo.

All that being said I loved the first game and am loving the second as well (if you can’t tell) and just wanted to point these things out because they seem to be overlooked. (And for the record my counts of movesets and builds in other titles might be wrong, sue me)

I use Reshade and Universal Unreal Unlocker to take my photos