In early November, I played through The First Berserker: Khazan on PS5. It is a derivative soulsborn game. In other words, its structure is similar to the FromSoftware RPGs: Demon Souls, Elden Ring, Bloodborne, and the like.
Like other titles in the genre, Khazan has minimal story. Khazan starts off as a war hero who was branded as a traitor by his emperor. Khazan makes a pact with phantom who gives him strength. Khazan wants to get revenge against the empire that betrayed him. The phantom wants to use Khazan's body to investigate forces of chaos that are causing an imbalance between the the netherworld and the human realm. By Dickensian coincidence, we learn that their goals align perfectly as the game progresses.
Khazan, and just about all the other characters I have seen in the game, have zero personality. There's no fun banter, no character driven small talk: just minimal writing to serve as a vehicle for hack 'n' slash leveling up. The phantom's voice is so overdone that I wonder if it was the same voice actor who did Dr. Claw in the Inspector Gadget cartoons of my childhood. But everyone else is pretty bland. What story there is takes itself too seriously. There is no significant conflict between the NPCs or much of any character development. If there was any, it was so inconsequential that by now, I have completely forgotten. The writing is not as lackluster as say...Dragon's Dogma 2, where it seems a general outline of dialogue was used in lieu of actual dialogue. But Khazan's writing was still clearly an afterthought.
However, we don't play this kind of game for the story. In fact, most soulsborn games have minimal story, preferring to focus on exploration and character development. The height of this genre is Elden Ring: a sprawling open-world RPG with lush, widely varying landscapes and intricate character development. In terms of exploration, Khazan is less like Elden Ring, and more a step back to Dark Souls. You don't have an open world, but rather a series of areas that you can revisit as many times as you have the patience for.
The soulsborn genre taught us an appreciation of clunky combat. I played the original Demon's Souls back in 2010. At first, I thought the combat was awful: all the enemies were really slow, attacking with awkward wind-ups and combos. And many of the attacks didn't seem fair at all. You could try to parry, but the parry window was impossibly difficult, and if you dodged behind an enemy that was winding up, the attack would some how turn around to find you, or bend space to smite you at a great distance. What had happened to the crisp combat of God of War 2 or DMC 4? I originally thought that this might have been a limitation of PS3 hardware, but this has hilariously become a staple of these kinds of action-RPGs, as anyone who has fought the Tiger Vanguard in Black Myth: Wu Kong sorely knows. (In fact, to deal with Elden Ring's combat, dI developed the ridiculous strategy of taking off all my clothes for a boss fight so that I could dodge quickly enough to keep my distance while spamming spells from afar... until I found out that using a 2-handed sword to stagger everything was the game-equivalent of "easy mode.")
But combat is actually where Khazan shines. It is not the least bit clunky. "Fast and responsive" would be an accurate description. The parry and dodge windows are very fair, and just like God of War 3, if you have dodged out of the way, you will not get hit. Rather than give us a multitude of weapons with only a few viable options, Khazan gives us 3 weapons to choose from, all of which have upgradable, unlocking skills. One problem is that the skills take a long time to unlock, the net effect of which is to encourage players to commit to one out of the 3 in a given play through. However, one can reset their weapon skills at any time in the character menu. Like the original Demon's Souls, Khazan's weapons have attribute based scaling, which makes it disadvantageous and cumbersome to switch weapons, but one can find items to change the scaling of weapons, and fairly early on, one will find a merchant who sells an item that allows you to respec your attributes.
I played the first half of the game using the dual wield weapon set and skills, but I got tired of doing the same thing over and over again, so I switched to a spear. It was easy to reset my skills to get proficient with the spear, and I used an item to change the scaling of my best spear to go with my attributes. Unfortunately, the weapon respec items seem limited and are mostly found through exploration.
Although Khazan has fast, responsive combat compared to most soulsborn games, it is subpar when compared to classic action games like Devil May Cry 4 or God of War 3. Combinations are limited, and it takes a long time to unlock all of a given weapons skills, so you get stuck in Scarlet Nexus Syndrome, where the combat is a blast towards endgame, but a slog when you are starting out.
Soulsborn games are RPGs, and as such, leveling up is an integral part of gameplay: with each level, you gain a point in an attribute. Very gradually, you become more powerful than your enemies. But once upon a time, a crazy prodigy in internet land decided to make it his or her life's goal to beat this kind of game without leveling up. The internet decided to support this masochistic approach, and the web is now full of advice about efficient character builds, saying that the most important thing is to memorize enemy move sets, and many people talk about spending hours on any given boss.
As I am from an older generation, I remember playing old school turn-based RPGs like Phantasy Star on the Sega Master System. If a boss is too hard, you don't beat your head against the wall fighting it over and over again. You can rethink your strategy, change gear, grind levels to get stronger, or all of the above. I have found that Khazan rewards playing smarter. Boss enemies almost always give you status effects, and using elixirs to buff yourself against status effects and using items intelligently to buff yourself makes things go smoothly. I have gotten through most bosses in a few tries on Normal difficulty. I had to spend a little bit more time on 2 of them, but I was able to bring them down in a reasonable amount of time that could not be described as "hours." In fact, I found the hardest boss in the game to be the 3rd boss. This is likely because I was still learning the game flow, or it could be a single instance of game imbalance in an otherwise well-balanced game.
That being said, I haven't needed to spend a lot of time grinding in Khazan. I tend to get lost easily in games that don't have a good map on the main game screen, so between the side quests and time spent trying to find my way around, I leveled up sufficiently to beat the game. One of the signatures of soulslike games is that if you die, you drop your experience points, and you have to fight your way back to the location to claim them. Khazan is pretty friendly here. There is an item you can use to get them back automatically, and you can purchase one of these every time you visit an NPC at the home base. Even friendlier, if you die on a boss, the experience points get dropped just outside the boss arema, so you can get your priorities straight when you walk in to the meet the boss.
I experimented with changing my attributes without trying to go for a "build." I found a combination that works for me, and it seems to "break the game." Most of these soulslike games have an encumbrance system. If your gear is too heavy for your stats, you will typically be slower. In Khazan, you don't seem to move slower, but rather, your stamina takes longer to regenerate. However, the strength is the attribute that allows you to equip heavier armor, so I set the scaling on my spear to scale most with strength and got my strength high such that I have better damage scaling while being able to equip heavier armor without a stamina penalty.
Level design in Khazan is acceptable, but not stellar. The towns, caves, castles, and secret labs you go through mostly look fairly similar, with a smaller number of areas having their own identity. It is behind Elden Ring, but still acceptable as we do not yet have Elden Ring 2 to keep us busy. I have neither been impressed nor offended by Khazan's maps. One thing I will note, is that the developers thought it would be fun to try to kill you with fall deaths. I have lost count of how many fight-on-the-ledges I have had to deal with. About 2/3 of the way through the game, I became sick of all the "death-traps-on-the-ledge" that I had to wade through. You can not jump. You can not ledge grab. And fall deaths become frustrating busy work. The death screen for the game even reads "Khazan has fallen." I finally realized that this is because 50% of the time, this is actually the reason for Khazan's death.
There is plenty of loot all over the place to grab. However, the weapons and armor you find are leveled. Enemies in earlier areas drop lower level weapons while enemies in later areas drop higher level weapons. Sure, this works, but it makes the loot feel repetitive. At any one time, you end up carrying around a hilarious number of great swords, dual-wield sets, spears, armor, and amulets, all with different stats. This is acceptable, but it prevents the excitement you get when you stumble across that hidden flaming sword in the second area of Demons Souls or that insanely powerful wand you find in the swamp outside of the prison you accidentally teleport trapped yourself into in Elden Ring.
Overall, I would say that The First Berserker: Khazan is an interesting, but derivative soulsborn game with above par combat, minimal story, and acceptable maps and loot. The one change that would have made it great would have been being able to switch between the three weapon types in real time combat along with allowing certain enemies to be more or less vulnerable to one of the three weapon types. As is, the game was enjoyable enough to keep me playing through the end.
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