Heavenly Sword - Chasing The Stupid Peacock

*There's a poll up. Go vote for what I'll play next.*

To get started, I don't think Nariko is actually alive. I think she died years ago and some bizarre snake demon possessed her dead body. Do you need proof? Just look at that hair of hers (that's actually the demon). Her hair is having constant seizures and it might just be the most dangerous object in the game. My wife has long hair and she complains that it sometimes gives her headaches. Nariko has MASSIVE amounts of hair and it wiggles randomly. Her head/neck must be killing her. But she never complains about it because her body doesn't actually feel pain, because she's dead. If you just shaved off her hair her body would collapse because the demon would no longer be in control. It all makes sense now.

Chapter 4 is all about Flying Fox. He's been told to kill Kai and Nariko needs to prevent this. So she'll spend most of the level chasing him and fighting through hoards of annoying enemies. It was this section where combat started to become very frustrating especially as I watched enemies randomly ignore my attacks to hit me. This can be extremely aggravating against the heavy-type enemies you encounter in this level. I'll be hitting them and they'll suddenly just launch into an attack that nails me.

Nariko's dodge maneuver doesn't actually take her far enough out of the way of combat. When I'm playing God of War, I know that if Kratos dodges that I'll be okay and I have moment to re-orientate myself. When Nariko dodges I need to keep hitting to right thumbstick so she'll dodge again, this way she might actually be out of harm's way for a moment. Making it worse is if I take a hit, I'm probably going to have to take the enemies entire combo before I have enough control back to block/counter/dodge.

To add to the confusion I'm not sure if my attacks can or cannot stop an enemy attack. I wonder this because sometimes they do and sometimes they don't and I'm not seeing an overall pattern to it. And the heavy-hammer wielding suck. I did find it useful to throw a body into their mist knocking them over and then I'd stab them. Again, it was frustrating to have to wait for the ragdoll physics to stop before I could stab them. They're on the ground, let me kill them already!

There are some ninja/assassin enemies that show up too, but those guys are wimps. Really easy to take them down so don't worry about them.

There's a section where you have to fight more of Roach's pets (turns out they're orangutans). You get to use a rocket and you better make sure your shots count. If you don't kill mass amounts of them with the rocket you can easily find yourself surrounded by a large number of these guys. I recommend throwing a body into their midst to knock them over and then stab them while they're still on the ground.

When you finally catch up to Kai and the Stupid Peacock it appears that you're too late. Peacock has a rope around Kai's neck and then drop her from a pretty amazing height. Being able to fly has that advantage. Looks like Kai's dead. Boss battle against Stupid Peacock then occurs.

Peacock himself isn't that hard to fight, especially if you stay on top of him. He will do two things that make this fight tricky. First, while flying around the arena he'll throw a projectile at you, you need to counter this. Once properly countered you can control the projectile and hit him with if for decent damage. This can be tricky to properly counter though. You can also use these to nail some health containers around the outer arena but those are fairly hard shots and you have to be properly lined up the moment you deflect the projectile to nail them.

His second, and far more annoying trick, is making clones of himself. I'm still not sure what makes the clones vanish. Some clones would apparently get bored and leave while others would hang around taking pretty significant damage. He'll call these guys in on a regular basis once you reach his second health bar. When you reach his third health bar he'll call in 10 clones to harass you. I got through this, but I'm still not sure why the clones would vanish.

Once all 10 clones are down Nariko's part in the fight is over. Big reveal: Kai is still alive and she's still holding her crossbow thing. You get to play as Kai for a moment. You have a limited amount of time to find Flying Fox and shoot him with an arrow. One hit and it's battle over, Stupid Peacock is dead. Man this guy was a lame enemy. He dies talking about how the battle had style, like you actually care.

Chapter ends with Nariko carrying Kai back to her clansmen. Kai will survive, so if you like Kai you can cheer and if you hated Kai you can just pretend that she actually died.

I do think that Kai should have died, it would've had more impact on how Nariko is living her life. Remember that Kai is basically an innocent. Even when she's killing people it has to be justified as a game to her. If Kai died that would mean that Nariko used Kai as a tool for her own selfish ambition. That would've been a great lesson for Nariko to learn. Instead Kai gets to live and Nariko only has to feel sorry for almost killing Kai.

Nariko was apparently followed by a crow. The crow is some kind of familiar for King Bohan. Nariko yells at the crow to tell it's master they they're ready for him. This sets up the final battle. I assume that next time I'll be typing about the final battle.