The First Berserker: Khazanis the latest game to expand theDungeon Fighter Onlineproperty. With 2022’s DNF Dual, it tried to satisfy hardcore fighting game fans while also providing an experience palatable to newcomers. The First Berserker is attempting something very similar in the Soulslike genre. While this first expedition into the land ruled by FromSoftware is well shy of perfect, it does represent an impressive fledgling effort with plenty of good ideas.
An Eye On Accessibility
The First Berserker is a traditional Souls game in every way that matters, while carving out a few concessions that help to improve accessibility without outright dismantling the difficulty. One smart concession is how you earn EXP from every failed boss encounter, and the better you perform, the more you’ll gain. To complement that element, you earn skill points by performing technical maneuvers such as perfectly timed blocks, providing another route for powering up, even while faltering.
It’s a system that smartly encourages players to utilize these powerful techniques, incentivizing those who may be predisposed to grinding their way through encounters to learn how to play the game more efficiently. It may be a tactic taken straight out of Mr. Miyagi’s playbook, but it is also very clever game design.
And if that’s not enough for you, there’s also an easy mode. I played through a third of the game on this setting to see how it compares, and while it does a pretty good job of lowering the difficulty without destroying the core gameplay systems, your stamina regeneration being considerably faster definitely encourages a less thoughtful style of play.
Even if imperfect, the easy difficulty would still be a welcome inclusion if not for the regrettable decision to lock players out of the normal difficulty once they’ve made the switch. So, if you are finding that the lowered difficulty is hurting your overall enjoyment, you’ll either need to start over or suck it up. It is oddly backward to give players difficulty options, but then arbitrarily restrict their ability to move between them.
I would strongly suggest that anxious new players start on the normal difficulty and wait until they unlock the Spirit of Advocacy in the third stage of the game before committing to the easy difficulty. This spirit will fight alongside you, which is itself a dynamic way of diminishing the difficulty of boss encounters.
An Embarrassment Of Mechanical Riches
The First Berserker’s greatest asset is its everything and the kitchen sink approach to combat mechanics. It has perfect dodges, parries, deflects, a counter, staggering attacks, special moves, and dozens of upgrades that allow you to modify all of the above. You can invest in a skill that will make perfect dodges damage your opponent, you can unlock the ability to perform a perfect guard while charging an attack: there are a bunch of novel ways to tweak how these mechanics work across the three weapon types and it is a blast experimenting with them all.
If you favor one mechanic over the others, you’ll find that it will be robust enough to get you through nearly every encounter, but the gameplay shines brightest when you are gracefully weaving them all together. Passing through a massive AOE attack with a well-timed dodge, parrying a sequence of attacks immediately after, and then landing a well-timed counter to crumple your foe and deliver a blistering, brutal attack feels nothing short of majestic. The highly versatile, deeply satisfying combat is The First Berserker’s crowning achievement.
And best of all, every boss encounter features baddies that’ll push you in all the right ways. These bosses all feature at least two phases, and a couple of them have multiple forms. Their designs aren’t anything to write home about, but every encounter is enjoyable enough that I rarely even noticed. My only gripe is that a few of these bosses borrow attacks from mid-bosses, which does cheapen those encounters a hair.
Outside the boss encounters, battling the standard enemies is enjoyable, but The First Berserker reuses enemies a little too frequently which can make some of these encounters feel a little perfunctory. Don’t get me wrong, working your way through the stages is still enjoyable - even if the level designers rely a touch too heavily on irksome traps - but the game kicks things into the next gear when the big baddies come out to play.
Mechanical Mania
Unfortunately, that same mechanics-on-mechanics design philosophy that makes for such satisfying combat is applied everywhere, and when you aren’t slinging steel, the results are a little more mixed. The biggest issue comes with the currencies. Because everything has a currency of some sort. Everything.
You have coins to purchase items and equipment, Lacrima for leveling up your core stats, Vengeance Orbs help you increase your damage output, Soulstones will upgrade your experience gain and health recovery, Lacrima of Circulation upgrades your Spirit of Advocacy, you need to find Jarlings to unlock Jar-based headwear in Danjin’s shop, augmentations cost Transmutation Orbs, you’ll need to earn skill points to unlock abilities and traits, find ghostly relics to unlock and upgrade your phantoms, and your blacksmith requires specific materials to smith your weapons. Like, look at that. It is a lot, right?
This absurd deluge of collectibles and currencies means that everything you do has a material reward associated with it - that’sgood! Yet, it is unquestionably a lot to handle, and even twenty hours in I was still losing track of it all - that’sbad. Pair this with a loot system that stuffs your backpack with junk and you have a recipe for constant menu sifting.
But even here, there is some magic to be found. The level of granularity these systems provide you with, and the ability to tinker freely with them, can be really fun. I like how armor sets work. I like that there’s a progression of buffs that unlock with each equipped piece, and I enjoy trying to pair the perfect sets together, mixing and matching to get a few buffs from each. There’s a lot to dig into, and I think the Soulslike sickos are going to have a great time with it.
A Tale As Old As Time
As for its story? It’s fine. Unlike a FromSoftware game, The First Berserker has a more explicit narrative. Beating a boss will advance the plot and provide you with a short cutscene or two. The story itself is inoffensive, but I do find it baffling that so many Soulslikes insist on adding these explicit narratives, yet never seem to craft a story that justifies taking the controller out of the hands of the player. It is all pretty brief though, so, you aren’t going to have to worry about any painfully long exposition dumps or anything.
The stages are competently designed and mirror FromSoftware’s style of layout with levels that coil around themselves, gradually opening up via shortcuts. But between snowy mountains, dusty castles, and, yes, poisonous swamps, the locales can feel a little generic. The muted color palette doesn’t help things either. The stages are also segmented, which undermines that whole folded-world approach that makes FromSoftware’s levels so iconic. This isn’t to say that the levels aren’t fun - they are - but they don’t stand out.
It is worth noting that the stages get more involved and ambitious as they go. The game doesn’t necessarily put its best foot forward in that respect.
I suspect that most fans of the Soulslike genre will have a great time with The First Berserker: Khazan - especially if their primary focus is on the gameplay. It has some thoughtful approaches to easing frustration while maintaining that rewarding, Soulsian challenge. The First Berserker: Khazan may not be on the level of a Bloodborne or a Sekiro, but in the midst of combat, it can feel shockingly close.
