A Little More Character to the Action – The First Berserker: Khazan (PS5) Review

Character action games were never particularly popular, but with the advent of Dark Souls, we’ve seen the broader “Action” sphere of games gradually get filtered down into a style where you press right bumper for a light combo chain, and right trigger for a heavy combo chain, and ne’er shall the two meet or mingle. It’s been pretty exhausting, as someone who loves Dark Souls, but also dreams of a world where you could conceivably play “one of those” with a more elaborate degree of player expression, similar to games like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden. 

Thankfully, Team Ninja made Nioh 2, and balance was restored to the world as everyone rejoiced and had fun forever.

Unfortunately, gluttons that gamers are, I continued to seek more and more games like Nioh 2, and was consistently disappointed by Team Ninja’s follow-ups, as well as most of the Soulslike genre’s reluctance to even come close to the bar of variety set by FromSoftware themselves. I wanted more! I wanted to parry! I wanted to parry three different ways with different skill floors for each one! I wanted to dodge through enemies and do combos behind them! I wanted to have cool afterimages and helm splitters and Table Hopper from Devil May Cry 4 and more! More! More!!!!

In all of my whining and wishing, never did I ever imagine that someone would actually follow my pie in the sky ideas, and craft a beautiful, beautiful, exceptionally linear Soulslike title, inspired by Nioh 2 in the most loving way imaginable, and bring it together just as my last sparks of hope started to fizzle out…

The First Berserker Khazan is a fantastic take on the Soulslike formula, and one that truly impressed me with just how good it continued to feel all the way through my 50 or so hours with the game. It may not be a new Devil May Cry, and it may lack the sheer mechanical variety of something like Nioh 2, but it’s clearly a game that’s been crafted by people who love the same kind of action games that I do. 

Khazan takes place in the Dungeon Fighter Online Universe, and unfortunately, I know absolutely nothing about this setting. I know that it’s one of the most popular games in Asia, but outside of my brief adding of DNF Duel to my epic games account when it was free, my knowledge is limited entirely to a vague awareness of it being heavily focused on various job classes. Thankfully, you don’t really need to know much about the DNF setting to understand what’s going on here (Though if you look up some of that DNF lore later, you come to appreciate what an inspired idea it is to basically make an entire game about favorite bosses from a years old raid); Khazan wants revenge, and god be damned, he’s really gonna go for it.

There isn’t much depth to this narrative, but to be honest, that doesn’t matter much. The Souls games have succeeded on narratives that operate exclusively in the realm of “probably”s and “could’ve”s, and while Khazan‘s has a degree of more substantive engagement in the form of one-on-one dialogue and a handful of pre-rendered cutscenes a la Nioh, it’s not exactly on the inspired levels of something like Lies of P or any other RPG peers. The man wants revenge! He gets it! Hell, he even goes “more revenge please” at the end! I can’t fault a barebones story for being serviceable as a means to an end.

Oh and that end, let me tell you buddy, that end.

A few years ago Lies of P surprised literally everyone by not only being a dark and gritty game about Pinnochio of all things, but also an exceptionally well designed one. While many were mesmerized by the concept of Bloodborne meets Italian puppets, I was completely blown away by how fantastically tight everything in the game felt. Some said that it was the closest that a Soulslike had gotten to the realm of actually feeling as mechanically good as a FromSoftware game, but for me, it was handily exceeding them. 

There’s a real weight to everything you do in Lies of P, animations lock you in place, attacks have hit-stop with plenty of impact, and weapons (for the most part) feel meaningfully different and impactful to switch between. When it comes to less polished games in the genre, something like Code Vein, one of the biggest problems is how floaty or stiff everything can feel. It doesn’t feel like you’re controlling a character (the main appeal of “character” action games to me), it feels like you’re either pushing a cart around, or struggling to keep your footing at all times.

Khazan isn’t going for the same level of gameplay variety as Lies of P (a feat that I would argue is insane given the sheer amount of weapon combinations that silly little puppet could create), but it’s absolutely nailing that same level of tight excellence. You have three types of weapons to choose from — Spears, Great Swords, and Dual-Wield — each with their own skill tree and gearset bonuses that can tangibly change both the inputs you’ll manage and what those inputs can do. 

You can think of Spears as a traditional dexterity build, weapons that let you move fast, exploit weaknesses, and do a lot of funny jumps and such. Great Swords are, well, heavy big swords, and they focus on finding opportunities to plant your feet, soak damage, and hit things in the head with a giant slab of metal. Dual-Wield (a more roguish set of twin weapons) is all about various movement abilities that are less focused on invincibility frames and more about manipulating your placement on the battlefield with great ease and great reward. I dabbled in all three weapon types over the course of the game (thanks to a robust and incredibly easy to use re-speccing system), but I found myself consistently coming back to my beloved Spear, so that’s what most of this review will focus on.

The Spear is a beautifully terrifying instrument of destruction, and I think Khazan is one of the few games I’ve played that truly nails just how frightening it is. I was turned towards spears after reading the visual novel Full Metal Daemon Muramasa, where one fight has the protagonist wax about how absolutely horrifying a spear can be in war, and how historically it’s used both to vicious ends, and as a means of perpetual deterrence in the right hands. Do you know how scary it would be, as a guy armed only with a sword, to try and close the gap with someone who has a gigantic pole they can just keep jabbing you with?! That’s exactly the kind of weapon I want to use, and unfortunately while games like Elden Ring capture “cool” ideas like turning a spear into a drill, or using it as some sort of magic focus, they consistently fail to pander to the base level fantasies of what these weapons can represent.

When using Khazan’s Spear, the completion of a standard combo gives you a temporary buff that adds afterimages onto all your attacks, amping up the amount of attacks that you’re getting in at any given time. On top of this, you move significantly faster, and with different gearset bonuses and later skills, you can augment this state to last longer, let you move through enemies after specific attack animations, and much much more. You can use it as a pole vault to kick enemies in the gut! You can chain that kick into a jump off of their head! By the time I completed my Spear build, I was dodging all over the place in a way that was focused on placing me in new locations to deal better damage, rather than utilizing rolls just for the sake of invincibility frames.

You also gain access to four different skillslots that use up a resource called “Spirit”, but unlike many of its contemporaries, Khazan has you building up a substantial amount of it as you’re fighting. Lies of P or Nioh take multiple playthroughs to get to the point where you feel like you can use your extra abilities more than once or twice a fight, but in Khazan you’re constantly using a barrage of skills on top of a surprisingly deep core-kit, making for an impressive degree of interaction at any given time. These skills are primarily for damage, but they can also have secondary effects like applying buffs, chaining with other moves, or just letting you attack in a way that you normally wouldn’t be able to. 

For example, one of the earliest elite enemies you’ll run into is a tall spindly dragon-type guy, who’s immediately unfazed by most of your regular attacks. However, one of the basic moves you can get for any of the weapons is an overhead slice, and using it on this type of enemy causes an incredibly satisfying orange smashing effect on their skull, temporarily stunning them and letting you get some extra hits in. A lot of enemies will work this way (most wanting you to get behind them, obviously), and it can be satisfying not only having these extra attack buttons to hit, but also using them to interact with these enemies on a level of depth that feels left behind in the modern interpretation of this genre. Everyone loves hitboxes, but at a certain point that fixation became heavily focused on just making sure things could or could not hit each other, rather than on what actually happens when they meet.

Similarly, there are three different ways to “parry” in Khazan, and while I know some out there are getting fed up of how the parry button has become a mainstay (and at times a lazy balance breaker), I am unapologetic in my absolute adoration of the mechanic, and having three options is like having three incredibly decadent treats just for me. There’s the standard parry (pretty much identical to Sekiro or Lies of P) where you time the button press and reduce or negate damage if done correctly; there’s the “counter” for special attacks indicated by an emblem over an enemy’s head which must always be timed perfectly for a rewarding reprisal; and there’s “reflection”, a longer drawn out animation-based parry that can only be used on certain attacks, but will reward you with a significant hit to an enemy’s defences, and typically a pretty satisfying slow-mo animation (seen below).

When you combine all of these separate little flourishes, they elevate Khazan beyond the standard Soulslike fare. Khazan is an experience that rewards your persistence with perfection. When I learned how a boss works in Khazan, that knowledge was etched into my brain so mechanically that when the inevitable higher difficulty rematches rolled around a couple hours later, I was able to crush most of them on my first try. You could boil down Khazan to the same old Soulslike combat that has become the accepted paradigm, hell it even has the stagger bar seen everywhere since people realized Final Fantasy XIII is actually awesome, but with the sheer amount of engaging tools with varying skill floors at your disposal, Khazan becomes so much more.

Khazan skews a little harder than your average Soulslike, but at every turn it also has an uncharacteristic amount of quality of life features that help make the experience feel easier to engage with. Similar to Lies of P, Khazan places the EXP you lost upon death outside of a boss room, rather than at whatever awkward place you happened to die while trapped inside. Moreover, you also earn skill points as you fight and engage with your weapon’s kit in battle, meaning that repeat attempts at the same boss still aid to your overall progression (though there are level caps slowly unlocked after specific stages). It feels great to bash your head and really come to learn and understand each individual boss, and then unlock that new skill for the spear that lets you do a little spin, and go back in feeling even stronger! 

While Khazan has the Diablo-style loot drops of Nioh, it’s never dropping anywhere near as much as those games, and actually gives you reasons to access systems that took Nioh a substantial amount of time to explain relatively quickly. When you get to the end-game of Nioh (or more likely your first NG+ run), you start actually using the Blacksmith feature that was unlocked incredibly early on in the game because you finally have an idea of what kind of gearset you want to go for, and what stats it should have. In Khazan, you reach that point about halfway through your first playthrough, which feels significantly better, and allows you to access the more in-depth build defining additions that these gear-sets often bring without waiting 90+ hours. Getting to the 3/4ths mark of the game and having a set that made it so one of my abilities now made me harder to stagger, and then pivoting to one with some quick crafting that let me dash through everyone with my default combos fundamentally changed the way I was interacting with the game. More games should give you access to things like this! It’s always crazy to me how much the Action RPG sphere remains so hardline on locking the fun away until you’re done with your first run! Let the first run pop off too!

The only thing I could even truly mark as a downside is a pretty uninspired visual identity, a trait unfortunately all too common in the genre. While I love the high fidelity cel-shaded look, and I think that almost all of the main characters and bosses specifically stand out as well designed and eye-catching, they’re all trapped within a dismal and dreary Unreal Engine 5 brown and gray muck. I get that Dark Souls was edgy and grim dark and loved Berserk, but you reach a point where the grimy post-apocalypse fantasy aesthetic is exhausting, and I was at that point when Dark Souls 3 came out! Almost ten years ago!

It’s really unfortunate that these environments are so dull to look at, because the levels themselves are tightly designed! There’s interesting ideas like the omnipresent blown up moon in the sky, or the more traditional fantasy castle towns that are clearly inspired from its MMO origins, and they’re able to create some truly incredible spectacles in certain fights where you feel just how cool the developers thought an idea was. The third boss of the game is a two phase dragon fight! Where it hides in fog with one glowing red eye hopping around as your only signal of when you might possibly get attacked! That’s endgame Souls stuff right from the get-go! It’s awesome!!! And then you’re dumped right back into the generic mountain crag world. It’s a bizarre tonal dissonance

The real victory of Khazan to me, is that I’m glad that the open worldification of the Soulslike genre hasn’t fully cannibalized the desire to create a traditional level-based experience. While I love the interconnected designs of earlier Soulslikes, their fixation on bigger and longer with each passing attempt (and especially with the bloat of Elden Ring in recent memory) slowly eroded what makes that smaller scale so good. The original Demon’s Souls established this with its archstones! Letting them create five aesthetically distinct zones that stand out instead of massive biomes! Nioh understands this with its consistent remixing and adjustments on their curated levels for various missions, allowing for all sorts of different experiences inside the same fields of play, versus the Elden Ring style of just dumping a copy-paste edit of a stage fifteen feet away, breaking the world flow. You can go big! Games like Nioh and Khazan prove this! You just have to consider where that big is being put, and how interesting it’s actually going to end up being.

I love Khazan. I didn’t expect to, but I really really do, and I’m glad to play another banger that understands a different flavor of the well-considered peak that Lies of P built on. As of this review’s initial publishing, Neople has continued to push all sorts of quality of life updates over the months since release, from remixed boss rushes to entirely new difficulties (and incredibly, a girl Khazan????). At some point I’ll run through it all again to see what’s been added, but even at launch, The First Berserker Khazan is a fantastic action game, and I hope that more games can learn from its willingness to try.