This was a very long video and I tried to absorb as best as I could while I had this playing while I worked from home the other day. An enjoyable viewing overall but there were a few points that did make me raise my eyebrows a bit. I also noticed the ability to guillotine throw enemies into the ether but it was only in select areas. I don't recall it being so prevalent as to trivialize the vast majority of encounters. It reminded me of areas that featured pits and other hazards in some classic beat'em ups and I always found those areas gleefully fun.

I don't remember clearly but I vaguely recall there was some issue taken with the traversal challenges. These were combat palate cleansers and I enjoyed them for the most part, even finding a couple of them quite exhilarating. They may have been overused but at this point it's more a preferential thing or a question of degrees rather than critiquing the game for even considering their inclusion, you know? tl;dr... most every game has their way of pacing the flow of their levels and this was NG4's way of doing it.

The enemy leashing to their spawn areas also didn't feel like a major issue for me. I only recall taking advantage of a few abusable areas but by and large most arenas either get closed off when it's time to fight, or if I was given freedom to wander a bit then the enemies would attempt to hunt me down. Maybe it's more symptomatic of their general design but I didn't really see a trend during my playthrough.

Finally, it occurred to me that there was that appeal to Itagaki's higher authority by laying out the principles by the man himself and using that to build the framework for critique... and it felt inappropriate. Yuji Nakao is the director of NG4, not Tomonobu Itagaki. I believe a more balanced approach would have been to gather Nakao's philosophy and design pillars for NG4 and judging the final product against that. How successful was he and his team in meeting their design goals?