BODY: Soulslike fans looking for their next punishing obsession may want to mark July 31 on the calendar. The Relic: First Guardian, a dark fantasy action RPG, arrives with an ambitious pitch: an open world stalked by more than 70 bosses, each demanding mastery of a combat system that bends the genre's rules.
Where most Soulslike games gate every action behind a shared stamina bar, The Relic: First Guardian narrows stamina's role to defense and dodging. Attacking flows freely, but the moment you need to block or roll out of danger, the resource management kicks in—forcing players to weigh aggression against survival in a way that feels distinct from the FromSoftware template.
The world draws heavily on Asian mythology, a setting still relatively rare in a subgenre dominated by European gothic and Japanese feudal aesthetics. The hands-on preview highlights a landscape built for exploration rather than corridor-crawling, with the sheer boss count promising that danger is never far off the beaten path.
That density of bosses is the headline feature. Seventy-plus encounters is an enormous number even by genre standards, raising the question of whether each fight can feel handcrafted or whether some will blur together. The preview suggests the developers are betting on variety and setpiece spectacle to keep the gauntlet fresh.
The insider take
From Tokyo, the timing is notable: The Relic launches into a crowded summer for high-difficulty action games in the Japanese market, where the Soulslike label has become a genuine selling point rather than a niche descriptor. The Asian-mythology framing is a smart differentiator—Korean and Chinese studios in particular have been leaning into regional folklore to stand apart from the FromSoftware canon, and Japanese players have shown real appetite for it. Whether 70 bosses reads as generous or exhausting will likely define its reception here.
Originally reported by 4Gamer.net − 最新記事 (Japanese).