As I first booted up PG-Geisha's Revenge, I genuinely believed the game's rarity system would introduce deep strategic complexity. The premise seemed promising - different rarities with unique abilities that could be mixed and matched for tactical advantage. But after spending over 80 hours across multiple playthroughs, I've reached a rather disappointing conclusion: the strategic depth is largely an illusion, and the game's combat system ultimately boils down to repetitive button-mashing with occasional body-swapping mechanics.

Let me break down exactly why this happens. The game presents you with five distinct rarities, each supposedly bringing something unique to the table. In theory, this should create countless strategic combinations. Yet in practice, I found that approximately 70% of special abilities simply aren't worth the risk-reward calculation. Take poison zapping, for instance - it sounds fantastic on paper, but when you're in the heat of battle against slitterheads that hit like freight trains, spending precious blood resources on a marginal damage-over-time effect feels like throwing resources down the drain. The same goes for bomb-throwing and trap-setting abilities. They look flashy in the ability menu, but they fundamentally don't alter the combat flow in any meaningful way.

What really frustrates me about this system is the blood resource management. Blood serves dual purposes - it fuels your special abilities while also functioning as your health pool. This creates constant tension where using any significant ability puts you at immediate risk. I've counted at least 23 instances where I died specifically because I gambled on using a special move at the wrong moment. The game's punishment system is brutally unforgiving - three critical hits to your current host body means permanent death, and you can't survive outside a body for more than five seconds. This creates a perverse incentive to play conservatively, sticking to basic melee attacks rather than experimenting with the game's more interesting systems.

The parry system compounds these issues significantly. After extensive testing, I'd estimate the parry window is somewhere around 0.3 seconds, with directional requirements that feel inconsistent at best. When slitterheads can launch your host body across the battlefield with a single blow, attempting precise parries becomes more of a lottery than a skill-based maneuver. This unreliability pushes players further toward the safety of basic attacks. Why risk a complicated setup involving poison traps when you can just hammer the melee button, swap bodies when health gets low, and repeat the process?

I've developed what I call the "75-20-5 rule" through my gameplay experience. About 75% of combat situations are best handled through basic melee attacks, 20% through strategic body swaps, and only 5% actually benefit from special ability usage. This distribution reveals the fundamental flaw in the game's design - the most spectacular abilities are also the most situational and risky. The blood cost for abilities like battlefield manipulation or area denial simply doesn't justify the marginal advantages they provide.

Where the game truly shines, in my opinion, is in the body-swapping mechanic itself. The tension of desperately searching for a new host while your timer ticks down creates genuine excitement. But this excellent core mechanic is undermined by the poorly balanced special ability system. I've found myself deliberately avoiding abilities that require significant blood investment, instead focusing on passive enhancements that don't put my survival at risk.

The tragedy here is that with better balancing, PG-Geisha's Revenge could have been a masterpiece of strategic action gaming. As it stands, players are better off ignoring most of the flashy special moves and focusing on mastering the fundamental combat loop. After my extensive playtime, I've concluded that the optimal strategy involves treating special abilities as occasional garnish rather than main course - use them sparingly, only when absolutely necessary, and stick to what actually works: melee combos and timely body swaps. It's disappointing that such a visually stunning game with such promising mechanics ultimately encourages the most straightforward approach possible, but that's the reality of dominating every game level in PG-Geisha's Revenge.