Gothic 1 and 2

Okay so if you want to be the coolest kid in the block on RPG Codex you have to bend over and let the idea that Gothic HAS THE BESTESTS COMBAT SYSTEM EVER WITH CAREFUL TACTICAL PLANNING AND AMAZING ACTION penetrate your sweet boyhole, but if you play it you may actually notice it's the worst fucking thing to ever befall on this planet yes even more than that one thing with many millions of people from last century.

Let's talk about melee combat because archery and spells are stupid and consist of exploiting the AI by pelting enemies with bullets, either made from wood or magic, from a higher plane (possibly of existence because doing more than one playthrough will straight up make you want to end yourself) where they can't reach you until you're out of arrows/mana or the enemy is dead.
You enter combat mode by unseathing your weapon. You keep the action button (M1, or CTRL if you are reading this in 2000) pressed and use your directional keys to swing your sword either left, right, or forward. Left (A) and right (D) swings lock you in place but can be chained indefinitely with each other as long as you keep your timing right - you gotta wait for the previous animation to end before making another attack, the recovery period will be much longer if you button mash. Forward (W) attacks make you perform a 3 pixels long front step that's useful if the enemy is just beyond your left-right combo's reach. When you start out and have no weapon skill (an actual numerical value you can raise, tis an RPG after all) you can chain left-right attacks into a forward attack, but you can't actually chain a W into anything after that.

I want to bring attention to weapon skill right away. This is a stat, there's one for both 1-handed and 2-handed (slightly slower weapon but better reach and damage), you can raise once to become "trained", and once again to become a "master". Each level makes your attacks faster and expands your moveset - once trained you unlock a longer W combo and you can finally chain Ws back into As and Ds, at master you unlock special attacks if you input three or four Ws in quick succession which do absolutely fuck all as we'll see later. You also get some nice animation changes and do not impact gameplay at all - for example, you use 1-handed weapons with both hands until you become trained, but once you do it doesn't make a difference because there aren't off-hand weapons, shields or anything like that. Pretty simple and cute right? Well, I'm simply warning you because Gothic apologists will fucking splooge over how deep and intricate this combat system is mainly due to how weapon skill impact your animations, and you may think damn, did they make Viggo Mortensen and Mark Hamill mocap 10000 animations or some shit to make Shadow of Mordor but without DDR controls, but nope. You have three attacks of which two can chain together. Level up a stat to chain all three. Do it once again to unlock a bunch of useless weapon spazzes you'll never use. That's it.

The battle system is reduced to running in front of the enemy and doing A > D > A > etc combos indefinitely, praying you manage to trigger enough crits (determined by weapon skill, going 0 > 10 > 20%) to win the number race and actually down the enemy before biting the dust yourself. Because that's what Gothic ultimately is, a damage race, a big skill check where you can only hope you have big enough numbers to win. This is a Piranha Bytes game, meaning damage calculations are done thought flat damage reduction formula, meaning buying a +5 strength sword in town will make a previously unsormountable obstacle into a cakewalk - nice player skill based action system here fellas.

But hey, this game surely must give the player functioning defensive options they can master to consistently avoid damage and close the gap created from having low stats right? I mean, being an ARPG and all? Well you are right, and in luck, because you get THREE: a backstep that covers no distance and has NO iframes, a timed block that has long enough startup to be impossible to be used reactively, and an automatic lock-on that lets you circle-strafe around an enemy if close enough. The last one is the only decent one, but it's still very cumbersome because, as you may have noticed, the WASD keys are already used for attacking and you are firmly locked to the ground as long as you do so, in order to free up those keys for regular movement you have to let go of the M1 button, wait for all the recovery animations to take their sweet time to finish, and finally use A or D to strafe around the enemy. It's still the only decent defensive option because it moves you laterally in a game where basically every attack is a lunging/frontal attack with no tells.

Jesus fuck the tells. Enemy attacks have no startup animations whatsoever except maybe a couple of cases, it's fucking crazy. That's why I actually lied before: the block startup time is actually very fine, it's just everything in this fucking game attacks on frame 1 of their animation and it's impossible to react to. Blocking lasts only a couple of seconds before it automatically ends (with a pretty long recovery time before you can block again no less), so you can only commit to a block and pray, and you will still probably get hit during the long recovery time at the end. But even if you actually manage to block some enemy hits this way, so what? It didn't waste any enemy stamina because there is none, nor there is any kind of resource dictating how long enemies can attack, blocking recovery is so long you can't even counter in time before they do another attack, you just wasted a few seconds you could have spent mindlessly attacking (sorry, sorry: by CAREFULLY attacking keeping track of the COMPLEX timing-based combat system in order to SKILLFULLY and TACTICALLY overcome your foe) crossing your fingers for a crit.
The dodge covers no space and has no iframes, I don't need to say more. I'll give you some nice tidbits of information instead: did you know blocking doesn't work against monsters (this is a game feature no less... But you only find out in the tutorial zone of Gothic 2)? Did you know monsters are the enemy category with the worst attack tells of the game? Did you knwo I'm gonna fucking punch my fucking monitor rn

This is nothing though. You haven't lived until you faced a multiple enemies encounter in this game. You haven't lived until you find out that NONE of the defensive options described above work (not even circlestrafing because, well, multiple enemies). You haven't lived until you find out THAT YOUR WEAPON'S HITBOX IS ONLY ACTIVE FOR THE ENEMY YOU ARE LOCKED ON TO. WHAT THE FUCK. If you throw yourself in a pack of rats or something and start swinging, your sword will phase through every rodent except one, the one you are looking at at that moment. Too fucking bad if you thought 2-handed weapons and side attacks would help against crowd control - they are actually worse.
This is the dirt worst. I have no idea why they might have decided to implement this. The melee weapons are not hitscan, they are actual physical objects with an accurate hitbox attached, I've checked and tested. They couldn't have been afraid of the player stunlocking huge numbers of enemies because hitstun is so short it would impossible. I have no fucking clue. So how do you win multiple enemies encounters? By killing one enemy spamming A-D-A-D, releasing M1, waiting for the long, uncancellable attack recovery animations to end, slooooly turning on place (tank controls btw) to face the second enemy, pressing M1 again to lock onto it, start spamming A and Ds again. Sure sounds fun.

Finally, as in the final nail in the coffin of this piece of trash, the RNG. Enemy blocks are determined by a dice roll, so every enemy encounter against humans will last 20 more hits it needs to because you have to watch 20 seconds of plink-plink-plink (but this is actually super strategical, this is not a button masher kid). This is why the long flowery animations you unlock as you progress through weapon skill are actually useless - they will just get blocked, because for every player hit after the first one the chance for the enemy to block rises to like 90% and those special attacks are always at least third or fourth in your combo, and leave you more open due to longer recovery.
Monsters don't block - they dodge. They will dodge forever. It's not like a dodge that covers space - wolves avoiding your hits because they physically get out of your damage range would make too much sense. It's like a WoW dodge, they do the jump-back animation and then snap back to their original position. You can push them against a wall or whatever the fuck you want, they will keep dodging until the game decides against it after a while. This dodge chance is also totally rigged - if you aggro a group of, let's say, four mobs, and kill three without taking damage, the fourth one WILL dodge INDEFINITELY. I've tested this. The carousel of wasted time and shit animations lasts longer the better you play. If you took some damage they (the last enemy) will die after you fourth or fifth whiff like everyone else, if you managed to show a iota of skill to not get hit beforehand they'll dodge FOREVER until you let them hit you back at least once. Swear on me mom, I whacked a zombie for three minutes once to demonstrate this - I didn't take a hit against his partners, I now had a 0% chance to hit him until I took damage again. Wow.
Jesus fuck, Morrowind gets a lot of flack for its miss-miss-miss-miss combat but at least it's consistent, your chanches to hit are directly related to a transparent statistic you can manipulate like the others, this... Is just unacceptable.

For whatever it's worth, Gothic 2 does actually improve the formula somewhat. Every attack has a dedicated button so no more awkward M1 presses management when trying to juggle multiple tasks, the forward attack covers more space, side attacks are unbound to a key by default and hidden in a subsection of the options menu (making me think they realized there's not enough depth to warrant three different kind of attacks) along with the OG Gothic controls, the backstep covers more space and ACTUALLY HAS IFRAMES WHICH EVEN WORK AGAINST NON-HUMAN ENEMIES MY GOD, the block's recovery is waaaaaaay shorter and you can actually block as long as you want if you keep spamming the button, and the RNG misses are toned way the fuck down to being almost irrelevant. However, almost all the good will this game accrued with its positive changes is lost due to an incredibly dumb formula change.
Regular hits: (STR + Weapon Damage)/10. Crits: Str + Weapon Damage. That's crits having a x10 damage multiplier. That's A LOT. In a game with flat damage reduction formulas, where just a couple of points make the difference between fighting a brick wall or a fluffy couch, having a x10 crit multiplier is like getting handed a revolver that shoots BB pellets most of the time but a H Bomb when it doesn't. Now weapon skill isn't a stat you train three times and be done with it to get a crit chance capped at 30%, it's a regular stat you can raise to 100 with a 1:1 critical chance ratio. You are EXPECTED to reach 100% with your weapon of choice since the enemy HP values are made with the x10 multiplier in mind and you need to be as consistent with them as you can, especially since Gothic 2 by itself is very hard due to being bundled with an expansion that rebalanced the whole game, but until that point you have to cope with the idea that you'll sometimes need four hits to kill a early game rat while you can explode Shadowbeasts with two if luck is on your side. Human enemies work the same way too, you have to deal with the fact bandits will two-shoot you until the endgame as well.

Sorry if this rant seemed directed towards imaginary strawmen that think this game is a godsend, but this is a reality amongst the fanbase and sites like RPG Codex. They appropriated the git gud mantra for a game where there is not gud to be git, and they'll pat each other on the back while circlejerking over how much CASUALS don't GET how DEEP this combat system is because it's super hard and tactical and you can't button mash through it. They even compare it to Dark Souls, get the FUCK out of here. This is just another number based CRPG, one that is not fun until you get so overlevelled/equipped you can explode everything in your path while being completely detached from the core combat system.

According to GoG Galaxy, I have over 50 hours in Gothic 1, and almost 40 in 2 (which I'm barely halfway through). I also inted to play 3 with its standalone expansion and Risen.

I hope Nioh gets a decent discount on Steam soon.