The lack of a real dodge (not that sword-swinging side jump thing) is absolutely baffling. Platinum made the window on the parry absurdly long to compensate for Raiden's relative inability to escape attacks, but I would have vastly preferred a much tighter window with a dodge system. It would keep me from feeling instantly hobbled while simultaneously preventing Rising from being the world's easiest game of simon where I hit up+square when I see orange and L1 when I see blue.
Speaking of the parry, why is it on the same button as attack? I assume this is meant to be some sort of risk reward system, but it's just annoying when I'm hitting a Gekko, it rears back its leg (which is glowing orange, of course), I do the parry move, and Raiden just keeps swinging the sword instead. This only happens on Gekkos, so I just use triangle moves against them, but that can't be an intentional design decision, can it?
While I'm complaining, the sword aiming is super dumb. It just slows the pace of combat down to a crawl, especially since you swing the sword by pulling back on the right stick. That doesn't work half the time, either. When I try to cut quickly, which the game encourages with the combo and pieces counter, my input stops registering and Raiden just kind of jerks the sword back and forth. Why wasn't it just R1 to cut?
I liked fighting the dog, and that was about it. Platinum should make a game where you just fight a series of dogs instead.
