Salt and Sanctuary: Magic mode done. It's funny how boss difficulty wound up being a lot different with some of them this time. I struggled with some that were easy on the first run and aced others that had been hard. Magic can be outrageously broken for any boss with an elemental weakness, but sometimes you can be in for a real slog if you hit resistances (the last boss was suddenly a very notable endurance marathon, I had to spam familiars and run away a lot), in which case slapping poison on the sword and doing it the old-fashioned way sometimes turned out to be a lot more practical. It's really nice to have the option of ranged nukes when you need them, but it's also hard to spam spells in a long fight without wearing yourself down. This is kind of why I feel that guns were more valuable to me in my first run than offensive magic actually was in this one--gun ammo is functionally infinite since bullets are so cheap, and they don't eat away at your stamina bar either. Fireball barrage is an immensely satisfying way to hose down an enemy, though.
So while I was finishing that, I also took the time to join and then abandon all the other religions (there's a trophy for each of them). This has some odd consequences. People from your old mob will chastise you but still do business if you'd left vendors at their sanctuaries. That part's okay! What's less okay is that in order to join the SUPER SECRET death cult, you need to desecrate the sanctuary of a group you'd formerly belonged to. This is basically the less peaceful version of using the conversion item that just kicks everybody out of the sanctuary and blank slate resets it--this way, every vendor in the room goes hostile and then waves of guards show up to try and murder you.
It turns out that isn't a temporary inconvenience, word gets out and once I wandered into another shrine of The Three--the group I had previously spent most of the game converting sanctuaries to--everyone there attacked me too. So briefly there was this scary moment when nowhere was safe and all my former compatriots were rightfully out to murder me for being a dick! But it turns out I can pay another NPC a meager amount of salt to just make everyone forget what I did, so whatevs. Well, it was a neat idea at least. Also when you abandon one religion your rank in it gets completely reset. So when I later rejoined the one I actually wanted to be part of, I had to go back and re-farm all the crap items I'd used to rank it up the first time. (You don't really need to spend any significant amount of time farming in order to max out rank the first time, since you tend to find a lot of this junk naturally just exploring...but this time I'd already spent everything I'd previously accumulated and had no choice but to farm it all anew.) This is actually important since rank boosts contribute to your healing supplies.
I do like some of the specific visual details that come with each group, though--they each have their own distinct sprites for each of the vendor types, for the tombstones that mark player death sites, and for the healing items that you restock when resting in a sanctuary (some of which items may or may not be slightly different mechanically, I'm not really sure--at the least, I know one of them will definitely poison you if you chug it too frequently, which is hilarious).
Afterward, I started, deleted, and restarted a cleric 5-6 times until I finally got a kill on the tutorial boss. Platinum acquired! In-game, the reward for this is actually fairly huge: enough salt for like a dozen extra levels right out of the gate, another black pearl (skill upgrade item) thrown in for good measure, and a couple high-end weapon upgrade items that are normally available only singly or doubly and in the last 5% of the game. Wow. Also he drops a big pile of gold that you can't get because your character freezes for the ensuing narration, but whatever, you don't care about gold in this game pretty much ever. Dumb fight though, he only really has two different attacks for you to remember but he has a thousand HP and you deal single-digit damage so it's like ten minutes of don't make a mistake or you die.
Anyway, since it's a shame to waste all that cool stuff, and because I haven't messed with prayer at all yet, I might as well run with this. It's a short game (magic mode would've been an easy 10-hour replay if I hadn't fucked up so badly with my religion) and there's still a few days before DS3, so hey. It's been pretty neat so far--I dig that Light is both a divine spell in this game and a genuinely useful one, because S&S has some environments that outright demand a torch and that's a problem because I don't have the stats to one-hand my chosen weapon. So instead: cast Light before leaving sanctuary, rest to recover, leave to explore with spell active at no functional cost. Will usually last you a significant fraction of a dungeon dive. Really nice bonus. As for weapon, burrrrrrp copying Fenrir, holy scythe is go. It's amazingly good and pretty much hands-down the best cleric weapon and you get it only like a third into the game. The only statistically superior option I see on a more complete file turns up when there's basically nothing left but the final boss, and is a drop from a hard-to-reach optional fight anyway.
