recent: tears of the kingdom, or as i like to call it botw 1.2, its the same thing all over again just with one or two added gimicks, the open world is dead, npcs are boring and nintendo just got away with it like that
not so recent: i cant stand persona 5, joker and his entourage are annoying teenagers, the time management is a horrible gameplay addition and the artstyle is just a visual overstimulation
with that being said,~~ plz dont kill me~~
Here’s the thing I never got: most Souls-like aren’t actually that difficult, they’re just tedious. And I feel like I’m taking crazy pills because people don’t seem to notice and/or care.
I don’t mind doing a boss encounter 20 times to get the move set down. I like the feeling of beating a boss by actually becoming better. But why the hell do I need to run trough a dozen enemies before I get back to him? It’s like a damn unskippable cutscene where I need to mash the same buttons over and over again! And people rightfully get mad at those, but put it in a souls-like dress and people love it.
I’m a 40 year old dad, I really don’t have the time to waste doing stuff I already mastered 20 times over. Just give me a damn quick save that disables during combat. It doesn’t make anything easier, it’s just less tedium.
Right? I so agree. Further, I feel like a lot of games are just as hard… but they give you a little wiggle room so that you can learn how to fight while you’re fighting, and you get this pleasing feeling of being smart and overcoming something difficult just the same, and you can get into the flow of it and let the music sink into you and feel fucking awesome even if it’s hard and you do end up dying multiple times.
But with souls games, one (1) tiny mistake and bam, you’re dead, and now you have to sit through this long-ass loading screen. That doesn’t feel like more difficulty to me; that feels like the type of bullshit that is like getting sniped from across the map by an NPC you can’t see. It just interrupts the flow of the fight, and the player’s immersion, repeatedly, when it doesn’t need to imo. And without difficulty settings, it screws over people who have hand pain or stiffness for any of a number of reasons, or people who have shitty cheap knockoff controllers, or people who have minimal hardware and maybe the game stutters just enough sometimes to make them die, and so on.
And the ‘community’, at least the one on reddit, is insufferable (in aggregate! I don’t automatically think you’re an ass because you like souls games, I promise. I’m just tired of people trying to use their like souls games as some of kind of proof that they’re better than other people, and of their complaining about difficulty settings and other accessibility measures.)
But yeah. Something like Hyper Light Drifter, that respawns you right by the fight immediately after you die, or something like Celeste where again you respawn right at the same level immediately after you die, is fine. But souls’ games death screen is too long on its own, let alone combined with all the stupid backtracking.
You don’t die in one hit to most things unless you run with very low health and armor. That’s a solvable problem.
And while sometimes bonfires can be a bit far apart, especially in the earlier games, people also seem to forget that you can literally just run past enemies. That said, I think it’s part of the journey and the struggle. Dark Souls is basically a rythm game in a way and that takes experience. Basically, you don’t need to kill everything but it’s good exercise.
Also there has always been an “easy mode”, cheesy build and multiplayer. If you think the game is too hard, play different.