Anyone who played any beloved third-party NES game:
Oh, that's cute! 😏
Edit: Just so we're clear, I'm poking fun here, I like Demon/Dark Souls just fine.
but waay too many games get compared to them as though they're the first game with ball-retracting difficulty, lmao.
Normies and their love of souls games is highly annoying. All you have to do is tell someone they are skilled and they believe it
I'm not saying souls aren't hard, hell, I'm not even saying they aren't good.
I'm saying the NES was on it's own level of hard as balls.
Tbf, some of those were hard because of bad design too. Souls games are hard but I'd argue always more fair
Eh, debatable. There is some pretty bad design in souls games too. The bad design choices being deliberate doesn't make them any less shit.
There is a lot of bad design in recent souls-type games where it strays from fair to guess-the-bullshit. Elden Ring was / still is fun but boy do I fucking hate some design choices they made in that game and that they have since spread to other games like everyone followed around whatever apple did with the iphone.
"Nintendo hard" was indeed, a thing.
Could be worse.
Could be 'X-Com: Into the Deep' hard.
I can tell you've never beaten Malenia. I hear there's a Teletubbies battle royale MMO in the works for true gamers like you. ;)
Isshin from Sekiro would probably be a better example of a tough, consistent FromSoft boss. Malena is very build specific. Friends who had heavier builds and where used to blocking suffered. I've run dex through the extended franchise, and she melted.
I still find the FromSoft type of difficulty, Sekiro included, more manageable than something like Ninja Gaiden. They're mostly about pattern recognition - learning a moveset and responding accordingly. Not easy by any means, but generally a matter of patience. Ninja Gaiden, especially on Master Ninja, is about split second, highly contextual decision making against a mob of more aggressive enemies.
Souls games are mostly RPGs over Action games like Ninja Gaiden, which means build and item usage will trump skill for a lot of the fights. Its why they just straight up disabled Poise by the time of 3 to try and balance back.
Its also why Sekiro, which offers you minimal options besides the blade, is so much harder than the rest. You have little option but to get good and the game literally gives you a massive handicap for its entire duration (the Charm) that it doesn't even tell you about until you beat it just to help you do so.
Its also their best game but way too underrated because it is way harder than the rest without any cheese available from summoning or overleveling.
Agreed on all points.
The comparison was more on a cognitive level though. Even when disregarding the RPG mechanics, most encounters require very little thinking.
Engaging large groups of mob enemies is discouraged by design. No-lock helps, marginally, but at some point damage is guaranteed by way of AI design and attack/recovery times.
Boss movesets aren't especially complex and are well telegraphed. Once learned, most From bosses are just a matter of responding to cues on time - where timing is the primary difficulty factor.
Isshin was a decent counterpoint - including 4 movesets during the course of the fight. Morgott, in Elden Ring, proved more difficult than many of the popular "hard bosses" during a no-damage no-summon boss run due to the depth of his moveset and the relative complexity of the move triggers. Even then, against a single enemy, it can all be predicted/influenced by the player.
In NG, by way of the number of enemies and the intricacy of the combat system, there really is no preparing for a fight and it takes a lot of quick thinking to excel. Enemies punish poor positioning, but also too much or too little movement. Enemies fatally punish excessive blocking, but it is required to delay essence absorption. Attack chains and enemy type influence essence drop. Essence is essential for quickly thinning large groups, as well as restoring ki and health. I could go on, but my point is despite the largely unparalleled speed of the game, harder difficulties are essentially hyper-violent chess.
Its a problem with a lot of games, in which eventually the difficulty turns it from a game you play into a game you memorize. So you often just bash your head against it until muscle memory makes you do the moves exactly in the only way that could possibly get you through.
Its almost like turning the game into a speedrunner strategy, but its the required play.
Which is the point where I do think that Souls game's difficulty usually hits the correct level, wherein you have a solid chance to one shot most bosses when you see them simply by being careful and thoughtful to your timing. Most people won't, but its something a lot of "uber difficult" and even Soulslike games lack.
Elden Ring is the only odd on in that regard, as its delayed attack and insane tracking means you can't really recover without prior knowledge on the boss and his attacks. Its almost Dark Souls 2 level at times.
I'd argue the opposite for NG. It's a stylish action game with an expressive combo system and excellent player mobility. Given that, and the dynamism of combat, no two instances of the same encounter play out the same. That's my point. In addition to having hugely satisfying combat, it plays a little like a spatial puzzle.
Sure, higher difficulties (which are reserved for subsequent playthroughs) require a lot of muscle memory in regards to actual input. Intuition is required for moves that require precise spacing and to exploit attack i-frames and not be murdered during longer recoveries. The closest it comes to prescriptive play is reducing your moveset to an optimal subset, but only when dealing with extreme pressure.
Just watch this, it'll do a better job of explaining than words ever will.
I've never played a Ninja Gaiden before (its reputation of "HARDEST GAME EVER" killed any desire to try), but all I got out of the first few minutes of that video was iFrames being the cornerstone of everything. Like, numerous attacks that clearly should have landed just not registering because he was in a combo or in the middle of a cinematic attack.
Which relying on is usually a symptom of what I was trying to describe, wherein the game is too punishing to do anything but that optimal subset of abilities.
Its the opposite but much the same of the prescriptive play issue, except instead of treating the encounter as a "solved" thing you have to work through, you instead treat your character as a "solved" thing where you memorize the moves that Power Armor or iFrame through attacks and constantly use it to get through each problem. The original God of War games were infamous for this, where you usually can use only 1-2 combos the entire game at the top difficulty.
Again, maybe I got the wrong bead on NG as I've not actually played it, seemingly as its fans want by how much they treated it as an impossible to play difficulty fest for most of its life, but that is a problem with a lot of other similar games regardless like the aforementioned GoW.
I’ve got hundreds of hours into the souls series, Bloodborne and Elden Ring included, but I’ve bounced off Sekiro at least half a dozen times. For me, it’s the setting and the fixed protagonist. I like medieval fantasy and cosmic horror, and I like being able to create my own character.
I do fully intend to get around to Sekiro eventually.
It doesn't help that Sekiro takes a bit before it really gets moving. You start out with so little healing and missing major parts of your kit, like the Mikiri, that it also doesn't feel super good to play until after the first zone or so.
Like, once you hit and beat the boss at the top of the castle is when it actually feels like the game comes together and then its only up from there.
Isn't Malenia easiest with a heavy build? You just go upgrade some huge weapons with double colossal and can out trade her, because she's balanced around small windows of opportunity.
You do have to dodge her sword dance, but she's a low poise and relatively low range boss, and both of those are best exploited by heavy builds. You just can't block.
The windows are tight, but if you're good at parrying most of her moveset is punishable and bleed procs wreck her. Waterfowl dance isn't that hard to avoid; Trivial if you have distance enough to run.
I had an easy time. Friends who rolled heavy had a hard time. Haven't played a heavy/shield build since it ruined my first DS1 playthrough, so can't comment beyond that frame of reference.
As someone who had been gaming since before and through the nes up to souls and ongoing, souls game kick ass, but are now tired and over done. NES difficulty is equal as a different kind of hard. I've been there, I've played it all, every console, pc, tens of thousands of titles. One is not harder than any other and they are both fun, which itself is subjective.
Am I crazy for just hating the genre entirely? I’ve beaten DS 1-3, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring and every single one of them have just been the same thing over and over, get clobbered and reset back to bonfire and continue throwing yourself at enemies and bosses until you finally figure out their pattern. It’s boring and way too time consuming, especially as a parent.
Making the entire series’ identity based off of bullshit deaths just doesn’t seem fun to me
Sounds like you haven't played the original Ninja Gaiden.
Or even the later titles. Despite a highly autistic following, the first NG2 no-damage run on Master Ninja was 12 years after launch...
My hands still hurt from Ninja Gaiden Black.
I just finished a playthrough a week or two back. The only thing that game hurts more than your hands is your confidence with action games and your controllers L-stick. Literal controller drift. Too much gleaming blade.
nah,I have. That's pretty much my point, lol
Yeah, I remember ghosts n goblins and it's like sure. I don't need to shit on Souls games because of it though. Honestly dark souls greatest achievement isn't in making the most difficult games, it's in making a higher than average difficulty games that are far more satisfying and less frustrating than those old school platform hell games.
The dark souls hate is retarded. They are modern big budget games with almost no gay ass storytelling and very decent expectations for player competence. There are a lot of copycats because the formula is great.
I don't hate them, I'm just poking fun at the way any game with any kind of difficulty is automatically labeled as "the dark souls of " insert genre here, as if it's the first game with mainstream appeal that actually challenged players.
Hell, the NES Megaman games still rape my ass, and it took Years for me to beat Megaman X
oh, I'm not shitting on Demon/Dark Souls. I liked demon souls just fine (the little bit I got into it anyway). I'm mostly poking fun.
and stirring things up a bit in a way that's more fun than the stuff we normally talk about on dot win... ¬_¬ the world's a dumpster fire, granted, but a little distraction is good now and again, lol
Battletoads. Never made it past that one driving section with the lava
TMNT the original.
Hard Driving in the arcade.
Just like Battletoads. An amazing concept for a game...until they throw "that level" at you and basically end your run right there. It's not the same kind of levels you just got through, it's a "one-off" type of thing, and it's far more difficult than it honestly should have been.
The thing is, that was the case for every Battletoads level. I only ever beat it once in my early 20s because I never played it as a kid so I'm kind of foggy on the exact details but from what I remember, you've got:
Standard brawler Rappelling into a pit Riding moving platforms The lava sled level that everybody bails on Race a rat to the bottom of a series of pits to disarm a bomb A water race level (I think?) similar to the lava sled A weird one-wheel disc thing where you race to the end that requires perfect timing on corners And a rotating tower that you climb to the top to fight the queen.
Also played through it with a friend and we made it as far as it's possible to make it with 2 players -- there's a bug that makes one of the later levels impossible for 2 players. I think it was on the disc race level.
Sooo many quarters wasted. You could almost cheese it with Donatello's reach but not really. And once you were down to Raph lmao good fucking luck.
I liked the overhead movement system though.
I've never played dark souls but I still hate it because it has fucking ruined video games. Every other indie game now is just dodge roll stamina bar recharge wario ware instead of actual gameplay.
What, you don't remember the part in Star Wars where Luke killed all the jawas to save R2?
Super Star Wars on SNES? lol
fair
Don’t even get me started, my introduction to video games was playing Jekyll and Hyde on the NES. Absolutely brutal
The only reason Souls games get a reputation for being hard is because they have mass mainstream appeal, so they get played by legions of bad players who then blame the game. 99% of its difficulty comes from trying to rush things and getting into a pickle. Its the same with other memeatically "hard" games like Darkest Dungeon.
Like, I've Level 1 done DS1 and BB because of how simple they really are to play. I'm not really a "gud gamer" but I was still able to manage them, and without having to assemble a "route guide" to all the overpowered items as fast as possible, but just playing normal.
But NES games weren't nearly as fun or worth playing for anything besides the "street cred" of being the biggest masochist (or realistically, because you had nothing else to do). The majority of the games famous for being difficult are just bad games we have nostalgia for, so we keep them from fading into obscurity. If they dropped today they'd be mocked constantly for how shoddy they are.
I think a lot of people confuse tedium with difficulty, and don't realize it.
Its ironically one of the strengths the Souls games have. The interconnected world is fun and neat, but it also cuts out huge amounts of wasted time and tedium of getting back to where you died once you get far enough. Dark Souls 2 even made the controversial idea of just removing enemies if you die enough times and Elden Ring just puts checkpoints before some bosses.
Heck its one of the reasons that despite being a Fire Emblem oldfag who hates a lot of the easiness of the newer games, I enjoy the Turnwheel system. Because 99% of players just restarted a chapter if their character died anyway, so just cut the time loss and let them have a short rewind with the same seed.
back in my day we rented westwood's lion king repeatedly from blockbuster and got stuck at the waterfall or throwing level.
For real though, there is good difficulty and there is bad difficulty. Clunky unresponsive controls and being hit despite not being in the shown area, do not make for 'fun difficult', and that was my expierience playing souls. For that matter, bullet sponge enemies doesn't make for 'fun difficult' either.
I'm fine with difficult, but have it be fast reaction difficult. That's where the fun is.
Sierra Online says hi
Nah, gotta disagree here. A lot of the Sierra games were not hard, they were just stupidly annoying. Hard, to me, means if you work at it and get better (I'll include both increasing player skill and character skill here) you can succeed. The King's Quest games, on the other hand, had a bunch of cases where if you missed something (including, in some cases, things that were never or barely hinted at) or if the RNG didn't like you (screw you, Dwarf, you thieving bastard) you'd softlock the game but not realize it for hours. That's not difficulty, that's just trolling.
Thing is, that applies to 80% of NES hard games people are talking about here.
Go play some of them with a Quick Save or Rewind feature that is becoming so common now, and you realize most of the difficulty is "we surprised you, you died and its a 3-5 minute level until you get back and you'll have forgotten it by then, if you even learned how to avoid it."
They were literally designed to eat all your time so you didn't buy other games (or had to rent them for longer) because we were still transitioning out of Arcade milking, and its really only people's nostalgia and the "street cred" they derived from the suffering that keeps them defending it.
Lots of games, especially older games, have ''FAQ you'' difficulty.
Because you need to check a Frequently Asked Question or a Walkthrough to figure where to go or what to do. And I don't mean ''collect all the hidden characters'' ( Hello Fire Emblem ). Just the main story line.
God forbid you forgot 7 hours of gameplay ago and one week real time, there was a guy, in some town you forgot, who made glass jewels you must ask to craft a glass orb to use as a substitute for shattered orb to put in a tower pedestal. No quest log, no reminder.
And emulation with speed-up function + saved state are a sanity-saving comfort function. ( Often it's ''cheating'' ( platofmers ), many times you could use the normal save function but Save State takes half a second ).
Honestly most RPGs are a slog when I only get to game for a few hours a day.
Persona 3 Reload isn’t even that long and it still took me almost a month to complete
Infocom games did the same thing.
HHGTtG, you better make sure you feed that dog ...
The thing is, most of those games could be beaten in like 20-30 minutes once you knew what to do. Especially the earlier ones.
So yeah, you had to start over. Yeah, they force you to replay things that you already know how to do, but it's really not that long. That's just how games were done back then.
Dark Souls might be "fair" but the runs back to the spots where you're learning and dying a lot can get really fucking tedious as well.
lol, true.
It's the same shit, just pattern recognition
It's kinda sad that it's been more than a decade since Demon's Souls and the Souls games are still considered the most difficult. Something should have come along that is also universally considered tough, but mostly fair once you understand the game mechanics.
As the OP pointed out, on the NES alone, you have Ninja Gaiden, Battletoads, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Gauntlet, Ikari Warriors, Ghosts and Goblins, The Immortal, Mega Man, Fester's Quest, Silver Surfer, Castlevania III, and umm ... there's likely more. This is just off the cuff.
Oh, honorable mention to Blaster Master and Paperboy. While not exactly difficult, some of the timing and dodge/avoidance while still doing the paper delivery can be tough. And some of the bosses in Blaster Master can be frustrating to learn the patterns to.
World Cup Soccer by temco. got it on a double cart with super spike vball with our nes (had the infrared four-player adapter all bundled in). I'm pretty sure the same company also released a beat em up game that utilyzed a lot of the same sprites, though I couldn't tell you which came first.
Not really a soccer fan, but it was definitely an entertaining, if hard as balls, game, with a level of comical violence that made it novel. i tried to describe it, but honestly, it's just easier to show you, lmao.
That's some Tecmo charm alright. Probably part of the kunio game set that got broken up into a million pieces over here with different names.
For instance, there was also Super Dodge Ball that was hilariously violent and could be really tough. The computer, at least two of the teams, knew frame timing so well and had the ability to not only decimate your team, but could get the ball to return to them and just go ham on you until you were eliminated if you messed up even once.
I think it was adapted from an old arcade soccer game they made under their former company name, tekhan.
Dark Souls is a glorified Megaman game. Change my mind.
more or less, lol
ok