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.
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.
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