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.
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.