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.
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.