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.
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.
The Sigma release on PC (1, 2 has a lot of problems) adjusted the difficulty, making it less ridiculous and a great place to jump into the series. Harder difficulties are still there for people who either enjoy working to master complex mechanics or have reaction times sufficiently far outside of the mean. Very much a personal preference, but few games cater to that niche these days. Personally, the appeal isn't in the difficulty but in the attainable high skill-ceiling and the exhilarating gameplay that comes from it.
To a degree, and more so in NG2. NG1 is less permissive, and therefore more decisive. That said, essence (the orbs) are automatically absorbed when not blocking or attacking, so the player was blocking a lot. Some of those i-frames are the result of counters - no different to ripostes in FromSoft games albeit more fluid. Others require use of essence and good setup. In that regard I consider NG a better solution than its derivatives (God of War, notably), since that optimal subset is still fairly large and the "cinematic attacks" require quite a bit of thought to use effectively. That was largely my point - it's not just mindless action or rote input.
Soulslikes (Elden Ring in particular) fall apart quite quickly if you're outside of the intended skill bracket. All of the artificial challenge runs speak to this. Given the relatively small number of combat options, without sufficient challenge the game is essentially reduced to alternating 2-3 inputs with exact timing.
As someone working on a challenging combat system, I'd be very interested in hearing if you have any proposed solutions. You're clearly quite analytical when it comes to gameplay.