I love how there is almost like an infinite sine graph of ways of individual interaction specifically with the popularity of media.
Sorta like...
- If it‘s popular it must be good! That many people can’t be just wasting their time right?
- Actually all mass media ~s~uuu^cks^! It's just for engaging with as many rubes as possible. I now like art film and performance art. I am a boy and I am 21 years old*
- Ah, I should really get over myself a bit, I'm getting tired of finding torrents and subtitle files. Some mass media stuff isn't so bad, there's lots of stuff you can only do with lots of labor and resources after all
- ...Never mind, I forgot how often that means watching movies funded by the US Department of Defense
- ...Never mind again, I'm so tired of every second movie I watch being about the ennui of middle class white people, I'm going to go see which _Fast and the Furious_ movie I can circumironically love enough to confuse people online
- I am going to deironicize myself and face to bloodshed [hits create account button on forums.insertcredit.com]
*- had a funny moment last night like this, my partner's little brother is 21 and I've known him since he was about 12, and especially in the past 2 or 3 years he's become really thoughtful and contemplative. He's a really great guy and I appreciate him a lot, which for me means I tease him a lot too. A few days ago my partner said they maybe felt like rewatching _Battle Royale_ at some point soon and I asked lil bro last night if he'd ever seen it and if he wanted to watch it while we had a bunch of Chinese food. He said he read the book (I lent it to him years ago) and read the manga but he thought the movie was _boring!!_ And then he said he's been really into, like, `https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_cinema`? And I just had to laugh because it made me remember what I was like at his age.
Anyway we ended up watching something he had seen before, _Burning_ (2018), a Korean movie that is based on the short story _Barn Burning_ by Murakami Haruki, or rather I would best describe it as if Lee Chang-Don read the short story and thought "wtf this doesn't have an ending." It was pretty good actually. Our little bro has pretty good taste for a 21 year old
+1 for Souls and Bloodborne. They‘re full of cool art and great environments, but I can’t stand the audacity. If the mandate of these games is “git gud,” they sure don't actually want me to! I think one of the basic appeals of video games is being able to get a (maybe shallow) sense of accomplishment within a relatively predictable span of time. In Soulsbornes, I might go a whole week without having any progress to show for it–not because the games are very challenging all the time, but because they punish you with major setbacks whenever you fail.
If a boss kills me with his first attack, and it costs me another ten minutes to get back to it and even SEE its second attack, which then kills me, it might take me an entire night or more to even witness the boss's full move set, let alone devise a strategy for dealing with it. In my opinion that's bad and dumb, and regressive! Most games used to work like this as a way to take your quarters, and I thought we all agreed to move on at the turn of the century.
At some point I start thinking about all the real-world skills I could be learning in less time than it would take to stumble poorly through a Souls game, and to me at that point it ceases to be a video game.
I should mention that unlike @exodus, I *do* like animationy action games, so this really is just a matter of bad checkpoints almost singlehandedly ruining a thing. I like Sekiro a *lot* more, and even got the Platinum--my first ever
@Lacquerware#12155 Yeah, even as someone who really loves Dark Souls 1-3 and Bloodborne, you do have to put in a lot of work to maintain the illusion that, even if Soulsbornes are very hard and we like them because they're hard, the consequences of failure are more a question of tolerating the monotony than really actually changing the way failure works. It just means running from the nearest checkpoint back to the boss room.
And... a lot of bosses in Dark Souls and Bloodborne are just... big damage sponges with attack animations you have to time your dodges to. Mind you, a lot of those are still really cool, visually, thematically, some of them have pretty cool mechanics, some are interesting because of the space they're in, but even souls fans would be lying to themselves if they said another big monster the camera can't follow very well or another humanoid with fast movements and attacks was truly remarkable boss design.
Also agreed about _Sekiro_, it both puts a lot of this into perspective and fixes a lot of it. It was the first game where I didn't feel dread about the game becoming harder (even if I enjoyed that dread), I felt thrilled. It's also the only one I've got a Platinum trophy on!
@Gaagaagiins#12164 Wow, I've found someone who agrees with me! Awesome.
I really wanted to love Bloodborne because there's so much about it that's really cool, including the monster designs. But so many of the bosses amount to flailing, screen-filling piles of inscrutable hitboxes that require an undue number of deaths to even observe, in my experience. It's also weird how co-op can completely eliminate all difficulty from the game, so it's either miserable or effortless, depending entirely on your luck. I revisited Bloodborne like five times in as many years before finally clearing it, and that only thanks to some lucky online matchmaking. The final boss took two attempts and yielded no real sense of accomplishment. o.O
Thought of another one: Super Metroid. Just played it back-to-back with Other M (which I enjoyed thoroughly in Dolphin), and although it does lots of cool things, it's also so unguided that I spent about 3/4 of the time wandering aimlessly. Like ten hours! Fusion and Other M did more to funnel players toward the objective, and I've never really understood why that was such a contentious change. "Exploration" shouldn't have to mean "repeatedly scouring every inch of a whole planet."
@Syzygy#12173 I do think the “difficulty” stems more from how it pushes your patience than the actual mechanics of the fight, although the damage values often mean you can‘t afford to make even one or two mistakes, which seems inevitable when you don’t even know what an enemy does.
I've seen a lot of Souls fans give up on Sekiro because of its difficulty, and it mystifies me. I found the latter so much more learnable, not to mention you have many more tools to assist you.
agree that the git gud thing is external to the games, however the emphasis on killing the player is not. I mean a core mechanic (and theme) of demons/dark is dying and its consequences. Demons has multiple examples of shiny objects being placed in seemingly reachable locations, then you get torched by a dragon or whatever.
The games are also open in their attempts to intimidate the player. Start fighting one boss, then a second joins the fight. Walk into a cemetery and you have to deal with a dinosaur sized wolf holding a sword in his mouth.
I think that the games, at their best, do a good job of conveying endurance, will, persistence etc vs death and entropy. They are a trial for most humans, however, and not for everyone in that regard
but “attack animations” and “invincibility frames” are not concepts that I imagine most players would be attuned no, nor are they concepts that the games encourage the player to recognize or engage with, and the character growth/stats/items/equipment system is the opposite of intuitive. Not saying that's a bad thing, the obscurity has its appeal and I personally like it.
HOWEVER, I think sekiro is the first in the series that really drills down on the technique, and I had a similar experience to
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@Lacquerware#12176 I found the latter so much more learnable
when I played it. Yes, sekiro is more difficult, but it's more clear and insistent on what you need to gain some conceptual+hand eye coordination functional ability over. So I had this paradoxical experience with it where I found myself more intimidated, fail harder, but still probably made it through the game quicker than any of the preceding souls because I had to drill down and engage with the technical side (like ninja gaiden 2004 which I thought of while playing it)
@Syzygy#12179 This is a really interesting and such a wide open conversation.
Your point about Souls having more means with which players can affect the difficulty of encounters through leveling up or getting better gear or upgrade materials is true in relation to _Sekiro,_ but I have two broad issues with that statement.
The first is that it does remain that how much those tools can actually help are still balanced to stay roughly within a certain range, and often raising one's power levels numerically still does have at least some barriers that need to be overcome with skill checks. Accessing more powerful tiers of upgrade materials often will require overcoming challenges first. If I'm stuck on the Quelaag and somehow grinded up enough Titanite Shards to upgrade all of the appropriate gear and it still isn't enough to beat her, I'm severely limited on how much stronger I can get in this moment, since if I can't beat Quelaag I'm not getting access to Titanite Chunks. It also calls into question just how much of an edge those incremental numerical improvements are really going to give you. If Quelaag can kill you in 3 hits but you can put enough points into Vitality so that you can take 4 hits, that's pretty significant. But if a player is not able to do the fight well enough that that isn't a meaningful difference for them, it shows the limit of those means to increase your numerical strength. How many hours of grinding would it require to get enough Vitality to take 5? Probably a lot. At that point if the player knows they can only take ~12 hits and need to not waste even a single drop of Estus, it becomes an exercise of memorization of patterns and learning a near consistent execution. That isn't necessarily fun for your average player.
The other issue is that how to best use these tools still depends on the player either developing a literacy for the game's mechanics or feeling enough of a desire to go and do homework to be able to get through the game. That means engaging with the game, and engaging with the game in a way that is not terribly fun or interesting either, especially since the information as presented in the game is not really helpful in this regard at all, since it would boil down to trial and error or experimentation to get a sense of exactly how all the numbers are interacting. I would not think it clear what the difference between 15 and 20 Vitality is, for instance, and visually even when leveling up the difference looks incremental at best. The game all but hides information for how obtuse some of it is, like weapon scaling, or how much you can expect stat growth in general to help you, or how Adaptability is almost completely useless, and so on and so forth. If a game is losing people, I wouldn't expect them to start to wonder why they should have stopped using the Drake Sword a long time ago.
As such, I think the balance of the game still trends toward it being a game of above average difficulty, and not just because of just how the numbers interact, but also because it places a good deal of demand on the player in terms of being of above average game literacy. But yeah, I do also blame the game's marketing and the game's reputation spread by word of mouth. _Dark Souls_ is hard but it's not as hard as its reputation would have one believe. Some of that difficulty is not necessarily intended and is because of the game's poor communication of some mechanics too though.
Landstalker - I kinda like it. For some reason it realllly bothers me that there aren‘t really bosses. It’s pretty unfriendly to play. I think I decided I didn‘t enjoy* it during a puzzle that maybe relied on NTSC dithering to produce the right color? I just never got on its wavelength. Would rather play Light Crusader, Crusader of Centy, or Link’s Awakening.
2.
Earthbound & Dragon Quest XI - **!!!SPOILERS!!!** This is kind of my joke answer? Ultimately I actually enjoyed playing both of these but they were also relentlessly boring sometimes because you spend the first half of each game collecting the characters and building up your party and then you spend the second half of each game re-collecting the same characters and building up your party. That sucks. **!!!END SPOILERS!!!**
3.
Panzer Dragoon Saga - Maaan maybe I built this game up too much in my head but it bums me out that most of the dialog isn't in Panzer-speak, somehow I don't get the combat at all, you move reallly slowly... but the soundtrack is completely amazing. I would play a remake of this in a heartbeat if it used the original soundtrack and not the remixed soundtrack they released recently.
4.
FFVII Remake - Again, just cannot get the flow of battle. The voice acting is bad in every language. Midgar should not have a daytime. Also pretty much all stories should be shorter, not longer.
5.
Warcraft III/World of Warcraft/Starcraft II/Diablo III - Maybe these games are good? Maybe they aren't. Blizzard's aesthetic switch from gritty pre-rendered-ish pixels to 3D cartoons killed all my interest. Just can't vibe with them.
Gonna echo what people are also saying about Sekiro here too. It put maybe some of the most intense demands on players in the entire series, but also going to add that I think a big part of what makes it more learnable in that sense is because of how much work they put into making the game control and feel a certain way. Sekiro, unlike most Dark Souls series entries, and I think mostly true for Bloodborne, has a lot more ways you can, say, move-cancel with a dodge or deflect/block. In Dark Souls it was sort of the point to commit to attacks, that‘s why the Poise system exists, but in Sekiro if you swing at a boss and a few fractions of a second later you intuit that was a bad move, if you’re fast enough you can block or dodge instead. This at least to me contributed to feeling that my intentions in combat were more faithfully represented with how Sekiro responded.
About Souls: discourse over difficulty, be it positive or negative, bores me to death because it is absolutely the element that I care less concerning these games. Almost every conversation surrounding this franchise ends up revolving around the goddamned difficulty and I don't know, these are long and very stratified games involving a lot of elements and systems in them, I think there is at least the possibility of a conversation other than how hard they are.
I play souls because mood, atmosphere and because I love the subtle tragedy enveloping everything in those worlds. I love fragmented and environmental storytelling and the fact you need to implicate yourself both mechanically and narratively to figure it all out. Also they all have my favorite art direction of all time in videogames, enemy and location design is breathtaking and the way levels link and connect with each other is surprising and very well thought out. Just naming a couple of things I think are interesting and never see discussed.
Souls have the summoning system and that is basically easy mode, just find a friend you feel like sharing the journey with and play that way. You even can summon NPC's if you are playing offline. It may not be convenient for you but it's there!
Since I am deep in Sekiro currently I will echo some points. It is an easier game to master without a wiki. As there are very few obtuse mechanics. The mechanics are THE MECHANICS. Bosses don‘t have secret resistances or weaknesses. There’s no elemental buffing etc etc. Souls games are easier with a wiki because you can read up on a TON of ways to brute force your way through a boss your hands might have a hard time mastering. Its a very insightful read on @Gaagaagiins part to say that Souls requires you become FAR more literate with the underlying mechanics than Sekiro does.
I will also add to what @jeelz said. Having replayed some of Panzer Dragoon Saga the game does not live up to the hype. It is for its era exceptional. But we have 22 years of the medium that have come after it. There is so much flying around poking at the world that feels a tad tedious. I have come to believe that Zwei is actually the game to replay in the series as it hits all the beats and in a much more compact manner. Still, there are things in PDS like the pace of the battle system that forever ruined all later turn based RPGS for me. It also doesn't help that almost every big RPG afterwards was so complex and systems intricate that I can't even get myself excited to play it.
Agree that what you describe are the best and most interesting parts of those games. But the imposition of “difficulty” is I think a deliberate imposition on the mood/spacial design/opaque and allusive storytelling technique that they had already been doing with King‘s Field. At risk of being overreductive, demons is bending a king’s field game into action game shape: speeding up movement, strictly gating progression through the environments by fog doors impassible until you kill a big monster, etc. I‘m not convinced by arguments that these games are not substantially about difficulty. Could have foregone the huge glowing red “you died” text if you didn’t want players to register your game as tough
@Gaagaagiins#12164 Also agreed about Sekiro, it both puts a lot of this into perspective and fixes a lot of it. It was the first game where I didn’t feel dread about the game becoming harder (even if I enjoyed that dread), I felt thrilled. It’s also the only one I’ve got a Platinum trophy on!
With Sekiro they finally realized that putting checkpoints before bosses and miniboses... is good? Crazy idea, I know. On top of that, Sekiro is a boss and miniboss game. You can fly through areas with regular enemies in a minute lol.
On the other hand, a game demanding that you engage with its difficulty on its terms, and even a game assuming video game literacy and then expecting you to become literate in its mechanics, aren't inherently bad things. Some of my favourite games are my favourites specifically because they demanded those things and I enjoyed meeting the challenge.
It's just why I also understand when people say they don't like them, and find them overly player-hostile. And even if I end up liking it, the problem with _Souls_ isn't that the game demands you learn how it works, it's that the information it gives you to do so is often obtuse.
