Any of the Dark Souls. They’re hyped up for being difficult, but the only thing that makes them difficult is the clunky controls.
Like, I could make Pokemon Yellow equally difficult by taping a dish sponge to a Gameboy and requiring the player to operate the buttons through an inch of fluff.
The story’s kinda there if you dig for clues, but it comes off as random bullshit if you don’t.
They are fucking gorgeous, I’ll give em that.
I’ll never understand the ‘git gud’ circlejerk… I 100%'d DS2, and made it a good chunk through Elden Ring (think I was about 80% done before finally saying fuck it). I ‘got gud’… But DS never got fun.
I absolutely love the style, setting, visuals, and music - I really wanted to like DS… but the combat and clunky controls absolutely murder the experience.
what’s clunky? I would agree they have some clunky elements, mainly the targetting will sometimes cause problems, but I don’t recall much else being necessarily clunky.
‘clunky’ is the end product, but the biggest contributing factor is the absolute committal nature of initiating an animation. Need to take half a step to the left to dodge an arrow? Fuck you, I’m only one second in to a 2.5 second sword twirling animation! …and actually you double clicked at the start of the animation, so I’m gonna do it again for another 2.5 seconds! …so you die, respawn, redo that fight but this time you know when the arrows are coming so you don’t use the long animations. Clear the fight, wooooo you got gud… but trying to dodge arrows and not being able to cuz your character is busy doing a dance routine is some of the least fluid combat I’ve experienced in a videogame. Any keystroke that comes with an animation is always in competition with other keystrokes that have animations.
Combat boils down to memorizing attack patterns and playing a mental macro on repeat until the enemy is dead. There’s no responsiveness from the player, you just die until you know why you’re dying, and tweak the sequence until it works. Eventually the final boss is dead.
I’ve been told that for whatever reason it feels way less clunky on a controller - I’ve only ever played it on a mouse and keyboard.
idk.
Like I said, to each their own. I’m a little jealous of whatever it is the fanbase is feeling when they play those games, but it’s a miss for me.
I get what you mean, you’re not the only one. There are generations of games that have explicitly trained you on fast twitch button mashing with graceful dodge frames and intentionally engineered safeguards so rng is in your favor to bring about the best experience. And I’m not mocking you…it’s just how it is and it gets me too. Trying to unlearn that is hard.
I also hate the ‘difficult for the sake of difficult’. I know some people get a high over doing something incredible, but I don’t get that from banging my head on the same thing over and over. Any souls, souls-like, souls-lite or weighty mechanics games like MH get a hard pass from me.
However, I really enjoyed Remnant, it’s a mp souls-like - something about witnessing everyone’s shenanigans but still being able to pick each other off the floor is a lot of fun. It feels different and more like what souls should have been (imho).
Any of the Dark Souls. They’re hyped up for being difficult, but the only thing that makes them difficult is the clunky controls.
Like, I could make Pokemon Yellow equally difficult by taping a dish sponge to a Gameboy and requiring the player to operate the buttons through an inch of fluff.
The story’s kinda there if you dig for clues, but it comes off as random bullshit if you don’t.
They are fucking gorgeous, I’ll give em that.
I’ll never understand the ‘git gud’ circlejerk… I 100%'d DS2, and made it a good chunk through Elden Ring (think I was about 80% done before finally saying fuck it). I ‘got gud’… But DS never got fun.
I absolutely love the style, setting, visuals, and music - I really wanted to like DS… but the combat and clunky controls absolutely murder the experience.
For me at least… to each their own.
what’s clunky? I would agree they have some clunky elements, mainly the targetting will sometimes cause problems, but I don’t recall much else being necessarily clunky.
‘clunky’ is the end product, but the biggest contributing factor is the absolute committal nature of initiating an animation. Need to take half a step to the left to dodge an arrow? Fuck you, I’m only one second in to a 2.5 second sword twirling animation! …and actually you double clicked at the start of the animation, so I’m gonna do it again for another 2.5 seconds! …so you die, respawn, redo that fight but this time you know when the arrows are coming so you don’t use the long animations. Clear the fight, wooooo you got gud… but trying to dodge arrows and not being able to cuz your character is busy doing a dance routine is some of the least fluid combat I’ve experienced in a videogame. Any keystroke that comes with an animation is always in competition with other keystrokes that have animations.
Combat boils down to memorizing attack patterns and playing a mental macro on repeat until the enemy is dead. There’s no responsiveness from the player, you just die until you know why you’re dying, and tweak the sequence until it works. Eventually the final boss is dead.
I’ve been told that for whatever reason it feels way less clunky on a controller - I’ve only ever played it on a mouse and keyboard.
idk.
Like I said, to each their own. I’m a little jealous of whatever it is the fanbase is feeling when they play those games, but it’s a miss for me.
I get what you mean, you’re not the only one. There are generations of games that have explicitly trained you on fast twitch button mashing with graceful dodge frames and intentionally engineered safeguards so rng is in your favor to bring about the best experience. And I’m not mocking you…it’s just how it is and it gets me too. Trying to unlearn that is hard.
I also hate the ‘difficult for the sake of difficult’. I know some people get a high over doing something incredible, but I don’t get that from banging my head on the same thing over and over. Any souls, souls-like, souls-lite or weighty mechanics games like MH get a hard pass from me.
However, I really enjoyed Remnant, it’s a mp souls-like - something about witnessing everyone’s shenanigans but still being able to pick each other off the floor is a lot of fun. It feels different and more like what souls should have been (imho).