#I don't go into a soulsborne game and expect it to be easy

[dazzlerazz]

I do enjoy a difficult boss fight but what I do not enjoy is a boss fight so difficult that even to my best of my abilities I can't beat and then I can't access the rest of the content, but I don't wanna watch a synopsis because if I own the fucking game I can just get through it right?

It's a never ending cycle of feeling defeated and not having fun. I enjoy it when it's not easy, I want something difficult, but when it surpasses difficult and then into "impossible by someone who isn't extremely dedicated or just gets lucky" then we get into territory that's a slog for the simple reason of being a slog, where all the fun to be had is to play thr same thing other and over, the same voiced lines again and again, the same arena, the same "only this damage can hurt the boss" the same gimmicks, the repetition, repetition, repetition. It's not just a mood killer, it's a killer of the statement "I like this game"

[slightly-gay-pogohammer]

I haven't played less of p, but can keep asking questions!

Do you have any propaganda for playing the game?

hi welcome to the lies of p propaganda

literally a mix of bloodborne and american mcgee's alice when it comes to aesthetic, vibes, themes and battle systems. if you liked either of them and are upset that bloodborne won't get a port and alice won't get a sequel this is a good alternative

the devs confirmed a sequel and a dlc btw. and they're indie so they shouldn't have many problems

INCREDIBLE soundtrack, and here's some examples of my favorites because i need to share quixotic, memory of beach, shattered memories, hall of fame and arche abbey everywhere

the boss fights are difficult, but most of them are very fair and easy to learn the patterns of. while some are clearly fodder... anyone who played a soulsborne game know that every now and then you have to deal with a curse-rotted greatwood or a witch of hemwick if it means you can have a pontiff sulyvan or a lady maria in return!! if you don't mind spoilers i highly recommend checking out the battles with the king of puppets or with champion victor

tackles themes of overcoming grief, different ways to deal with it, rebirth, what it means to be human, being your own person and honestly and lies, with the latter especially being the most prominent one and heavily implying that even if honesty is good, sometimes a lie is a much better option for everyone

INCREDIBLE visuals hello

i need to talk about how good the monsters design is because body and mechanical horror fans rise UP

you can actually mix-n-match every single weapons you can find around, not including very overpowered boss weapons, and you can have a cannon arm?? like yes it's far from being the fastest weapon but consider: i can either hit and dash or i can make the boss explode

Your Choices Matter you know when a game promises you that they don't. well they do they DOOO literally every single choice starting with your very first one matter HEAVILY in the end

i can't stress enough how good the characters are, they're all full of life and energy and Love. you get a puppet in love, a beautiful charismatic old woman, a spunky young mechanic, whatever the fuck venigni my dad venigni has going on, an actually pretty fun version of the cricket and even pinocchio, who like most soulsborne seems to have little to no personality, is way more human from the get-go, with a lot of characters noting that he's so easily annoyed by their bigger-than-life personality and dramatique

this game made me cry SO many times between the music the lore and the incredible writing and voice acting. it's weird to say i didn't expect that much from it, like when the first trailer arrived we all went haha bishounen pinocchio bloodborne game, but the various npcs and even some bosses feel so human that inevitably seeing them going through situation destroyed me fr fr

but seriously the small details fuck me up so bad. the fact that pinocchio starts by making heavy mechanical noises whenever he moves and occasionally twitches and makes no noise when he attacks and the more "good ending" choices you make the less mechanical noises he makes and the more he occasionally grunts whenever he's hit is so nice?? they literally change every single one of his animation if you aim for that ending and it's so!!!!! aaaa

and also you can play fashionsouls the clothes have no effect other than being fancy so you can literally wear whatever the fuck you want and i, personally, find it very fun. big fan of the workshop master clothes btw that was my main until i unlocked the white clothes

i could go on but it would fall in spoilers territory fnasdmg point is. play lies of p

[bunchashapes]

@postsforcrabs i'll do ya one better and just answer it publicly under a readmore. so for realsies elden ring dlc spoilers under the cut, don't click unless you've beaten the dlc or at least seen the last boss

so. mechanically. that fight was tough. I don't think I've seen a single person say anything charitable about it beyond "it gets easier if you use a greatshield", which is nooooot great for a fromsoft boss. Even Malenia had SOME people sayin "it's not that bad".

I respect the boss's design in a certain respect, if you're gonna make the for realsies final boss of elden ring, you might as well go whole hog and make it hard as fuck. But I can't remember any time I've seen a soulsborne boss and thought "do i really WANT to beat this guy? like do i wanna spend the time learning it?" In the end i beat it by switching my playstyle to greatshield/halberd, maxing out scadutree and spirit ash levels, and summoning an npc AND spirits (summoning two summons gives him wayyy too much health). I don't think this is necessarily bad on its face but I feel like they almost expected you do that boss with a shield? Which is weird considering how many of the bosses in the game have movesets that challenge your ability to roll perfectly, only to have the final challenge be a moveset that's nearly impossible to roll through safely but REALLY easy to tank with a shield. Didn't you guys make bloodborne super aggressive and dodge-based because you thought too many people were hiding behind their shields in dark souls?

Narrative/thematically speaking, it was Weird and I enjoyed it. I enjoy the dlc-wide subversion of "mohg abducted miquella?? oh noooo 😟" to "oh what the fuck" and the way it all culminates is VERY weird and offputting in a way that would not at all surprise me if it was Martin's idea. There's a lot to piece through with Miquella's decision-making with courting(???) Radahn and abandoning of St Trina and everything. It all lines up with what we knew about him in the base game but it just adds another layer of fucked up-ness. I also really like the description for Radahn's armor revealing what Melania whispered in his ear in the first cinematic trailer! It's all fun stuff to dwell upon in the coming months

[ohwyrd]

4, 9, and 30 for the art asks king

artist ask game (click through link)

while answering these i realized these are actually so fun to think about Thank You king

answers under cut!

(EDITING 100 BILLION TIMES BC TUMBLR NUKED TF OUT OF MY POST???)

4. Fav character/subject that's a bitch to draw

on god I love this series but literally anything soulsborne related. Shit ruins me like I love drawing art for it but trying to find clear refs for some fits in the game is like borderline impossible and it only gets worse the further back in the series you go. Trying to find a fit from demon’s souls and the screenshot is 144p vantablack dark and all details are incomprehensible, shit makes guilty gear designs like easymode compared to them

9. What are your file naming conventions

Tbh, I have been in school for art so long that my name conventions are very boring. I usually just name the file after whatever scene/character I'm drawing, "dustbin" or something if it's just a canvas im shitting out ideas on

this is what my wip folder looks like rn, spoilers ahead:

30. What piece of yours do you think is underrated?

Ough. I am not actually too sure about this one but I think the easy answer would be any original stuff as opposed to fanart kdsjfha. It is often harder to get out because I actually think more about compositions/designs when making these, but since they're mostly for work or just practice I don't expect them to get a lot of traction, they don't and I'm cool with that.

That being said tho I do like this dude that I painted sometime last year, don't think I added him to my art blog here but here he is on twitter (this is a link)

[shareoff-plays-games]

Dark Souls (For A Non Believer)

So recently I have finally completed a playthrough of the original 2011 Dark Souls (well, not quite. What I actually played was the 2018 remastered edition but as far as I can tell it is pretty much the exact same game with updated textures so. You know.) and I wanted to write down some of my thoughts. This review will be mostly spoiler-free, other than minor spoilers relating to the start of the game which are limited to a specific section wrapped with a warning.

Note: I have yet to play any other FromSoft game, so I cannot provide comparisons or speak on the Soulsborne series as a whole, only on the first Dark Souls game.

I add the subtitle "For A Non Believer" because, up until very shortly before starting the game, I was quite sure I would not enjoy a Souls game, let alone ever beat one. I started playing it as sort of a joke - my thoughts were "I'm going to try a little bit and die a thousand times and then give up, that sounds like it would be funny", and then I ended up being fairly surprised by how much the game sucked me in and just kept on going.

The reasons I thought I wouldn't enjoy it are pretty interesting in hindsight - some of them are, in my opinion, fair criticisms or gripes with the game, and were indeed aspects of the game I did not enjoy, and some of them were less so, either slightly inaccurate or completely inaccurate misconceptions. Obviously, I ended up enjoying the game a fair bit (or hence I would not have beat it), and so I find examining those thoughts interesting.

So here it is: why you think you won't enjoy dark souls (probably, I don't know your life, I'm really talking about myself here.)

Notion #1: The game is insanely difficult.

Verdict: Partially Debunked

So before I started playing Dark Souls I genuinely expected it to be the hardest game I've ever played by a wide margin. So I braced myself for an insanely hard game... and then that insanely hard game never came.

Don't get me wrong: Dark Souls is not an easy game, that much is certain. It is definitely punishing, sometimes extremely so; at times it is indeed quite difficult, and at other times surprisingly cerebral and thinky for what is ultimately a "punch bad guys" action romp. It asks, no, it demands that you do not play on auto pilot, that you pay attention, and that in itself can be genuinely hard, especially contrasted with lessons learned by other games.

However, when it comes to the actual difficulty of the challenges presented - I found the vast majority of them to be fair, and comparable to similar challenges presented in other hard games. Some particularly applicable examples that spring to mind are the original God of War trilogy (on the second-to-last difficulty: the hardest difficulty is a fair bit harder than Dark Souls) and Hollow Knight. Other difficult games, like Celeste or Furi, are perhaps harder to directly compare to DS but my experience of them is that they're still of vaguely similar difficulty.

It is worth noting that all of these games, unlike Dark Souls, punch their hardest in optional content which is actually far, far more difficult than anything offered in Dark Souls (player / community imposed challenges excluded).

Ultimately, my point is that as far as difficulty goes, the game doesn't really stand out. Yes, it's a challenging game, but it's a challenging game that honestly stands among so many other challenging games, and the internet fame and cult status it sort of ended up getting as "the hardest game ever" is entirely unwarranted. And in my opinion, it leverages this difficulty well to create a good experience, which brings me to point #2.

Notion #2: The game is difficult for the sake of being difficult OR: the game is incredibly dark and edgy for the sake of being edgy.

Verdict: Mostly Debunked

If you're anything like me, you have been at times put off by the discourse the Soulsbourne games have generated online. There's this sense of... bravado, that beating one of these games is somehow an indication of the player being somehow superior to other people.

It even sometimes feels like people talk of it as if it is an inherent moral virtue to be good at these games, or to persevere to beat these games despite the challenge.

If you're anything like me, this sort of discourse makes you:

Feel mildly irritated.

Roll your eyes so hard you forget their original orientation (metaphorically, of course, because you're just reading idiots online talking about a video game with a completely undue sense of self importance and it does not deserve the energy expenditure that reacting to it physically would be)

Want absolutely fucking nothing to do with the games.

Which I will admit is silly on my part, because first of all, the game does have a lot of players that aren't like this and are fairly reasonable, and secondly, you don't need to be a Dark Souls Fan™ to enjoy Dark Souls. And besides, people are entitled to their opinion... I guess. (this moral position really is dumb though lmao)

Anyway. So there's this Gamer™ sense that difficulty is inherently good and valuable, being gatekeep-y and allowing for massive bragging rights seemingly becoming virtues in their own right, which undeniably is the exact appeal of the game for a certain portion of the fanbase.

I will not lie - it is pretty satisfying to be able to say I beat the game, but my enjoyment and appreciation of the game goes so much beyond that.

The difficulty of the game is a crucial and inherent part of the game design, it is absolutely required to make the game work. I think the game design of Dark Souls is brilliant and well thought out, and the difficulty is a necessary cornerstone of that. Let me explain.

Let's take a hypothetical action RPG game that is, for the most part, not very difficult. (Substituting a game that fits the description in should be easy enough and is left an as exercise to the reader).

In those games, it logically follows that making a mistake is not generally punished (or punished in a way that allows you to ignore the punishment easily enough).

In that sense, these games do not teach you not to make mistakes, and do not ask of you to attempt to actively get better.

The end result of this is that these games are highly ineffective at teaching the player how to exploit their systems, get better, or generally play them well. Any "mistake" the player makes has to either be not a real mistake at all (because really the game allows it) or suddenly insanely punishing out of nowhere.

To be perfectly clear, this is not a criticism of any hypothetical game that fits this description: A game can opt for focusing on other things and still be a great game. It is, however, in defense of Dark Souls.

Why, then, is Dark Souls difficult? It is difficult because, counterintuitively, by being difficult, it allows you to learn in a way you just cannot in easier games.

It is difficult because it allows the game itself to make some paths and methods of facing down obstacles to be more correct than others, or some to be strictly incorrect or impossible, without it feeling downright unfair, because listening to the game and avoiding punishment is a core tenet of the entire game design.

It is difficult because, by being difficult, it can force you to go slowly and actually observe. Observe hints of danger; observe your own mistakes; observe enemy AI patterns; observe any advantages you can turn in your favor. The game being difficult gives all of these things meaning, brings them to life.

The start of Dark Souls 1 is infamous for being a bit brutal, but paradoxically, it is the kindest section of all - it teaches you so many lessons about how to play the game, and it is mostly brutal because you simply don't know how to listen yet. I personally absolutely adore the design of the first few hours of gameplay, and I think they absolutely show the game at its best and show an excellent example of what I mean by the design philosophy I described above.

WARNING: spoilers for the first few hours of gameplay

-----------------------------

After a brief tutorial section lasting a couple of minutes that serves to teach you the basic controls, you are thrown into a "boss fight" with a message on the floor recommending you run away. I, like most first time players, attempted to fight the boss for a bit, which goes rather poorly because the boss deals a lot of damage to you but since you still only have the tutorial weapon the damage you deal to the boss is quite pathetic.

A careful examination of the boss arena shows an open door in one of the walls which is far smaller than the boss itself, allowing you to escape. By this, the game teaches you that some challenges may be too difficult for you and you need to run away before you are prepared to deal with them: Keep that in mind for later, and also consider that this is in the first place only possible if the game is difficult enough to force you to run away at times without it feeling completely jarring or out of place with the rest of the game.

So you run away. You rummage around a bit, end up finding a better weapon, and emerge on an overhang that overlooks the boss you just ran away from, with a clear crumble in the stone where you can jump down towards the boss.

The game teaches you the controls for a plunge attack from above, and by following the game's direction you jump down onto the boss, deal massive damage, and then with the HP it has left you find that you deal far, far more damage than you have before. Huh, so sometimes approaching things from another angle can give you an advantage... Interesting.

Shortly after the boss, you reach a large hub-like area with several NPCs and a few branching paths. The path I tried first had absurdly hard enemies, and due to the game's reputation for being incredibly difficult I attempted to defeat them for a while, before realizing I should possibly try and see if there's another path I missed.

Lo and behold, the other path had far easier enemies - still somewhat punishing and requiring careful approach, but far easier to deal with, and I found myself suddenly making a fair amount of progress.

Just as the game had taught me earlier, all I needed to do was run away and find another approach, and come back stronger. (when I eventually came back to the area, I found it far easier and more manageable to deal with, just as the tutorial boss had been).

Some time after, I reached what I'd consider to be the first "real" boss of the game. This boss is fought on a sort of narrow bridge. Attempting to fight it at first reveals a couple of archers on a tower overhead shooting at you at the same time, which is quite disadvantageous and I die pretty fast. Before my next attempt, I examine the tower on which they stand carefully and find a ladder that allows me to go up and kill them. One disadvantage down!

I try fighting the boss a few more times and quickly an observation about another disadvantage arises - the arena is quite unfavorable for fighting the boss, as dodging its attacks is either very hard or impossible in the extremely narrow arena.

A bit after realizing this, I look around to try and find an advantage I can use to offset this disadvantage. And then I remember - the archer tower! looking up at it reveals the same crumbled stone at the front facing the boss arena, just as in the overhang above the tutorial boss. I run there, making it just barely up the ladder before the boss slams at me (okay, maybe the boss killed me while climbing the ladder once or twice), go to the edge, jump down and BAM, massive jump attack damage which suddenly makes the boss feel like a joke to beat with all those attempts under my belt allowing me to easily combo down its remaining HP.

This, to me, is the true brilliance of Dark Souls 1. The way the game uses difficulty to force you to look for any advantage you can get, think of alternative solutions, carefully observe and notice your environment, while gently nudging you in the right direction... If you only care to listen.

-------End of spoilers-------

My thoughts on the game being "edgy" are somewhat related, although also separate. That the game has a dark world and many visually and thematically dark areas is undeniable - hell, it is even part of the name of the whole game. The world is gritty and a bit depressing, the lack of fire and firelight being significant both lore-wise and as a symbol, the darkness oppressive both in story and in gameplay. However, it is this darkness that allows the fire to shine so much brighter, both metaphorically and literally.

There really is no better feeling than reaching a bonfire in a desolate place, after fighting your way through a very dangerous zone and nearly depleting your resources. Seeing the glimmer of fire in the far distance is possible because it stands out in the environment so much, visually, and feeling the potent hope it represents is possible because it represents something that is so different from the rest of the game - if the game weren't so difficult, reprieve wouldn't be so meaningful.

In that sense, the game's ludonarrative is incredibly consistent and really drives the point home, because just as the bonfires represent hope and determination to you (as the player), a chance to keep going, they also literally represent the last dying hope of the denizens of the world (including your in game player character).

Beyond my musings on game design, it is also worth noting that while the game is fairly difficult, it does not generally speaking have meat shields or insanely grindy sections that make you hit enemies for ages without them dying. You die fast, true, but so do the enemies. I was a bit shocked by how much damage you deal to most bosses in the game (even ones considered quite difficult), and most normal enemies die in 1-4 hits (depending on the stage of the game and the specific enemy). Even some of the massive giant bosses really die in a few well placed combos.

Notion #3: Some elements of the game seem needlessly frustrating.

Verdict: Mostly True

This was one of my biggest preconceived gripes with the game, and possibly the one I consider in hindsight the most justified one. Personally, I particularly disliked the idea of very tough bosses combined with checkpoints (bonfires) that are decently far away, forcing you to run for minutes before starting your attempt each time, which ends up adding up to hours over a playthrough. Hours of just... Running the same segments over and over to get to bosses.

And, I'm gonna be real here - I still don't love this aspect of the game, although my opinion here does have a bit of nuance.

To explain what I think, I will start by saying that I don't think I'm particularly good at this kind of game, and believe my experience to be overall relatively indicative of the Average Dark Souls Experience™. I believe I probably did better at some bosses than the average, and worse at others.

All of this to say that really, at the end of the day, Dark Souls 1 really does not have that many difficult bosses, and bosses in which this problem is very prominent (as in, the run to the boss feels frustratingly long, and the boss is tough enough for the player to need to repeat it a lot) are surprisingly few.

Still, I am not attempting to defend this point - when it does happen, it sucks. A lot of the discourse online and in Soulsbourne fan spaces is that "it makes it all the more satisfying when you do beat the boss" - I consider that to be artificial difficulty, one that is unnecessary to boot, and this kind of adamant discussion in favor of every single difficult thing in the game is part of what turned me off the game in the first place and made me think it wasn't for me (because if the game glorifies difficulty for the sake of difficulty, I am not interested... but as explained in the previous point, I absolutely do not believe this is the case here)

There were other minor gripes I ended up having regarding the game being needlessly frustrating at points, ones that I wasn't necessarily prepared for beforehand and first encountered while playing the game myself.

Overall, my experience was that every game has imperfections that can manifest in either boredom or frustration, and in a way they just feel somewhat exaggerated and more frustrating in a game like Dark Souls which punishes you so heavily for mistakes.

The other gripes I had are much more specific to the design of certain areas or enemies, or related to random jank of the game mechanics (such as some hitboxes being really strange, the lock-on mechanic having several flaws, etc), and are therefore less interesting to discuss in my opinion - but they do exist, to be sure.

At the end of the day I enjoyed the game enough to be able to overlook all my gripes (although I certainly was frustrated at times).

Conclusion

It is fair to say I think Dark Souls is a good game. It uses its mostly rather fair difficulty to create a very satisfying experience. I mentioned some of the things I loved about it, and some of the things that annoyed me, but there were even more things I loved or didn't love that didn't really fit into any of my preconceived notions and thus didn't make it into this review. To mention a couple of them briefly:

The system for leaving messages for other players and seeing other players' bloodstains (how they died) makes you feel a bit less alone in the dark and lonely world, while also providing the feeling that every playthrough is a bit personal because other people who played the game did not see the exact same messages. The messages are often helpful, sometimes heartwarming, occasionally funny and sometimes provide misleading or deadly advice (which is funny in its own right... if you don't take it at the wrong time). In that way, it gives a dead world just that little extra spark of life.

The minimal UI really does serve the game well. There are no quest indicators, and yet there still are quests, even if they are more subtle than in other RPGs. The game clearly does put a lot of effort into guiding you to go where you need, even with minimal text and no map or quest log, although at times this can be flawed and you can certainly feel a bit lost. Unfortunately and as a direct consequence of this design choice, I think that if I ever stopped playing the game for like a month I would be completely lost so I sure am glad that did not happen.

The second half of the game is kind of noticeably worse and lower effort than the first half, in my opinion. Still good enough to be worth playing as a whole, but a lot of areas are a bit unmemorable or have things that are kind of bullshit (cough cough Bed of Chaos), and the bosses past the midway point are both a bit less interesting and a fair bit easier (although, objectively speaking, this part of the game probably is a fair bit harder... it just feels easier because of the skills you gain from playing through the first half)

And finally, the big question. Would I recommend Dark Souls, to a non believer such as myself? That depends, but if you want a deeply satisfying experience, with a solid emphasis on its own brand of exploration and trial and error, I would definitely recommend at least giving it a try with an open mind, taking the experience as it comes. I am very glad I gave it a shot, even though I never really intended to, and in a way glad for the misunderstandings I had because it allowed the game to surprise me so much more.

One last thing I'd like to say, in the wake of having completed the game, and this may be just me, but I really enjoy seeing the way Dark Souls influenced all these other games I have played and loved over the last decade, and appreciating the way it has forever changed the landscape of games in every genre. The game is so iconic that spotting shallow references to it in a game like Dead Cells is easy enough, but really being able to consider its wider design influence and compare and contrast it to other games is something I greatly enjoy.

It really is no exaggeration that Dark Souls (2011) changed the landscape of gaming forever. And to the non believer I say - are you curious about the game that changed history? You should be, it deserves it.

[klysanderelias]

Demons souls playthrough still going okay - struggling with the aspect of the game where I'm expected to bounce from level to level instead of following one path to completion. Also, they didn't rework any of the bosses, it seems?

I guess it's fine for most of them, but like... I'm really struck by how many of the bosses so far have been uninteresting gimmick fights that probably needed a little overhauling.

Tower Knight and adjudicator both are in the same boat where if you can't figure out the gimmick, you're going to struggle but not in a fun way - it's laughably easy to dodge both their attacks but watching them no sell hits gets frustrating if you're not keyed in to what you need to watch for (I forgot adjudicator had the blade in his belly and there's very little reaction to hitting it so it's easy to think there's something else you need to try instead of just whacking the thing like fifteen times). And also, 'hit the enemy in their weak spot enough until they fall down and you can smack their head for actual damage and then do that for a few cycles' is a fucking Zelda boss, not dark souls.

Armor spider was fine, arguably the best boss I've fought so far, but it's running into that issue where I don't like walking into a boss arena and finding out that because I'm running a certain build, I'm just gonna have a bad time. The area denial fire spread doesn't have a counter play except 'run away' so the fight became tedious as I kept having to work my way up to hit it a few times before it pushed me away and I had to spend another thirty seconds just getting there again.

Leechwalker could have been interesting except the moveset was boring. I liked the healing mechanic and while it would have been easy to just switch to fire damage to negate it entirely, I liked having to time the healing and burst it down before it could start regenning again. That being said, it's hard to see attacks coming at you when the boss is literally just a writhing mass of leeches, and that means the moveset has to be pretty basic. Also the weird run down to the boss arena felt like it was just there to artificially increase the size of the arena.

Vanguard is vanguard, good tutorial boss but bringing him back as a miniboss sucks because the only challenge is his enormous health pool.

I don't really have much to say about phalanx - it's slow and easy to cheese, and if you DON'T try to cheese it out, you'll do fine anyway.

I guess it's just like... All the bosses so far have been slow tedious fights? They're not engaging. I haven't been like 'oh FUCK I can't wait to fight this guy again,' they're just... They're holdovers from a design philosophy that's been iterated on for decades now, and what was groundbreaking at the time is the bottom of the barrel of any of the other games.

I'm still enjoying my time in demons souls so far, but i think it'll be easier to stomach as a museum tour than the latest soulsborne experience.

[chibigaia-art]

Idk how to find it again but the other day I saw a tweet saying that if you don't read the genshin lore, you miss a good part of the fun, and it kicked off a domino effect in my brain so. Long rant under the cut???

On one hand, yeah, it's true: the exploration part of genshin is something you can enjoy without necessarily having knowledge of the lore around each place, but it would definitely be more interesting if you knew what happened in specific spots etc etc. Reading notes, talking to npcs, I love that stuff! Knowing more about the world you're playing in, especially if it's a fantasy one, is super fun, and it's something I personally love doing (I'm one of the idiots that reads most of the items' descriptions in soulsborne games and I'm also the idiot that spent hours talking to every possible npc in FNV)

But.

The exposition in genshin is boring as hell and I honest to God can't get invested in it at all, despite trying multiple times. Genshin's story has some REALLY cool bits, but almost none of it gets shown and is instead told to the player via convoluted and lengthy conversations with npcs, which ykno would be fine if. The dialogue was bearable. You don't always have to "show, don't tell" but it feels like genshin goes for the "don't show, tell in excruciatingly long dialogues with paimon repeating lines other characters said/making the xth comment about food" (I am still convinced that the game would be way more bearable without paimon around, or if they had made her less... Like that,, the traveler feels very passive because paimon does most of the talking)

And the problem is, with the way genshin is, with the type of game genshin is, I can't really expect anything different - it has to feel like a full single player game while also being a gacha and requiring all the gacha-like features which inevitably influences the way the story is written (constant updates > a lot of events to write, pad them with a lot of additional lines so it's added 'gameplay', add some useless npc quest lines + constant new banners > a lot of characters that get thrown in the story and get a spotlight once every ten months if you're lucky, and sometimes don't even contribute to the main plot)

Anyway, thinking about all of this made me wonder if genshin would have been better as a full, single player game, since removing the gacha/new story updates every X months would have helped idk, reduce the cast, flesh out the main characters (traveler included) and you know, maybe!! Maybe it would have! Maybe the dialogues would have been shorter, and the writing easier to digest, but the combat system is also very subpar, which yeah, it's not surprising because it's a gacha game first, an action rpg second, so that would have to be improved as well

If you reached this point, ty for listening to my 2am brain soup!!! I just needed to write my thoughts down somewhere and I didn't want to annoy my friends

So yeah maybe you lose some fun not knowing what the genshin lore is going on about, but the writers definitely don't make the job easy

Tldr genshin needs a skip dialogue button

[waheelawhisperer]

One final note (I swear. For now) on the V6 fight: I dig Blake. Her civil rights struggle's compelling, her ability to kick people in the head is neat, and the power of Mutual Yearning did at least as much in the Haven skirmish as Maidenbowl 1. All that noted...her writer(s) picked a funny time for crucial evil ex semblance exposition. Kinda wish that had been worked into the spooky barn convo, possibly with a side of 'I should've warned you all (but you especially) about him back at Beacon'.

I feel like the Semblance exposition bit actually would have fit just fine in a traditional anime, where talking is a free action and characters regularly explain how their powers work (or how someone else's powers work). Bleach or Naruto would've had a whole episode dedicated to Adam's Semblance and probably worked his tragic backstory in along with it. RWBY, though, does things a little differently.

This show is not big on explanation or exposition, especially during fights. It's great because it makes the fights fluid, with few breaks in the action, but it can make it hard to tell what's going on at times. RWBY's not inclined to feed the viewer information and does not like to nail down details at all (we still don't even have a concrete timeline, for example. I've seen multiple posts trying to figure out when Beacon's school year starts, they've all come to different conclusions, and all of those conclusions have been reasonably supported by evidence in the show. Apparently this avoids plotholes, somehow). RWBY does a lot of the detail work it does give us in the background, like the way we see the headlines in Volume 7 that are very easy to miss and yet give us important context about the situation the protagonists are involved in. I think that when you engage in this kind of storytelling, you have to walk the line between assuming your audience is smart enough to figure out what you want them to know and putting the burden on them to tell your story for you.

To give you an idea of what I mean, let's talk about FromSoft games for a bit. Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, etc. all like to convey their story primarily through item descriptions, dialogue with NPCs, and environmental details. The player characters don't take an active role in the setting's plot so much as wander into it, kill the things that are trying to kill them, steal lunch money from gods, and somehow ascend to unimaginable power. The FromSoft style of storytelling locks information crucial to understanding either the setting as a whole or a given aspect of it behind an item hidden in the ass end of an optional zone that the player may not ever even find, much less thoroughly explore, and it's such a commonly-acknowledged aspect of Soulsborne games that "I'll just wait for the Vaati video" has become a meme among the playerbase. To elaborate, the lore's so damn complicated and ambiguous that much of the playerbase doesn't think they'll be able to absorb it without the assistance of a YouTuber who's built a specific niche around making FromSoft lore accessible to the studio's audience.

Arknights is another good example. There's nothing wrong with asking the audience to put some thought into the story, to read between the lines a little, but Arknights writes a whole damn novel between every line and then expects you to spend half a day just figuring out what the hell is going on in a given cutscene. We run into the same situation as we do with Soulsborne, where the Tumblr Loremasters wind up explaining story events to the people having trouble following it, something I saw just recently with the Invitation to Wine event (it does not help that the physical design of Arknights's storytelling interface is ass. The text is so small you need glasses to read it, the interface is often dark and dingy, and rarely does anything pop. Fate Grand Order is dogshit in almost every possible way, but at least I can read the fucking story without straining my eyes. I may not know what the hell is going on sometimes, because Nasu is a lunatic, but I can at least read the words he puts on the page without undue effort. That makes a big difference).

As you may have gathered, I don't like this method of storytelling. I think it's lazy and places too much of a burden on the audience. It feels to me like I'm expected to do the work of coming up with and justifying the story instead of the people who are getting paid actual money to do it.

I'll admit that this is at least partially personal preference. I'm generally uncomfortable with ambiguity, and while I love coming up with anything from stupid daydreams to full-blown fictional universes, I don't consume media with the expectation that I need to be developing the story myself. I expect the writer(s) to have already done that, which is why I have such a love-hate relationship with FromSoft games. Great lore, interesting world, terrible way of conveying it.

Anyway, RWBY sometimes struggles with this as well. There are a lot of things in the show that I can come up with reasonable explanations for when someone raises the point, but... those explanations aren't provided in the show. Hell, we frequently have basic worldbuilding stuck in side materials like the official guidebook or World of Remnant. A lot of what we know about how Dust works, what the Kingdoms are like, the CCT, etc. is found in a series of short expository videos instead of the actual show. It ultimately feels like doing homework is necessary to get a real understanding of basic elements of the show. I'm not asking for RWBY to drop an infodump in every single episode, but I'd very much like the show to have put in a bit more work in building up the setting (we've still learned next to nothing about Vacuo in the show proper, for example. Most of what we know comes from the CFVY books, as far as I'm aware, and who knows how canon those will be once the show reaches Vacuo?). I really think we would've benefitted from one more Volume at Beacon fleshing out both the setting and the relationships between the characters before the genre shift in the Maya era.

Yeah, maybe more information about how Adam fights could've been worked into the barn conversation, but Blake is more focused on reassuring Yang than preparing her to fight Adam again and then fumbles the ball by suggesting Yang needs to be protected, at which point Yang isn't interested in listening anymore. Sure, the writers could've written it differently, but I'm not sure they really needed to, since I think what they're going for here is that neither of the Bees are really ready to confront Adam again. They will be, but they're not there yet.

I don't really think saying "I should've warned you about him back at Beacon" really fits what the narrative has been giving us, though. Think about the way Blake behaves in the Beacon era. During Volume 1, she (thinks she) is free of him. There's no reason for her to tell her teammates about Adam because he's not part of her life anymore. She's made a fresh start. She's goofing off with her teammates and enjoying her new life as a Huntress. By the time she realizes Adam's still a threat, it's too late. She doesn't seem to have any idea how deep his obsession with her would run until he actually shows up on her doorstep, maiming her partner/future girlfriend and threatening to destroy everything and everyone she loves. She isn't going to tell her teammates about him because without any real reason to believe he'd go after her, she's just sharing her tragic backstory for no reason.

Also yeah I love Blake, she deserves all the hugs and people who love her enough to build her up instead of tearing her down and a goddamn choreographer who cares about getting the most out of her kit.

[cerastes]

I've never finished any of my soulsborne games and I was wondering if you have any advice on which Playthrough to continue (or restart) first and any other advice. Bloodborne - Heading to Shadow of Yharnam. Sekiro - Miniboss in the burning palace/lost somewhere after the rider/burning bull. Dark Souls - Blight town. I think I like Bloodborne's playstyle the best of the three, but it's been a long time since I played so again, dunno whether to restart or just try and find my bearings.

I say continue Bloodborne. You should be able to ignite the muscle memory relatively easily in that one, given you are firmly in the midgame. In the other two, you are pretty early game, so it's easy to see you have an affinity with Bloodborne over the other two.

My number one advice, which I always give out, is to master the fundamentals, that is:

Spacing.

Stamina Management.

Timing and Tempo.

Level HP.

Spacing -> The central point of Soulsborne gameplay, particularly in Dark Souls but still very strongly present in both Bloodborne and Sekiro, is spacing. Nothing is more important than knowing where to be at any given time. If you have ever watched me stream any Soulsborne, you'll notice that I'm perpetually adjusting by moving around not randomly depending on what the enemy can do at any given range. This, of course, comes with experience and knowledge of any given fight, but that doesn't mean you can't apply this skill for fights you don't know: Before you even think about trying to get some damage in, make sure you are at the right place in relation to 1) the enemy you are fighting (which are this enemies' most dangerous and hard to deal with attacks? Which are the easiest? How do I bait them?), 2) the room in which you are fighting (rule of thumb: DON'T get cornered or pushed to the wall/ledge, ever), and 3) your own moveset ("I am using Blade of Mercy, so I need to hug the enemy to deal damage" vs "I am running a Blacksky Eye/Tiny Tonitrus Arcane build, I am going to attack the enemy from afar, where is it safer and how many attacks can I get in before the enemy closes in again?").

Stamina Management -> Stamina management is different in each individual game, at its easiest in Bloodborne, at its hardest in Dark Souls 2 (and inexistent in Sekiro, which does not use stamina). This is the second most important aspect, in my opinion. Know how many swings, from full stamina, you can do before running out of stamina. This is NOT how many swings you should do. You always have to account for the stamina you'll be consuming upon quickstepping/rolling. Against any significant enemy, you'll never be able to dedicate your full stamina bar into attacking. Stamina is your attack resource as well as your defense resource, ergo, spending it all in attacking gets you killed. Always leave enough stamina in your tank when attacking for at least one roll, more depending on the specific enemy. This is the most common mistake Soulsborne players make, and what ends up driving away the majority of people that quit the games. As I always say, it's easier to think of stamina as "green health": If you run out of green health in a bad spot, you'll quickly run out of red health shortly after.

Timing and Tempo -> This is innately tied to the two above, and you should think of Timing and Tempo as the practical use of both Spacing and Stamina Management at the same time. Know when to attack, how much to attack, and then how and when to move. This might sound overwhelming, but it is not as hard as it may sound, even without experience in a fight. A tip I give people when it comes to Soulsborne is that, whenever you come across a new enemy or boss and you don't know what to expect, just focus on dodging for a bit to see how it attacks. See what it does, and how it does, for a few moves, while only using stamina to dodge, and then start fighting. Now you have a MUCH better idea of what the boss can do without having to die a bunch of times each time they do a new attack. Attack whenever it's safe to, and just enough times so you still have time and stamina to dodge. Getting greedy and committing to attacking while putting yourself at risk is completely meaningless, because bosses in Soulsborne have low HP pools, and getting one or two extra attacks in at the cost of 70% of your health isn't going to make the fight shorter in any meaningful manner.

Level HP -> There is this massive and widespread misunderstanding that an important part of Soulsborne games is that you die in one or two hits. It's not just novices or secondaries that think this, an important part of the fans and even other game developers that try to emulate the Souls formula erroneously believe this as well. The reason this frankly stupid belief came to be is twofold: Firstly, because a lot of people, content creators included, tended to invest heavily in offensive stats with a mentality that works in other games that are not Soulsborne, which does in fact expect you to increase your overall durability and is balanced around the fact. It's no surprise, then, that people were dropping like flies from one or two attacks from mobs in the midgame and on, which led to this meme that "Dark Souls is the hardest game ever!". One, no, it's not, people were just really bad at it, two, the hardest game ever is Super Monkey Ball 2, so they were not only bad at video games, but also objectively wrong. The other aspect that contributes to this belief is that the more skilled players and content creators did, in fact, get away with not leveling HP because they are very good at dodging. If you don't get hit, you don't need HP, and that's true, it's the basis of Level One runs... But the average player isn't this good at dodging, let alone a novice. So this technically true statement, that you don't need HP if you just don't get hit, became widespread as a slogan of how you should play the game. But practically? Most people aren't that good at dodging, and the game doesn't expect you to be that good at dodging, either, hence why it gives you the option to, you know, increase your HP. Plus, investing on offensive stats heavily is objectively inefficient simply because your main source of damage in these games comes from weapon upgrades, not raw stats. You need significant stat investment to make your numbers go up in any meaningful way. And again, Boss HP is low in Soulsborne games, so doing a lot of damage is, in most cases, just not that necessary or significant, because you can kill the boss just a little slower by playing normally. So level your HP, until you get good enough that you don't need to. But you need to get there first.

The rest is just seeking adversity, really, and things naturally will follow.

[chaoticbooklesbian]

I'm not good at puzzles. I like stories, though, and with video games, lots of stories involve puzzles. Even action-adventure games and straightforward RPGs frequently involve puzzles as part of the storytelling - players will have to figure out how to make something work, or how to get around something. If a puzzle is too hard, I'm OK with looking up a solution online.

What I don't like is being punished by the game, repeatedly, for having trouble with puzzles. I don't like having to white-knuckle my way through a challenge just because it's supposed to be a challenge. I don't like the challenge being the point. I know some people do like that, and that's why Soulsborne type games exist - if you're there to be challenged, and you just need a story to exist so you have a reason to go through the challenge, great! There are games for you. There are also games for me, where the point is the story and the challenge is secondary, and they frequently have different difficulty modes to ensure that as many people as possible can have the best experience possible playing the game. Dragon Age: Inquisition comes to mind - there's the easy/casual mode for people like me, who just want to get to the story, and the fighting is just a way to get to the story, and there's the higher difficulties for people more interested in a challenge.

I tried out Stray yesterday, the new post-apocalyptic puzzle game wherein you play as a cat that gets separated from its family and has to solve the mystery of an ancient city populated by robots to return to its family. The first few chapters were about what I was expecting - slow puzzles with few consequences for failure, where I could try and try and try and look up the answer when I couldn't figure it out for myself. Then I made it to chapter 5, Rooftops, which takes you out of the safe zone of the city into an area infested with Zurks. The Zurks, if they catch you, will eat you; if too many Zurks catch you, you die. Getting past them is a fast, intense kind of puzzle, and if you're bad at puzzles like I am, failure is inevitable. Failing repeatedly, the way I do, forces you to watch the cat you're playing as get eaten by Zurks repeatedly. There's no blood, no gore, but it's obvious what's happened. After several puzzles that I failed repeatedly, I had to exit the game and melt down. I couldn't handle it. I want an easy mode in this game. I want a mode in this game wherein the Zurks don't kill the kitty, just slow it down and prevent it from jumping up to higher levels until they're shaken off. It would be an easy mode that doesn't remove content from the game, but also doesn't require someone who's bad at puzzles to watch a cat die repeatedly until they can figure out each individual puzzle. Giving people the option to figure out the puzzles in a way that won't be distressing feels like mercy. I understand why they didn't include it as an option - it would lower the stakes significantly if the cat can't die, and would lower the challenge significantly as well. However, it would also make the game a lot more accessible for a not-insignificant number of people - people who are bad at puzzles like me, people who aren't familiar with these kinds of puzzles, people who don't have the kind of easy quick reaction time required to do these fast puzzles. I might consider modding a game for the first time in my life if someone came out with a mod that made the cat immortal or made the Zurks slower or both. That way, I would be able to progress through the Zurk-infested areas without dissolving into a puddle of tears every few puzzles because the cat kept dying and it was my fault. I don't want to kill the cat, I just want to see the story. I really hope someone makes an Immortal Cat mod for this game so that I can play it all the way through, or the developers release an Easy Mode patch that makes the cat immortal. I want to play this game. I want to like this game. Right now, as it is, I am unable to, and that makes me really sad. It's an interesting premise, the graphics are really nice, the worldbuilding is interesting, and I can't play it. Please give me an easy mode. I'm begging you.

[klysanderelias]

tl;dr dark souls discourse drives me nuts because so many people seem to fundamentally misunderstand what game they're playing: this ain't dragon age or the witcher, this is honestly much closer to like, DDR. And yeah, the game devs keep making games that fail to communicate that, but also, demon souls came out like THIRTEEN YEARS AGO, it's beyond frustrating that the community is full of elitist assholes who can't or won't explain that concept

also, just play bloodborne. Bloodborne is still the single best soulsborne (i haven't played sekiro yet) game out there and does the best at actually teaching the concepts you need to enjoy the game.

I keep thinking about Margit and I went and looked at some of the articles about him and it's so wild the messaging about Elden ring right now. There's an article I think from polygon about how hard margit is, and how people have been struggling to fight him, and some of the responses had me dumbfounded.

Like. A +8 weapon? I'm not trying to shame Jenna stoeber, or ANYONE who's having trouble against him, but there's a difference between 'this is what I as a player did' and 'here's an article on the front page of Google of you search this boss'

I guess the disconnect for me is like... To a certain extent, this is part of the reason why people are afraid of dark souls, because people LOVE the narrative of like, oh my God only 2/3rds of the people who bought the game have beaten the first boss (which is wild because like, one, that's how video game purchases work, there's like 15% of the people who will never load up the game let alone get farther than an hour or two, and two, I'm 13 hours into the game and beaten like six bosses and I haven't beaten him yet, it's an open world game for chrissakes) because it makes the people who DID beat him feel like super special boys

I keep saying that the biggest problem with dark souls is that the community cannot and/or will not explain anything, and the git gud meme is just a shallow vision of the deeper toxicity of a community dedicated to sucking themselves off for getting 'elite gamers' and in order to reinforce that hierarchy you CAN'T help introduce people to your fun game (which is why if you ever bring up 'should dark souls have an easy mode' you're sure to start a huge fight with someone whose identity hinges on that not happening)

But also like, this isn't a game where you should WANT to beat a boss on the first try! That's not what the game is about! Forgive me for crawling up my own ass here for a second, but for me, part of the fun is learning the fight and getting into the flow, to the point that on a couple of these bosses, I've been legit disappointed when I beat them on the first try. Like, it's fun to beat a boss, but I see so many people get frustrated and cheese or bosses or just over level to the point that they can steamroll and I'm just like... Are you actually having fun? Is this enjoyment for you? Or are you just relieved it's over?

And genuinely the more I think about it, the fundamental misunderstanding is that people are approaching it like a traditional RPG experience where you're expected to basically win every fight, it's just a question of how rough it is. And I've seen a lot of stuff for elden ring that continues to run that exact same ideology! They say of COURSE margit is hard! that's because the game is trying to tell you to go somewhere else and level more before coming back and crushing him!

And I just have to shake my goddamn head and wonder what the fuck went wrong.

You don't pick up guitar hero, open up a song, and expect to get every note correct on the first try. You don't start DDR, step on the pad, and decide that clearly the game is too hard when you can't hit all the steps! And it's so frustrating to try and explain this to people like, yeah, I get it, you're dying a lot, and that's upsetting, especially because some of these bosses seem super overpowered or unfair, but I promise you that they're not. What people don't seem to understand (and again, is not ever explained to them) is that the point of dark souls is to fight the bosses. Not to BEAT the bosses, but to fight them. That's why every game ends with starting over. That's why people play them over and over again. Not because the story is so deep, or the choices so meaningful, or anything like that, but for the exact same reason you open up guitar hero once you've played every song.

And part of the reason why this polygon article drives me so nuts is because this is a major gaming website communicating a completely bonkers read of the game to the people trying their first souls game, and probably turning basically all of them off.

And like, I'll be the first to admit that the souls games are deeply flawed, kind of irritating, and have failed to actually improve on their failings despite huge amounts of money and attention, but also, I want people to be able to enjoy them!

And it's a conversation for a different time to talk about how dark souls should have an easy mode, or at least difficulty settings, but that's important too, because there's too many assholes who use these games as a core part of their identity because being 'good at dark souls' is some kind of badge they wear with misguided glee at the cost of ruining so many other people's play experiences.

Anyway not to plug my own shit again but I'm going to put the video of my final run against the Tree Sentinel here again, because I think it's a good way to illustrate what I'm talking about. When I fought this boss, I was at the base level, using the base gear, without using any cheese. It took probably two hours to figure out the flow of that fight. But like, you can see how I've learned the patterns to his attacks, learned the timings to dodge, and I end up getting through the fight without taking a single hit, and I can tell you I had a blast doing it. I could have taken a run or two, decided he was 'impossible at my level', and gone fucking around for a while before coming back and just brute forcing the fight with healing and massively upgraded weapons, and yeah, maybe that's more fun for some people! But I'll tell you, from personal experience, just because you're overleveled and overupgraded don't mean you're gonna win the fight.

https://youtu.be/eDdukfmknHc

I've literally watched a dude do a playthrough of DS1 close to 100 levels over where he should have been by the halfway mark and STILL struggle to beat bosses. The suggested level to beat the end of the game is 80.

Anyway, the point is, I'm just complaining because I have so many goddamn feelings about dark souls as a series, and I'm really enjoying Elden Ring right now but also I'm aware that not only am I the hyperspecific player type it's built for, but also I'm aware that it still dramatically fails most of the people who are going to pick it up over the hype, and that's very disappointing to me because I want to share my love of these games with people who aren't self-righteous pricks.