That’s not at all what I’m saying, you absolute peanut.

But as it stands, the game is merely a cliched experiment dredged from the same shallow pool as the internet’s most contrived, YouTube-baiting pseudo-mysteries.

There can be a middle ground between these two thoughts.

Their last five games were:

To be fair: you can argue that the King’s Field, Shadow Tower, Evergrace, and other assorted dark fantasy games developed by FS are aesthetically similar to the DS series.

You realize “knight walking slowly towards creepy castle” as an aesthetic really only applies to, like...maybe 10 games in their entire 67-game catalogue, right?

These are all fair points, and I don’t even necessarily disagree—but, as you so rightfully point out: at the end of the day, this a game series that is a commercial venture and, as such, it’s going to be designed to appeal and take into consideration the audience(s) that the developers think won’t cause more work for…

Bruh the DLC for DS2 legitimately turned me off from finishing the game for years....until I saw this dude complete a no-hit run of the entire game in one sitting.

Going through the place as fast as possible is definitely the best strategy, imo; but knowing the route still doesn’t make me not groan in annoyance every time I know it’s the next place I have to go through.

Bingo. There’s a lot of “whoops, no way I could’ve seen that coming. Guess I’ll replay the last 15 minutes and keep an eye out for that…(get 5 minutes further on next run). Whoops, no way I could’ve seen that coming…”

Very fair! For me, I stopped making magic-focused characters after a certain point in DS2 because it made the games less fun for me.

Your first complaint is entirely fair, and one I also defend as a barrier of entry against the series when people bring it up. They do require time to master, and their way of punishing the player for failure as of means of trying to teach game mechanics can often be frustrating for those without patience and/or time…

I also wouldn’t call Sekiro “cheap” because the entire design of how the player is supposed to manage and parse encounters is predicated more on a reliance on stealth and quick reflexes than it is on your managing how many enemies you aggro at once—purposefully or on accident.

Before it was used to refer to how shit PvP in DS3 was on launch, the term “Gank Squad” was used by the DS community as a way to refer to how many of the more frustrating enemy encounters in DS2 + the DLCs were basically teams of enemies clustered around together, or patrolling the same area together, that you had to…

I am talking from a game design standpoint, not a “personal skill” standpoint.

I’ve always found DS2—especially the DLC and re-release on PC—really overdid it worse than DS3 or DS1 did in terms of gank squads. There are literally some areas, imo, when it’s just an endless slog to get from one bonfire to the next because of how densely packed some areas are with enemies and things that want to…

And that’s perfectly fine! I’m in a similar boat myself, most days, which is why I go play one of the other hundred or so games I’ve accumulated over the years.

Yeah, exactly. The narrative and gameplay typically give you enough context clues to be able to parse what certain enemies might be weakest against—like Lightning dmg against Dragons—and, even if it’s not the most damaging option, using a bow and arrow to mitigate how many enemies you aggro at once cuts down on the…

I’m also talking about how ranged attacks can basically break enemy AI since, at range, 99% of enemies don’t aggro or “alert” their groups to you presence when hit. Or, if they do aggro, there’s usually so much space between you and them that you can easily burst them down before they get to you.

Honestly, I want to say that the games are pretty good with giving you context and narrative clues as to what the elemental weaknesses are to each boss. (Like, obviously, don’t use fire against a boss that uses fire against you, and all Dragon-type enemies will be insanely weak to Lightning due to it being mentioned…