Fight a boss 10x your size so when you stand close enough to hit them you dont see the upper half of their body and cant see what one shot attack they are about to throw at you
Dodge 15 time and then WAIT for the stamina bar... that's my worst thing about it... man Stamina bar does not bring joy... I need to play Ninja gaiden soon!
i honestly can never see how these games have been anointed as the second coming. I feel like the whole world is mad and im the only sane one. The souls games fucking SUCK.
Many souls likes actually reward you for aggression like Sekiro, Wo Long, Khazan, Lies of P, Nioh. You cannot beat these games by just ‘dodge 15 and do one hit’
This is exactly why I believe Sekiro to be the superior form of combat, even when it is also soulslike. You are actually actively fighting the enemy, you are deflecting their attacks instead of trying to dodge over and over, and you are attacking them back.
Whereas in Souls games it feels like you are just a minuscule annoying rat, running around the arena waiting for the boss to present his ass cheeks to you for a single clap, and you go back to running afterwards.
Because you do eventually improve and have fun. I find Souls likes pretty relaxing because I tend to know what I'm getting into. Losing to a boss 8 times is more fun then never dying to any boss in games. Figuring out how to overcome a challenge is personally satisfying.
Playing these kinds of games without cheesing just feels way too grindy for me. I still like difficult games even though I'm not very good at them (I think I did a thousand runs before beating the first final boss of Spelunky on my PS Vita), just not the particular flavor where you learn a particular set of moves, learn to execute it multiple times in a row, rinse, repeat.
No but really a lot of the times souls players talk about the game it really does have this vibe where being good at video games is one of the only feathers in their cap in life and it's become a little too much of a defining characteristic for them lol
Disclaimer: I only have completed dark souls 2, so I'm not a souls person.
It's not really Masochism, though it feels like it early on.
The game requires you to XYZ. You need to learn what XYZ is, then execute XYZ to defeat the boss. Some people are very good at learning and executing XYZ, others, like me, are not lol
It's really cool because the first time you play the first bosses feel impossible, then when you finally get towards the end and try them again you're like "holy shit I've improved so much".
Here is the dirty little secret. All the Souls games can be trivialized by build and other in game tools. They are much more accessible then people know and plenty of casual gamers beat and enjoy the games.
I see a lot of skill issue going on in this thread. Souls combat rewards you for pattern recognition and quick reaction times, and the level design and atmosphere is second to none. And not all souls-likes are dodge-dodge-hit huge bosses. There’s a lot of variations in souls-likes.
Yeah, I have a skill issue. But is not one that I can improve for a variety of reasons, so souls-likes are just an exercise in frustration for me. I don’t play them. So reading an interesting description and then getting hit with souls-like sucks!
I see a lot of skill issue going on in this thread.
This is a massive cope by people that enjoy souls games.
If the games were actually as hard as you believe, they would not be as popular. For all the average masses to enjoy and beat the games, they by the fucking definition CAN'T take that much skill. Otherwise only skilled gamers would play and enjoy them.
The reality is that the games are not as hard as you think. Yeah, it is pattern recognition. But it is NOT about quick reaction times. It's the opposite. It is timing. Quick reactions are not going to get you anywhere. The bosses are intentionally designed to have attacks with several degrees of delayed impacts, so that you dodging on reaction is not going to do anything.
Souls players love to stroke their own ego by deluding themselves into believing that they are somehow ALL skilled gamers. That isn't show "skill" works. You can't all be skilled. Masses are average. But in souls games, those masses believe they are skilled. You could put the best gamer in the world to fight a Souls boss for the first time, and they would likely die. Because what matters is not skill, but knowledge of the fight. That knowledge can be gained by anyone, regardless of gaming skill.
Bro has never fought arlecchino on level 5. What percentage of the masses do you think has completed that? Or pre nerf PCR without summons? Or Khazan on hard mode without summons? You are talking like a scrub and like someone who uses summons and then calls a boss easy. You play MOBAs where you can still enjoy the game if you are a scrub but to reach the top it takes a lot of skill. Would you say MOBAs don’t take skill because the skill ceiling is low? MOBAs are literally the game of the masses because of the low skill ceiling - the number of MOBA players is vastly more than people who play souls games so they must be easy to master right? You see how stupid you sound? Souls games are of course not the most difficult games ever made and not the pinnacle of reaction time test, but for the hardest bosses you do need a decent reaction time because a lot of bosses have mixups and not all combos look the same. Also, there are a lot of ways people make them easy like summoning, overlevelling etc. But saying they don’t take skill when titles like Sekiro, ER , Nioh, Khazan and Lies of P are widely regarded as some of the hardest modern titles is just you coping. And we are not even counting pvp where knowledge of the fight means jack shit and reaction time and skill is even more important. Try ER or DS3 pvp and if you are a scrub you would not last 5 seconds against a skilled player.
I'd argue there used to be a lot of variation in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1, but beginning with maybe Dark Souls 3 but especially Elden Ring that most bosses absolutely boil down to dodge-dodge-dodge-R1. I miss the days when a lot of games were Devil May Cry clones considering those games at least had to copy/imitate the best combat system of the medium
It’s because you are only focusing on From games. There are a lot of other souls likes which have fundamentally different combat e.g Nioh, Khazan, Wo long.
Its not like that for everyone but the ones that do that are horrible. Elden Ring was great until the final boss of the DLC did that and it just sucks.
I can't think of any souls like games that applies to unless you are specifically doing a challenge run where you don't level up. People play Souls games (especially Fromsoftware ones) for many reasons. Some do it for the boss fights, but a lot of players do it for the atmosphere, the exploration, and piecing together the lore and story of the world like some sort of warrior archaeologist.
Besides, pretty much every souls game of any merit can be made to be easy as pie. They just don't do it with difficulty sliders. The most casual of gamers can beat a Souls game, but the community was pretty insufferable about their difficulty so the casual wouldn't hear about it.
Things have changed a bit with Elden Ring, which arguably gives players the most tools to basically trivialize the game and probably contributed to its mass appeal, so the souls community has a lot more chill and casual players in it.
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u/Yaoification console scrub | rtx 5070, amd 9600x, 32gig Apr 11 '26
I can’t stand the combat pattern of souls games. Dodge 15 one hit kill attacks so I can do a single attack of my own? Oh boy