Was in a comment section about designing games to respect the player’s time and mentioned I never finished Hollow Knight because it makes you fight the final boss again each time you want to give the secret boss another shot.
Someone jumped in literally telling me “GET GOOD” and when I told them there were other things I’d rather be doing, they followed up with “so don’t get hard games just to complain about.” They never responded when I asked them how I was supposed to know exactly how hard everything in the game would be before I ever played it.
Every fucking time. I swear I can set my watch by it. The Dark Souls series has earned my undying enmity for what it has done to gaming discourse.
The most useful piece of advice i got for this game was here on sexbear someone told me to stop looking at the bosses healthbar and never take my eyes off the boss. After 3 failed attempts at playing that game i then breezed through to the end and didn’t even die against the final boss lol. In this instance its the only game i ever bothered to “gut gud” at but only because someone actually told me how to.
That’s how to beat untimed bosses in general regardless of the genre. And I think this principle is pretty old too since I got it from a shmup guide on Gamefaqs way back in the day. You conceptualize the boss fight as a contest to see how long you can survive the boss with dps being secondary. If you can get to the point where you can dodge every single one of the boss’s attacks, then you pretty much win the boss fight as long as you occasionally remember to attack the boss. Even if you only do 1 dps, if the boss can’t land their attacks on you, then you win because 1 dps > 0 dps.
Well kind of i didnt explain properly because sekiro isnt really about just blocking or just dodging thats actually a very hard way to play infact its not even about doing damage its primarily a mimic shonen sword fighting anime game. So the way to play is partially learning the sequence of attacks but also in between parry and dodging is wildly swinging your sword. It doesnt matter if it doesnt do damage because damage isnt really important the stagger bar is the real health bar the health bar is a distraction.
What I learned about the game is to not focus on doing damage because if you’re waiting to do damage you’re waiting forever and the damage you deal is way too low what you want to be doing is keeping up the pressure so the bosses stagger builds up, landing a hit is just a bonus but not the objective. Once i learned that the game became smooth sailing because the only way to end a fight quickly is to keep the pressure up.
I was by no means saying anything akin to oh just dont get hit nerd that’s basically just git gud mentality and equally as annoying. What I meant to say is the health bar in sekiro is a red herring and can be completely ignored because its not relevant to winning a fight. If you do infact just only not get hit and wait for the perfect opportunity to land a hit the fight will go on forever and also suck, sekiro is actually very anti that strategy it disincentivises that kind of play.