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.
I find THK to be a very easy boss, it’s rare that i don’t beat it. HOWEVER, i do not think that is OPs point. In any case, it wouldn’t be my critique of that fight.
Having to do an easy miniboss first every time before i get to work on the actual challenge i care about is a waste of my time.
It’s just how it is. This would have easily been mitigated if Radiance would just work like any other dream boss. I get there are plot reasons why i have to fight THK again before i get to dreamnail it, but it still means i have to redo a time consuming task i have already achieved and that has become really unrewarding over and over again until i get nauseated by it. Some amount of that kind of thing is ok-ish, but i always found this approach fairly pointless, it doesn’t have the same payoff that beating a hard boss or a tricky plattforming segment delivers. I also do not find it adds significantly to the payoff of these challenges when they get obstructed by routine rote tasks.
More importantly, beating THK shouldnt be turned into a repetitive rote task. It cheapens that part of the lore.
Edit: After reading the post upthread about the same situation, i get why people would disagree on this
Yeah you’re right, it doesn’t feel great. But if it’s a matter of difficulty rather than satisfaction there’s steps to mitigate the difficulty so you can still get to see the true ending, and I wanted to help OP with that!