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.
Silly as it sounds that’s surprisingly good advice for Sekiro, working on the assumption someone’s experienced with Dark Souls and the like. In the other games parrying is overpowered but incredibly janky and slow, so everyone learns to either block or iframe everything and only a few learn to parry the handful of things you can parry in those games. Sekiro on the hand relies on staring enemies down and blocking at the last possible instant instead, in a way that’s very unintuitive if you’re used to prioritizing iframing and positioning to just not get hit.
You can get through the early fights with just dodging and positioning, but that does hit a wall eventually where you do literally have to just start learning the game’s core gimmick until you’ve internalized it the way you have to internalize iframe timing in the other games.
The biggest irony is that imo the best boss fight in the game is a more traditional soulslike fight with minimal parrying and lots of dodging and careful positioning. The parrying is a cool gimmick but I didn’t really like the fights that were actually designed around it. Maybe the what was it called? Long-necked centipede or something? That was exactly the right length and amount of parrying for a fight, just a fast frantic burst of parrying everything like mad and then it was done.