SadStruggle92

And already some of you have doubtlessly gone down to comment “lmao git gud”. Motherfucker it’s not about difficulty. You know what was a difficult fucking game? Sekiro. That game is hard as balls and I absolutely love it, precisely because its designed in a such a way that it fixes everything about Dark Souls that sucks.

In Sekiro they fixed this. Instead of literally just dodging every single attack, you have a dozen different defensive options that you have to learn and apply to different attacks. Instead of knowing how every single enemy encounter is going to go down, you have a bunch of different ninja tools that have different effects that you can experiment with.

Did you try a Magic build? That may be more your style.

Anywho, I do think that what you're asking for out of Dark Souls is something fundamentally different than what it actually is. In my opinion, Sekiro shares far more with older games like Tenchu, the Ninja Gaiden series, & maybe just a little bit w/ Metal Gear Rising than it does with most other games in the "SoulsBorne" lineage. It is at base a "Ninja Game" first & foremost, and I think it really only gets considered as similar to the rest of From Software's catalogue due to shared developer parentage, and similar control formatting.

Conversely, it's well known that the "Souls'" both Demon & Dark, are spiritual successors & reimaginings of the old King's Field games. Now anybody who knows anything about the history of JRPGs could tell you at a glance that King's Field is obviously a console-centric adaptation of old Wizardry & Ultima-style CRPGs, in particular Ultima Underworld. In fact FromSoftware themselves specifically cite the commercial success of the Japanese port of the original Wizardry game for their 1990 pivot to videogames development (previously they made commercial business software). Just as well, Hidetaki Miyazaki has expressed in the past that he draws just as much influence from TTRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons as he does other videogames in terms of his own games design philosophy.

Put another way; although this is rarely addressed in discussions of the games themselves, the "SoulsBorne" series in fact shares a direct "genealogical-design" link with Morrowind & Skyrim. Which I think is probably most self-evident in Elden Ring & reveals the whole game about why that specific game seems to work so goddamn well. They've been perfecting, incrementally, what Bethesda has been fumbling with trying to implement wholesale for the last 20 years; which is the question of how to correctly adapt the Ultima-Wizardry CRPG framework to console gaming.

This also, I think, explains what some of your problem in "getting into" Dark Souls might be. A lot of people try to approach the games like they're action games & get clowned on, they're not. They're Western-Style RPGs that happen to have been developed in Japan, and you need to approach them with that mindset I think, in order to really get any mileage or enjoyment out of them as games.

All I'm gonna say is, it is perfectly valid to reject a dish by appearance alone, but I don't really believe you can say that you've actually tried it if all you did was prod at it with a fork & sniff it.

I'm just calling it as I see it, comrade.

I gave up after about 5 minutes because the controls felt weird

I mean there's a term for that, it's called "Not even trying."

:shrug-outta-hecks: