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this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
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Me with dark souls series.
But I don't know if it's because of the games themselves or by the toxic community that makes everything a "skill issue" and blames you for not being good enough to play them instead of helping a player find a way to enjoy them.
Same. It's especially frustrating when people get hyper specific about genres. Specifically, claiming that black myth wukong is not a souls like because reasons, so I bought it and suffered through the first two chapters before giving it up. I don't care what monkey minutia makes it not a souls like, it has punishing bosses and no difficulty settings.
I don't play souls likes that have no difficulty settings. I'm nearing 50 and my reaction times are not what they used to be. Sometimes I just need to tone it down to be able to enjoy a game.
I always found funny when the soulslike tryharders get pissy about difficulty settings and hyper specific about bullshit. To me, those people seem like they are trying so hard to gatekeep in order to keep the genre a niche that only them can enjoy. As if they were afraid that the genre became too "casual". It's kinda pathethic when a community (be it soulslike or any other one full of tryharders) wants to keep something in a certain way so nobody else can enjoy it. As if they were afraid that "impure" people could rob them their fun or something.
Point: The series and genre has evolved
Conclusion: The first of the series was not as good as it could have been.
There have been many games since that provided an interesting evolution on the formula. Sometimes, just by throwing away needlessly obtuse bits of the original. And only by traveling back do we see: Yeah, it broke a lot of molds. But some of those molds existed for a good reason.
Stopping people from pausing, giving the most obtuse explanations, putting near-invincible enemies so near your starting point - generally not good design steps even when building up something challenging for players.
And worse: Every critique of it had to be filtered through “git gud”. Yes, its push for high difficulty was a good thing for gaming advancement. But people tried to excuse EVERY issue the game had through that filter. A dad that wants to pause the game to care for his crying baby does not need to “git gud”.
Dark Souls is just clunky controls + sequence memorization, presented as 'difficulty'. And yeah, operating the clunk effectively is difficult, but it's a low hanging and very unsatisfying flavor of difficulty.
I could make Pokemon Yellow difficult by requiring you to operate the controls through a dish sponge, but that wouldn't make it fun.
Unpopular opinion apparently, but I wholeheartedly agree with you on Dark Souls.
Yeah, I noticed this too. It's an unpopular opinion to think that dark souls is not hard but just frustratingly clunky in order to make it appear hard.
It's just not satisfying. Reminds me of certain old games that were made artificially hard by dumb mechanics only to make them last longer.
I've played hard games that were satisfying to beat, then I tried several dark souls games (included elden ring and a myriad of soulslikes) and found them obnoxiously clunky and unfun.
They feel like playing the old Dragon's Lair arcade game. Duck, swing, move left on cue etc.