I've been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don't mind so much the fact that it's different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I'm bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Dark Souls.
Got Dark Souls II to see what the hype was about, and 100%-ed it cuz I was post-surgery with nothing better to do.
Fast forward, and a friend gifted me Elden Ring, so, here we go again.
It's famous difficulty was just a combo of clunky controls and obnoxious health pools, which made mastering that type of difficulty really unsatisfying.
I gitted gud, but Dark Souls never gitted fun.
Same applies to Souls-likes.
I really wanted to believe. Fucking love the aesthetic, but that's about the only positive I can recall.
I've always somewhat agreed. I've played elden ring and some DS 3. I think the world design is very fun, and most fights individually can be fun. But at the end of the day every boss fight is a janky rhythm game that gets longer and longer.
I see the appeal, but the most I do like once a month is jump in Elden Ring for an hour or two where I bumble around exploring or upgrading my stuff, find a boss fight, and just learn the funny Osu!-like pattern to beat it. It never leaves me mesmerized or champing at the bit for more like I've seen some of my friends get obsessed with it.
This is exactly how I feel. I just don't think they are fun most of the time. I don't think they are harder than the well controlled third person action games like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, but I never feel like I can blame the cumbersome controls in those games like I can with souls-likes. Weirdly, the only souls-like that I ended up enjoying was the heavily memed/mocked Final Fantasy Origins. It had an interesting story (total inversion of the story of the first FF game) and had somwhat interesting skills and upgrades.
I tried both Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 1, and even Bloodborne. All felt shit and I literally couldn’t even find achievable goals from any of their starting areas.
I’ve played (imo) much better Soulslike games all the way through, like Tunic, Stellar Blade, and Another Crab’s Treasure. But FromSoft, ironically, seems to make the worst of them.