DoH is a garbage fight. Making all his moves 1shots for a fucking fully upgraded character just makes this a test of not being hit and not actually a good fight.

Finally beat him. Fucking shit boss.

Final boss doesn't seem too hard but I only saw his first phase. He probably pulls some goofy one shot bullshit in phases 2 and 3. Also annoying that you have to redo the Genichiro fight every time. Shit like this is why these games are getting worse and worse. Fucking loser bandwagoning fans who claim to love the games bc theyre so hard and decry all interesting game design leaving is with these fucking dumb challenges constantly that arent actually good theyre just annoyingly tough for no reason other than all the "fans" thought these games were special because they wanted to git gud.

I mean, every other area/boss was full of interesting design, so ending on a boss that forces you to master the super deep mechanics that make for one of the game's chief selling points seems pretty fair. What's the point of developing a combat system that refined if the game never pushes it as far is it can go? Provisionally agreed on DoH - did not feel like a fair fight, whereas final boss so far is like a culmination of every human fight in the game. Would you really have preferred it if it had had a shortcut through a design choice, like Gywn and his boring parry weakness?

the sad part is that these games were never intended to be hard for the sake of it. miyazaki would say in early interviews that they (i.e. demon's souls, dark souls 1) were hard because it was immersive and rewarding for the player. it served a greater purpose. it was clear though when dark souls 2 came out that everyone's obsession with the difficulty of the series because it made them git gud had changed the game design.

still love their games but i tend to wash out on the dumb hard fights if they just feel like ball busters for the sake of it

Agreed with Trilo.

Also I don't think the final fight is initially too bad. The actual final fight seems fair (again, haven't seen the final 2 phases yet), but having to repeat the Genichiro phase every time I want to try it is deliberately tedious solely for the sake of it.

I just miss the Demon's and Dark Souls days

Album Rating: 4.5

Demon or Hatred only has 1 one shot and it's a charge move that's easy to dodge if you just jump to his left, really don't think that fight is that hard if you follow the guide I laid out. And yeah, Isshin the Sword Saint is an absurdly hard boss fight. it got to a point for me where if I took damage to Genichiro I'd let him kill me and reset the fight. Same with phase 1 of Sword Saint. After a while I was killing Genichiro and beating phase 1 of Sword Saint within a minute each, flawlessly every time. Phases 2 and 3 of Sword Saint are fucking insane and require perfect play. Actually found phase 3 to be easier than phase 2 because of the highly punishable lightning attack but still god damn. Your posture crumbles quickly and it's insanely hard to keep the boss's posture meter high. You absolutely must nikiri counter him every chance you get. If you can't pull that off then you're completely screwed until you get good at timing it. Luckily the window for it is pretty good, way better than parrying in souls.

Okay, I can vaguely get on board with the Genichiro hate in that fight, although working out how to slam him into oblivion within a minute is a pretty nice indication of how far you've come throughout the game
Imo the best From game for difficulty is still Bloodborne because it rewarded players' mechanical skills to a higher degree than the others on all stages/bosses, but it was especially punishing otherwise. Haven't mastered this to nearly the same degree yet so can't gauge where it'd fall

Album Rating: 4.5

Honestly, the final boss made me "git gud" to such a degree that going through ng+ I've made it more than halfway through the game, including the first real Genichiro fight atop the castle, without dying once. After beating the final boss everything else feels way easier to me now, which is kinda cool. I think this game is amazing for level of difficulty but the final boss is without a doubt the hardest fight they've ever made imo. And yeah I'm in agreement that bloodborne is great for difficulty, albeit frenzy is a dogshit mechanic.

Album Rating: 4.5

"Also annoying that you have to redo the Genichiro fight every time. Shit like this is why these games are getting worse and worse."



I can empathize with hating to redo the fight over and over again, although you will get good enough that this becomes trivial, but I'm pretty sure it's always been like this. If you beat Ornstein or Smough and die to the other one, you don't come back to a fight with just 1 of them, you redo it from scratch. Conversely, Dark Souls 2 was more forgiving considering you didn't need to redo Throne Watcher and Defender, nor Nashandra if you died to Aldia. But yeah, far back as I can recollect this has always been a thing and not something Fromsoft just developed in later years.

Ornstein and Smough was okay because it was unique at the time. As the games go on they've gone harder and harder on gank fights and multi-phases and multi-enemies that have less and less unique aspects. A good challenging fight works once in a while, but when every fight becomes that it gets tedious.

Sekiro *is* mostly good with this but O hoped it would side step it completely rather than just saving it til the very end.

I can't even beat Geni before grandpa, fucking hell. DoH is down tho.

Ever since Artorias of the Abyss they've basically just gone all in on gank bosses that require perfect play in games where the combat is unremarkable and subpar at best. Believe it or not I don't play the games for a perfect challenge. If I want to play flawlessly I play games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta that actively reward and encourage that type of play. The fromsoft games are not designed around that though, which is so weird when they focus on it. It's the weakest aspect of their games.

To compensate for the tedious design they put warp points and bonfires every four feet because the "inconvenience" and smart level design of the original games would only exacerbate these issues. It's just stuff like thos which reminds me exactly why I hold DeS and DaS in such high regard over all the others, which I barely revisit. I miss it when they weren't afraid to innovate and challenge and design in ways that were unexpected and new.

Album Rating: 4.5

I think people hold DS1 to a ridiculously high standard that doesn't exist. It was innovative and creative as hell but it had soooo many issues. The bonfire placement was seriously garbage, and not giving the player the ability to fast travel was just tedious. People argue that it made the players backtrack and really get to experience the map but that sounds like fanboys trying to justify bad game design. Then you have the garbage platforming sections like Sen's fortress, bad boss design like Bed of Chaos, Moonlight Butterfly, Seath the Scaleless; Capra Demon, O&S, and Nito, and Gargoyles are all gank fights, and Four Kings if you're shit at fighting them; the hitboxes are egregiously bad a lot of the times and I-frames are nowhere near as good as they'd later be in DS3 and Bloodborne; covenants are completely useless and tedious as hell to use; faith builds are broken beyond belief in pvp, and so on. I love DS1 but I think people are wearing nostalgia glasses when they reflect on it being the peak of Fromsoft. Sekiro has an infinitely more engrossing world and better mechanics and enemy design. It could do to have more bosses with a capital B, and the reskin of Guardian Ape is trash design, but otherwise game's a masterpiece imo.

DS1 has issues like all the games but a lot of what you just called issues are great strengths of the game. Hitboxes are still a major issue in Sekiro, thay never changed. They've always had problematic.

Bonfire placement in Dark Souls was perfect. They've gotten worse and worse with every game since. DS3 and Sekiro have the worst placements yet. It's maddening. Bed of Chaos sucks but I'd rather a million Bed of Chaoses over one more Demon of Hatred. Covenants have never been good. The idea is good but the execution was never right. Bloodborne and DS3 are far too lenient with their iframes because of how heavily the bosses incentivise nothing but boring dodge builds. PVP was never meant to be balanced. It was meant to be unfair and horrible and full of evil people doing bad things when invading people. Instead people wanted to turn it into an honourable duel system, the most boring way to treat how PVP functions in those games.

Capra Demon's gank does suck, yeah. Gargoyles works because both enemies have different movesets and timings, it's very fairly designed. O&S are also quite sensibly designed around a variety of playstyles. Gamss from DS2 onwards stop incetivising certain builds in their focus on more rolly polly dex stuff. Nito isn't really a gank fight, you can completely avoid all other enemies. Four Kings isn't fantastic but it was never particularly hard either.

Sekiro and DS3 are full of poorly designed maps that necessitate fast travelling constantly rather than actually traversing the world in a more engaging fashion. By the endgame of Sekiro I am seeing 1000 loadscreens an hour because of all my warping. Dark Souls you could play for many hours without ever seeing a load screen. It was beautiful.

We seem to have fundamentally different views on these games. I absolutely despise DS2 and 3. Sekiro has a lot to love but it also exacerbates a lot of the core issues with the souls series aftee Dark Souls 1. It's quite upsetting to always see the potential fall short like it has time and again. I don't know of Dark Souls and Demon's Souls were flukes or if they just no longer care for making the games as carefully and thoughtfully as they used to.

If i cant get through these last bosses I'll cry as I want ng+

Album Rating: 4.5

No fucking way, Demon of Hatred is a solid challenge, Bed of Chaos is just rng bullshit. And I'd rather dodge-roll through enemy attacks and be up close and in the battle than DS1's approach of just smacking everything in the ass or parrying to trivialize bosses. I like Gargoyles and O&S, just saying DS1 has more gank fights than 3 or Sekiro to my recollection. As for bonfire placements, DS3 has some superfluous ones, same with Sekiro, but I'd take those over the scarcity of DS1's. Dying at the bottom of Blighttown only to wake up at Firelink Shrine isn't fun. I'm never like "Oh sick, I get to run all the way back there again". DS3 eliminates a lot of the tedium of having to waste 5-10 mins at a time running back to a challenging area that you keep dying at. Remember how dogshit the 2 dlc bosses from DS2 (Blue Smelter and King's pets) were? Each would have benefitted greatly from a bonfire just before the boss. Can you imagine if there wasn't an idol right at Demon of Hatred or the final boss? Would you have any incentive to keep wasting upwards of 5 minutes getting to a boss that you kept dying to? Imagine being at the top of Sen's fortress and realizing you want to go back and purchase something from a merchant or do something else at Firelink. You'd have to backtrack through a tedious gauntlet of bs, only to have to do it all over again when you come back to it. I cannot fathom how you people think being inconvenienced to backtrack constantly is enjoyable. Remember being at the bottom of the Depths and having to backtrack all the way out of it? Or Ash Lake and having to waste like 15 minutes running back through it and out the Great Hollow, which was another awful platforming section. Pure tedium.

Album Rating: 4.5

Idk how anyone can 'despise' Dark Souls 3, it has some of the best areas and bosses in the entire franchise. 2 is also highly overlooked although it has a lot of the issues I complained about with Dark Souls 1.



Also how is Sekiro poorly designed map-wise? I think it might have better interconnectedness than DS1 tbh. Everything lines up in a logical way and the maps themselves are gorgeous, rife with exploration and challenging enemies and rewards. And the only 2 maps that aren't strictly speaking connected to the main world (Hirata Estates and Fountainhead Palace) have some of the best level design we've ever seen from Fromsoft.