I was watching a few videos on the difficulty in Khazan recently (https://youtu.be/iRn_4QtYFiM and a different one which I can't find any longer) where the creators argued that the difficulty, while very hard, is essential to the experience of the game. If the bosses were any less difficult, they would not pose enough of a challenge to players, thus diminishing the sense of accomplishment when beating the boss.
This made wonder if difficult bosses really are the most defining characteristic of soulslikes since that's what most people seem to focus on. Dark Souls was notoriously marketed as the difficult game franchise, with FromSoft even leaning into this reputation with their DS1 Prepare to Die edition. But is difficulty really that important to a good soulslike?
Demon's Souls, for example, mainly has gimmick bosses. Sure, Allan and Maneaters are quite difficult objectively speaking, but apart from Flamelurker (?) there was no boss in the game that gave me major trouble - it was primarily the brutal level design and lack of bonfires.
DS1, which had been heralded as this super hard game, doesn't pose too many super difficult boss fights, by modern standards, either - the level design and interconnectedness of the world is the primary focus.
I feel like Sekiro (and maybe Nioh? haven't played any of them) pushed the genre to include suuper difficult bosses, then Elden Ring did, now lower-budget studios with games like Lies of P or Khazan do, whilst the other pillars of what make up a "standard" soulslike take up a little bit of a background role.
With all that said, I was just wondering what your experience with difficult bosses has been recently and if you value difficult bosses over any other aspect of the games. Maybe you don't care about difficulty at all and rather want to explore and feel the atmosphere of the world you're in.
Have a nice weekend โ๐ป
The interconnected world and bosses are from it's origins as a metroidvania subgenre. The pacing of each fight, how death is handled, and the skills are important to being a souls game.
Each time you fight something you could die, at any point in the game. And that's not from leveled lists or the enemies becoming bullet sponges. It's from the combat system and how it's designed. You're not just killing enemies as you run through an area, though you can do that, you're facing off against them.
Dying is important. It's even a plot point in every From game. Earning points(souls) to use for currency to level and buy items, and the pressure to not lose them, is a big part of the games structure. That's not unique to souls games, but it's definitely a core mechanic. (Devil may cry being a big example)
The skills are often over looked, but they determine what we can even do in the first place. Some games can get away without skills by leaning more on the metroidvania aspects such as Tunic and Hollow Knight. But for a soulsborne game they're kinda essential. A more "true" game could remove the skills, but it would need to have some other way to constrain the players ability to use different classes of items in their place.
I used to hate these game, btw. I love them now though, and i think that gave me a good look into how they operate in a way.