this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
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I’m working my way through it now. They’re not really much different from the main game. The problem is the bosses in the main game were also pretty frustrating. A lot of absurdly long attack chains where it’s hard to read when you have an opening. Delayed attacks you have to memorize the timing for. Attacks where the enemy either dashes or stretches their model an absurd distance to hit you so it’s hard to get away from them or gauge distances. Damage values that will kill you in a few hits even with high health and armor. Attacks that start and execute so fast that anything with a cast time gets punished.
Outside bosses we have the enemies behind half the corners, we have platforming sections in a game that doesn’t really support that, etc.
I’ve always like their games in spite of a lot of the flaws. The level design, world building, atmosphere, weird writing, etc all are still great and what draws me to the games. In what in what other games can you see: bald scam man, onion man, sunny d man, “dip head in wax”, rolling lightning goats, doot doot boat ghost, etc?
But it feels like in terms of gameplay design it’s kind of stagnated. A lot of the same design patterns for difficulty plus the pressure to keep making the game feel hard to people who have played all their games before has led to them stretching their design about as much as they can. In my first play through of Elden Ring for the first time I gave up trying to play my usual Ooga booga strength build in favor of that stupid comet azure magic combo to just anihate the bosses rather than deal with their bullshit. And in previous games I happily smashed my face against things like Nameless King or Madam Butterfly and Dancer well before I was supposed to fight then.
I think at this point I just want to see FROM do some different things. Sekiro was a nice mix-up on the basic formula and while it wasn’t really my cup of tea, Armored Core 6 felt like a breath of fresh air. The mainline souls style games feel like they’re trying to keep linking the fire over and over.
Let's not forget how blatantly the bosses read your inputs. FROM bosses have always done this, but it's never been so obvious; it kinda breaks the "tough but fair" illusion.
My take is that since players have gotten so powerful, bosses had to adapt...but the only ways to make them stronger have upset the balance between "tough" and "fair". Hit boxes for attacks have gotten larger, which hurts readability; attacks that you used to be able to dodge now land, even though it didn't look like it. Bosses hit harder, combo their attacks, and they can even cancel into different combos now.
All of this happened because bosses are balanced around Spirit Ashes and the new insane weapon arts. It's harder than ever to SL1 the game, because if you don't have a good Ash summon or a crazy weapon art or didn't grind for upgrade materials, main quest bosses are stupidly hard. If you did do all of those things, they're almost trivial.
It's weird. The bosses used to be the highlight of Soulsborne games, and now they're the worst part because they're just not fun anymore. Dragonlord Placidusax is my favorite fight, and it's not even close. I either trivialize my way through the rest, or just wanted them to be over. The satisfaction of fighting a worthy opponent is gone, because it's almost always just unfair for the player, or unfair for the boss.
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