Their characters Ayu and Haruka
Forgot to add: this is 1/6 requests I took ages ago! I'll be posting these sometimes while I also work on daily sketches
- he/him
Kind of just do stuff, tend to like stuff like Touhou and Doom and Terraria and Serious Sam and things
25
R-18 stuff over at @mandatoryanomaly
Basically everywhere else, Discord, Tumblr, Bluesky, Twitter, Steam, Fediverse, etc. I still go by "anomalouslymandatory" if possible
I think Dark Souls might have ruined the metroidvania genre by making every metroidvania think it has to be "like Dark Souls," ie, pointlessly challenging with an overbearing parry system
It was a very funny self-own for me to make this post and then immediately try out Grime, a game that tutorializes the parry before it tutorializes attacking
I am tired of the 'good combat' industrial complex I am tired of parrying I am tired of games making me invest time in learning boss patterns before they've done the work of proving they're worth my time
the problem with parries is that they are binary. you either get the parry or you don't. in a game where combat is centered around parries, everything is boiled down to reaction and rote pattern recognition. positioning? crowd control? unique strategies? all are gone. just hit the button at the right time, and hear the loud sound effect, or don't and die.
this is why parries are so popular, of course. what you did right is instantly rewarded, and what you did wrong is instantly clear. none of that frustrating vagueness of dying because you let a group of enemies take control of the screen and overwhelm you, or because the attack you tried to punish a whiffed attack missed. just hit every parry and win!
of course, that "frustrating vagueness" frequently comes from depth. higher-level strategic management of situations, knowledge of all of the players tools' and their unique properties... it's what makes action games of many types truly rewarding to explore in the long term.
it also makes it easier to ease players into games, because they don't immediately have to master everything that will help them win. if the sole factor to winning is correctly timing all your parries or dodges, then the player is directly forced into that dichotomy and if they can't reach a specific level of competence, well, tough shit for them I guess. the only ways to modulate the difficulty of parry-focused combat are to adjust the punishment, adjust the enemy's timings, or adjust the timing windows, and none of those are that accommodating, IMO.
leave the timing tests to the rhythm games, where they belong. join the anti-parry movement today.
I think Dark Souls might have ruined the metroidvania genre by making every metroidvania think it has to be "like Dark Souls," ie, pointlessly challenging with an overbearing parry system
It was a very funny self-own for me to make this post and then immediately try out Grime, a game that tutorializes the parry before it tutorializes attacking
I am tired of the 'good combat' industrial complex I am tired of parrying I am tired of games making me invest time in learning boss patterns before they've done the work of proving they're worth my time
Like Dark Souls spends its first hour being easy. It throws a small amount of Dark Souls bullshit at you to let you know it's serious, but it doesn't really demand great execution. The first boss fight is a fakeout you're meant to walk out of, and the second boss fight is a very easy fight. Most importantly, it doesn't require you to execute all of its mechanics effectively to succeed, and it doesn't really try to test you until significantly later in the game. The game actually thinks about your investment and whether you are willing to engage with the challenge at that point in the journey.
Most of those newer souls-inspired games just don't get that, they feel like their difficulty is just a genre convention that they get to deploy. And maybe it is for a segment of the audience, but I just find it kind of presumptuous as a player – by the time Dark Souls stops pulling punches you are deeply invested in that game's story and world. A lot of those games seem to assume that you are playing the game for the difficulty, and like, no, my time is more valuable than that.
the more a game wears its “Dark Souls inspiration” on its sleeve the less I trust that they got anything of value out of Dark Souls
