if you watch chrontendo or jeremy parish's video works series, a thing they are constantly saying after about 1984 is "RPG elements." they talk about it constantly, how the RPG just suddenly Exploded in the japanese game market and suddenly every single game was getting "RPG elements." at most this is, you know, literally an experience and level system, but in the more general case it's just the addition of state beyond health and ammo. it's any form of meta-progression, where you either gain items relevant to plot, or you gain things that alter the gameplay. in early 80s games, your character was exactly the same at the beginning and end, but after the RPG Explosion, it became incredibly common for even very arcade-y action titles to integrate some amount of progression, however minimal - though in some cases it was quite remarkable how literal they got.
now obviously this took deep root, to the point where you can't even meaningfully apply it to modern games as a phenomenon, yet the effect is still there. the ripples are no longer perceptible only because they have become so big that we're inside of them, and it's interesting to have been present for the beginning of other seismic shifts like this.
i'm playing blasphemous 2, which I think is excellent (I may write more about it later) and it sort of took a while for it to click that it has an estus flask, and how normal that is now. Like, this game is not a darksoul - it does not have bonfires or bosses that oneshot you (anymore than castlevastle did) and it's definitely, definitely all about movement. This is a conversation I just had the other day: Dark Souls is not a metroidvania, because you don't get new movement abilities. that's the one absolutely unique thing about the whole subgenre, and DS doesn't have it.
This game does, because it is a love letter to Symphony of the Night, even more than the previous game was. According to wikipedia the devs consciously tried to make this much more SotN than the first one, and they succeeded. The hallmarks are everywhere, the vibes, the level design, the movement tech, the whole thing is definitely, unquestionably "fuck it, let's just make Symphony, that's what we really want." and thus, as you'd expect, combat is almost secondary to movement - SotN has nice rich battle mechanics and your character levels up and stuff, but 90% of the game is about jumping, dashing, chaining techniques, doing increasingly silly shit just to get onto high ledges, and that is where progress happens; enemies are mostly just obstacles. this game is like that. so: it's just simply not dark souls.
and yet it has an estus flask. You have a potion with a permanent keybind and a limited number of uses, which you upgrade over the course of the game to carry more and make it more effective, and it automatically refills when you stop at a save point. and who's surprised by this? it's a good idea that deletes the twin miseries of players having to juggle potions and devs having to make enemies strong enough to get through 50 full-heals if the player so chooses to play that way.
metroid manages your health over the course of the game with a sledgehammer: it just loads you down with a dozen E tanks, so by the end you can basically just walk through enemies, ignoring them completely; you just have to refill before a big fight. symphony went the other way, kept life very limited, so it's easy to die right up until the end, even to low level enemies if you aren't careful - but you could load yourself down with healing items. it was irritating to use them, but you could do it.
the flask splits the difference: you basically start the game with about 2/3 of an E-tank, effectively, and you finish with maybe 1.5-2 tanks, but it's up to you when and how to use them, and it costs time, so it's not just an implicit bump to your life bar. you do get permanent life bar and flask upgrades as well of course, so by the end of the game you're definitely stronger, and you definitely don't worry as much about getting hit, but you're not SO tough that castle traversal feels like a pointless exercise. you worry LESS about getting hit, but you still, very definitely, do not want to get hit if you can avoid it.
of all the many things that Dark Souls brought to the table, the estus flask was possibly the most interesting and novel, and it's not bound to the darksoul model in any other way, so there's no reason not to drop it into something like a castlevastle. hell, put it in an FPS! put it in a mech game. who cares. it's just an interesting new way to do healing that they happened to think of while developing that game, and everybody else looked at it and went "...oh, yeah, I guess you could do it that way. Why weren't we doing it that way?"
