vivi-n

Even as someone who doesn't play these games specifically this is something I feel lot in regards to any sort of fan levels, romhacks and even a lot of indie games. It really seems like people get so caught up in the high-level play stuff they think that's what makes the game, and that a good level is just anything that tests that as hard a s possible. I want to see people with the guts to make easy levels that are still fun and memorable, to leave leeway, to focus on the flow and pace of going through it and not how many skill checks they can string together.

In that vein I've recently been frustrated going through a lot of rigid boss battles in modern retro-styled games, where there's no recourse to beat them except to more or less do a perfect no-hit run through these perfectly set up attack patterns. Then I'll go play some real retro games, the ones which inspired them, and the bosses are often a lot simpler and flow way better. There's room to cheese, play around, etc, and they wind up being a lot more memorable that way.

as prevalent as this stuff is in romhack/mod type scenes i think it extends to...potentially any game really. i'd extend it past even what mirai mentioned, certainly, but i feel like the things she brought up were on my mind when i made a post complaining about a different side of that whole phenomenon early on this year. i think music games are a really obvious example, and even by the time i started playing beatmania iidx almost 15 years ago i heard people complain about how often bemani boss songs sound bad and/or are chosen/made to be ultimate challenges because it's easy to justify writing stupid messes of button presses for them. but even outside the hardest songs there's a sense that the music and chart design started to move towards more defined ways that make many songs in a given few years of the game feel similar to each other. and it had a similar effect! it's a lot harder for me to point to singular songs that i think are especially fun to play in newer versions of the games for reasons aside from "well i like the way it sounds the most"

and this kind of thing was on my mind constantly playing elden ring. the game's decision to populate every mini-dungeon with battle challenges means tons of boss-type enemies literally repeat over and over or are just paired up with each other in arbitrary combinations to provide some kind of roadblock. and even the major bosses have a tendency to share all of the same traits because the developers have learned all the cheesy and scrubby methods for fighting bosses that people used in demon's souls and dark souls. so they virtually all have strong ranged attacks or gap closes, long combo strings, and openers which look similar but have different timings so you die for rolling just because you saw the startup frames. it's not like i think any of those things are horrible ideas individually, but piling them all on every single time makes almost every boss fight feel like a similar challenge of practicing reactions and slugging it out till you master everything or give up and summon instead. but for me it made the game so much more monotonous, since with only a few exceptions it was clear every time i made it to a new boss that it was going to be the same kind of process and feeling again. there's a couple bosses that really stick out from the mold, or have a kind of funny gimmick built in to let you create a different kind of setpiece, and they're by far my favorites; i feel like so many of the others are interchangeable at best, and in a few cases outright badly designed, putting a tedious challenge in a spot where the game could have built seamlessly to a climatic moment instead of just making me think "god, why did they put this jackass here?" for an hour first

i feel like kay's mentioned this a lot, "it's easy to make a hard game" and such, and particularly in that kind of fanwork world it's very clear to me why people who become deeply involved in a community like that learn the vocabulary deeply and just try to apply it again. it's hard to innovate, or express ideas more abstract than "try to do this!"...but i'm truly frustrated by all the trends i see like this which seemed aimed at delivering The Thing People Say They Like The Most at the cost of communicating ideas and feelings, or even just varying the pace and texture of a game, which i think reach far beyond even the things you've mentioned. but those are very pronounced examples because the people creating them are focused on the things that have kept them playing the game for so long, and they're aiming at a like-minded audience. i guess