Games

Yeah but just because IGN gave it 10/10 doesn't make your opinion valid, all those souls series are very very slow, you die, you go way back to some location from an hour ago and slog through the same generic fantasy level again just to get another shot at the guy who killed you, and it just gets more boring each time, especially when the locations don't stand out from any other generic fantasy place.

It's extremely punishing and discourages free player experimentation and creativity and fun with the mechanics and encourages reading the wiki to cheese a boss so you don't have to do it again or going somewhere else to level a stat or get the right gear like some lame ass MMO or ass creed, which makes it all tedious and boring.

The reason people focus in on how these games are hard is because they assume they're not meant to die much at all, if ever, because who tf wants to sink in all that time repeating the same boring bullshit journey over and over, so they rightfully bounce off the design.

The real difficulty of souls games is having the stamina to make it through the repetitive slog, but if you really think about it why should you bother when you're meant to play games to have fun.

"If it's not fun, why bother" as satoshi iwata famously said ;)

Compare that to a fast game like Doom (original, not the shitty reboots), you die, there's that wipe effect and you're going a mile a minute, less than a minute and you're right back in the action to give it another shot with a new tactic or strategy. It's not that death isn't punishing or doesn't matter because you lose all your weapons, it punishes you with difficulty, not boredom.

And more fundamentally those games just are very slow which doesn't help the boredom, there's no significantly faster way of traversing a thing the second time compared to when you just walked the first time, sure you can roll and whatnot like the speedrunners and time it perfectly but compare it to something like Ultrakill with it's fast stylish action and expressive movement mechanics and a difficulty a good bit higher than any of the souls games by a good mile.

The only game that doesn't have this problem in the series is the OG demon' souls, idk about the remake since I hadn't played it yet but the levels themselves being physically smaller obscures the issue at the core of the design.

And all this is coming from someone who loves "boring" games like the paradox strategy games or sims like Arma or MSFS, the difference is these games don't force you to repeat the same bullshit over and over, sure you might have to go back to a pretty early save in a HoI4 campaign to fix your mistake by the time it comes up but that's on you, the game doesn't force an arbitrary retread of the same ground over and over.

DMC4 didn't have the best level design either, precisely because there was too much of it, and DMC5 went in the right direction and made everything a corridor of monsters so you can get right to the combat and quickly, because that's the fun part of the game.

Souls combat can be fun too when you're really in there rolling about the place with some huge dragon or some shit but to actually fucking get to it isn't worth the time investment of navigating some bullshit maze over and over.

All the aforementioned games can be pretty dang hard, Doom on UV or DMC5 on DMD are both tougher than most Souls encounters, but they are fun and encourage you to try harder and souls doesn't, and that's the point of course, with it's story and atmosphere lining up perfectly with that vibe that the world is indifferent to your journey, but all of this doesn't make it good game design and certainly doesn't make it a template other games can copy-paste willy nilly when it doesn't fit the tone, i.e. Jedi Fallen Order.