I Love-Hate Soulslikes (The Forbidden Gamer Discourse)
I was watching this GinoMachino Dark Souls 3 No Hit run and for a large portion of the run (from about 37 minutes in) he's discussing his thoughts on the quality of other soulslikes, why he feels that FromSoft are still the best at the "genre", and transitions into talking about why he dislikes Nightreign (the recent co-op roguelike built on top of Elden Ring) relative to other FromSoft games.
It sparked a chain of thought I've been kinda ruminating on for a few years now.
I don't like soulslikes, even though I've spent hundreds of hours playing them. I also love soulslikes, even though my time with them is majority frustration.
Love/Hate
I don't think I'm entirely alone in this and I think what underpins this is that FromSoft games are very well made, and so people like them and thus think they like the genre.
The problem with this is that "soulslikes" as a genre is still very poorly defined to the point of being an extremely well-worn punchline on IronPineapple's "Souls-Like games you've never heard of" series - "is this a soulslike? ehhhhh I just wanted to talk about it. It has dodge-rolls???"
I think FromSoft games are so well made that people will slog through a ton of stuff they don't like in order to get to the stuff they enjoy, and that stuff varies hugely from person to person but underpins what makes a "soulslike" for each person.
I'll be honest, I fucking hate the boss fights. It took me years to figure this out.
| Fuck this monk
What I enjoyed about Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne, the games that made the formula click for me, was toodling about the open worlds, carefully carving out more and more tenuously safe territory to explore. I love coming across an area while underlevelled and gradually figuring out strategies to overcome strong enemies, through both skill and subterfuge.
I can't do that shit with bosses. Every single time I struggle to git gud, and generally have to either refine my build (i.e. play the game in a way that feels less natural to me) or go grind some levels to gradually lower the difficulty until it's kinda trivial.
I find this maddeningly dull.
Elden Ring
Elden Ring is broadly considered a high point in the genre - FromSoft's Opus. And for the boss-botherers, I can see why - the bosses are fun, varied, and recombined in interesting ways throughout.
But at almost any point, if I struggled to beat a boss I could just turn around and go spend 30 hours doing anything else and come back to a cakewalk. This kinda ruined Elden Ring for me.
I still had that option in DS3, but it was much more limited and more explicitly "grinding levels", so I felt discouraged from doing it. In Elden Ring, just playing it will eventually mean you encounter some key area hugely overlevelled - there's just so much stuff to level up from.
This also meant that the Erdtree DLC was... pretty dogshit for me. Everywhere you turn there's an endgame+ difficulty boss, and you are expected/required to have an extremely strong build to make any progress with them. The open areas felt really barren and unrewarding to explore, so I ended up dropping it after 10 or so hours.
| Fuck this knight
The DLC felt designed around people who prepared for its release by "building a DLC character" - basically 100%ing Elden Ring with a highly meta-appropriate build so they could steamroll through the boring shit and get to the bosses.
The people I know who most enjoy soulslikes all did this, while I just strolled in with my every-Great-Rune character hoping that I'd at least get to play and was greeted by the first room containing a mini-boss that murdered me in 3 hits. Right.
This is a general issue I've seen in a bunch of other games with late/post-game DLC, but it feels like a lot of the hardcore fans approach all soulslikes with this sort of approach - they've got a job to do, and that's killing bosses. Frivolities like having fun along the way are wasted baggage, and if you don't like that then you might be the problem.
A Wider Problem
| Fuck this guy and his wolves
I think that's also why they disagree about so much. In the Gino video above, the chat is rife with people arguing about their opinions as if they're stating objective facts.
"Nioh 2 is ass." "No, Nioh 2 is literally just Nioh 1 but better in every way." "Lies of P is perfectly balanced." "Parrying is boring." "Wuchang is goated." "Khazan is the only one to do it right" - I'm paraphrasing a great deal here but that's a collection of utterly unrelated and subjective opinions.
Something about gittin gud at Souls games has fostered this belief that understanding how to beat a hard game means confers ontological knowledge of its quality.
I think FromSoft have built a "community" of players who get massively divergent value from their games but assume they're all on the same page. They all overcame the same mighty obstacles so must all share the same perspective on it. A bunch of them go on to make these very opinionated takes on the genre with their own games - and we get Lords of the Fallen, and Lies of P, and Khazan, and Nioh, and Mortal Shell, Wuchang, and Wukong, and...
And nobody wants to drop the boss fights.