Was in a comment section about designing games to respect the player’s time and mentioned I never finished Hollow Knight because it makes you fight the final boss again each time you want to give the secret boss another shot.
Someone jumped in literally telling me “GET GOOD” and when I told them there were other things I’d rather be doing, they followed up with “so don’t get hard games just to complain about.” They never responded when I asked them how I was supposed to know exactly how hard everything in the game would be before I ever played it.
Every fucking time. I swear I can set my watch by it. The Dark Souls series has earned my undying enmity for what it has done to gaming discourse.
Sekiro fans giving out advice like “to beat this boss you have to parry them”
The most useful piece of advice i got for this game was here on sexbear someone told me to stop looking at the bosses healthbar and never take my eyes off the boss. After 3 failed attempts at playing that game i then breezed through to the end and didn’t even die against the final boss lol. In this instance its the only game i ever bothered to “gut gud” at but only because someone actually told me how to.
That’s how to beat untimed bosses in general regardless of the genre. And I think this principle is pretty old too since I got it from a shmup guide on Gamefaqs way back in the day. You conceptualize the boss fight as a contest to see how long you can survive the boss with dps being secondary. If you can get to the point where you can dodge every single one of the boss’s attacks, then you pretty much win the boss fight as long as you occasionally remember to attack the boss. Even if you only do 1 dps, if the boss can’t land their attacks on you, then you win because 1 dps > 0 dps.
Well kind of i didnt explain properly because sekiro isnt really about just blocking or just dodging thats actually a very hard way to play infact its not even about doing damage its primarily a mimic shonen sword fighting anime game. So the way to play is partially learning the sequence of attacks but also in between parry and dodging is wildly swinging your sword. It doesnt matter if it doesnt do damage because damage isnt really important the stagger bar is the real health bar the health bar is a distraction.
What I learned about the game is to not focus on doing damage because if you’re waiting to do damage you’re waiting forever and the damage you deal is way too low what you want to be doing is keeping up the pressure so the bosses stagger builds up, landing a hit is just a bonus but not the objective. Once i learned that the game became smooth sailing because the only way to end a fight quickly is to keep the pressure up.
I was by no means saying anything akin to oh just dont get hit nerd that’s basically just git gud mentality and equally as annoying. What I meant to say is the health bar in sekiro is a red herring and can be completely ignored because its not relevant to winning a fight. If you do infact just only not get hit and wait for the perfect opportunity to land a hit the fight will go on forever and also suck, sekiro is actually very anti that strategy it disincentivises that kind of play.
Silly as it sounds that’s surprisingly good advice for Sekiro, working on the assumption someone’s experienced with Dark Souls and the like. In the other games parrying is overpowered but incredibly janky and slow, so everyone learns to either block or iframe everything and only a few learn to parry the handful of things you can parry in those games. Sekiro on the hand relies on staring enemies down and blocking at the last possible instant instead, in a way that’s very unintuitive if you’re used to prioritizing iframing and positioning to just not get hit.
You can get through the early fights with just dodging and positioning, but that does hit a wall eventually where you do literally have to just start learning the game’s core gimmick until you’ve internalized it the way you have to internalize iframe timing in the other games.
The biggest irony is that imo the best boss fight in the game is a more traditional soulslike fight with minimal parrying and lots of dodging and careful positioning. The parrying is a cool gimmick but I didn’t really like the fights that were actually designed around it. Maybe the what was it called? Long-necked centipede or something? That was exactly the right length and amount of parrying for a fight, just a fast frantic burst of parrying everything like mad and then it was done.