I was watching a few videos on the difficulty in Khazan recently (https://youtu.be/iRn_4QtYFiM and a different one which I can't find any longer) where the creators argued that the difficulty, while very hard, is essential to the experience of the game. If the bosses were any less difficult, they would not pose enough of a challenge to players, thus diminishing the sense of accomplishment when beating the boss.
This made wonder if difficult bosses really are the most defining characteristic of soulslikes since that's what most people seem to focus on. Dark Souls was notoriously marketed as the difficult game franchise, with FromSoft even leaning into this reputation with their DS1 Prepare to Die edition. But is difficulty really that important to a good soulslike?
Demon's Souls, for example, mainly has gimmick bosses. Sure, Allan and Maneaters are quite difficult objectively speaking, but apart from Flamelurker (?) there was no boss in the game that gave me major trouble - it was primarily the brutal level design and lack of bonfires.
DS1, which had been heralded as this super hard game, doesn't pose too many super difficult boss fights, by modern standards, either - the level design and interconnectedness of the world is the primary focus.
I feel like Sekiro (and maybe Nioh? haven't played any of them) pushed the genre to include suuper difficult bosses, then Elden Ring did, now lower-budget studios with games like Lies of P or Khazan do, whilst the other pillars of what make up a "standard" soulslike take up a little bit of a background role.
With all that said, I was just wondering what your experience with difficult bosses has been recently and if you value difficult bosses over any other aspect of the games. Maybe you don't care about difficulty at all and rather want to explore and feel the atmosphere of the world you're in.
Have a nice weekend โ๐ป
I appreciate your thoughts on this - all organised too!
That's a very good point you bring up about degrees and kinds of difficulty. It's like comparing DS1 to Khazan. DS1 was difficult because no other game existed like it before. Khazan is difficult because players had around 15 years or so of playing other difficult soulslikes, so the difficulty here needed to be magnitutes higher to justify the crazy kit and movement you have by the end of the game. Different group of people in mind too.