Post the Dark Souls of a series

>did you play sotn when you were like 10 or something
y-yes actually

and i played OoE when I was 18 or so

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Dawn of Sorrow is harder. For one is a bigger game.

For another, Nitesco exists in OoE. Whatever you might say about DoS not being as hard my reply to you will always be
>Nitesco

I really Loved that game it was awesome

I like when he yells "SHANNOA!!!!"

>not posting DeS

Umm... no sweetie

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One job dude. One fucking job.

Just to showcase how fucking ridiculous the purple beam is
youtu.be/kg8Qxd1zAcE

DoS doesn't have a single hard boss. OoE is full of them.

The hardest part in DoS is the shitty seal circles you have to draw after each boss.

no. aol has more in common with the typical souls structure

i like botw more though

I think Circle of the Moon is the hardest IGAvania title desu

The only hard part is Death Mountain. Every kid knew you could beat the final boss by crouching.

wut? The only hard boss is maybe the zombie dragons. It has the easiest Death battle in the whole series after Castlevania 2.

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What's ridiculous here? That's just a guy playing well. Enemies take a lot of time to die, I don't see how that's OP

The only things "hard" about igavania past Sotn is the enemies never stop really doing a lot of damage to your character, while in SOTN most bosses are piss easy very early on.

Iga didnt make cotm

>sweetie posting

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I don't feel that way at all. Died so many times in the fucking flame demon in DaS. The bosses in OoE are hard too but you have the advantage of not having to perform the ritual once the boss energy is down. On DaS if you mess up those regains a bit of its health and keeps fighting

maybe it was cause I'm dumb but I got stuck like 5 goddamn times in this game, which never happened in any other Mana game. I needed a guide to find out there was a second class promotion near the end of the game.

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That's not playing well, that's what that combo does. You run fast like the mother fucking Sonic from Sonic Rush and mash the buttons to grind the enemies meat with the purple beam.

You can't seriously claim that the dumb little draw gimmick is the sole reason you found DoS to be harder right?

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Just like you probably think the bosses in OoE are harder because of the shit controls of that game take more time to get used to.

I beat both games, OoE has more broken shit to help you deal with bosses. The real hard mode is the Albus Mode.

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Controls or not, OoE's bosses are faster, hit harder and take longer to learn. DoS on the other hand can be steam rolled through with no exploits needed just like every other metroid-like Castlevania. There's no difficulty spikes or anything and the true final boss is a massive joke. Meanwhile Dracula in OoE oh my goodness, not even castlevania 3 whopped my ass that hard.

I emulated it and didn't see the appeal. Had more fun with Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow

Good for you, user.

Only even remotely hard metroidvania is circle of the moon, everything else the rpg stuff makes it piss easy

Can we all agree SoTN and Super Metroid are the easiest, most broken pieces of shit of their respective franchises?

Maybe youre just bad. Should've got Nitesco.

I'm confused by this.

Try it with the romhack that enables constant running, the games biggest flaw is the fact that you need to double tap to run.

>should've gotten the exploit
Meanwhile DoS doesn't need a specific thing to be easy, it's easy no matter what just like SoTN. It's like saying Dark Souls is the easiest game of all time because summons can carry you the whole game.

kek no. COTM is a joke.

>Death's second form

What the fuck were they thinking?

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fun fact: a complete copy of OOE is like $100+

>buying games
People still do this?

Glad I still have mine then

Not that I think $100 is too much. I'd still go for it if I really wanted that game.

sell it then and make easy money if that price is true. it's just a rom on a cartridge.

SHANOAA!! is easily one of the best death gurgles ever. Also that was a rad boss fight.
youtube.com/watch?v=Wh_CNt66xRk

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€100 doesn't help me that much. I rather keep my game. The government can take my car if they want to liquidate anything I might be owning to them.

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SM's physics, tricks, and open map design give it a higher skill ceiling than most other entries in the series despite being on the easier side during a regular run.

>€100 doesn't help me that much
sure as hell does more than a useless cartridge that you can just play for free by getting a rom on the internet.

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Ah the Dark Souls of Persona.

>one is a porn game
There is no way that's real. SJWs would go insane

it's a good thing you don't get the purple beam until Dracula's Castle

If you chop your hands off, SoTN is difficult as well.

Regular run is that matters, every other self-imposes handicap are nothing more than denial.

Especially if you play as unarmored X

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A single player game's difficulty means how hard is it to beat, and SM is the most braindead easy entry in the whole series. Physics and openness don't make it harder, or at least not in SM's case. Even disregarding that, it's not like any pickup in SM compares to that one goddamn energy tank in ZM, you know the one.

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gamezone.com/originals/9-games-that-are-the-dark-souls-of-their-genre/

All the hard bosses are in Dracula castle. The shadow dude was probably the one I had most trouble with.

The most difficult boss battle is accepting. The second is letting it go

You can't use nitesco for most of the game

Difficulty is kind of a nuanced thing and there isn't some magical rule that say only bog-standard vanilla runs matter. If I'm at the point where a regular playthrough isn't challenging enough, I have a ton of way to challenge myself in SM. Whereas in Fusion, despite being harder on average, most playthroughs aren't that different from one another due to how constrained the event system and map is. You do low%, but that's about it.

easy or not sotn is the best designed , 2d sprite wise its sickkkk

You can use for the hardest parts.

What you were stuck on the fish? lul

But everything before Dracula's Castle is harder than anything in DoS. The latter doesn't have any bosses that make you memorize their entire moveset just to survive, like that crab fuck, which is why killing it with the elevator was so satisfying.

Everything before the Dracula is linear and short as fuck. You can't possibly be serious.

Only the ocean level has any depth. Because it's a freaking ocean

true.

Actually yes it does, that's what a game's difficulty is always referred to, gimp runs have never ever been part of it and no sane person would use them to describe a game's difficulty since they're player-made, at that point you might as well include user-made mods as part of a game's difficulty. It's pretty obvious you just don't like the fact that SM is getting "insulted", sorry but it's the truth.

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>Shin Megami Tensei IV
>Persona Game

>not grinding familiars for hours till you reach level 3
>not being an Owl tammer
You guys only made the game harder for yourselves.

took me some fucking balls to finish all 4 without cheating on emulators, had to force myself to play on the original hardware to never feel tempted to savestate

and boy, what a ride

SHAWN

Also damn, that guy did a no damage

Who's talking about levels? I'm talking bosses, and it's not like DoS having less linear levels makes it harder somehow. It's still easy all the way through.

I'm glad people still buy games to keep the industry running and creating more games for me to pirate

>grinding
yikes.

OK fag I don't care anymore. I'm probably at disadvantage here because it's been 12 years, probably more since I played these games.

My favorite is Portrait of Ruin anyway, dunno why I'm wasting my fingertips to discuss which one of the lesser games is harder.

You know a better way to reach max level with the familiar? The drop rate on that shit was low

>You know a better way to reach max level with the familiar?
how about not doing that in the first place.

Order of Ecclesia is the high point of the Castlevania series.

Prove me wrong.

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The Metroid portion of the Castlevania has a fetish for backtracking and artificial length, so they’ll disagree with you on that.

Portrait of Ruin was the hardest now that I think of it.

The sisters kicked my ass from Monday to Sunday everytime.

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Nah. Sekiro is the Dark Souls of FromSoft games

>not being a owlbro
It's like you never even played the game if you don't use your favorite familiar.

I play games to enjoy myself and have a good time, and grinding is the opposite of that.

>Actually yes it does, that's what a game's difficulty is always referred to
According to who? Why should a discussion about difficulty only be limited the most regular playthroughs? Do games with difficulty selection not count, now?
>gimp runs have never ever been part of it and no sane person would use them to describe a game's difficulty since they're player-made
That's not entirely true because the degree to which you can 'gimp' yourself depends on the design of the game itself.
> at that point you might as well include user-made mods as part of a game's difficulty.
No because you're literally changing the design of the game at that point.

>may I ass you a question?

Sword Familiar in Sotn is still my favourite one.

ASS CLOWN

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SLICE

>According to who?
What do you mean who? Any time someone asks how hard a game is, nobody but you is going to bring up gimp runs, because they're not part of the intended difficulty, they are user made, just like mods.
>Do games with difficulty selection not count, now?
How the hell did you infer that from my post? That has literally nothing to do with gimp runs because the latter is 100% user made, just like mods.
>That's not entirely true because the degree to which you can 'gimp' yourself depends on the design of the game itself.
Irrelevant, what matters is that a gimp run isn't part of the developers intended difficulty and isn't appropriate to include it when describing a game's difficulty. Also not true, a gimp run could be something like playing blindfolded, much like the blind runs in gdq.
>No because you're literally changing the design of the game at that point.
Just like how gimp runs are literally changing how the game was intended to be played genius.

Mate, stop, you are never going to convince anyone that a game's difficulty has anything to do with gimp runs. Like the other guy said, SoTN can be hard if you chop your hands off. It's pointless to include gimp runs since like I said not only are they not part of the intended difficulty, but there's no limit as to what constitutes a gimp run, like for example playing with your feet, meaning at that point describing a game's difficulty becomes fucking arbitrary even in your own weird mentality.

>Just like how gimp runs are literally changing how the game was intended to be played genius.
Playing the game a different way because it lets you is not the same thing as actually changing how it's designed, what the fuck are you even talking about?
>intended difficulty
How would you even know what that is, and why should anyone even care? Is a playthrough that collects 6 energy tanks less true to the developer's 'intended' difficulty than one that only collects 5? Do we need to consult an interview in order to determine this? It's entirely arbitrarily defined.

julius mode in DoS is the hardest thing in any igavania prove me wrong

Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance are way harder than this, come on.

I still haven't beat Death with Jullus mode

kek no.
Cotm is more like the most annoying one because you have to double tap the whole game to run.

also hod? really? is there even a single hard boss in that game?

Medusa familiar makes Dracula piss easy, but what I really wanted to tame and made the effort to grind to level 3 were the brain eaters or whatever, but the version of them that make columns of fire. AI was shit, ended up being useless and attacking behind walls or under the floor.
Not really desu

I think people remember CotM to be really hard because of that one part of the castle that had the Ice Knights and the Coliseum, other than that the only hard bosses was the big goat and the twin zombie dragons.

I've noticed you ignored nearly all of my post, including the very point that makes your argument moot: the fact that there's no limit as to what constitutes a gimp run, meaning every game ever now has limitless difficulty if you are to include gimp runs when discussing how hard they are. You can add an endless amount of handicaps meaning discussing difficulty becomes pointless with your logic.

>Playing the game a different way because it lets you is not the same thing as actually changing how it's designed, what the fuck are you even talking about?
I never said that. You're the one who brought up changing design. When the point was that both change the way a game is meant to be played and can interfere with what constitutes as a game's difficulty.
>How would you even know what that is
You don't need to "know". How much aid (eg: item pickups) you find and how much you master the game's mechanics, that's a game's difficulty without deliberate gimping. Intended difficulty is not the same as saying "how you SHOULD play the game", it means that it doesn't include custom-made obstacles like in gimp runs which can artificially inflate a game's difficulty endlessly, hence why it's pointless to include them when talking about how hard a game is.
>and why should anyone even care?
user don't be stupid. People ask and discuss how hard a game is all the time, and that always means talking within the game's own reaches, not custom-made gimp runs.
>Is a playthrough that collects 6 energy tanks less true to the developer's 'intended' difficulty than one that only collects 5?
Are the players deliberately choosing to skip energy tanks for the sake of a gimp run or are they only able to get that many because of their amount of skill and/or desire to explore? Two people can have different opinions as to how hard x is. But with gimp runs, x is no longer x, it's x+y. When people ask how hard a game is, they're talking about x in general unless stated otherwise, like you.

>tfw the first fucking boss filtered me
fucking crab

>not really desu
meant for

I don't see any porn games there, bro. If you are mistaking long live the queen for one, it isn't.

Arrow special attack and learn how to magnetize yourself brah, thats it.

>singular hub area with NPCs that slowly appear as time goes on
>two or three paths to pursue at any given time
>combat more reliant on baiting a specific pattern and punishing with patient and methodical strikes
why yes, OoE actually is rather dark souls-esque
it even came out within a year of Demon's Souls

Compared to the final boss in OoE and nothing else?

Part of the problem is probably that I'm playing on a hacked DSi where the shoulder buttons are giving out, so sometimes the megnet power is unreliable. Had been using the axe glyph though, is arrow better for that fight? I figured axe would be great because I can throw it out whenever I want.

Perfect anwser, man of culture

Worst Igamania

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Im not comparing at all, though I dont remember having much trouble with Dracula, like I said in another post, Medusa familiar level 3 helps a fucking lot. On the other hand I was retarded and had to see a guide in order to realize that I had to use the special attack of Dracula's powers in order to finish the game.

I replay the game once or twice a year and Death Mountain still kicks my ass. Fuck that place.

I can't think of any boss in cotm that's harder than any boss in ooe. They're all so braindead easy and slow.

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Arrow is great for the special attack, its pretty much a ticket for the next phase of the battle every time you use it, or at least make the current one much shorter, then yes, use the axe for the normal attacks.

circle of the moon was way harder.

nah.

God i want to feed QP pudding so hard

imagine actually believing this

Perfect

>Dragon's Dogma - The Dark Souls of Fantasy RPGs
HAHAHAHAHA
Holy shit, are game journalists truly incapable of not being retarded?

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>aria
i can dig it
>harmony
literally how the fuck

no way in hell can anyone but a shitposter like HoD over any other igavania.

>When the point was that both change the way a game is meant to be played
Yeah and my point is that different kinds of playthroughs add challenge without changing the basic game design, that's an important difference.
>You don't need to "know"
If you don't know what's intended, and you can't explain or quantify how close to the intended method a certain style of play is, then all you're doing is pulling shit out of your ass.
>How much aid (eg: item pickups) you find and how much you master the game's mechanics, that's a game's difficulty without deliberate gimping.
Okay, so how is getting fewer health pickups because you're good enough to progress without them any different than skipping abilities, bosses, or accessing areas earlier because you possess the needed skill?
>People ask and discuss how hard a game is all the time, and that always means talking within the game's own reaches, not custom-made gimp runs.
Any kind of custom challenge is within the game's own reaches though, if it wasn't it wouldn't be possible to do. What you just said doesn't even make sense. You're acting like custom challenges are hacking the game's code or something.
>Are the players deliberately choosing to skip energy tanks for the sake of a gimp run or are they only able to get that many because of their amount of skill and/or desire to explore?
Are you going to answer the question or not?

In what fucking way?

OoE was mostly difficult at the start without the good glyphs yet. I remember getting absolutely raped in the linear maps outside the castle where you pass through a forest or cave where you fight those jellyfish that grab you in the air or that creature with the long tongue

OoE Dracula doesnt even play. For the first time in the series you pissed him off hard enough that he'd actually walk and straight boot your face off

Bro are you deliberately ignoring my point about gimp runs making difficulty discussions a moot argument? You know that just tells me that you're conceding your main argument right?

>Yeah and my point is that different kinds of playthroughs add challenge without changing the basic game design, that's an important difference.
But that wasn't the point here. It's not design, it's the fact that they both change the way the game is meant to be played and can change the difficulty endlessly.
>If you don't know what's intended, and you can't explain or quantify how close to the intended method a certain style of play is, then all you're doing is pulling shit out of your ass.
I put "know" in quotation marks because you don't need to ask the devs, when what matters is the game itself. What the game lets you do is all you need to know and what actually factors in a game's difficulty.
>Okay, so how is getting fewer health pickups because you're good enough to progress without them any different than skipping abilities, bosses, or accessing areas earlier because you possess the needed skill?
Uh, what does this have to do with the argument? You may have misread something somewhere. My point was that someone not getting every pickup doesn't necessarily mean it's a gimped run since it may not have been deliberate but rather that it's just the extent of their skill and desire to explore, usually their first run of the game.
>Any kind of custom challenge is within the game's own reaches though
Not at all, the game has nothing to do with you blindfolding yourself for example. Custom challenges do not represent the game's actual difficulty when discussing how hard a game is. They are gimp runs, they are a separate category, and as such SM is the easiest Metroid of all because gimp runs will never be represented as part of a game's difficulty.
>Are you going to answer the question or not?
I did answer it though? Read the third point of this post since you didn't get it.

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not even close, mh frontier goes beyond anything the mainline series ever went in difficulty.

Frontier's Zenith content is more over-punishing of mistakes compared to mainline, but it's not as hard as it was made out to be and the hunters are especially powerful. Musous are some of the hardest content in the series for sure but they're a minority of optional superbosses. You could say that there is a good deal of difficulty climbing the gear ladder if you're playing solo, but this is more a deal of the game unintentionally getting into a position that isn't newbie friendly across the board and it's a reason why the game ended up on life support, other than COG's own hubris.

I think FU fits the bill of 'Dark Souls' better in that it's kind of overrated and the charm was more or less lost with time because it's nobody's first MH anymore.

fucking hate this website

Dark souls to me just means clunky controls and slow shitty attack animations.

>SMTIV
>Dark Souls of Persona games

Umm, what?

it's not the damage of your weapons, it's the monsters' attacks. there's nothing in FU that's nearly as crazy as some of the stuff in Frontier, and FU doesn't really have counters to gunners. iirc one of the reasons they mentioned Brachydios was made for was the lack of monsters that could even hit gunners since most monsters just have an easy to dodge dash/beam attack for far away hunters. he has a zero windup version of his giant leap and if he's enraged it means big kaboom

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>It's not design, it's the fact that they both change the way the game is meant to be played and can change the difficulty endlessly.
A romhack or mod can do a lot more to change the difficulty of a game than any kind of custom challenge you yourself come up with. The two aren't even comparable.
>I put "know" in quotation marks because you don't need to ask the devs, when what matters is the game itself. What the game lets you do is all you need to know and what actually factors in a game's difficulty.
So how is a custom challenge any less intended if the game 'let's' you do it?
>My point was that someone not getting every pickup doesn't necessarily mean it's a gimped run since it may not have been deliberate but rather that it's just the extent of their skill and desire to explore, usually their first run of the game.
So a certain playthrough suddenly stops being a accurate representation of the game's intended difficulty if the person playing intentionally avoids certain helpful items, even if the end result is the same as if someone did so out of ignorance? That's sounds pretty contrived.
>Not at all, the game has nothing to do with you blindfolding yourself for example.
Okay this blindfolding example is really fuckin' neato and all, but you can blindfold yourself no matter what game you play. My point is that some challenges are dependent on the game itself. For example, in Super Metroid you can beat the bosses in the reverse of the usual order. Doing something like that in Metroid Fusion is impossible due to how it's designed. So there's a certain element of optional challenge that one game has that the other never will. So no, you can't always 'gimp' yourself endlessly, the extent to which you can handicap yourself is limited by the design of the game you're playing.

Finished all but 2 without cheats or emulators.

>A romhack or mod can do a lot more to change the difficulty
You're just going to keep ignoring my words or what? What part of "both are user-made ways to play the game that can change the difficulty" do you not get? Stop bringing up irrelevant differences that have nothing to do with that point, the only thing that matters here.
>So how is a custom challenge any less intended if the game 'let's' you do it?
You're confusing "how the devs WANT you to play" with intended difficulty again, even though I told you about this in a previous post. A gimped run deliberately changes the difficulty, unlike a regular run that just happens to miss out on stuff non-deliberately since, after all, finding that stuff is part of the difficulty. The latter is still experiencing the game's intended difficulty, the former is not.
>So a certain playthrough
What part of finding stuff is still part of the game's difficulty did you miss? The person doing their first run is going to involve their inability to find the pickups as part of constructing their opinion about the game's difficulty. Meanwhile the person doing a gimped run does not, at all. They are doing their own thing and know exactly where the pickups are already. Their opinion about the game's difficulty for a non-gimped-run would be different than the newcomer.
>but you can blindfold yourself no matter what game you play
Honey, this has been my point the whole time, and the other guy with the SOTN example as well. The fact that there's no limit as to what constitutes a gimped run, meaning all games are endlessly difficult if we were to take your logic of applying them to a game's general difficulty. You don't get to decide where it stops you know, it's your logic's fault.
>So no, you can't always 'gimp' yourself endlessly
Yes you can, them not matching in one aspect doesn't mean there aren't endless handicaps. More importantly the point is that with your logic you'd have to say all games are impossibly hard.

Fucking kiss already retards

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The Dark Souls of Persona

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>Lets you save anytime

Not quite but the difficulty spikes can be harsh *smirks*

That's the Skyrim of Zelda games

SMT isn't hard but some retard journalist literally called SMT4 the "dark souls of persona"

Aesthetically this is definitely true

That would be Dark Souls 3.

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Wait so Yoshi's Story is now considered hard because it has special runs involving frame perfect bug abuse? And these runs need to be added to the game's overall difficulty like you say so for some reason?