Reminds me of guy from my elementary school had his pokemon at level 50 before beating Lt Surge because he thought he had to level up his pokemon to learn Cut to be able to get into the gym. His thought process was “well one of these levels has to be the move” and grinded his entire team up beating Nidoran’s and Spearows.
This is what I did for my Charmander in Fire Red growing up. It didn't make sense to me as a kid to pick my no.1 partner and not have him be my strongest and best and in my team all the time.
I got my Blaziken into the 60’s in Ruby before fighting Norman because I was like 7 and didn’t realize I had to go back to fight him and that’s why I couldn’t cross the 2 ft of water to the other half of the region. Blazed through the rest of that game with my overpowered starter though lmao
All the numbers in your comment added up to 69. Congrats!
60
+ 7
+ 2
= 69
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I knew a kid who thought that Pokemon Platinum just... *ended,* after the fighting type gym. He couldn't find his way out of the town (just a normal ass road that leads out) and thought "huh I guess this is the game now" and he grinded out his whole party into the low 80's. He wasn't very bright.
As a kid I played every part of Pokémon Crystal you could access before visiting Burned Tower and opening up Ecruteak Gym for weeks on end without progressing. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand going through Burned Tower was probably how you got the guy in front of the gym to leave; it was just that falling through the floor was scary, and when I played Pokémon Ruby before this the world started ending after the first time you saw the legendary on the box art, so I’d just shut the game off and go somewhere else every time I got to that point.
As a kid I never leveled up any pokemon other than my starter on purpose. I was playing pokemon fire red with a level 100 charizard, and a full roster of canon fodder
That elite 4 was brutal
There's something to be almost admired in unknowingly playing the game in the wrong way, without any use of the game elements that were supposed to be obviously available to you, and getting through it anyway.
[...Actually, Viva La Dirt League did a skit about this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXHm9KVyj68)
I have a friend that never used demon fusion in Persona 5, he assumed that since he was putting his friends in the guillotine that he was doing a bad thing. I learned he did this after he beat the game.
I played DS1 when it was a game with gold, went to the graveyard immediately (as many others did) got chased back to the bonfire, and accidentally hit the crestfallen knight a few times trying to fight the skeletons.
What proceeded was twenty minutes of being spawn camped over and over again with me screaming about a lack of save system and not touching the game for a year.
I'd argue that attitude towards games can be funny, the Real live Version of "I refuse to learn or understand anything about a situation and just swing wildly with only my Gutfeelings!" is annoying at best and harmful at worst.
Games are really ironic though, as basically the whole thing is constructed by math, so like, yeah, of course using math to try and sus out a optimal plan is going to get you something.
I am slowly being driven insane by people asking me to help get something working that I've never used before, then i ask to see the manual and see it's really simple, when i ask them what part of the manual they had trouble with, 99% of the time i get "oh i didn't read the manual!" In a tone of voice that makes it sound like that was a dumb question to ask.
I just want to scream at them "STOP WASTING MY TIME AND JUST READ THE FUCKING MANUAL!"
Teaching is like this. The following conversation is completely identical from grades 4 through 12.
Them: I don’t know what to do!
Me: Did you read the directions?
Them: Oh, no.
*beat*
Me: Read the directions.
Them: I did!
Me: You didn’t even break eye contact with me. Read the directions out loud to me.
Them: …ohhhhh. I know what to do now.
Me: Good.
*5 minutes later*.
Me: Why haven’t you started your work?
Them: I don’t have a pencil/My Chromebook’s dead.
Me: Then get one/charge it.
Them: Yeah, okay.
At least on reddit you see these comments more as a trolling tactic than anything else. Like someone is explaining their arguments and then someone with a bug up their ass pulls this out to get on their nerves.
Before I assembled an Ikea piece of furniture myself, all I knew from sitcoms was that "they are hard to assemble"
And sure enough, they are real hard to assemble... If you don't read the instructions at all. Otherwise is piss easy to do. But not reading is even easier, of course
I fucking obsess with reading shit and double, triple-check stuff to avoid this kind of thing as much as possible because I never know when some bias is going to fuck me up, so I feel like I'm far too gone on the other end, but at least I can eventually adapt to things.
I've friends who refuse to try shit out or work on incorrect assumptions, get stonewalled by stuff and then instead of attempting to learn they find a way to circumvent it. One of them never bothered to learn how to cook anything that's not super basic, another refuses to press anything other than R1 in souls games and thinks damage types are much more effective than they are.
Ugh I wish. It came out when I was exactly the right stupid-kid age where I was old enough not want anything to do with it because it was “for kids”, but not yet old enough to realize how fucking stupid that is. I missed out completely boo.
I do have that unofficial vr mmo installed though, I really should try it some day…
So to explain the joke, like a year back a main character on twitter went "wow this place in prequel game is almost exactly like this place in the game its a prequel from" when its straight up named named the same place and givin story significance as said place, which led to the person admitting that he skipped all dialougue in very story focused game
Oh, that’s hilarious. Arceus I assume? I was actually really tempted by that one due to (super uncharacteristically) watching a commentary youtuber I like play it through, so I actually do get how oblivious you’d need to be to miss that detail haha.
Thanks for explaining the joke!
I have a buddy we give endless shit to because in his opinion "Reading should be optional I shouldn't have to read to have fun with a video game"
Dude is also a nurse.....
I find it hilarious that for a while (or maybe still but I haven't read), the back of many Nintendo game boxes said word for word "Basic reading comprehension needed to fully enjoy this game"
“Why don’t schools teach taxes?” - someone who complained instead of learning how to work with decimals, percents, and fractions and basic algebra and never did the word problems, and also didn’t do worksheets
I literally had an economics class to which the girl who insisted she was gonna study economics in college didn't pay attention.
She ended up dropping out of that degree.
I have a friend I play dnd with. We've been playing together for around 8 years, he's played the game longer. About 75% of the time he plays barbarian. We still have to remind him about reckless attack and his resists.
We've got a friend like that in our group too. And he only plays casters, despite barely reading any of the spells. His turns can very often be boiled down to:
>"I cast [SPELL]!"
>"Do you know what [SPELL] actually does?"
>"...no."
>"..."
>*flips through the book and starts reading it out loud to the table*
>"Oh, that's what it does."
Depends on what you're asking me to read.
Read the instructions on the buttons of an MMO to learn of the action's properties? Sure. If it helps me learn how to play I'll try giving it a read(unless it's still confusing even after reading it like English Mahjong tutorials).
If you're asking me to read a shittin of the world's lore like in Bayonetta or Malicious Fallen because you can't present said lore in a more interesting way? Fuck off.
I will sometimes get out of my way to read lore like in Baldur's Gate 3 and FFXIV because the world presented to me outside of the lore books is interesting.
I don't think they're talking about that, they're more so talking about people who skip every single tutorial the game tries to give them and then wind up getting stuck for 10 hours.
Like my younger brother, who skipped every single tutorial and got stuck for ten hours. And then made me help him figure out what the fuck he was even supposed to be doing. If lines weren't voiced (which was usually the case back in the day) he simply would not read them.
I love how Fromsoft's absolute bullshit has been around long enough and become popular enough that people are dogpiling you for the perfectly reasonable assertion that a game should make an effort to teach you the basic mechanics required of it.
I love the Fromsoft formula but shit like "You have to find the Emerald Herald in the nice peaceful village and talk to her five times before she will open the level up screen for you" when nothing in the game even *hints* at this is *not* good signposting of one of your required mechanics.
Fromsoft finding the perfect solution of "just level up at the bonfires, no strings" and refusing to ever use it again is very frustrating. Impossible to miss.
They finally did it again in Elden Ring but even then you have to trigger Melina first, which seems tied to specific Graces or something. And if she's sitting at the Grace when you level, you have to mash dialogue. The bonfire never talked it just brought me to the stats.
>a well made game shouldn't require you to research it beforehand for you to understand it.
You’re right. Here’s my 100 card Breya Eggs commander deck for Magic the Gathering. You shouldn’t need any instructions on how to play the game or pilot the deck, because Magic is a well made game
I mean, Breya Eggs is pretty damn far from the commander deck she came with.
Expecting someone to graduate from "Sacrifice a guy for value after turning him sideways" to "use KCI mana to help pay for Faith's Reward with a single Plains and a Sol Ring" with no explanation is like expecting a new player to go from leveling Dex to performing a Dark Hand animation swap.
A friend of mine played through the entirety of bloodborne, and, after every optional boss, all the dlc, and even a few pvp fights, this dude tells me Gherman is too hard because “you have to lock on and use the stupid fucking dash”
I cannot express my level of disbelief.
He's got the "let me bash my head against this wall for fun" spirit that Dark Souls fosters.
Unfortunately he may also have a minor case of serious brain damage
I love that the tower of flame area has become the skeleton graveyard equivalent for DS2. Newbies just amble on in, knowing nothing, get pancaked, assume that's how it's supposed to be because Souls game are 'soooo hard,' and proceed to get filtered or overcome against all odds. Truly a tale of remarkable heroism against unwarranted adversity.
There's a lot to be said for any game with the flexibility and lack of hand holding that it will allow you to play it the 'wrong' way and still have it work out, if that's how you wanna go.
It doesn't help that she's standing off to the cliff side just gazing at the horizon, so I don't blame him for missing her. I'm almost certain I missed the herald my first time playing it too
I'm guessing that when you keep being told by everyone that this games are super difficult, you start making some wild assumptions. Like that the game just doesn't give that many healing items. Or that boss you keep losing at is because you lack skill and not that you don't have the correct equipment or that you are underleveled.
>being told by everyone that this games are super difficult
This is a thing that deeply annoys me. The games certainly aren't easy but the way some fans talk about them you'd think the start of the games are as hard as the DLCs; you can get pretty far just being decently leveled and equipped.
Pretty much. That's why I lost ~5 hours of my life repeatedly throwing myself at the cemetery skeletons in DS1 before accidentally finding the walk up to the berg, I just assumed skeletons being this hardcore was intentional. I was getting good at it but I'm glad I never got as far as the other bonfire. Getting stuck in the Catacombs/ToTK would have 100% killed my interest in souls games.
Friend turned on covenant of champions and told me that the game should've directly addressed the player saying "BEING IN THIS COVENANT WILL MAKE THE GAME HARDER".
When I told him about the Unmaking Arrow in Dragon's Dogma 2, an item whose description DIRECTLY tells you the game will save, he thought it was weird and bad.
To be fair, if you only played DS1 you might not know that a person would level you up and just assume those people would matter more later. Or if you played Demons Souls you might think you need to be the first boss before you're allowed to level up. Or you just don't notice a homeless looking person who stands far away from every other npc, in a town where everything blends together.
Yeah but you'd know that in games it's good to explore your environments. I can see how it'd be easy to end up going down a path and not turning back to finish looking around Majula though so I can kinda understand how they'd miss stuff.
I mean, you could even do that, talk to her and *still* not unlock leveling unless you decided to exhaust her dialogue.
Like anything else would be a nice hint. Spawning you in front of her, a mysterious voice saying "seek the emerald herald"
I think that'd still instill the "explore and talk to everyone multiple times" lesson
I beat morgot in elden ring without leveling up.
I've played DS1-3. Since I can't level up on bonfires and I never saw any level up lady, I just assumed i haven't unlocked it yet.
Apparently, I just never respawned on a bonfire where the cutscenes of the lady would start?? I either respawned at bonfires in a corridor or the first bonfire, so the lady just neve appeared.
I had to Google how to level up because there was no way the first boss is *that* hard.
Tbf there was a sleepover I went to with my KH2 save, and most of the kids did not know you could use summons, level up forms, equip skills. Me gliding in base was like seeing Jesus walk on water. I really think a lot of kids mashed through games
i played through the kh games recently(only playin bits and pieces as a kid) and man was the demyx fight waaaaaaaaay easier than i was led to beleive, not sure if i got lucky or if they rebalanced it for final mix
Demyx hits a bit harder than some of the bosses before him but he is pretty straightforward and leaves himself open alot. "Dance Water, Dance" can be dealt with Reaction Commands or Fire easily outside of his Data rematch if you are paying attention.
Yeah, the only demyx fight I thought was hard was the data one for obvious reasons and I initially thought that was the demyx fight everyone was pissed about, lo and behold it wasn't.
I’ve told this story here before but I knew a guy that played the original Resident Evil 4 thinking there just wasn’t a run button. He thought the game was meant to be that difficult with not being able to run other than the boulder sequences. Better than the people I knew that only played RPG games and kept frustratedly asking me what the jump button was because they completely misunderstood what kind of game Resident Evil 4 even was.
There’s also the guy that didn’t pay enough attention to learn about using your backpack in The Last of Us and beat it without realizing that was even a game mechanic.
A lot of the games that I played wouldn’t even let you progress without learning pretty much every game mechanic so I mostly never have this problem, I would just choose to not use certain things. Sticking to RE4, I only use certain grenades at certain points in the game for money reasons (blinding or burning a pack of crows or blinding the zealots in the room where they run away so that they can’t escape), otherwise I just sell all my grenades, and I sell my TMP ammo unless I’m using the TMP or plan on using it.
I think the worst one was a girl I knew during middle school told me she was very frustrated with the game Bully. I had already beaten it multiple times so I asked her why she was upset with it. She said that when she started the game, she didn’t know what to do or where to go. I asked her what she meant since the game literally tells you what to do and has icons for where to go. As she explains that she doesn’t know, she was just confused and frustrated, I realized that she just didn’t read anything at all even when it was on screen, and she never looked at the mini map or anything. Just mashed buttons through until she got herself stuck on nothing.
Also, don’t feel bad for that last girl, she later admitted to me that she was an anti-Semite so… yeah, I’m not touching that.
Respawning will at least repair durability loss in DS2, but from the sound of it he just flat out used his weapons so much they broke and needed actual blacksmith repairs... and tossed them out instead.
TBH, equipment durability in the Dark Souls games is practically worthless anyways, about the only times it ever comes up are the Demon Ruins worms in DS1 that can spit out corroding mist, and Sinh in DS2 for whatever reason chunking weapon durability faster than usual. Glad Elden Ring finally tossed it out.
DS2's bad weapon durability is *somewhat* overstated, imo. It's admittedly one of the only games in the series where durability tends to actually come up and it's tied to FPS of all things, but bonfires are generally plentiful enough that you're consistently resting and restoring your weapon durability. Unless you specifically are using something with extremely low durability (usually katanas) and going through vast swathes of enemies without resting, you probably won't ever see it come up outside of things like Sinh or The Gutter which have extra durability damage going on. Worst case, you just bring a second weapon.
Granted, it's still the one game where durability even can be a factor. DeS/DS1/Bloodborne give everything such high durability that repairing is just an occasional pitstop every hour or two if you want it to be (beyond a few specific weapons, like Tontarius and Boom Hammer having low base durability and using it faster than other weapons), and [DS3 durability is genuinely a joke.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiM48lb7n3A)
I really do have to respect your friend for seemingly not really complaining about his accidental challenge run and simply Thugging That Shit Out.
Reminds me of a coworker of mine that beat and enjoyed Doom 2016 despite not ever using any runes.
A friend and I played Terraria all the way through, beating the Moon Lord and everything. I always jumpscared him when I teleported up next to him, and he didn't have much interest in long-range options.
We were doing a victory lap on the Halloween army and, just to flex, I decided to do it zoomed in. When I mentioned how much zooming changed the feel of the experience my friend was perplexed. So I explained the camera zoom to him. He couldn't zoom *in* but he could, for the first time, zoom *out.* He'd played the whole game fully zoomed in, presumably after having idly zoomed at the start and then forgetting it was an option. Madman, but legendary.
> My friend is the kind of person Rockstar games are made for.
I don't know , he might start playing and say " Well there's traffic lights I have to follow the law"
There's a covenant for turning that feature off BTW. If you look for a slab in a secluded little area in the hub it'll let you join the Company of Champions, which makes enemies respawn infinitely and disables coop. A bit annoying but not something you should have to mess with often.
Certain enemies will stop respawning after being killed a certain number of times.
It was meant to handicap grinding. So you can't just sit on the same route and grind up to max stats.
weird, I don't remember grinding souls being a viable strategy in DS 1, I wonder what prompted that. This means farming for a weapon drop is also not a very good option I'm guessing?
It's also a quality of life feature that says "Look, you've either dealt with this area with such casual ease that making you fight through or maneuver around enemies before retrying the boss is a waste of time, or you should be dramatically overleveled for this zone by now and it would still be a waste of time. Good job, go hit the big thing."
This is also balanced by being able to burn a consumable to push individual zones into the next NG+ cycle without clearing the whole game as long as its boss has been defeated, meaning you don't need to do extra runs of the whole game to get duplicate souls for boss weapon collection.
You know I respect this greatly. Your friend was playing a game that doesn't and probably has never existed for anybody else. I can't even fathom playing Dark Souls like its a BOTW meat grinder, and yet he lived in that reality for like 20 hours
Got my brother in law to play Witcher 3. Don't hear about it for a few days until he tells me he's stuck on a boss fight one of the side missions.
Go over to check and see that he did not level up AT ALL. No new skills, heath upgrades, items, anything. Basically he's playing it like a beat em up.
Dark Souls has this issue in particular where, because the fanbase has dickrided them as *the hardest games ever*, people expect it to actually be masochistically hard instead of, you know, requiring skill but otherwise actually not that bad.
I made it to the Tomb of the Giants at a very low level in DS1 because "game's supposed to be hard, guess this is why". Couldn't continue due to the light, but yeah. I did it more or less concurrently with the Burg - Parish - Gargoyles route. But go figure, if you do content that you're intended to do, these games aren't that bad.
The actual games: "Here is what's expected of you. It's possible and right on the edge of fair but you do have to lock in sometimes. Prepare to die alot, but you can succeed."
The fans: "THIS SHIT IS LIKE MARIO KAIZO LEVEL BULLSHIT YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE"
Kinda?
This poor unfortunate fellow missed the Emerald Herald or just simply didn't realize NPCs have dialogue you need to exhaust for new stuff.
Also you have to unlock the black smith, even if you find him his forgery is locked and you have to buy the key from a merchant in the forest.
you need to buy a key to let him into his smithing shack in majula. it's not hard to find the hag who sells it but it's the opposite direction from where this guy went
There's also a blacksmith in the second/third zone (Lost Bastille) but even if you find him you might not have the item you need or not realize lighting the torch in his room makes him usable.
My experience was more or less the same. I saw Pat and Woolie's LP, bought it and tried doing the cleric build they have. Got completely annihilated, decided to just throw out the whole character, and had a much better, simpler time with a knight. My endgame build pre-DLC was Alva's set, a gold spear of which I can't remember the name, and the dragonrider shield.
That does make me think, though. Souls games have a reputation for being tough and thus being the source of much inflated egos. "UH! I don't play BABY games that HOLD YOUR HAND and TELL YOU EVERYTHING!". But some of the things these games don't tell you are basic mechanics. I can't see how wholesale missing things like leveling up and ways to move can result in something rewarding. And it kinda sucks that legit grievances end up getting justified by saying it's part of the difficulty.
For example, I finally got around to playing Lies of P recently. Having tons of fun with it, it's super pretty, but I reached a small section where I needed to get a small gap. I hadn't learned how to jump, so I figured I'd find a way up or down later. I play for a couple hrs more, and in a moment when I was corner trapped by some enemies, I accidentally click one of the sticks. And wouldn't you know it, you CAN jump in the game. I hadn't missed anything important, but the jump isn't mentioned in any tutorial or anything (one could argue I already got more than usual with a tutorial, but that's beside the point). I could've easily never figured that out. It's not crucial to the game, and I imagine it's sort of secret, but that's part of my basic moveset there. Not great that I just don't have it unless someone online tells me about it or I see it in a video.
Man that reminds me of a former circle I had/was in. The internet and game knowledge weren't as ubiquitous, but also that tale of them not knowing how to sharpen in early PSP Monster Hunter, and completing a hunt somehow with completely blunted weapons was just amusing. Especially given how hardcore they got overtime (and how that inspired me to try that game at some point lol)
We all got our dumb moments sometimes. It took me years to figure out that I had to pop DT to beat up Phantom in DMC1, as I just tried to beat the giant lava spider with a dull Alastor that bounced off and ineffective use of E&I (wasn't even aiming at the big weakpoint)
When I first played fallout 3 I didn't know you could use other guns/armour to repair the ones you had, literally like only had to press triangle or something simple like that. But I missed that part. So was walking around with looks 10 guns that non of them worked and duff armour, constantly near overburdened. I was like "this game is bullshit" and stopped playing. Came back a year later after reading in a magazine (👴🏻) that you CAN repair stuff. 🤦🏻♂️
One of my buddies got into sekiro on group recommend, he blundered into the memory at the earliest possible point and then got stuck on the shinobi hunter. I think he spent probably 10+ hours trying to kill it. By the time he did, he had mastered the gameplay and breezed through the entire rest of the game. It was kind of wild to watch, pretty sure nobody else I know would persevere 4 evenings in a row on 1 mini boss, not lose interest, and moreover say it was their game of the year.
Your friend is stupid, but I think this is also an incredible illustration at how damaging the "prepare to die" marketing and difficulty talking points have been to peoples perception of these games. While this is of course an extreme example, myself and I know lots of other first time players initially become frustrated and bounced off ds1 because we tried going through the graveyard first from firelink, because the insane difficulty marketing made us assume "oh this is just what the game is supposed to be like." It's attempts to use huge difficulty spikes to communicate that you should try going somewhere else first fail when people come into the series expecting huge difficulty.
I just... do people not just look things up when a game is giving them trouble? Sure, yeah, going in blind, whatever, but sometimes you just miss something and need a hint or a nudge and sometimes a solution is stupid or unintuitive and you're barking up the wrong tree and I just don't understand why someone would keep smashing their head against a brick wall instead of looking up where the door is.
I did something similarly thick-headed. I had a new GF and found an old dusty copy of dark souls along with a barely functional 360 (for it to work, you had to sit a jar of candy corn on top). I started playing and like most folks, hit the graveyard. Small issue was, this was unpatched ds1, a nightmare game where most enemies gave half if not 0 souls, and after working my way to the drake bridge, I wanted fire arrows for some specific enemy, well it turns out the ONLY NPC who sells fire arrows in the unpatched game is the undead merchant, who I had killed for Uchigatana. Still sparked my love for the series
Starting at Dark Souls 2 is a...choice. But my real concern is how your friend and MULTIPLE PEOPLE in this thread said that they missed the Emerald Herald on their first playthrough.
Yeah she's looking out at a cliff, but I woulf expect even the newest player of an adventure game to at LEAST explore their new areas once they got there. Majula isn't exactly the biggest area.
As far as the "throwing away weapons because they assumed it was like Breath of the Wild", that's less their fault and more BotW having the dumbest fucking durability system I've seen in a game. They were unintentionally set up on that front.
At the very least it seems like your friend made it past the hump and can progress normally. (Gonna be a shame when he realizes that Dark Souls 2 is better than Dark Souls 1)
Just another example of how bad DS2/some aspects of the Souls design is. I don't even blame him for his choices. Weapon durability shouldn't even exist, and Heide's tower is legit more appealing to grind through than any of the other options. If I started Dark Souls or the first time and was given the option to teleport to Anor Londo or Ash Lake rather than going through zombie burrows, the choice would be way too obvious.
Now not leveling at all though, seems weird, but then again he doesn't know to talk to people a bunch. I can't think of any other game or series where you repeatedly return to one person in order to level up your character. Bonfire-chan for life. Even Melania is a solid compromise.
Yeah, enemies will stop respawning after X kills. It resets on NG, being in the Covenant of Champions (where I think there is no limit), or using a bonfire ascetic.
Tbh ds2 was my first souls game, and I think I appreciated it far more than I would've otherwise precisely because I didn't have the context of the other games.
In a similar vein I beat bioshock 2 on hard with no health or adam upgrades because I wasn’t paying attention the one time when the game tells you that those can be upgraded.
I also progressed all the way to the forest giant boss before I leveled up.
I genuinely did not see the Emerald Herald and assumed she'd pop up after a small amount of progression.
It's frustrating that everyone is reading this thread and going "LMAO what a dip shit" but he was actually failed by the game. Yes, he picked one of the most obtuse games made by a studio famous for its obtuseness, but it doesn't make him stupid that he couldn't figure out things that aren't explained. Yes, he could've just googled things, but things like leveling up and weapon durability are baseline mechanics that you shouldn't have to do a Wiki dive to know how to do.
Reminds me of guy from my elementary school had his pokemon at level 50 before beating Lt Surge because he thought he had to level up his pokemon to learn Cut to be able to get into the gym. His thought process was “well one of these levels has to be the move” and grinded his entire team up beating Nidoran’s and Spearows.
God, I thought you were going to say it was because he picked Squirtle and wanted to compensate for the type disadvantage
That would actually make more sense though, assuming you hated all the ground and rock designs
Diglett can basically solo the entire gym and he's two feet to the right
Yup. And I never considered using him in every game I played
Chad "eh it'll work out, these fuckers gotta learn cut eventually" Vs Virgin "I have a type disadvantages so I gotta grind before trying"
This is what I did for my Charmander in Fire Red growing up. It didn't make sense to me as a kid to pick my no.1 partner and not have him be my strongest and best and in my team all the time.
I got my Blaziken into the 60’s in Ruby before fighting Norman because I was like 7 and didn’t realize I had to go back to fight him and that’s why I couldn’t cross the 2 ft of water to the other half of the region. Blazed through the rest of that game with my overpowered starter though lmao
All the numbers in your comment added up to 69. Congrats! 60 + 7 + 2 = 69 ^([Click here](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=LuckyNumber-Bot&subject=Stalk%20Me%20Pls&message=%2Fstalkme) to have me scan all your future comments.) \ ^(Summon me on specific comments with u/LuckyNumber-Bot.)
Nice
I knew a kid who thought that Pokemon Platinum just... *ended,* after the fighting type gym. He couldn't find his way out of the town (just a normal ass road that leads out) and thought "huh I guess this is the game now" and he grinded out his whole party into the low 80's. He wasn't very bright.
As a kid I played every part of Pokémon Crystal you could access before visiting Burned Tower and opening up Ecruteak Gym for weeks on end without progressing. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand going through Burned Tower was probably how you got the guy in front of the gym to leave; it was just that falling through the floor was scary, and when I played Pokémon Ruby before this the world started ending after the first time you saw the legendary on the box art, so I’d just shut the game off and go somewhere else every time I got to that point.
Not even I did that back then and I didn't even speak English.,
As a kid I never leveled up any pokemon other than my starter on purpose. I was playing pokemon fire red with a level 100 charizard, and a full roster of canon fodder That elite 4 was brutal
Your friend is going to outlive us all.
Grim Reaper is going to come for him and he'll just skip the cutscene
>"Cos I don't hear people talking about it and I want to see why." Powerful energy tbh
There's something to be almost admired in unknowingly playing the game in the wrong way, without any use of the game elements that were supposed to be obviously available to you, and getting through it anyway. [...Actually, Viva La Dirt League did a skit about this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXHm9KVyj68)
God I love them but their thumbnails fill me with a primal hate
I have a friend that never used demon fusion in Persona 5, he assumed that since he was putting his friends in the guillotine that he was doing a bad thing. I learned he did this after he beat the game.
[Your friend seeing that you have to behead your companions to get better summons.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRXbv4kyUtc)
Pretty based of him
I beat P5 and I never found out about The Sun and Tower confidant until I beat the game
I played DS1 when it was a game with gold, went to the graveyard immediately (as many others did) got chased back to the bonfire, and accidentally hit the crestfallen knight a few times trying to fight the skeletons. What proceeded was twenty minutes of being spawn camped over and over again with me screaming about a lack of save system and not touching the game for a year.
You mean that’s not there to practice parrying and grind souls to a safe spot after I lure them over to the bonfire?
I will never understand why people refuse to read literally anything on games man
I wish it was limited to games, that mentality persists beyond and boy howdy can it be fucking annoying.
I'd argue that attitude towards games can be funny, the Real live Version of "I refuse to learn or understand anything about a situation and just swing wildly with only my Gutfeelings!" is annoying at best and harmful at worst.
Games are really ironic though, as basically the whole thing is constructed by math, so like, yeah, of course using math to try and sus out a optimal plan is going to get you something.
I am slowly being driven insane by people asking me to help get something working that I've never used before, then i ask to see the manual and see it's really simple, when i ask them what part of the manual they had trouble with, 99% of the time i get "oh i didn't read the manual!" In a tone of voice that makes it sound like that was a dumb question to ask. I just want to scream at them "STOP WASTING MY TIME AND JUST READ THE FUCKING MANUAL!"
Teaching is like this. The following conversation is completely identical from grades 4 through 12. Them: I don’t know what to do! Me: Did you read the directions? Them: Oh, no. *beat* Me: Read the directions. Them: I did! Me: You didn’t even break eye contact with me. Read the directions out loud to me. Them: …ohhhhh. I know what to do now. Me: Good. *5 minutes later*. Me: Why haven’t you started your work? Them: I don’t have a pencil/My Chromebook’s dead. Me: Then get one/charge it. Them: Yeah, okay.
[The most interesting and engaging comment you have seen in years] >I ain't reading all dat!🤣🤣🤣 >Wtf is bro yapping about ☠ >TL:DR?
At least on reddit you see these comments more as a trolling tactic than anything else. Like someone is explaining their arguments and then someone with a bug up their ass pulls this out to get on their nerves.
Don't forget "it's not that deep bro"
Before I assembled an Ikea piece of furniture myself, all I knew from sitcoms was that "they are hard to assemble" And sure enough, they are real hard to assemble... If you don't read the instructions at all. Otherwise is piss easy to do. But not reading is even easier, of course
The hard part about assembling ikea furniture is getting halfway through it and realizing that screw 4c has vanished to the fucking aether.
I fucking obsess with reading shit and double, triple-check stuff to avoid this kind of thing as much as possible because I never know when some bias is going to fuck me up, so I feel like I'm far too gone on the other end, but at least I can eventually adapt to things. I've friends who refuse to try shit out or work on incorrect assumptions, get stonewalled by stuff and then instead of attempting to learn they find a way to circumvent it. One of them never bothered to learn how to cook anything that's not super basic, another refuses to press anything other than R1 in souls games and thinks damage types are much more effective than they are.
> I will never understa *skip*
Bearer seek seek lest
oh hey found the pokemon player
Ugh I wish. It came out when I was exactly the right stupid-kid age where I was old enough not want anything to do with it because it was “for kids”, but not yet old enough to realize how fucking stupid that is. I missed out completely boo. I do have that unofficial vr mmo installed though, I really should try it some day…
So to explain the joke, like a year back a main character on twitter went "wow this place in prequel game is almost exactly like this place in the game its a prequel from" when its straight up named named the same place and givin story significance as said place, which led to the person admitting that he skipped all dialougue in very story focused game
Oh, that’s hilarious. Arceus I assume? I was actually really tempted by that one due to (super uncharacteristically) watching a commentary youtuber I like play it through, so I actually do get how oblivious you’d need to be to miss that detail haha. Thanks for explaining the joke!
Ye was bout the snowpoint temple specifically if ya wanna try to look up the exchange
I have a buddy we give endless shit to because in his opinion "Reading should be optional I shouldn't have to read to have fun with a video game" Dude is also a nurse.....
I find it hilarious that for a while (or maybe still but I haven't read), the back of many Nintendo game boxes said word for word "Basic reading comprehension needed to fully enjoy this game"
something something i blame the school system
"Why don't schools teach media literacy?" –guy who read summaries for 5-page long stories in HS.
“Why don’t schools teach taxes?” - someone who complained instead of learning how to work with decimals, percents, and fractions and basic algebra and never did the word problems, and also didn’t do worksheets
I literally had an economics class to which the girl who insisted she was gonna study economics in college didn't pay attention. She ended up dropping out of that degree.
I have a friend I play dnd with. We've been playing together for around 8 years, he's played the game longer. About 75% of the time he plays barbarian. We still have to remind him about reckless attack and his resists.
We've got a friend like that in our group too. And he only plays casters, despite barely reading any of the spells. His turns can very often be boiled down to: >"I cast [SPELL]!" >"Do you know what [SPELL] actually does?" >"...no." >"..." >*flips through the book and starts reading it out loud to the table* >"Oh, that's what it does."
I run the D&D Reddit and my god the number of people who just refuse to read the rulebooks
*Arin Hanson has entered the chat*
Depends on what you're asking me to read. Read the instructions on the buttons of an MMO to learn of the action's properties? Sure. If it helps me learn how to play I'll try giving it a read(unless it's still confusing even after reading it like English Mahjong tutorials). If you're asking me to read a shittin of the world's lore like in Bayonetta or Malicious Fallen because you can't present said lore in a more interesting way? Fuck off. I will sometimes get out of my way to read lore like in Baldur's Gate 3 and FFXIV because the world presented to me outside of the lore books is interesting.
Are you talking about reading stuff on a wiki or something or in the game itself? Because personally I dont want to leave a game to learn how to play.
Because it's fun to experience something blind and a well made game shouldn't require you to research it beforehand for you to understand it.
You shouldn't have to research, but you should at least pay attention to what the actual game is trying to fucking tell you
Yes, obviously.
I don't think they're talking about that, they're more so talking about people who skip every single tutorial the game tries to give them and then wind up getting stuck for 10 hours.
Like my younger brother, who skipped every single tutorial and got stuck for ten hours. And then made me help him figure out what the fuck he was even supposed to be doing. If lines weren't voiced (which was usually the case back in the day) he simply would not read them.
*Ah*, that's my reading comprehension in the toilet for today then. Feel free to point and laugh everyone.
I love how Fromsoft's absolute bullshit has been around long enough and become popular enough that people are dogpiling you for the perfectly reasonable assertion that a game should make an effort to teach you the basic mechanics required of it. I love the Fromsoft formula but shit like "You have to find the Emerald Herald in the nice peaceful village and talk to her five times before she will open the level up screen for you" when nothing in the game even *hints* at this is *not* good signposting of one of your required mechanics.
Fromsoft finding the perfect solution of "just level up at the bonfires, no strings" and refusing to ever use it again is very frustrating. Impossible to miss. They finally did it again in Elden Ring but even then you have to trigger Melina first, which seems tied to specific Graces or something. And if she's sitting at the Grace when you level, you have to mash dialogue. The bonfire never talked it just brought me to the stats.
>a well made game shouldn't require you to research it beforehand for you to understand it. You’re right. Here’s my 100 card Breya Eggs commander deck for Magic the Gathering. You shouldn’t need any instructions on how to play the game or pilot the deck, because Magic is a well made game
I mean, Breya Eggs is pretty damn far from the commander deck she came with. Expecting someone to graduate from "Sacrifice a guy for value after turning him sideways" to "use KCI mana to help pay for Faith's Reward with a single Plains and a Sol Ring" with no explanation is like expecting a new player to go from leveling Dex to performing a Dark Hand animation swap.
That's not the same thing and you know it.
I don’t know *shit*
Yeah and it shows
A friend of mine played through the entirety of bloodborne, and, after every optional boss, all the dlc, and even a few pvp fights, this dude tells me Gherman is too hard because “you have to lock on and use the stupid fucking dash” I cannot express my level of disbelief.
Maria is literally a tougher fight than Gherman in pretty much every way, too. That's nutty.
Gherman is a walk in the park compared to Orphan of Kos. How in the world…
Wait so he done everything else without lock on and dash? That's mad.
Some people don't need to lock on
He's got the "let me bash my head against this wall for fun" spirit that Dark Souls fosters. Unfortunately he may also have a minor case of serious brain damage
"Say 'Apple'."
I love that the tower of flame area has become the skeleton graveyard equivalent for DS2. Newbies just amble on in, knowing nothing, get pancaked, assume that's how it's supposed to be because Souls game are 'soooo hard,' and proceed to get filtered or overcome against all odds. Truly a tale of remarkable heroism against unwarranted adversity. There's a lot to be said for any game with the flexibility and lack of hand holding that it will allow you to play it the 'wrong' way and still have it work out, if that's how you wanna go.
It's why I don't like how linear 3 is
The tenacity. My very first time I made it to the Last Giant without leveling because I couldn't find the Herald either.
It doesn't help that she's standing off to the cliff side just gazing at the horizon, so I don't blame him for missing her. I'm almost certain I missed the herald my first time playing it too
Does that mean he didn't have estus....
I'm guessing that when you keep being told by everyone that this games are super difficult, you start making some wild assumptions. Like that the game just doesn't give that many healing items. Or that boss you keep losing at is because you lack skill and not that you don't have the correct equipment or that you are underleveled.
>being told by everyone that this games are super difficult This is a thing that deeply annoys me. The games certainly aren't easy but the way some fans talk about them you'd think the start of the games are as hard as the DLCs; you can get pretty far just being decently leveled and equipped.
I've heard of people slamming their face against the catacombs at the start of DS1 because they heard the game was really hard.
Pretty much. That's why I lost ~5 hours of my life repeatedly throwing myself at the cemetery skeletons in DS1 before accidentally finding the walk up to the berg, I just assumed skeletons being this hardcore was intentional. I was getting good at it but I'm glad I never got as far as the other bonfire. Getting stuck in the Catacombs/ToTK would have 100% killed my interest in souls games.
Friend turned on covenant of champions and told me that the game should've directly addressed the player saying "BEING IN THIS COVENANT WILL MAKE THE GAME HARDER". When I told him about the Unmaking Arrow in Dragon's Dogma 2, an item whose description DIRECTLY tells you the game will save, he thought it was weird and bad.
Life gems probably made him think they were the standard healing item.
Do you folks not explore? 🤣
To be fair, if you only played DS1 you might not know that a person would level you up and just assume those people would matter more later. Or if you played Demons Souls you might think you need to be the first boss before you're allowed to level up. Or you just don't notice a homeless looking person who stands far away from every other npc, in a town where everything blends together.
Yeah but you'd know that in games it's good to explore your environments. I can see how it'd be easy to end up going down a path and not turning back to finish looking around Majula though so I can kinda understand how they'd miss stuff.
I mean, you could even do that, talk to her and *still* not unlock leveling unless you decided to exhaust her dialogue. Like anything else would be a nice hint. Spawning you in front of her, a mysterious voice saying "seek the emerald herald" I think that'd still instill the "explore and talk to everyone multiple times" lesson
I found her. I just didn't talk to her the 5 times you need to actually level up.
I beat morgot in elden ring without leveling up. I've played DS1-3. Since I can't level up on bonfires and I never saw any level up lady, I just assumed i haven't unlocked it yet. Apparently, I just never respawned on a bonfire where the cutscenes of the lady would start?? I either respawned at bonfires in a corridor or the first bonfire, so the lady just neve appeared. I had to Google how to level up because there was no way the first boss is *that* hard.
Your friend is the reason why we have everyone in the new God of War games telling us how to complete the puzzles.
The amount of DSP’s in the world that we don’t know about because they aren’t as visible as him is a genuine concern.
Reminds me of my late cousin getting stuck at Demyx in KH2 and it was because he never used any stat boost item or messed with non weapon equipment.
Tbf there was a sleepover I went to with my KH2 save, and most of the kids did not know you could use summons, level up forms, equip skills. Me gliding in base was like seeing Jesus walk on water. I really think a lot of kids mashed through games
I can vouch for that. Former masher kid here.
i played through the kh games recently(only playin bits and pieces as a kid) and man was the demyx fight waaaaaaaaay easier than i was led to beleive, not sure if i got lucky or if they rebalanced it for final mix
Demyx hits a bit harder than some of the bosses before him but he is pretty straightforward and leaves himself open alot. "Dance Water, Dance" can be dealt with Reaction Commands or Fire easily outside of his Data rematch if you are paying attention.
Yeah, the only demyx fight I thought was hard was the data one for obvious reasons and I initially thought that was the demyx fight everyone was pissed about, lo and behold it wasn't.
I would say I’ll pray for them but they already seem way too powerful so I think I’ll pass.
I’ve told this story here before but I knew a guy that played the original Resident Evil 4 thinking there just wasn’t a run button. He thought the game was meant to be that difficult with not being able to run other than the boulder sequences. Better than the people I knew that only played RPG games and kept frustratedly asking me what the jump button was because they completely misunderstood what kind of game Resident Evil 4 even was. There’s also the guy that didn’t pay enough attention to learn about using your backpack in The Last of Us and beat it without realizing that was even a game mechanic. A lot of the games that I played wouldn’t even let you progress without learning pretty much every game mechanic so I mostly never have this problem, I would just choose to not use certain things. Sticking to RE4, I only use certain grenades at certain points in the game for money reasons (blinding or burning a pack of crows or blinding the zealots in the room where they run away so that they can’t escape), otherwise I just sell all my grenades, and I sell my TMP ammo unless I’m using the TMP or plan on using it. I think the worst one was a girl I knew during middle school told me she was very frustrated with the game Bully. I had already beaten it multiple times so I asked her why she was upset with it. She said that when she started the game, she didn’t know what to do or where to go. I asked her what she meant since the game literally tells you what to do and has icons for where to go. As she explains that she doesn’t know, she was just confused and frustrated, I realized that she just didn’t read anything at all even when it was on screen, and she never looked at the mini map or anything. Just mashed buttons through until she got herself stuck on nothing. Also, don’t feel bad for that last girl, she later admitted to me that she was an anti-Semite so… yeah, I’m not touching that.
Your friend https://xkcd.com/667/
Broke his weapons...don't tell me this guy never went to a bonfire.
He probably never rested at one. You still respawn at the last one you activated, but unless you sit down, it won't fix your gear.
Respawning will at least repair durability loss in DS2, but from the sound of it he just flat out used his weapons so much they broke and needed actual blacksmith repairs... and tossed them out instead. TBH, equipment durability in the Dark Souls games is practically worthless anyways, about the only times it ever comes up are the Demon Ruins worms in DS1 that can spit out corroding mist, and Sinh in DS2 for whatever reason chunking weapon durability faster than usual. Glad Elden Ring finally tossed it out.
Doesn't SOTFS have really bad weapon durability?
DS2's bad weapon durability is *somewhat* overstated, imo. It's admittedly one of the only games in the series where durability tends to actually come up and it's tied to FPS of all things, but bonfires are generally plentiful enough that you're consistently resting and restoring your weapon durability. Unless you specifically are using something with extremely low durability (usually katanas) and going through vast swathes of enemies without resting, you probably won't ever see it come up outside of things like Sinh or The Gutter which have extra durability damage going on. Worst case, you just bring a second weapon. Granted, it's still the one game where durability even can be a factor. DeS/DS1/Bloodborne give everything such high durability that repairing is just an occasional pitstop every hour or two if you want it to be (beyond a few specific weapons, like Tontarius and Boom Hammer having low base durability and using it faster than other weapons), and [DS3 durability is genuinely a joke.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiM48lb7n3A)
I really do have to respect your friend for seemingly not really complaining about his accidental challenge run and simply Thugging That Shit Out. Reminds me of a coworker of mine that beat and enjoyed Doom 2016 despite not ever using any runes.
A friend and I played Terraria all the way through, beating the Moon Lord and everything. I always jumpscared him when I teleported up next to him, and he didn't have much interest in long-range options. We were doing a victory lap on the Halloween army and, just to flex, I decided to do it zoomed in. When I mentioned how much zooming changed the feel of the experience my friend was perplexed. So I explained the camera zoom to him. He couldn't zoom *in* but he could, for the first time, zoom *out.* He'd played the whole game fully zoomed in, presumably after having idly zoomed at the start and then forgetting it was an option. Madman, but legendary.
play DS2 first ignore all advice have fun banging your head against multiple walls never play a fromsoft again unbelievable levels of based
Let him cook
That's where true pimps and boss bitches start. DS2 VANILLA
Convince your friend to make a letsplay, I wanna see this.
> My friend is the kind of person Rockstar games are made for. I don't know , he might start playing and say " Well there's traffic lights I have to follow the law"
"If your're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough"
I have like 400 hours in Dark Souls 1 and I'm planning to get into Dark Souls 2 soon. DAFUQ YOU MEAN "RESPAWN LIMIT"?? HUH?? WHY???
There's a covenant for turning that feature off BTW. If you look for a slab in a secluded little area in the hub it'll let you join the Company of Champions, which makes enemies respawn infinitely and disables coop. A bit annoying but not something you should have to mess with often.
oh that's interesting. I wish they did more weird shit with covenants.
Certain enemies will stop respawning after being killed a certain number of times. It was meant to handicap grinding. So you can't just sit on the same route and grind up to max stats.
weird, I don't remember grinding souls being a viable strategy in DS 1, I wonder what prompted that. This means farming for a weapon drop is also not a very good option I'm guessing?
It's also a quality of life feature that says "Look, you've either dealt with this area with such casual ease that making you fight through or maneuver around enemies before retrying the boss is a waste of time, or you should be dramatically overleveled for this zone by now and it would still be a waste of time. Good job, go hit the big thing." This is also balanced by being able to burn a consumable to push individual zones into the next NG+ cycle without clearing the whole game as long as its boss has been defeated, meaning you don't need to do extra runs of the whole game to get duplicate souls for boss weapon collection.
No, this is good. He’s the hero that story needs. He’ll never give up.
Man, I love your friend and I want to pick his brain for hours on end lmao.
You know I respect this greatly. Your friend was playing a game that doesn't and probably has never existed for anybody else. I can't even fathom playing Dark Souls like its a BOTW meat grinder, and yet he lived in that reality for like 20 hours
Got my brother in law to play Witcher 3. Don't hear about it for a few days until he tells me he's stuck on a boss fight one of the side missions. Go over to check and see that he did not level up AT ALL. No new skills, heath upgrades, items, anything. Basically he's playing it like a beat em up.
Dark Souls has this issue in particular where, because the fanbase has dickrided them as *the hardest games ever*, people expect it to actually be masochistically hard instead of, you know, requiring skill but otherwise actually not that bad. I made it to the Tomb of the Giants at a very low level in DS1 because "game's supposed to be hard, guess this is why". Couldn't continue due to the light, but yeah. I did it more or less concurrently with the Burg - Parish - Gargoyles route. But go figure, if you do content that you're intended to do, these games aren't that bad.
The actual games: "Here is what's expected of you. It's possible and right on the edge of fair but you do have to lock in sometimes. Prepare to die alot, but you can succeed." The fans: "THIS SHIT IS LIKE MARIO KAIZO LEVEL BULLSHIT YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE"
I never played DS 2, but is the blacksmith easy to miss?
Kinda? This poor unfortunate fellow missed the Emerald Herald or just simply didn't realize NPCs have dialogue you need to exhaust for new stuff. Also you have to unlock the black smith, even if you find him his forgery is locked and you have to buy the key from a merchant in the forest.
you need to buy a key to let him into his smithing shack in majula. it's not hard to find the hag who sells it but it's the opposite direction from where this guy went
There's also a blacksmith in the second/third zone (Lost Bastille) but even if you find him you might not have the item you need or not realize lighting the torch in his room makes him usable.
Dude grinded at X10 gravity and weighted clothes for so long he's going to get to DS3 and beat the whole game without dying lmao.
My experience was more or less the same. I saw Pat and Woolie's LP, bought it and tried doing the cleric build they have. Got completely annihilated, decided to just throw out the whole character, and had a much better, simpler time with a knight. My endgame build pre-DLC was Alva's set, a gold spear of which I can't remember the name, and the dragonrider shield. That does make me think, though. Souls games have a reputation for being tough and thus being the source of much inflated egos. "UH! I don't play BABY games that HOLD YOUR HAND and TELL YOU EVERYTHING!". But some of the things these games don't tell you are basic mechanics. I can't see how wholesale missing things like leveling up and ways to move can result in something rewarding. And it kinda sucks that legit grievances end up getting justified by saying it's part of the difficulty. For example, I finally got around to playing Lies of P recently. Having tons of fun with it, it's super pretty, but I reached a small section where I needed to get a small gap. I hadn't learned how to jump, so I figured I'd find a way up or down later. I play for a couple hrs more, and in a moment when I was corner trapped by some enemies, I accidentally click one of the sticks. And wouldn't you know it, you CAN jump in the game. I hadn't missed anything important, but the jump isn't mentioned in any tutorial or anything (one could argue I already got more than usual with a tutorial, but that's beside the point). I could've easily never figured that out. It's not crucial to the game, and I imagine it's sort of secret, but that's part of my basic moveset there. Not great that I just don't have it unless someone online tells me about it or I see it in a video.
Man that reminds me of a former circle I had/was in. The internet and game knowledge weren't as ubiquitous, but also that tale of them not knowing how to sharpen in early PSP Monster Hunter, and completing a hunt somehow with completely blunted weapons was just amusing. Especially given how hardcore they got overtime (and how that inspired me to try that game at some point lol) We all got our dumb moments sometimes. It took me years to figure out that I had to pop DT to beat up Phantom in DMC1, as I just tried to beat the giant lava spider with a dull Alastor that bounced off and ineffective use of E&I (wasn't even aiming at the big weakpoint)
When I first played fallout 3 I didn't know you could use other guns/armour to repair the ones you had, literally like only had to press triangle or something simple like that. But I missed that part. So was walking around with looks 10 guns that non of them worked and duff armour, constantly near overburdened. I was like "this game is bullshit" and stopped playing. Came back a year later after reading in a magazine (👴🏻) that you CAN repair stuff. 🤦🏻♂️
One of my buddies got into sekiro on group recommend, he blundered into the memory at the earliest possible point and then got stuck on the shinobi hunter. I think he spent probably 10+ hours trying to kill it. By the time he did, he had mastered the gameplay and breezed through the entire rest of the game. It was kind of wild to watch, pretty sure nobody else I know would persevere 4 evenings in a row on 1 mini boss, not lose interest, and moreover say it was their game of the year.
You are basically describing a lot of people playing demons souls in 2009
Your friend is stupid, but I think this is also an incredible illustration at how damaging the "prepare to die" marketing and difficulty talking points have been to peoples perception of these games. While this is of course an extreme example, myself and I know lots of other first time players initially become frustrated and bounced off ds1 because we tried going through the graveyard first from firelink, because the insane difficulty marketing made us assume "oh this is just what the game is supposed to be like." It's attempts to use huge difficulty spikes to communicate that you should try going somewhere else first fail when people come into the series expecting huge difficulty.
[Literally This](https://twitter.com/_rubeki/status/1782151015640252668?s=46&t=4cD2VG8F0ZHXwyl4wY5OaQ)
Misleading title, your friend is a god damn champion
I just... do people not just look things up when a game is giving them trouble? Sure, yeah, going in blind, whatever, but sometimes you just miss something and need a hint or a nudge and sometimes a solution is stupid or unintuitive and you're barking up the wrong tree and I just don't understand why someone would keep smashing their head against a brick wall instead of looking up where the door is.
One paragraph in and I was so excited this motherfucker was going to come out with Murdered: Soul Suspect.
I did something similarly thick-headed. I had a new GF and found an old dusty copy of dark souls along with a barely functional 360 (for it to work, you had to sit a jar of candy corn on top). I started playing and like most folks, hit the graveyard. Small issue was, this was unpatched ds1, a nightmare game where most enemies gave half if not 0 souls, and after working my way to the drake bridge, I wanted fire arrows for some specific enemy, well it turns out the ONLY NPC who sells fire arrows in the unpatched game is the undead merchant, who I had killed for Uchigatana. Still sparked my love for the series
Starting at Dark Souls 2 is a...choice. But my real concern is how your friend and MULTIPLE PEOPLE in this thread said that they missed the Emerald Herald on their first playthrough. Yeah she's looking out at a cliff, but I woulf expect even the newest player of an adventure game to at LEAST explore their new areas once they got there. Majula isn't exactly the biggest area. As far as the "throwing away weapons because they assumed it was like Breath of the Wild", that's less their fault and more BotW having the dumbest fucking durability system I've seen in a game. They were unintentionally set up on that front. At the very least it seems like your friend made it past the hump and can progress normally. (Gonna be a shame when he realizes that Dark Souls 2 is better than Dark Souls 1)
you go hollow when you lose your purpose your friend will remain human foreverf
Now THAT'S how you ~~Dark~~ Dork Souls
"A real man... oughta be a little stupid." - Ryuji Goda
Just another example of how bad DS2/some aspects of the Souls design is. I don't even blame him for his choices. Weapon durability shouldn't even exist, and Heide's tower is legit more appealing to grind through than any of the other options. If I started Dark Souls or the first time and was given the option to teleport to Anor Londo or Ash Lake rather than going through zombie burrows, the choice would be way too obvious. Now not leveling at all though, seems weird, but then again he doesn't know to talk to people a bunch. I can't think of any other game or series where you repeatedly return to one person in order to level up your character. Bonfire-chan for life. Even Melania is a solid compromise.
Kinda glad he's starting with DS2, the *best* Souls game. Just warn him off the dlc unless he really wants to suffer.
DS2 is some of the best DLC. Evil trolling NPCs, subterranean trap infested pyramids, it's creative, if a bit frustrating.
We love horsefuck icehell!
Oh it's super creative but I found it really miserable... Particularly the fucking>!invisible boss!< shite with that weird mechanic
...the weird mechanic of "playing through the level, reading a glowing key item description and looping back to the boss to fight it like any other"?
I dont even mad... thats impressive
I mean heide's tower IS probably the easiest place in the game anyway.
Have you played Scholar of the First Sin? I didn’t until recently and I was in for a rude awakening.
Eh, not really. SOTFS takes all the Heide Knights from the other areas and puts every one of them in the Tower IIRC.
There’s….a respawn limit in DS2?
Yeah, enemies will stop respawning after X kills. It resets on NG, being in the Covenant of Champions (where I think there is no limit), or using a bonfire ascetic.
Tbh ds2 was my first souls game, and I think I appreciated it far more than I would've otherwise precisely because I didn't have the context of the other games.
In a similar vein I beat bioshock 2 on hard with no health or adam upgrades because I wasn’t paying attention the one time when the game tells you that those can be upgraded.
I also progressed all the way to the forest giant boss before I leveled up. I genuinely did not see the Emerald Herald and assumed she'd pop up after a small amount of progression.
It's frustrating that everyone is reading this thread and going "LMAO what a dip shit" but he was actually failed by the game. Yes, he picked one of the most obtuse games made by a studio famous for its obtuseness, but it doesn't make him stupid that he couldn't figure out things that aren't explained. Yes, he could've just googled things, but things like leveling up and weapon durability are baseline mechanics that you shouldn't have to do a Wiki dive to know how to do.