Datz

I prefer GabeCube

I recently replayed Dark Souls 1 and tried a Strength build to see how it goes.

Full Havel's straight up lets you face tank Artorias, and you're taking almost a 1/15th of his health with just a hit.

Armor was nerfed after that, but still, it was rather hilarious. Magic was nerfed too by the virtue of bosses getting more gap closers and ranged attacks - by Elden Ring, magic is far from the boring "stay back and just spam attack" idea, but on the contrary, the cheesiest tactics I used when needed were Greatshields or dual jump attacks for stunning bosses. There's videos out there of people beating Malenia by just shield poking her to death with a spear, and I certainly used that when I wasn't having fun with Rellana. It's crazy to me how most people just grab a greatsword and only use that the whole game, then say the game's shallow or too hard.

Hollow Knight mostly had pretty barebones movement for a metroidvania. Great for combat, not fun for going from point A to B, and HK has seemingly more backtracking that other metroidvanias. Silksong actually has a sprint button that makes it all better.

Expedition 33 is still good, but a lot of people go as far as saying it's the best JRPG last decade, which feels like a copout when half of it is not being a JRPG. It feels like the Persona 5 hype all over again (which was a full on JRPG, mind you, but it also had problems and I felt was just good)

To clarify, I meant gameplay, because you can (and a lot of people do) turn on easy mode just to ignore it and focus on everything else.

The easy mode could win battles for you automatically and most people would "enjoy" it all the same, but I hardly think anyone would love it.

Edit: The context was explicitly combat, but, I feel there's still a difference of enjoyable combat and actually engaging combat. Is parryless easy mode challenging enough?

I (re)play Soulsborne for builds, and I think that's necessary to appreciate ER. Trying out all the spells and different weapons is most of the fun, the rest being trying them out on bosses.

Was it good though? I imagine you'd be AP starved until you get the Picto for AP on hit, and then it sounds like the opposite where you can spam costly skills.

The worst part is, that decent game isn't even in the same genre. E33 is too damn heavy on parrying. Imagine if all 2000-2015 Zelda games were garbage, and Breath of the Wild was the first good one. I'm sure some OoT fans wouldn't be too thrilled, while a majority of gamers would be.

As a JRPG fan though, I concur, most JRPGs suck ass, and it's often for the most obvious, easy to fix problems like slow combat speed, or throwaway random encounter design.

It depends on person and skill, a lot of people manage to beat a majority of bosses 1st try.

Also, personally, I just like using magic which makes some parts easier.

Expedition 33, but I'm sure other people think that about Silksong or Hundred Line.

I love the pictos system, it's the best thing about it and I hope other JRPGs take it, almost every pickup you find is good. Resuable consumables are cool, and the first two hours or so is cinema (even on Steam Deck with crappy settings). The rest is just good to flawed by the middle of Act 2, especially parrying (I'm decent at it, but I'd rather either play an action game where it's deeper, or a JRPG where it doesn't intrude on strategy)

That's also because M&L requires more attention to get the timing right. You need to look for cues who the attack will go to, see if you can jump on the attack or only over it, hold the dodge button rather than press, or multitask when both bros are being attacked. Or sometimes, DON'T jump, because you then take damage. The games are puzzle/action games with JRPG elements slapped in.

E33 is extremely telegraphed (barring the very rare jukes) so it needs to compensate with tight timing and erratic animations, requiring both higher skill + trial and error. Sometimes have to press another button, but you don't even need to figure it out (I tried to jump some attacks because of Elden Ring habits lol), the enemy or whole screen telegraphs it. It's a JRPG with action slapped in, at its core at least.

For another example, Deltarune and Undertale are basically action games too, but do a lot of stuff with their dodging, sometimes even switching genres to platformer/shooter etc.

Some of the newer FE games suck at that too, Three Houses in particular apparently.

Older games give you very good prepromotes in the midgame, and the 3DS games have the child recruits (it makes sense I swear) scale up to current story progress and scale off stats/skills of parents.

I was actually optimistic, because I like Mario&Luigi, so these combat systems CAN work. The problem is, the parry systems in E33 are 80% of your success (if you don't grind), yet are more shallow by comparison, and most of the depth is in the RPG parts that are just a supplement (unless you grind + play on easier difficulty settings, but it seems you need a Picto for AP on damage to let you have fun then)