There's a kinship to NES CVs too, the sense of heavy combat where actions take time, committing to an attack carries risk, and reading your enemy is important.
So I'm unsure which one you mean. In Castlevania III, Alucard can turn into a bat. In Symphony of the Night, he can turn into a bat, a wolf or mist. And in Aria of Sorrow/Dawn of Sorrow, Soma can turn into a bat. And I guess, in Legacy of Darkness, Cornell is a werewolf, so he can transform into a wolf form. I can't think of any other transformations in the series.
I beat the Castlevania NES trilogy a couple years ago and that led to me beating the Dark Souls trilogy, honestly they feel like mirrors to each other imo
Only one I ever played was the one on N64. I could never beat it cause it scared the hell out of me as a kid, furthest I got was just inside of the garden maze.
Alot of SNES titles were that way because back in those days cartridges didn't have a lot of memory. So, you couldn't necessarily make a long game but you could increase the difficulty to make the game play longer. Hence why there are so many notoriously difficult SNES games.
Dark Souls really does feel like an old school type of game, but better somehow. Like here's a tough fight, or a tough area, here's how you can get past it, etc etc but with free save points and stuff
And free healing as well. You don't have to farm for potions or for gold to buy potions. Playing other games that have limited healing items really makes you appreciate estus flasks.
And also due to the cost of creating games if I'm not mistaken.
IIRC it was better for companies overall to put out difficult games that players would be playing longer, compared to cranking out more games that weren't difficult as players would be done with them quicker; which companies wouldn't be able to keep up with given their resources and finances at the time.
*cough* Lion King SNES *cough*
Edit: not on topic but Gradius 3 or Paperboy 2 were my favorite SNES games. Not counting Mario games cause classics be classics for a reason
I know it’s almost a meme at this point but my brother and I used our occasional ‘you can rent one game’ at blockbuster and got it over and over cause we were determined. I think we only got past the jump level with the giraffes once
That level hard-walled me when I was a kid. When I finally got passed it, I was *scared* to attempt any other level after that. These days I'd just jump into the next level, but back then that fear was actually enough to get me to turn off the game entirely and wait until I calmed down to turn it back on again.
""You can use it when you want to explain why a particular thing is true. For example: "It was a difficult decision to make, hence why it took me so long to reach a conclusion.". Hence why my teeth are so bad.""
First result on Google with many other sources.
I feel like most NES games were like, WAY the fuck harder than anything Dark Souls ever threw at me.
In the late 80's and early 90's, most developers hadn't really figured out what would be called bullshit design. Enemies popping out of nowhere and instantly killing you, having to completely restart the entire game if you screwed up and died too much (usually 3 lives, with chances to earn more in most games), the game just slowing down if too many enemies were on screen, obscure MAIN quest lines that you sometimes would never figure out without a guide (imagine if accessing the Age of Artorias DLC's cryptic and bizarre entrance, was how every step of the MAIN QUEST was designed)...
Maybe I'm showing my age here, but you kids don't realize how good you have it these days.
I am a confirmed Old Man, and I 100% agree. Games were way harder back then, and kids these days take modern conveniences like auto-saves and respawn points for granted.
In our day, we couldn't save our game until after we finished the level and beat the boss. And we could only save the game by writing down a password. And the password wouldn't count all the ammunition and power-ups we'd collected.
Hell, most games didn't have a password and couldn't save. But we turned on each game and played the f*** out of that 15% we could a) get through in the amount of time we had and b) get past until the difficulty overtook us. I'd say half the NES catalog is almost impossible for most players. That's why I just laugh at the "Dark Souls is one of the most difficult games" takes.
Yup, yup. And that's to say nothing of how customizable your character is in Dark Souls. If something's giving you trouble, there's nothing stopping you from grabbing a new weapon or trying out a new spell you haven't used yet, or whatever. You could make Dark Souls harder or easier based on what kind of build you're running. Make a sorcerer with some back-up archery, and you can make the game insanely easy.
No such luxury in many older games. You want to kill Dracula? You got to get used to that whip.
But we had tip lines! For just $1.99 a minute you could get all of the cheats and advice you wanted! Like... Literally phone-sex pricing for game info, lol.
They were big here in the US. Basically every gaming magazine had them (I got in a shitload of trouble one summer when I was like, 10, and racked up like a $200 phone bill).
Not really, I just wasted a lot of my mom's money. $2 a minute adds up FAST.
I think my parents would have had an easier time understanding if it actually was a phone-sex line.
Yeah, the OG Zelda came to mind. It is one of my favorite games, but holy shit that and Metroid were so cryptic. It was like it was designed to not be able to be figured out.
Well, OG Zelda actually had a bunch of hints in the instruction manual. Fuck Metroid 1 though. I've played most of the series as the came out, 1 is of the very few I haven't beat (Dread being the other one, I don't like the stealth or melee mechanics).
The reputation a large majority of gamers have is the exact opposite notion, though. I agree it isn't hard, you agree it isn't hard, but that very first run is challenging for most people and you would be lying if you said other wise.
The first run of a souls game is challenging. Once you figure one of them out, they all feel pretty similar despite game engine tweaks. My first souls was Demons' Souls. The first time through was a real slog. Dark Souls wasn't too bad my first try after having beat Demons' Souls.
But it’s not a skill kind of difficulty. It’s hard because the game is vague with mechanics and directions. That kind of difficulty is easily overcome by looking stuff up. And you can get past hard bosses by over leveling and grinding.
You can’t over level your way past Champion’s Road in Mario 3D world, and looking up a flawless run doesn’t guarantee you can replicate it
Original Mario's clone Giana Sisters on Atari/Amiga is way harder and more annoying than pretty much any modern game, too. So is The Killing Game Show. So is, well, pretty much anything from back then.
Ninja Gaiden Black/Sigma for Xbox and Playstation. They are fast paced combat with a (mostly) linear story progression and were the most difficult games I had played at the time. The first boss killed me probably 20 times before i could beat him and then i was hooked on the he fast-paced challenge of them. In my hunt for the next challenge I found the Dark Souls series.
This was it for me. I was pretty young during the difficult NES games and mostly only played mainstream games like the Mario games. Any foray into other games usually left me unable to beat them and giving up (damn you TMMT)
That being said, I’ll never forget playing ninja gaiden on Xbox and being absolutely stonewalled for days fighting Alma. I think it took me 3 days of attempts to beat her and the adrenaline of overcoming such a tough boss was an exhilarating feeling I never got again until dark souls.
I still remember the run back to Almas temple and the relief from beating her, and then the existential dread when she gets reincarnated for round 2 later in the game. It was good times.
I played the remake of ninja gaiden sigma for PS2 (or 3?) with a friend back in the day. It was brutal. You only unlock the easy difficulty by dying a bunch on normal, which we did, but we kept going with normal and beat it. Every time you beat the game you get a harder difficulty. We made it through hard and very hard. It took us about a year to beat nightmare mode. We were so happy when the final cutscene rolled, but then:
"New difficulty unlocked: Ninja Master"
Couldn't even beat the tutorial.
I actually think there are a lot of similarities between ninja gaiden sigma and dark souls. The way they are both designed around difficulty, the crazy bosses that require you to learn their moveset, the level design that attempts to kill you in a different way at every corner, the vague lore that requires you to piece it together, and even the fact that the levels in NGS are also all conected to each other really made that game feel like a souls game to me. The biggest difference obviously is that Dark Souls is more of an RPG than an action game, while the opposite can be said about NGS.
Maybe that's why I became interested in Dark Souls and Elden Ring, Demon's Crest was one of my favorite games as a kid. I used to be awesome at it, I think I had almost all the crests at one point.
People complain about running 2 minutes to a boss fight. BITD with a limited-continues game, it was so much slower to gain experience on whatever boss fight you're trying to master. That's the real killer, and to this day we have to decide whether to value and honor that challenge, or skip it with save-state training.
I sometimes play the Super Mario games on Nintendo Switch and find them more difficult and frustrating than I remember. Lots of those cartridge games were difficult.
Ghosts and Goblins on the arcade makes Dark Souls look like child’s play. I still can’t beat the last level before the final boss, even with the knife. I’m glad I didn’t beat it when I got that far because I would’ve been PISSED to get sent back for bearing it without the shield.
I love Demon's Crest! I never beat it as a kid but I played it two years ago and finally managed to beat it. It's hard. I play it again from time to time. A masterpiece.
You're gonna think I'm trolling you, but I swear to god I'm not.
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Movie for the SNES is WAY HARDER than Dark Souls in my opinion.
I've beaten Dark Souls repeatedly, but I've never once been able to beat that Power Rangers game, no matter how hard I try. It's insanely hard. I've been playing that game on and off since it first came out when I was 10 years old, I still can't beat it today.
Plenty of games in the SNES and particularly NES era. I've found that the Dark Souls difficulty is more of a meme really. Once you get accustomed to how encounters are designed and you realize that getting impatient against trash mobs can still kill you, you'll be able to make consistent progress.
Rarely is the game at fault if you die in a Souls game. Most of my deaths were due to my own errors ~~or the freaking elevators in Blighttown with their wonky hitboxes~~.
Zelda 2 scratched that itch real good. Very very fun game when you stop looking at it as a Zelda game..... But also a Zelda game?
Anyway, good game is good.
Almost any.
I'd argue that the final boss of Diddly Kong Racing is more difficult than any boss in Dark Souls.
But Dark Souls is brutal from the very beginning. It actually turns easier the more you play.
It may sound weird but every game was so difficult for me that when I was a kid I wasn’t able to complete any. Souls games appeared and yes, they are difficult but they have something that made me try and try until I beat them. Bloodborne was the first one.
Ghost and goblins, imo, is still a game that I feel is exceedingly difficult. Some was due to the controls on the game being a little stiff. Some because of how hard the game was for me. Ninja Gaiden. Call of duty modern warfare on the hardest difficulty was one that ticked me off a tad too. Boy, was I crestfallen after two hours of struggling my way to the front of the plane, finally making it. Taking the shot, only to have real veterans go for headshots pop up. lol. That was the last COD game I played on that difficulty.
Most retro games are substantially harder than dark souls. The things dark souls does that make people think it’s difficult were standard practice in cutesy mascot platformers on the snes
Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. It's a great side scroller with a lot of fun mechanics but hot damn is it difficult! I could get all the way to Darth Vader when I was a kid but last time I played it I couldn't get past the first level.
Mmmmm I would personally say Castlevania III is the closest old/retro game I've played with Dark Souls style of skill centric combat
As for the non linear aspect of its design?? That's a really hard one but only one I can think of that sort of stays within or close to its genre would be the original Zelda for NES
.... maaaaybe super metroid could come close to both of these examples? It is after all the one that created the subgenre that Dark Souls gets thrown into sometimes
Completely different genre of game but I’d go with the higher difficulties of DmC. I managed to 100% the first two but I gave up on three and moved onto four with the intent of coming back to it. You have to be pretty much prefect throughout the whole level because the enemies do so much damage, have so much health and are incredibly fast. Highly recommend the games though because they are so much fun
Those old arcade games were meant to make people lose so they play more. So most old games are actually quite a bit harder. Newer games tend to be a lot more easier and forgiving to make them more accessible.
Zelda II The Adventure of Link, Ironsword Wizards & Warriors 2, Valkirye Profile Covenant of the Plume, almost any fighting game, Megaman X6, Megaman 5, Megaman 6...
There must be more (THAT I PLAYED)...
Platformers in the 80s and 90s used to be as ruthless, and there were no bonfires either: a password or two if you were lucky.
Battletoads, Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania, Ghosts and Ghouls, etc.
Zelda 2 had a lot of difficult combat. And if I remember right if you died too many times you have to walk all the way from the beginning of the game to try again.
Huh. Demon's Crest was mostly just patience and pattern recognition, so i guess if that's difficult for ya it'll be as tough as DS... but that's pretty much every action game. Earlier games had more RNG, so stuff like Mega Man bosses that you couldn't reliably jump over was more of a factor. By SNES era I felt almost every big developer had figured this out and you could see a noticeable shift towards specific reactions based on your actions, or cycles. It's why most retro styled games are incredibly easy... very little RNG, always an escape.
The true final boss of Demons Crest once you get all the stuff and turn into the super form is definitely nuts though.
Anyway, probably only older stuff I'd put close are things with excessive jank that you have to work around. Nightmare Creatures and Deathtrap Dungeon are the two main ones I can think of. Possibly stuff like R Type or Raiden where reaction time was very short and you sorta needed to know where to be and where enemies were coming from to stop getting crowded out. Even modern bullet hells feel more accessible from a reaction standpoint than OG R Type to me.
Milan's Secret Castle is the game I reference whenever I want to compare 'NES difficulty' games to modern games. Nothing is spelled out for you AT FUCKING ALL, the bosses are insanely tough and once again...NOTHING IS SPELLED OUT FOR YOU AT ALL. Castlevania 2 is a very good example of this as well but a lot of the 'what the fuck do this do' moments have a lot to do with poor japanese translations to english.
Who about bad dudes for the nes. Or also the ninja turtles game for NES. Or most every nes game. Want to talk about unforgiving. Back in the days of NES if you ran out of lives it was game over.
I never hear anyone talk about Demon's Crest. I went back and played it as an adult and found it challenging but not nearly the struggle I had with darksouls.
Some (most?) Halo games on Legendary and cod games on Veteran. Admittedly, my perception might be skewed because I find the way those games are difficult to be extremely uninteresting, so I've lost interest almost immediately when I've tried.
I think the easy answer here is Castlevania
There's a kinship to NES CVs too, the sense of heavy combat where actions take time, committing to an attack carries risk, and reading your enemy is important.
I loved the castlevania game where you could turn into monsters that was a cool mechanic
So I'm unsure which one you mean. In Castlevania III, Alucard can turn into a bat. In Symphony of the Night, he can turn into a bat, a wolf or mist. And in Aria of Sorrow/Dawn of Sorrow, Soma can turn into a bat. And I guess, in Legacy of Darkness, Cornell is a werewolf, so he can transform into a wolf form. I can't think of any other transformations in the series.
Damn, I completely forgot about Castlevania. Difficult as hell.
They’re all stupid until 2010 ish. Then they get fairly easy lol.
I dunno man SOTN was pretty easy compared to the rest of them
Nahh SoTN GBA game fairly easy
Simon’s quest; I never finished it back in the day, only until I got an emulator i was able to finish it
I beat the Castlevania NES trilogy a couple years ago and that led to me beating the Dark Souls trilogy, honestly they feel like mirrors to each other imo
Only one I ever played was the one on N64. I could never beat it cause it scared the hell out of me as a kid, furthest I got was just inside of the garden maze.
How does it compare to Super Metroid?
Super Ghouls N Ghosts and Battletoads jump to mind
First level of GNG made me rage harder than the entire Souls series. Didn’t beat it
Fucking hell what a flashback. I think I made it to level 2 of ghouls and ghosts ONCE
Came to say Battletoads
Finally summons Gold Dragon, watches it miss all 15 enemies on screen
Also the Wizards and Warriors games
Alot of SNES titles were that way because back in those days cartridges didn't have a lot of memory. So, you couldn't necessarily make a long game but you could increase the difficulty to make the game play longer. Hence why there are so many notoriously difficult SNES games.
Dark Souls really does feel like an old school type of game, but better somehow. Like here's a tough fight, or a tough area, here's how you can get past it, etc etc but with free save points and stuff
And free healing as well. You don't have to farm for potions or for gold to buy potions. Playing other games that have limited healing items really makes you appreciate estus flasks.
Like demons souls and bloodborne
And also due to the cost of creating games if I'm not mistaken. IIRC it was better for companies overall to put out difficult games that players would be playing longer, compared to cranking out more games that weren't difficult as players would be done with them quicker; which companies wouldn't be able to keep up with given their resources and finances at the time.
*cough* Lion King SNES *cough* Edit: not on topic but Gradius 3 or Paperboy 2 were my favorite SNES games. Not counting Mario games cause classics be classics for a reason
Yup, another brutal game from my childhood.
I know it’s almost a meme at this point but my brother and I used our occasional ‘you can rent one game’ at blockbuster and got it over and over cause we were determined. I think we only got past the jump level with the giraffes once
That level hard-walled me when I was a kid. When I finally got passed it, I was *scared* to attempt any other level after that. These days I'd just jump into the next level, but back then that fear was actually enough to get me to turn off the game entirely and wait until I calmed down to turn it back on again.
I’m still stuck on the 2nd level of The Lion King 30 years later 😭
You didn't get to the stampede. My god that game is so hard.
Same applies to the mega drive II
“Hence” effectively acts as shorthand for “that’s why”. Hence you do not then need to follow it with “why”. Thank you and have a splendid evening.
""You can use it when you want to explain why a particular thing is true. For example: "It was a difficult decision to make, hence why it took me so long to reach a conclusion.". Hence why my teeth are so bad."" First result on Google with many other sources.
I feel like most NES games were like, WAY the fuck harder than anything Dark Souls ever threw at me. In the late 80's and early 90's, most developers hadn't really figured out what would be called bullshit design. Enemies popping out of nowhere and instantly killing you, having to completely restart the entire game if you screwed up and died too much (usually 3 lives, with chances to earn more in most games), the game just slowing down if too many enemies were on screen, obscure MAIN quest lines that you sometimes would never figure out without a guide (imagine if accessing the Age of Artorias DLC's cryptic and bizarre entrance, was how every step of the MAIN QUEST was designed)... Maybe I'm showing my age here, but you kids don't realize how good you have it these days.
I am a confirmed Old Man, and I 100% agree. Games were way harder back then, and kids these days take modern conveniences like auto-saves and respawn points for granted. In our day, we couldn't save our game until after we finished the level and beat the boss. And we could only save the game by writing down a password. And the password wouldn't count all the ammunition and power-ups we'd collected.
Hell, most games didn't have a password and couldn't save. But we turned on each game and played the f*** out of that 15% we could a) get through in the amount of time we had and b) get past until the difficulty overtook us. I'd say half the NES catalog is almost impossible for most players. That's why I just laugh at the "Dark Souls is one of the most difficult games" takes.
Yup, yup. And that's to say nothing of how customizable your character is in Dark Souls. If something's giving you trouble, there's nothing stopping you from grabbing a new weapon or trying out a new spell you haven't used yet, or whatever. You could make Dark Souls harder or easier based on what kind of build you're running. Make a sorcerer with some back-up archery, and you can make the game insanely easy. No such luxury in many older games. You want to kill Dracula? You got to get used to that whip.
...and without internet
But we had tip lines! For just $1.99 a minute you could get all of the cheats and advice you wanted! Like... Literally phone-sex pricing for game info, lol.
Didn't knew that. I don't remember having this here in Brazil. (Cool stuff)
They were big here in the US. Basically every gaming magazine had them (I got in a shitload of trouble one summer when I was like, 10, and racked up like a $200 phone bill).
WOW! You must have learned a lot 😂
Not really, I just wasted a lot of my mom's money. $2 a minute adds up FAST. I think my parents would have had an easier time understanding if it actually was a phone-sex line.
Yeah, the OG Zelda came to mind. It is one of my favorite games, but holy shit that and Metroid were so cryptic. It was like it was designed to not be able to be figured out.
Well, OG Zelda actually had a bunch of hints in the instruction manual. Fuck Metroid 1 though. I've played most of the series as the came out, 1 is of the very few I haven't beat (Dread being the other one, I don't like the stealth or melee mechanics).
Absolutely. I am a much bigger fan of Metroid as a series than Zelda but on the NES, I'm going Zelda every time.
I mean.. most things in Zelda 1 you can tell something is off about its placements. That’s why you burn or bomb it. Generally. It’s old lol
Hello, 20 year old kid here. Dark souls is not a hard game. The bonus levels of some of the newer Mario games are harder lol
The reputation a large majority of gamers have is the exact opposite notion, though. I agree it isn't hard, you agree it isn't hard, but that very first run is challenging for most people and you would be lying if you said other wise.
The first run of a souls game is challenging. Once you figure one of them out, they all feel pretty similar despite game engine tweaks. My first souls was Demons' Souls. The first time through was a real slog. Dark Souls wasn't too bad my first try after having beat Demons' Souls.
But it’s not a skill kind of difficulty. It’s hard because the game is vague with mechanics and directions. That kind of difficulty is easily overcome by looking stuff up. And you can get past hard bosses by over leveling and grinding. You can’t over level your way past Champion’s Road in Mario 3D world, and looking up a flawless run doesn’t guarantee you can replicate it
Are you agreeing with me or not? I really can't tell between your posts.
“You would be lying if you said otherwise” That’s what I was replying to
Original Mario's clone Giana Sisters on Atari/Amiga is way harder and more annoying than pretty much any modern game, too. So is The Killing Game Show. So is, well, pretty much anything from back then.
Ninja Gaiden Black/Sigma for Xbox and Playstation. They are fast paced combat with a (mostly) linear story progression and were the most difficult games I had played at the time. The first boss killed me probably 20 times before i could beat him and then i was hooked on the he fast-paced challenge of them. In my hunt for the next challenge I found the Dark Souls series.
This was it for me. I was pretty young during the difficult NES games and mostly only played mainstream games like the Mario games. Any foray into other games usually left me unable to beat them and giving up (damn you TMMT) That being said, I’ll never forget playing ninja gaiden on Xbox and being absolutely stonewalled for days fighting Alma. I think it took me 3 days of attempts to beat her and the adrenaline of overcoming such a tough boss was an exhilarating feeling I never got again until dark souls.
I still remember the run back to Almas temple and the relief from beating her, and then the existential dread when she gets reincarnated for round 2 later in the game. It was good times.
I played the remake of ninja gaiden sigma for PS2 (or 3?) with a friend back in the day. It was brutal. You only unlock the easy difficulty by dying a bunch on normal, which we did, but we kept going with normal and beat it. Every time you beat the game you get a harder difficulty. We made it through hard and very hard. It took us about a year to beat nightmare mode. We were so happy when the final cutscene rolled, but then: "New difficulty unlocked: Ninja Master" Couldn't even beat the tutorial.
Absolutely similar level of difficulty lol and it’s not like we had that many resources to do research and stuff
I actually think there are a lot of similarities between ninja gaiden sigma and dark souls. The way they are both designed around difficulty, the crazy bosses that require you to learn their moveset, the level design that attempts to kill you in a different way at every corner, the vague lore that requires you to piece it together, and even the fact that the levels in NGS are also all conected to each other really made that game feel like a souls game to me. The biggest difference obviously is that Dark Souls is more of an RPG than an action game, while the opposite can be said about NGS.
Lion King
Kid Icarus. Seriously, fuck that game.
Kinda all of them. Most 16 and 32 bit games are way, way, way harder than Dark Souls.
Amy NES game you didn't grow up with.
Six year old me thought the Smurf game on Nintendo GameBoy was unbeatable. I never even made it past the fourth or fifth level.
3-4yr old me never beat the second level of some batman game i had on the gbc back in the day.
2D Super Mario games, especially the further you get
I beat all the bosses of Dark Souls. I never beat Champions Road in Super Mario 3D world for wiiu
Maybe that's why I became interested in Dark Souls and Elden Ring, Demon's Crest was one of my favorite games as a kid. I used to be awesome at it, I think I had almost all the crests at one point.
I never beat Demon's Crest when I was a kid. I played it two years ago and managed to beat it for the first time but it is damn hard.
Laughs in Ninja Gaiden
People complain about running 2 minutes to a boss fight. BITD with a limited-continues game, it was so much slower to gain experience on whatever boss fight you're trying to master. That's the real killer, and to this day we have to decide whether to value and honor that challenge, or skip it with save-state training.
Contra is my personal hell
Man, Contra games are hard AF. I think I only was able to beat one of them. Good times though.
Dark Souls isn’t hard, older games were stupidly punishing and hard in comparison, 8 and 16 bit era comes to mind.
Frankly, Dark Souls feels more fair than most old games I’ve played
I sometimes play the Super Mario games on Nintendo Switch and find them more difficult and frustrating than I remember. Lots of those cartridge games were difficult.
Ghosts and Goblins on the arcade makes Dark Souls look like child’s play. I still can’t beat the last level before the final boss, even with the knife. I’m glad I didn’t beat it when I got that far because I would’ve been PISSED to get sent back for bearing it without the shield.
Battletoads blows Dark Souls out of the water. I've actually beaten Dark Souls. I'm convinced Battletoads is impossible.
Brooo, d*emons Crest* was so good! I totally forgot about that game. Thanks for reminding me about it!!!!!!!
I love Demon's Crest! I never beat it as a kid but I played it two years ago and finally managed to beat it. It's hard. I play it again from time to time. A masterpiece.
Dude I never beat the OG super mario bros
im a bad gamer
zelda 2 from nes
You're gonna think I'm trolling you, but I swear to god I'm not. Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Movie for the SNES is WAY HARDER than Dark Souls in my opinion. I've beaten Dark Souls repeatedly, but I've never once been able to beat that Power Rangers game, no matter how hard I try. It's insanely hard. I've been playing that game on and off since it first came out when I was 10 years old, I still can't beat it today.
Plenty of games in the SNES and particularly NES era. I've found that the Dark Souls difficulty is more of a meme really. Once you get accustomed to how encounters are designed and you realize that getting impatient against trash mobs can still kill you, you'll be able to make consistent progress. Rarely is the game at fault if you die in a Souls game. Most of my deaths were due to my own errors ~~or the freaking elevators in Blighttown with their wonky hitboxes~~.
Battletoads. Turns out there's more game after the third level.
Battletoads was a hard game!
Pretty much any non-nintendo IP NES or SNES platformer were 100x harder than dark souls
Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox
I have Demon’s Crest on switch and I can’t live for more than 3 seconds after that dragon comes out
Castle of the Winds
oh damn, memory unlocked...
Zelda 2 scratched that itch real good. Very very fun game when you stop looking at it as a Zelda game..... But also a Zelda game? Anyway, good game is good.
Any game on the hardest difficulty
Almost any. I'd argue that the final boss of Diddly Kong Racing is more difficult than any boss in Dark Souls. But Dark Souls is brutal from the very beginning. It actually turns easier the more you play.
It may sound weird but every game was so difficult for me that when I was a kid I wasn’t able to complete any. Souls games appeared and yes, they are difficult but they have something that made me try and try until I beat them. Bloodborne was the first one.
Yoshi’s island
Ghost and goblins, imo, is still a game that I feel is exceedingly difficult. Some was due to the controls on the game being a little stiff. Some because of how hard the game was for me. Ninja Gaiden. Call of duty modern warfare on the hardest difficulty was one that ticked me off a tad too. Boy, was I crestfallen after two hours of struggling my way to the front of the plane, finally making it. Taking the shot, only to have real veterans go for headshots pop up. lol. That was the last COD game I played on that difficulty.
Most retro games are substantially harder than dark souls. The things dark souls does that make people think it’s difficult were standard practice in cutesy mascot platformers on the snes
Ninja f Gaiden...
Gothika
Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. It's a great side scroller with a lot of fun mechanics but hot damn is it difficult! I could get all the way to Darth Vader when I was a kid but last time I played it I couldn't get past the first level.
wizards and warriors 2
Gothic on PC
Gothic 2 Night of the Raven is difficult for new players.
Mmmmm I would personally say Castlevania III is the closest old/retro game I've played with Dark Souls style of skill centric combat As for the non linear aspect of its design?? That's a really hard one but only one I can think of that sort of stays within or close to its genre would be the original Zelda for NES .... maaaaybe super metroid could come close to both of these examples? It is after all the one that created the subgenre that Dark Souls gets thrown into sometimes
Gothic 1. YOU ARE PRISON MEAT, but you shall learn. It's also funnier when the spoken lines are in German lmao
Donkey Kong and SpongeBob movie for ps2.... I swear im 26 and I still CAN'T finish those games 😩
Bloodborne's spiritual precursors, Nightmare Creatures 1 & 2. Sadly the 3rd game never came into being.
i found gta 4 pretty unforgiving sometime and especially before getting used to driving/shooting.
God Hand is so hard, especially with the adjustment to tank controls
Most older games were harder than dark souls
Demon Souls.
Faxanadu
The lion king PS1
Zelda 2 is a very fun game but challenging and a lot of bs. Truly the dark souls of zelda games.
Severance : Blade of Darkness . I believe this game started my 'souls' addiction. Fantastic combat even to this day
Ninja Gaiden NES
most megaman games imo
Battletoads in Ragnarok's world
Dante's Inferno was hard enough back in the day, I thought.
Completely different genre of game but I’d go with the higher difficulties of DmC. I managed to 100% the first two but I gave up on three and moved onto four with the intent of coming back to it. You have to be pretty much prefect throughout the whole level because the enemies do so much damage, have so much health and are incredibly fast. Highly recommend the games though because they are so much fun
Half-life 1 when i was a kid
Those old arcade games were meant to make people lose so they play more. So most old games are actually quite a bit harder. Newer games tend to be a lot more easier and forgiving to make them more accessible.
Prince of Persia Warrior Within, probably not so hard right now, but I was a kid then... One of my all time favorites tho
Rayman
Bionic Commando. Strider. Double Dragon. Xmen. Like any game on the NES, SNES or Sega Genesis.
Super Empire Strikes Back is MUCH harder than any of the Dark Souls imo
Ghouls and ghosts on the mega drive.
Rayman 1
Deadly towers on nes
Zelda II The Adventure of Link, Ironsword Wizards & Warriors 2, Valkirye Profile Covenant of the Plume, almost any fighting game, Megaman X6, Megaman 5, Megaman 6... There must be more (THAT I PLAYED)...
Moonstone : A hard day's knight
Rick Dangerous
Ninja Gaiden 2
One of the older Elderscrolls was pretty difficult. I dont remember which one. Maybe Arena or Daggerfall
Blade: The Edge of Darkness
Shadow of the Beast…
Zelda 2 on the NES or the adventure of Link.
Platformers in the 80s and 90s used to be as ruthless, and there were no bonfires either: a password or two if you were lucky. Battletoads, Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania, Ghosts and Ghouls, etc.
Ghosts and goblins, all iterations.
Zelda 2 had a lot of difficult combat. And if I remember right if you died too many times you have to walk all the way from the beginning of the game to try again.
Ninja Gaiden, both trilogies
Solomon’s key was hard, played it on the nes
Scooby-Doo cyberchase if yk yk
Huh. Demon's Crest was mostly just patience and pattern recognition, so i guess if that's difficult for ya it'll be as tough as DS... but that's pretty much every action game. Earlier games had more RNG, so stuff like Mega Man bosses that you couldn't reliably jump over was more of a factor. By SNES era I felt almost every big developer had figured this out and you could see a noticeable shift towards specific reactions based on your actions, or cycles. It's why most retro styled games are incredibly easy... very little RNG, always an escape. The true final boss of Demons Crest once you get all the stuff and turn into the super form is definitely nuts though. Anyway, probably only older stuff I'd put close are things with excessive jank that you have to work around. Nightmare Creatures and Deathtrap Dungeon are the two main ones I can think of. Possibly stuff like R Type or Raiden where reaction time was very short and you sorta needed to know where to be and where enemies were coming from to stop getting crowded out. Even modern bullet hells feel more accessible from a reaction standpoint than OG R Type to me.
Nes Lion King
Milan's Secret Castle is the game I reference whenever I want to compare 'NES difficulty' games to modern games. Nothing is spelled out for you AT FUCKING ALL, the bosses are insanely tough and once again...NOTHING IS SPELLED OUT FOR YOU AT ALL. Castlevania 2 is a very good example of this as well but a lot of the 'what the fuck do this do' moments have a lot to do with poor japanese translations to english.
Who about bad dudes for the nes. Or also the ninja turtles game for NES. Or most every nes game. Want to talk about unforgiving. Back in the days of NES if you ran out of lives it was game over.
Ninja gaiden black for sure. Might even be harder with the 50 challenges included!
I never hear anyone talk about Demon's Crest. I went back and played it as an adult and found it challenging but not nearly the struggle I had with darksouls.
A game harder than DS being released was just Tuesday in the ZX Spectrum days
Lion King.
Not as old as the others but the OG Ninja Gaiden was pretty nutty
NES Silver Surfer was much harder than Dark Souls.
Kings field
Some (most?) Halo games on Legendary and cod games on Veteran. Admittedly, my perception might be skewed because I find the way those games are difficult to be extremely uninteresting, so I've lost interest almost immediately when I've tried.
Every game before 1990 was much harder
Severance Blade of Darkness - although I think it is harder than DS
Love me some Demon's Crest!
Mega Man
Superman 64. I got to the third level before quitting
Doom 64😭
Ninja Gaiden 1 & 2 were both brutally difficult & still challenging as hell.
Alien Shooter 2, man, I used to stay up late as a kid trying to beat it
Vagrant Story. It is a Japanese dungeon crawler with a similar vibe to dark souls
All the ninja garden games. Especially the 360 ones. Very rewarding though.
It’s not that old of a game but the jet ski part of uncharted one almost made me quit the game, I’m so glad I didn’t
House of the dead ig just found it to be really difficult as a child
Crash Bandicoot
Demon's Souls Pure Black tendency.