In that horrible spot of being too disliked to be directly iterated on and to unique to be replaced by the other eleventy-billion similar action rpgs from the era
I was just thinking about this the other day and realized most of the original NES games were the first rogue-lites so to speak, and even more punishing since you could completely fail entire areas and not retain any progress or power up whatsoever.
woah woah WOAH gonna have to stop you right there my guy, and share this loud and proud. go play THIS instead. you will NOT be disappointed. it is SO good.
I was literally just talking about that Lion King game last week. I never even made it to adult Simba without cheating. Part of me wants to try now but I have a feeling it would be a miserable time.
Totally, replaying games today with a rewind function, it really surprised me that games that took me months to finish as a kid can actually be finished in 2 hours or less in many cases haha
I would respectfully take the opposite position.
I beat Battletoads on original NES (no save states) many times over; both straight through and with warps.
The trick was, on level two, repeatedly bounce the birds of the side of the level to get near infinite 1ups.
Soulslikes have gotten way out of hand. I love the souls games but so commonly there'll be just some completely unrelated thing and people will go "oMg dArK sOuLs!!!!!" like sorry what does Hollow Knight have to do with souls at all?
I mean apart from the mechanical similarities e.g., when you die you lose all your currency used for levelling up, which you must retrieve or lose forever, the strong focus on bosses and telegraphed attacks. There’s also the narrative elements of navigating a dying world.
I understand that but those are all just mechanics in action games? The only thing to me that is even vaguely dark souls is the generally sad narrative and the losing currency on death. The rest of the game is mechanically nothing like the Souls games - not even in the same dimension
I deem something souslike if you lose currency on death, has a bonfire like system, and the "normal" difficulty is meant to be challenging especially in boss fights. Jedi fallen order is a great example of a soulslike using those systems and almost nothing else the same. Hollow knight has bonfires
i know there's this artist tool and steam, where it has models of feet you can pose feet to use a reference when drawing, it was tagged as a "Souls-Like"
I've always said the best sequel to the original NES Zelda games was Dark Souls
Far more than any of the later Zelda games that's for sure. Not that they're bad games, but they definitely didn't have the "here's a sword, good luck!" vibe of exploring a world full of enemies/secrets with no guide
This was one of two games thar I had on GBA (the other being Mario Kart), and let me tell you, I spent my whole infancy trying to beat that thing blindly. Thanks to Zelda II, I learned that you could just find a guide on the internet to beat a game.
Also, on the years that followed the first time I beat Zelda II, I started to speedrun it on my GBA without knowing what a speedrun was at the time. I knew that Hyrule map like the palm of my hand (this is what happens when you're poor and you only have two games)
Yall would love Ironpineapple's youtube series of finding soulslike in the most vague sense of the word lol. Some boil down to "has dodge roll? Good enough 🤷♂️"
Games back in the day hated you. I was just thinking how old rpgs would let you do the work of leveling a character and then kill them. Cause screw you, I guess.
One of the best (worst?) leaks of Nintendo was one claiming "they're redoing Zelda 2 but as a gritty realistic M rated souls like" and while I never believed them, I was hopeful for a nanosecond.
I recently went back and tried to beat it without any cheat codes. Technically I did but only by heavily abusing the save and restore feature in my emulator. Was still hard.
Comments
Kingdom Hearts Level 1 Proud Mode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5-dKL4S898
I beat Battletoads on original NES (no save states) many times over; both straight through and with warps.
The trick was, on level two, repeatedly bounce the birds of the side of the level to get near infinite 1ups.
Far more than any of the later Zelda games that's for sure. Not that they're bad games, but they definitely didn't have the "here's a sword, good luck!" vibe of exploring a world full of enemies/secrets with no guide