Note: Elsword is rarely stated here, it’s a concept I’m going through into several posts. There will be several posts, to both ridicule and praise on difficulty management. For now, I’m thinking of making one for Elsword, and one for Dark Souls. The post today is not about either, it’s about the global concept.
I’ve been playing Kritika more than Elsword recently, and I generally watch something on youtube while playing. Normally I just watch the two videos twobestfriends release and then I’m done with Kritika for the day(that’s like 40~60 minutes).
However, I was watching dashiegames this time around and luckily he was playing Donkey Kong Country 1. At least, lucky for me, as one of the levels is the reason why I made this blog to begin with(though I forgot about it and wrote about Elsword stuff instead, lol. And that level was one of the first instances where I felt a difficulty spike.
For the most part, there really was no difficulty spikes in most famous games you’d get as a child(for the snes/genesis(if you had trouble, then get gud). Either the game was just easy once you understand the simple mechanics or the difficulty was just inched up a bit at a time.
To skip all the extra exposition because most people are probably bored by now, the level is called Mine Cart Carnage. You might not know the name, but one look at the stage and most will go, “fuck that stage”(if you played DKC of course). Which is pretty funny because it’s one of my favorite levels. I heard many say that level has a bs difficulty spike. However, it’s just more that every level beforehand was basically for babies. Meaning, the whole first world is more of a tutorial and to familiarize with the controls more than anything else.
The emphasis on the level is reaction and input speed, meaning testing your reflexes. If you can’t beat that stage, how’re you going to handle the 2-4 or 5? Thus, instead of having slight trouble on every stage, they chose to give a big gap on one stage to build the player enough to handle several more stages. Several games have it, it’s just more obscure and generally way easier.
For example, in Devil May Cry 3, if you can’t beat the reaper mini boss on stage 2, you’d never stand a chance against Cerberus(the boss on stage 3), teaching you that guns have shit damage and you better learn how to dodge. Mega Man Legends’ first boss taught you better learn how to dodge and circle strafe(but since it was more of a child’s game, it’s not to an extreme(A better example of this is the first boss in Dark Souls, his moves are well telegraphed and easily dodgeable; It teaches patience is a much better virtue to have in that game than plain damage)). Anyways, I’ll talk about other examples in other posts, I might make a couple just on Dark Souls and what I think about a couple of levels.
I’ve talked about Elsword’s difficulty before(I think it was the first post), I’ll be putting more of those eventually.
I also find the next level after carnage rather interesting. On one hand, it’s way easier than the previous one; It’d be safe to say that the level should’ve been 2-2, therefore giving a save point before Carnage, making it much more manageable. On the other hand, while it doesn’t provide any beneficial factors game wise, it does present a few beneficial psychological factors that I find Dark Souls does at times. After beating Carnage, you’re welcomed to an easy stage, thus giving you a feeling that you rule in this game. However, this also brings overconfidence, and leaving the player with that feeling for too long is detrimental, thus the level right after that is hard as balls again. Just like after you beat the Taurus Demon in Dark Souls, you feel like a badass and you see a few undead soldiers and just laugh because they’re pathetic, only to be owned by the Drake shortly after, pushing you off your self-made pedestal.
In short, I don’t find Carnage to be a difficulty spike, but a difficulty curve. It’s not like FFX-2 where the difficulty just goes up and never goes down after a got past a good part of the game. Difficulty spikes just causes frustration and anger, and most importantly blaming the game instead of yourself, causing a break in both immersion(Immersion is used differently from how most people see it, it’s an act of having fun and dissolving the area around you, not about thinking your part of the game itself; That’s more of a delusional issue like escapism than actual immersion, but both can be seen as immersion). A difficult curve is both praising and ridiculing the player. Such as making fun of you and saying you’re not good enough to beat the level(such as many instances in daily life) and then praising you when you do succeed in the task.
It’s also a parenting style I admire, there’s a lot of entitled children today that only think about themselves, placing themselves on a pedestal and seeing as them as an amazing being instead of seeing everybody as amazing to the point everybody fits as a cog to a much bigger concept.
Mainly a Visual Novel Blog now 