For me, Cuphead was much harder than the 3 From games I actually completed (Bloodborne, DS3, Demon's Souls remake), mostly because in those games you can grind and level up to proceed without actually "gitting gud". Cuphead has no leveling up, you jut have to be gud.
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Was Cuphead as hard as a FromSoftware game for those of you who played it?
- Thread starter ScOULaris
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I finished the Cuphead DLC yesterday (and it was great!) but even though I've beaten all the FromSoft Souls games at least a couple times each I think they're harder than Cuphead, personally. One thing is that with Cuphead you just have the one move set and a few different weapons to consider. The Souls games largely have so much build variety and options that you can easily become overwhelmed and underpowered. Plus, the longest Cuphead fights only demand 2-3 minutes of staying sharp whereas some fights in the From games can take more than double that. Also no runs back to the boss in Cuphead :D
no, i think from games generally have both a higher floor and a vastly higher ceiling in terms of difficulty
one could posit that you could also become more OP in them i guess just because cuphead is relatively static but yeah. i probably died on single bosses in bloodborne and sekiro about 4x longer than it took me to beat all the cuphead dlc
one could posit that you could also become more OP in them i guess just because cuphead is relatively static but yeah. i probably died on single bosses in bloodborne and sekiro about 4x longer than it took me to beat all the cuphead dlc
Builds in Souls are basically bonus, they aren't needed at all, they are basically an add on if you want to make things more suited to your playstyle.
OK?I watched this video last night.
Top 10 Hardest Soulsborne Bosses (Including Elden Ring)
Today we rank the top 10 hardest bosses of the Souls Series, including Elden Ring, Sekiro, and Bloodborne. Let me know your top 10 list down below!Bloodborne...youtu.be
The person in the video has played every FromSoft game extensively to the point of completing many of the games' hardest bosses under self-imposed harder conditions. They've clearly played through all of FromSoft's games many times over on their stream while also making separate YouTube content on the subject as well.
In this video, he talks about taking 50, 70, even over 100 tries to beat some of these bosses the first time around.
That is ABSURD, and I don't believe for a second that even a novice player would take nearly that many attempts to beat Cuphead's hardest bosses. And yet, such an insane amount of time being spent on harder bosses in FromSoft games by an experienced player is normalized to some degree.
Hell, here I am saying that FS games don't come that naturally to me, but even I've never taken more than maybe 10-15 attempts on some of the bosses that always make those lists. That, to me, is already the mark of an insanely difficult boss fight.
A) 1 anecdote supporting your claim vs countless different anecdotes in this thread alone (I beat Orphan 2nd try, Midir is not hard for me, etc.)
B) This guy actually admits to deliberately hamstringing himself repeatedly even on first attempts. He says he refused to use Bloodhound Step and shields including against Malenia (and, presumably, spirit ashes like Mimic Tear), he mentions his # of attempts for a BASE level run for Maliketh, he says Orphan took him a moderate amount of tries the first time but he struggled only with a replay with a different weapon (and despite that, put him at #2 for some reason)...
C) He is probably either exaggerating his number of attempts (70 tries for Abyss Watchers? come on...) or he's the kind of player where he "throws" the fight if he's not playing perfectly or satisfactorily or something, usually in the name of Youtubing/streaming.
In other words, this is far from a typical player. Even you admit that you are not particularly skilled and still don't take nearly as many tries as this guy, so using this particular Youtuber to support your argument is whack. I might as well use the Dean Takahashi clip as proof that Cuphead is super hard. Look, this one guy can't even do the tutorial, QED
Yep, I don't think the average player will do self imposed challenges on games like this, they would want to use all the tools they can do to manage or else they would get stuck a lot.
I played Cuphead and loved it. Was a nice challenge. My brother got me to play the Demon Souls remake and I quit that game after about 4 or 5 hours. Demon Souls didn't feel harder as much as it was just irritating. Can't just have fun fighting a boss, no we'll make you take this stupid "shortcut" to get to the boss every time because fuck you. Stuff like Returnal, Cuphead, and HollowKnight were fun and challenging. Demon Souls felt like the developers where spiteful towards the players. Just a wholly un-enjoyable experience. If soap in your dick were precipitated into game form.
I watched two people I know play the early part of Elden Ring. Starting as a samurai with an Uchigatana and knowing that levels on anything but vigor early on are near worthless makes a massive difference compared to starting as a warrior and wasting levels in endurance and strength.
"More HP make you harder to kill" is not exactly groundbreaking meta.
That's the thing with Elden Ring. More vigor make you significantly harder to kill, but more endurance for more armor does basically nothing and more strength for more damage does nothing until mid- to late-game.
Man, all I know is that your post inspired me to go and play Cuphead for the first time in two years on Expert to try and stress all the chaos you're describing and to try and explain the most important skill I was leaning on to clear all four islands.
If you're just going to "Put something I didn't say or imply into quotation marks to suggest what I was TRULY saying," I'm just going to block and move on. I'm sorry for reading your post and trying to describe my mental stack with an example I knew you'd be familiar with.
I think From games are harder. Like, I had to put Bloodborne and Sekiro down for months on end because I genuinely could not progress, but Cuphead I beat in a week or two. It's hard, and there are certain bosses I despise, but it's not too difficult to figure out how to proceed if you get in trouble.
It really doesn't tho, yes in Elden Ring stats matter more than in other Souls but it isn't that big of a difference, heck I beat almost every Souls boss in the other games within 3 tries only putting everything into Vigor, Endurance and Strength, with the starting gear and all and never felt at a disadvantage, because:
1. Armor is useless 90% of the time, you take almost the same damage
2. Starting weapons upgraded do good damage in all games besides Elden Ring
3. You should always focus on Vigor either way, that's the most important stat since Demon's Souls launched in 2009
Now this is something I always agree with! I rely on Vigor a lot!
I laughed at how big my HP Bar was in my NG5+ of DSIII, it can get laughably big
I'd agree with some earlier posts that it's largely a subjective matter. Personally I feel like I have difficulty tracking multiple things at the same time which happens frequently in Cuphead. In the From games you're typically dealing with a single boss doing individual moves in sequence. In Cuphead and other bullet hell games tracking everything the boss and boss arena has going on just seems to overwhelm my thinking and force dumb errors on my part. I'm sure with practice I could improve in that area, but as it stands I find From games more manageable.
Various Souls bosses have predictable patterns as well, heck there are bosses where I don't get hit much to not getting hit at all. You also get more time to learn what bosses do in Souls games too.
For me, navigating in a 2d world is far easier than navigating in a 3d world. Also, in Souls, you have to manage your level. You could be under leveled with your character stats, or your weapon/magic could be weak. The boss could be weak against magic but you're a melee build. There are many ways Souls games can be more difficult. In Cuphead, everything is more equal.
And once you grind and overlevel it becomes a lot more manageable so you have more options and ways to overcome most encounters after some time and that's not counting summoning either. Well, for bosses they can still be weak against a melee weapon with elemental stats like fire, lightning and such(I would know as I used them a lot in Dark Souls 1). I would argue you would have to make Souls even more difficult with restrictions on your build...but then you can do more with it and tank it out with more health and healing items and spells or use stronger/overpowered weapons, magic and such so it can make them easier on yourself(though they won't be easy games but not nearly impossible).
As someone who went from Elden Ring right into Cuphead, I found the latter to be challenging but fair and most of the times I failed I could easily see my mistake and correct it for the next try. On Elden Ring there were bosses that had these ridiculous, random attacks that were almost unavoidable and I when I did beat them I felt I got lucky.
Cuphead is a series of 2 minute gameplay segments that are overcome through pattern memorization with instant restarts for every segment. It should be pretty obvious that overcoming each of those segments individually should be easier than running the sadistic gauntlets Fromsoft creates.
Except it's not because not everyone has the motor skills to overcome those overwhelming patterns and From's games don't require much in terms of motor skills... read the thread
Which may sound a reasonable premise but it's made absolutely hilarious by how that's completely NOT the case.
And even the claim that "it's just pattern memorization" is some daunting bullshit that has been already addressed across the thread.
Zelda bosses are "just pattern memorization". You learn what you have to do and doing it becomes trivial.
Cuphead bosses requires to learn a not-particularly-reliable pattern (as the elements of randomness in the mix are not trivial), to have reflexes, speed of execution, spatial awareness and an inane amount of patience for when you'll be repeating these paltry "two minutes" 50 times in a row.
Which feels orders of magnitude more "sadistic" to me that having to exert the same type of skills in a FAR more forgiving form when challenging your typical Souls boss.
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Souls bosses are also just pattern recognition and in the newer games the checkpoint are right next to the boss most of the time. Even in older games most of the time the boss run was just tedious not actually difficult. You just ran past all the enemies.
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Right. Valid points.
Then again, I can't help but get the strong vibe that most of the users coming up with summaries like "sadistic gauntlets" to describe From Software games are talking more about their reputation than out of any direct experience or genuine attempt to stick with them.
Cuphead makes retrying quick and painless, and you never lose any progress. There is no real concept of "builds" in cuphead except swapping a charm. The complexity is dramatically lower. Difficulty can mean a lot of things but Cuphead was a game I could get into and beat, while every Souls game I've tried has caused me to bounce off it primarily because I would get stonewalled early and it was unclear what I was doing wrong or if I was doing wrong and retrying was often painful.
I'm willing to accept the idea that individual fights in cuphead might require more narrow and accurate execution of core skills (especially near the end of the game) but the concept of "difficulty" is a very complex thing. I think Cuphead being dramatically simpler makes it less difficult for me, even as a total 2d platforming scrub like myself.
I'm willing to accept the idea that individual fights in cuphead might require more narrow and accurate execution of core skills (especially near the end of the game) but the concept of "difficulty" is a very complex thing. I think Cuphead being dramatically simpler makes it less difficult for me, even as a total 2d platforming scrub like myself.
I think cuphead is way easier but souls allows you to circumvent difficulty with OP builds and such.
Is it really though? Which bosses do actually need the smoke dash? I can't name but a few
OP
OP
None of them need it. They are all designed to where you can beat them without it for sure. Especially now with the DLC there are several other perks that are as useful or even more so than the smoke dash.
I'd assume this is a really subjective question. I love 2D platformers of all kinds, so Cuphead was definitely easier (though still challenging) for me, but I'd assume those who don't usually play these sorts of games would find it harder than Dark Souls. I definitely have more trouble with FromSoft games, though they are also generally longer games, so maybe that adds to how daunting they can feel.
They are. Unless they think the Iron Passage represents every boss trek in the series.
Cuphead fights are much harder, BUT Elden Rings feels harder just because I fucking hate having to walk all the way back to the boss.
Can you name which Elden Ring bosses have a long walk back to the boss?
Here, I'll help you. These are the major, harder bosses in the game:
Margit
Godrick
Rennala
Radahn
Rykard
Valiant Gargoyles
Draconic Tree Sentinel
Morgott
Fire Giant
Godskin Duo
Maliketh
Placidusax
Commander Niall
Mohg
Mohg redux
Malenia
Godfrey / Hoarah Loux
Radagon / Elden Beast
Godrick
Rennala
Radahn
Rykard
Valiant Gargoyles
Draconic Tree Sentinel
Morgott
Fire Giant
Godskin Duo
Maliketh
Placidusax
Commander Niall
Mohg
Mohg redux
Malenia
Godfrey / Hoarah Loux
Radagon / Elden Beast
Out of those, only TWO do not have a nearby Grace or Stake of Marika: Rennala and Placidusax. They are also not particularly hard and rarely cause people to get stuck in a retry loop. One of them (the harder one of the two) is also 100% optional and secret.
So, whatever.
🤷♀️
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Fuck no I don't remember their names. Lol. I couldn't tell you anyone's name
My point is that what you describe barely ever happens in the game. 99% of the bosses don't have a "run back".
Not that those "runs back" are ever that big of a deal, but that's another topic...
Ok. I'm going to be 100% honest and no making fun of. I completely forgot that the last time I played Elden Rings, about 30 hours in, I realized that I kept respawning at sites of grace, and never realized what the stakes were and used them. I think I just hit X over and over. So, everytime I died, like from big guy on little horse in the desert, I had to go through courtyard, up stairs, down an elevator onto beach, and through teleporter to fight again. It was a pretty big doh moment that I forgot about until now....
Vigor in a game where you can dodge attacks is more of a difficulty modifier than it is a necessary stat. For every boss you don't get hit in, the vigor stat was basically useless.
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Cuphead. Ninja Gaiden Black on Master Ninja or really any of them but 3 is my bar for difficulty. Cuphead can match it on some occasions. From games are all significantly below it imo. There's nothing in a From title that has tested my actual skills like Cuphead or Ninja Gaiden. You can brute force From games to a degree. The other two not really.