Which of the major Soulsborne titles do you think is the hardest overall?

[crespo]

I voted sekiro but I'm going through DS3 for the first time and some sections are quite difficult.. Just getting through Lothric and Grand Archives is pretty hard, and the DLCs are apparently the hardest parts of Souls games.

I didn't have much issue with the 20 or so hours i had in Nioh, though I've seen the DLC and that looked brutal.

Anyway, Sekiro still takes it just because of the lack of overleveling and summoning. The mechanics themselves are my favorite of the Souls games but unless you git gud at deflecting, you're screwed.

 

[Deleted member 37739]

I've beaten Dark Souls 1, 2, 3, Nioh and Bloodborne, most of them more than once and for me Sekiro takes it by a country mile - as many have said the lack of summoning, leveling or build variety makes it an uncompromisingly brutal experience (one that I admittedly couldn't overcome).

Yup. The number of times I said out loud "this isn't fun" while playing Sekiro could fill an entire novel. Emotionally exhausting, and at least for me, the wins I eventually eked out against the bosses weren't satisfying, I was just relieved to be done so I'd never have to put up with them again.

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I can very much relate - something about the rhythm of Sekiro seemed to rob hard-won victories of any satisfaction and I cannot explain why.

 

[almutama]

If its just first playthroughs, then sekiro no question. Though I found the ringed city dlc of dark souls 3 incredibly difficult. It came to a point where I was just running through the area without fighting because I felt so hopeless there.

 

[Rurunaki]

Dark Souls 2 because of the tacked on multiple bosses gimmick. Sekiro started hard and became the easiest of all when you stop playing it like a Souls game and learn to be aggressive with the parry (very generous window).

 

[Yossarian]

I was stuck on Orhpan of Kos in Bloodborne for three solid weeks. One of the hardest bosses of any game I've played. Only first stage Alma in NGB has given me this kind of trouble before.

My first Soulsborne, Dark Souls, took me a year or so on and off to complete, including DLC.

Dark Souls 2 and 3 weren't a problem, though I've yet to finish all their DLC.

I haven't finished Nioh. While it can be quite hard, it's mostly because everything around the gameplay is an absolute slog.

I've been playing Sekiro on and off since launch and I'm only up to the Guardian Ape. I think this is because there has been a lot of gaming distractions since it released, but I'd say it's also the hardest of the bunch.

I adore Sekiro, but there's only so many times I can bash my head against a wall before needing a break and coming back later.

 

[Deleted member 13645]

I've played all of them except Sekiro. Of those, I found Nioh the hardest. Something about the bosses felt quite a bit harder to read and get the patterns down for, like the vampire(?) bat lady boss. She messed me up so many times that I eventually just summoned and let them handle it, I really struggled to read her tells.

 

[ScOULaris]

Dark Souls 2 because of the tacked on multiple bosses gimmick. Sekiro started hard and became the easiest of all when you stop playing it like a Souls game and learn to be aggressive with the parry (very generous window).

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That's why Sekiro is far and away the easiest game in this genre, IMO. It all revolves around parrying, but the game's parry window is among the most forgiving I've ever seen in an action game. Not only that, but there is very little risk since a mistimed parry still results in a block with some extra posture damage, no big deal.

Compare this to something like Bloodborne or other Souls games where split-second dodging or rolling is paramount, which has always been difficult for me since the intersection of bosses' large, wild attacks and the i-frames of my dodge is oftentimes very hard to parse.

 

[PlanetSmasher]

I can very much relate - something about the rhythm of Sekiro seemed to rob hard-won victories of any satisfaction and I cannot explain why.

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Honestly, a lot of it to me was just that so many of the fights felt like they dragged on forever, with enemies taking huge amounts of counters or hits to KO while they could kill you in one or two solid hits. Combine that with the game's tendency to psych the player out with bonus health gauges and extra phases and I just started getting worn the hell out.

One of the things I LOVE about Nioh is the knowledge that if a boss crushes me, I can go back to it later with better gear and flatten it into the ground. For Sekiro, the final onus of success is ALWAYS your ability to be good at parrying, and parrying just...isn't really my playstyle. I don't have that kind of mindset when I approach action games. As a result I always felt like I was eking out a tiny win against an incredibly overpowered threat rather than developing my own personal strategy for taking a boss down or exploiting flaws in their AI the way I do in a Souls game or Nioh.

 

[eXistor]

Sekiro, that final goddamn boss...I'd say the game is overall pretty doable, but there are a few more bosses I had some serious trouble with, more so than in any other From games.

The rest are pretty doable and I played them all offline without too much trouble. Except Bloodstarved Beast in Bloodborne, I couldn't get past him for days.

 

[effin]

Easily Sekiro for me. Even things like the Bloodborne dlc didn't feel nearly as difficult as Sekiro was.

I think it was mostly cause Sekiro has the most brutally steep difficulty curve out of all the games - for me anyway. But also is the game where that curve flattens the fastest once it clicks.

 

[Deleted member 37739]

Honestly, a lot of it to me was just that so many of the fights felt like they dragged on forever, with enemies taking huge amounts of counters or hits to KO while they could kill you in one or two solid hits. Combine that with the game's tendency to psych the player out with bonus health gauges and extra phases and I just started getting worn the hell out.

One of the things I LOVE about Nioh is the knowledge that if a boss crushes me, I can go back to it later with better gear and flatten it into the ground. For Sekiro, the final onus of success is ALWAYS your ability to be good at parrying, and parrying just...isn't really my playstyle. I don't have that kind of mindset when I approach action games. As a result I always felt like I was eking out a tiny win against an incredibly overpowered threat rather than developing my own personal strategy for taking a boss down or exploiting flaws in their AI the way I do in a Souls game or Nioh.

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That's actually a good summation. Sekiro absolutely has this disconnect between the main game and the boss fights, because so little of what you achieve outside the boss arena affects what happens inside it. In RPG driven games, you sort of invest in the solution to the boss problem (like bouncing hard off Blood Starved Beast and then coming back with a leveled-up Saw Cleaver and a fistful of Fire Paper). In Sekiro, a few items can help (Shurikens against Lady Butterfly, for example), but it's never what you'd call transformative. You have to just... keep up: dodge, jump, parry, slash, parry, parry, mikiri, slash, slash, etc... Somebody once described it to me as a Rhythm Action game and that always stuck with me.

 

[ukas]

Sekiro is the only one that I actually finished out of all of those. Took me two solid evenings just to beat the last boss. No boss fight should ever be like that.

 

[PlanetSmasher]

That's actually a good summation. Sekiro absolutely has this disconnect between the main game and the boss fights, because so little of what you achieve outside the boss arena affects what happens inside it. In RPG driven games, you sort of invest in the solution to the boss problem (like bouncing hard off Blood Starved Beast and then coming back with a leveled-up Saw Cleaver and a fistful of Fire Paper). In Sekiro, a few items can help (Shurikens against Lady Butterfly, for example), but it's never what you'd transformative. You have to just... keep up: dodge, jump, parry, slash, parry, parry, mikiri, slash, slash, etc... Somebody once described it to me as a Rhythm Action game and that always stuck with me.

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One of my favorite little discoveries in Bloodborne was the realization that a Fire Blood Gem on a socketed Tonitrus turns ALL OF its damage from Electric to Fire, which makes it unbelievably effective against beast-type enemies weak to fire damage. The rematch against the powered up Blood-Starved Beast in the Chalice Dungeons took me less than a minute because of my Flame Tonitrus.

The ability to customize your playstyle and figure out strategies that work for you is one of the biggest boons of the Souls series and Bloodborne to me, and Nioh follows in a similar respect but with even more heavy emphasis on the RPG elements due to how MUCH stats effect everything you do.

 

[Deleted member 37739]

The ability to customize your playstyle and figure out strategies that work for you is one of the biggest boons of the Souls series and Bloodborne to me, and Nioh follows in a similar respect but with even more heavy emphasis on the RPG elements due to how MUCH stats effect everything you do.

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Look forward to hearing your thoughts on Nioh 2.

 

[balohna]

I had someone tell me he could never finish a Souls game or Bloodborne, but did finish Sekiro and it was his GOTY. Weird to contrast that take with this thread.

 

[PlanetSmasher]

Look forward to hearing your thoughts on Nioh 2.

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The beta this past weekend was an interesting experience. Nioh beta demos always feel super unbalanced because they're still testing difficulty and enemy stats, but I managed to make it through the first stage and Matsunaga (actually killed him with 0 damage at one point!). The Twilight Mission wanted me to grind way too much for my patience and my gear at the time so I played it for a little while and decided to hold off until the final game.

But overall I enjoyed it. It took me a little while to start getting my Ki Pulse muscle memory back and I'm still not 100% solid on Yokai Abilities yet, but I just love how it feels to move around in Nioh games. It's not the same kind of weight and "presence" as a Souls character has, but I'm fine with that.

 

[DontHateTheBacon]

Sekiro — because it's not about your character growing, it's about you, the player, growing and learning. Can't really just grind your way through a fight and I don't remember if there is an option to summon but I don't think there was, right?

 

[zma1013]

Dark Souls 3 for me. Enemies act like they were pulled from Bloodborne but you have the slower speed and less forgiving abilities from Dark Souls. If you want a "hard" mode, try playing a straight magic caster from the beginning when virtually everything is heavily resistant to magic and you cast as fast as a sloth moves.

Nioh was stupidly easy past the first couple bosses. You get powerful in that game very quickly, everything after is a breeze. 1 shotting bosses was the norm.

 

[Nightfall]

Probably Nioh, I couldn't even beat the first boss :(
I managed to do that with each and every FromSoft game at the very least.

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Haha same for me. Couldn't beat the first boss in Nioh but at least a couple of From Software bosses.

 

[DNgamers]

Dark Souls 3. I don't even know why but this game gets me. It's always fair, though and probably my favourite one, next to Sekiro and Bloodborne. <3

 

[AfarZ]

The Hardest is probably the first one you play, once you get the feeling of the game and the way it all works its down hill from there... untill something new shows up (it always shows up)

 

[Haze]

Wow I'm really surprised Sekiro is running away with this to the degree that it is. To me it's one of the easier ones because once you lock into the game's rhythm, that skillset applies everywhere in the game, pretty much. Maybe it has a steeper learning curve than the other games? Or maybe it's that people struggled with how it demands you play it the way it wants to be played, unlike with other Souls games. But to me that makes it easier because every boss, every challenge is designed around the exact same tools the player has. I might be forgetting how challenging my first playthrough was but on replays it definitely stands out to me as the easiest.

I voted Bloodborne because it's very demanding from the start and opens with a VERY hard skill check in Gascoigne. Compounded with the fact that blood vials don't replenish on death (bad, bad design choice imo), it can feel the most punishing. It also has shit like Frenzy and a lot of GOTCHA moments. And some of the chalice dungeon bosses are pretty damn hard. It also ramps up difficulty more brutally than most of these games in NG+ cycles, particularly for the DLC. I think it's kind of a wash but Bloodborne to me is the most punishing/mean of the lot so that's my pick, even though I don't think it's super hard and it's actually pretty easy to out-level a lot of the challenge, at least on NG. NG+ cycles are a different beast, the DLC kicked my ass up and down the first time I played it on NG+2.


I agree with this. Sekiro has almost no GOTCHA moments (except those kite-flying Tengu maybe?). It's a very straightforward challenge. No long runbacks and the most lenient death mechanics of any of them.

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That's how it felt to me. It was initially very difficult because I was approaching it like a soulsborne game.

once I unlearned that behavior and began approaching the game on its own terms, it eventually became a very doable experience aside from a few speed bumps like the final boss and demon of hatred.

Sekiro doesn't throw many curveballs because it hones in on a specific style of play which is applied to every encounter.

 

[Joelington]

Sekiro for sure; mostly because it's an action game as opposed to a RPG.
In all the other titles, challenge can be alleviated via level ups and gear upgrades. In Sekiro, your only option to beat a difficult challenge is to literally, get good.

 

[Chumunga64]

I actually don't think it's sekiro since it's a loss less obtuse and I think it has way less bullshit stupidity that stuff like demons souls and Dark Souls 1 have

 

[Hystzen]

Sekiro was the only one I had no fun doing and didn't feel relief or satisfied after finishing a boss more thank god that's done. It just so dull and frustrating due to fact you only can play one way

 

[Goldenroad]

It's obviously the one that doesn't allow any form of co-op or summoning. It's Sekiro by a mile.

I also feel like, if Sekiro is a "Soulsborne" game than so is Ninja Gaiden Black, and in that case, Ninja Gaiden Black wins.

 

[Kasey]

Dark Souls 3 DLC approaches bullshit territory.

 

[BZL8]

It's the most difficult on the list, but I personally wouldn't categorize Sekiro as a Soulsborne game. It has the essential "git gud" philosophy of Soulsborne but its not an action RPG like the rest of the lot.

 

[Onikage]

No. I don't care what the poll says. Sekiro was the easiest of them all.

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lol, if you don't care don't create one.

 

[casnix]

Having platinums in all but DeS, I'd have to say that Sekiro was the hardest for me. After that... maybe Bloodborne?

 

[BebopCola]

My first playthrough of Dark Souls I was such a Sword and Board guy, it was the only way I could play while being simultaneously thrilled and extremely stressed out haha. After a playthrough as a tank I started branching out until now I can play any build in Souls with relative ease.

Bloodborne was a steeper learning curve as there was no blocking, but your Hunter is so agile that I was able to adapt pretty quickly.

I was only able to give Sekiro a little bit of time, but it's combat against bosses/mini-bosses was really brutal for me. I suck at rhythm/parries, so it was tough going. I am looking forward to giving it some proper time so I can learn properly.