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Was Cuphead as hard as a FromSoftware game for those of you who played it?
- Thread starter ScOULaris
- Start date
I've always found CH to be much harder when playing with someone else. The bosses get more health and with how much shit is going on it sometimes gets confusing on who is who even though one is red and one is blue, plus the other person may just not be great at it.
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You can beat Nioh but struggled with Astrobot? Now I've heard it all. I'd hate to be a game designer in charge of balancing the difficulty curve. There's just so much variation between players.
If I remember right and it's been awhile so maybe I am wrong, I don't think you can even proceed to the 2nd (and 3rd) areas in Cuphead unless you beat the bosses on the previous area on Regular. You can't do the last part at all on Simple as you said, but I believe you have to beat everything on Regular to even reach that point.
Mix of two reasons:
1.) Games had gotten so piss easy and hand-holdy that at the time Dark Souls released it's difficulty stood out
2.) There are a whole swath of gamers who never gamed on 8/16-bit consoles, so they missed out completely on the eras when shmups (still the gold standard for difficulty in my eyes) and sidescrolling platformers ruled supreme.
You can get to the 2nd and 3rd Islands on that difficulty, you just can't get to King Dice and The Devil on Simple.
Trial by glowing magma. If you manage to beat Cuphead youll go from sucking to good at platformers in one playthrough. Good luck though.
I was watching that video posted in this thread and it seriously looked like someone who never played a video game before when I watched him play Cuphead. I played the first stage at my friend's place back at launch, and I looked like a speedrunner by comparison.
I really should get back to Cuphead.
I have finished every From game except from Sekiro and Elden Ring (didn't buy it) or DS3 (was too bored of the Souls formula by that point) and aside from a couple of points, didn't have a lot of trouble with them. But Cuphead broke me. Like actual "fuck this beautiful looking game right to hell" rage quitting bad.
It sucks that I'll never be able to finish it, but it has a lot of more to do with me than complaining about it being "unfair" or whatever. It's just downright impossible for me to beat.
It sucks that I'll never be able to finish it, but it has a lot of more to do with me than complaining about it being "unfair" or whatever. It's just downright impossible for me to beat.
Ah I couldn't remember I always thought King Dice stopped you when you tried to move forward without the contracts, guess I was wrong. Thanks :)
Yeah once you beat all the bosses King Dice will stop you when you try to enter the casino since you don't have the contracts when playing on Simple.
Fair enough, I'm like that as well.
Over 50? That's a lot. I rarely retry over 20 with most bosses in the Souls games.
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Yeah, but even then. With Cuphead even a mediocre player will take like, what? Maybe 10-12 tries maximum on their first time with the hardest bosses in the game?
To me the average player is gonna spend WAY more time retrying boss fights in a Souls game than in Cuphead.
Different skillsets needed for these games, they're not comparable. At least compare it to other run 'n' gunners like Contra.
And people really gotta stop using Souls games as the baseline for "HARD MODE GIT GUD GAME FOR [i[REAL[/i] GAMERS". Difficult games were around before Fromsoft were even a thing.
Many obstacles/enemies in the games can be dealt with cheesing/overlevelling/item preparation/etc.
Can't do any of that in Cuphead.
And people really gotta stop using Souls games as the baseline for "HARD MODE GIT GUD GAME FOR [i[REAL[/i] GAMERS". Difficult games were around before Fromsoft were even a thing.
Many obstacles/enemies in the games can be dealt with cheesing/overlevelling/item preparation/etc.
Can't do any of that in Cuphead.
At that point they might as well summon, level up, use magic, overpowered weapons and such. Various bosses in the Souls games can be taken down quickly(like Pinwheel) and using their weakness also helps to bring them down a bit faster(fire, lightning, dark, etc).
In Dark Souls 2 it took me like 1-5 tries with most bosses(as I one shotted quite a bit) and a few took over 10 tries. With Cuphead, I rarely 1 shotted the bosses and often took me 10+ with most of them and this is a genre I play a lot as well.
I just don't have the needed reflexes to beat that game. This is why I hate parrying in games with a mighty passion, unless it's something really lenient like in Skyward Sword. After like 60 tries I just said "fuck it" and stopped at Lady Butterfly.
But with Cuphead my muscle memory quickly kicked in and I eventually beat every boss, sometimes with less than 20 tries.
Nah, this is not standard at all. Someone like Timu is an exceptionally good player and he still took 10+ tries on some Cuphead bosses. Same with my bf, who retried some Cuphead encounters a lot but beat Manus on first attempt. And he grew up with the NES and playing shmups and all
"Mediocre players" will not even beat the first area of Cuphead
Along with the fact that even though you have to do good there are still many advantages in how to play the Souls games while Cuphead has a disadvantage with any weapon you use, limited powered ups, is harder in co-op(due to boss health increase and platforming stages) and requires you to do it mostly well.
Based on our metrics, 8-15 tries is around the average for people beating a boss in Cuphead. There's exceptions (Robot, Dragon, King Dice), but we found the people that get hung up the most are the ones that refuse to change weapons/charms or tactics.
I think there might be some discrepancies on the value judgement of what is "difficult" here too because some people base it on overall time and some on tries. Like, if you're going to beat a boss in Cuphead, it's going to happen in about 2 minutes on that try. So all previous tries are going to be less than 2 minutes long. So at an average of 10 tries to beat a boss, you're looking at about 10 to 20 minutes per boss. Most bosses in Souls games (unless you're wildly overpowered) take between 3 and 5 minutes to beat, not including run-backs. So a FROM boss that takes you 5 tries to beat (which isn't many) is going to be ~30 minutes counting run-backs.
There's also probably a mental struggle thing here too ....we found that bosses that had their ph3 (or 4) be their toughest phase actually had people feel like they were harder than the ones that had tougher phases 1 or 2. So even if they took more overall tries on the bosses with tougher ph1/2, the ones that had tougher ph3 fights were responded to as "harder" (like the Dragon and Robot, and the last section of the Piers stage). This makes sense, as it can feel like trudging through parts you've mastered over and over to just get to the hard part only to die quickly, which exhausts people mentally. I think this is a reason why some people responded negatively to Dark Souls 3's bosses that keep getting harder as the fight goes.
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I knew it! And that average is probably including a ton of relatively unskilled players since millions of people have purchased and played Cuphead at this point.
So I'd wager that on the top end (so most ERA members, perhaps), the average attempts would be much lower in the 2-5 range, no?
That's why I just can't comprehend people thinking that it's harder than Souls. Not only are the attempts fewer, but they are far shorter with instantaneous retries as well.
Actually, I'd love to see metrics comparing overall completion % between something like Dark Souls 3/Elden Ring and Cuphead. I'd bet the bank that Cuphead's is higher.
It's kind of tough, i guess I would say that we are kind of throwing out the outliers. People that beat stuff in 1 or 2 tries (which is exceptionally rare, but does happen) and then about 10-15% of people that have difficulty grasping basic mechanics and just give up on the Veggies or Slime after 30 tries.
But those outliers thrown out, yeah, the average is an average. We get the 3-5 try people and the 20-25 try people and the 10 try people right in the middle.
While Cuphead is easier for me, I think Souls games are easier for most people. Cuphead is a very acquired taste type of game. It's arcade era run and gun in a beautiful package.
Also, I'm a completionist with Souls and run and guns. I don't think all Souls completers are beating the ultrabosses.
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Interesting stuff. I'm a data analyst, so I'd love to dig into whatever performance metrics your team has gathered from the playerbase over all these years since Cuphead initially released. Must be fun looking through it.
I assume looking at such metrics is how the overpowered nature of the charge shot was discovered in the early post-release days? I ended up coasting through Islands 2 and 3 with the charge shot in Cuphead's 1.0 release all those years ago, and then I wasn't surprised to learn that it had been nerfed not long after my initial playthrough. When I revisited the game on Switch years later I was forced to make more use of all of the game's weapons/perks, situationally. So the game's balance is in a much better place nowadays than it was at launch due to changes like that.
I mean I beat basically every Souls boss before Elden Ring within 3 tries, so I can't speak for most people but I don't think the average tries per boss would be that much higher
No, it's not.
And since we went there, there are plenty of Souls bosses I did at my first or second try since I played Dark Souls 1 the first time. Five repeats would be pretty close to the upper limit in most cases.
I can't remember once where it happened with Cuphead. When I got away with 6-10 repetitions was when the game was treating me with kid gloves.
No, it's not? What the hell is this even supposed to mean?
And even if it was the case, "I'm incredibly familiar with this stuff so it comes easy to me" wouldn't be a particularly compelling argument, anyway.
It would just go to prove that it's not as as easy as you are making it out to be.
Well, good for you, but the question wasn't if you could overcome Cuphead (which I couldn't, so I gave up on it) but if it's comparable to Souls games in difficulty. Which it is in spades and then some more.
I don't even think their difficulty levels are anywhere near close, in fact. I find Cuphead entire orders of magnitude more punishing than ANYTHING From Software ever published. To a point where I'm simply NOT enjoying working toward the level of mastery the game is expecting for me.
That never happened with any From Software title.
Based on Steam Achievements:
Cuphead
Dark Souls 3
Elden Ring
Annoyingly, there is no universal achievement for beating From games, it's all broken out into individual endings. I chose the ending for each game with the highest percentage to get a rough estimate, but the actual completion rate is higher.
Cuphead
Souls Saved
Complete the game on Normal
14.2%Dark Souls 3
To Link the First Flame
Reach "To Link the First Flame" ending.
24.2%Elden Ring
Age of the Stars
Achieved the "Age of the Stars" ending
25.3%Annoyingly, there is no universal achievement for beating From games, it's all broken out into individual endings. I chose the ending for each game with the highest percentage to get a rough estimate, but the actual completion rate is higher.
The charge shot damage was an unfortunate combination of a late development stage tuning pass on boss health/weapon damage that missed the Charge shot coupled with a bug in the way damage was applied to bosses that actually exacerbated the issue on Xbox more than PC (the Charge shot "nerf" only slightly changed its damage on the PC version, while it changed the Xbox version's damage a lot, as it was doing way more damage than the already overpowered PC version's). It was never supposed to be like that, but let's just say that the months leading up to the original game's release was not good for anyone involved and, well, shit happens.
Bro, I beat Malenia high as a kite, meanwhile I can't leave the first island on cuphead completely sober.
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Whoa, really? I played it on PC, and I always figured that the 1.0 charge shot was just as busted there as on Xbox. Using it almost exclusively I one- or two-shotted most Isle 2/3 bosses on my first playthrough back then.
On my Switch playthrough a year or two ago I made use of nearly every weapon, depending on each boss's positioning and attack patterns. I did so mainly because I had always heard about how drastically the charge shot was nerfed since I had last played it.
Hmm, interesting. I'm part of those who did it on Normal as well!
If we're using metrics, I think completion rates would be far more interesting than number of tries, which don't paint the whole picture.
lmao, there it is
I'll have your bank, thanks.
There are plenty of Souls games bosses that took me 40 to 50 tries, and Cuphead bosses that took far far fewer. See how anecdotes work. The fact that people have to grind/level, co-op, or cheese to beat From bossess would mean they are also harder than people say they are.
Edit: Let me pull back, it's unnecessary
I'll give you that Souls games give you a lot of resources to make it easier if you want. Sort of like Megaman with the boss weaknesses. Don't Souls games also increase boss healt with co-op? I haven't played co-op in either.
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TBH I don't know if they do(I'm assuming they don't from what I can tell), but for that the weaknesses and powerful weapons/magic/items helps mitigate that problem when playing with other players who can handle them.
Souls bosses do have increased HP in coop, but typically the additional players DPS still outperform it, in addition to splitting boss aggro/AI and reducing hitboxes (since you can easily attack their back turned etc). There are very few exceptions where coop makes a boss harder (the one that comes to mind is Midir).
Splitting aggro is the reason summoning makes Souls bosses much easier. It is the true cheat code. Many of the toughest bosses are relentless, where part of the problem is finding time to heal or when to strike. Split aggro solves this. The bosses can't really pressure two or more people effectively in order to prevent healing or someone from just circling around to their back and wailing on them for an extended period.
Most of the Souls bosses are just not designed for co-op, as the vast majority of their attacks are based on focusing aggro on a single target, rather than area of denial (like Cuphead). So as soon as you add a second unit, the bosses struggle as the boss can usually only attack one player at a time (whereas Cuphead bosses mostly don't care).
That said, in Cuphead, if you're decently competent at parrying, you can effectively have infinite health if you keep resurrecting your partner.
Also, in Cuphead, when your partner dies, the boss doesn't keep their additional health like they do in the Souls games.
That said, in Cuphead, if you're decently competent at parrying, you can effectively have infinite health if you keep resurrecting your partner.
Also, in Cuphead, when your partner dies, the boss doesn't keep their additional health like they do in the Souls games.
From I can always find a way to cheese. Once Cuphead started getting bullet helly I had to nope out I just can't do that sort of stuff. And it sucks because I really like the art and music, it's the kind of game back in the day I'd use cheats in lol. Maybe I'll get it on PC one day and find some mods
I seem to fall fairly in line with the stats provided by Teeth. I feel like I'm going to end up full of false confidence from this thread when I start Elden Ring (in about 3 weeks - finally!) and get my ass handed to me by the first boss I face.
I think there's an assist mod to make the game more forgivable on PC.
I know that mods are possible bc I'm using one to see the bosses life bar lol