ADMITTING DEFEAT - WHEN A VIDEOGAME BREAKS YOUR SPIRIT

Count me among the ranks of people who can't play Dark Souls. I can DO hard games; I managed to fight my way through The Evil Within (which can be UNFORGIVING, but fairly so) and somehow managed to beat Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth even WITH bugs that rendered the music mute and a critical enemy INVISIBLE (the boat fight... never again x_x ), but... not when a game has as seriously complex a system as Dark Souls and tells you nothing about how it actually works.

I STILL don't know what becoming undead is supposed to do to you other than make you ugly as sin. I STILL don't know the rules of equipping stuff or even what half my inventory does. I got past the "tutorial" (which only tells you how to fight shit, not how anything WORKS) and kept getting my ass handed to me in the area immediately after because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Maybe I'm not hardcore enough, idk, but it really soured my enjoyment and I ended up reselling it because I didn't have the patience to learn the mechanics from scratch. :C

A slightly sadder story involves Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete. Guess who saved after the final dungeon point of no return underleveled and with no way to replenish her items before reaching the final boss... yyyyyyyyyyyyup. >_> And I especially raged since the game is SO GOOD, easily one of my favorite PS1 titles, but no, I didn't finish it because I thought the game would have the decency to warn me before I ventured past a point of no return!

...I think that game is solely responsible for all of the annoying "Are you SURE you want to leave school??? Are you SUUUUUURE???" messages I put in Prom Dreams. >_____>

Dark Souls is the kind of game that needs to be understood, in terms of how it works.
When the player understands its mentality, he'll also realize that it's yes challenging, but far from "hellishly hard to complete".

The first Dark Souls and Demon's Souls were SOOOO damn difficult to complete for me at first.
DAMN ORNSTEIN AND SMOUGH, SERIOUSLY. I've never again met bosses as difficult as these two in my whole gaming life (no, wait, well... the Nameless King in DS3 and the Orphan in Bloodborne aren't a joke either).
So yeah, I've dropped these games for a while again, and again and again until I managed to beat them. It took me a very long time. Now, I can play through them and all of the other games in the franchise without feeling that "Ornstein and Smough" level of frustration.
I started to love the series, its challenges and the way I feel everytime I kill a boss, complete a quest or gain a certain piece of equipment. The Souls games manage to give me a strong sense of accomplishment that few other games manage to give me.

It's simply the times we live in. Most of today's AAA games are not even challenging anymore, they are absurdly easy. So when a little challenge comes up, that game becomes the "hellishly difficult, prepare to die, it's over edition".

Another game that broke my spirit, a loooot of years ago, was Gothic. I was very young, so that might've been the case.
Gothic was the kind of Open World that NEVER felt the need to tell you exactly what you had to do. You could forget about a marker in the map telling you where the next step in completing a quest was. All you got was a description of the area\monster\object that the quest giver required you to find\kill\take and then it was all up to your exploration\investigation skill.

It was also difficult for me to join a guild at first. The first Gothic was set in a "prison colony", and all of the NPCs in there were evil. They were really bad guys. :(
A miner could just ask you to go fetch a powerful amulet with him, only to beat the crap out of you with his comrades once outside of the camp and steal all of your ore (the currency in that game) and your weapon.

It was a pure RPG with its rules and it never EVER wanted to let you know everything. You had to find out things on your own.

So yeah, I dropped that game too, only to go back on it some years later and finishing it and all of its subsequent chapters (Gothic 2 and 3). Great series that one as well.
I dropped Gothic 4 because, oh my god, what the hell was that... thing that's supposed to be an RPG?!

If it makes you all feel better, the first time I fought Ultimecia in FF8 she utterly slaughtered me after Griever was summoned, and I didn't beat her until about 15 years after first playing it (think I finally beat it in 2014).

Well, yeah. It's true that is not a bad thing to have games that are easy to beat.
It all comes down to what kind of games you like and, as you said, the time you can invest on those. I was just saying that Dark Souls' difficulty level is simply "challenging". It's not impossible to beat, it's not hell on Earth, it's just that the player, as you said, needs the time to understand how it works. Nothing new.

I like challenging games, but of course I also play and enjoy a lot of games which are not hard or challenging at all but have other good qualities. There's a lot of variety, every game has its own scope. There are games made for players who are willing to invest a lot of their time on them and games made to be played and finished without too much of an effort, like you said. And that's a good thing.

Although, yeah, I do believe some games are... WAY too easy, but mostly because of some faults in their design. Easy in a bad way.
For example, I remember I played two games lately which had a tutorial for their final boss fight.

Tutorial. On final boss fights.
Needless to say, I defeated those bosses without a sweat... because the game downright told me how to beat them.
Now, when I see things like this I can't help but think that something went horribly wrong during the design process of that game.
It's bad game design for me. I should figure out by myself how to handle situations like these. Whether it turns out to be easy to do or not it's fine.

But even if the boss itself would've turned out to be easy to defeat, at least it would've given me the feeling of having accomplished something on my own. A text telling me what to do doesn't give me satisfaction. And, imho, this is a requirement that can't be missing in a game.

As for the rest, I totally agree with you, Hexatona.
And, I will never stop saying this but please, forgive my bad English if you can (I'm sure I made some mistakes here and there)^^'. It's always difficult for me to properly explain myself.

The ones I remember from recent times are Risen 1, Risen 3 and Jojo Eyes of Heaven.
It's even worst to see things like this in games like the Risen saga. It's a saga made for a niche audience, but that wanted to appeal to everyone, without really pleasing anyone because it's an hardcore game filled with things like... this tutorial for final bosses, simplistic mechanics and such. It's bad when a game can't shape up it's own identity.

There are more games like that and not only when it comes to giving tutorial at final boss battles. They'll come back to me and I'll be sure to... rant about them a bit when they do. xD No, well, I don't think this is the place to do that.