Wrong way to make a hard game

[Axem Black]

Seriously? So I will preface like many people complaining that I am no stranger to the series and I don't think anyone plays this series without wanting a challenge. But this isn't how you do it.

I've been playing Legendary from the start and yep, it's hard. After putting hours into I started to get better and learn the levels and it felt very rewarding at times. But by the time I got to the 3rd level (having beaten all options before it), I couldn't help but feel like you need to cheese a lot of this game with magic. Which isn't appealing to me. There are a lot of just cheap areas, and cheap RNG that affects the game. Having enemies that have like a 5% chance to do something very different from there normal pattern feels like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ "gotchya!" moment.

I regret to say that I finally gave up and decided it wasn't even that fun at this point. Red Arramer is invincible except for when it does certain attacks? His swoops are just 50-50 guesses (unless you have inhuman reactions)? Honestly, all of the cheap areas in this game make me feel like they don't even play the game on Legendary. I figured I wouldn't even bother with it, lets just go to Knight and try to have an actual good time with the game, right?

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wow. There is no difference except you can take one more hit? Are you serious? There is only ♥♥♥♥ level design but you can take one more hit? No reason to even really play on Knight. The extra hit helps but it doesn't fix the bad design. I have to say I'm not going to bother beating this one which is sad. From what I've seen in this discussion board, a lot of people agree too.

[Chocos Ramabotti]

Like I said, to play truly on knight and to become gifted with triple as much checkpoints and an extra hit, you have start the game anew on Knight. (not recommend once you play on legendary)

The red aremmer on level 3 is avoidable, there is a route where you don't meet him. It's hard but definitely manageable.

[Axem Black]

I did start a new game, I did not lower the difficulty of a pre-existing game. It's a new save file, am I missing something?

[oldschool_BR]

Well, I have to agree that Legend is exaggerated. But then again, did you start the previous games on Professional? I'd guess not. The truth is new players should not start on Legend. The checkpoints are far from each other and there is a lot to memorize. It's also not like previous games did not have very very cheap sections, such as the unavoidable boss patterns in the first game, or the unavoidable genie who knocks you down in ghoul's stomach, in Super Ghouls.

I do have one issue with the game, which is the limit on the speed you can throw weapons. Previous games did put you in bad situations, but most often than not, you could get away with fast button pressing and reactions - and knowing the patterns. In this game, you are often screwed, depending on the situation you put yourself into.

[Axem Black]

Super Ghouls is nowhere near as hard as this, none of the other games are, except maybe the NES one? I never played it. no this is another level

[CosmikOtter]

I'm with you on this. This feels almost like a meme game- like the developers knew the public's perception of the classic games (and likely watched AVGN) and figured all of the annoyances brought up were what made them good.

I seriously cannot help but feel like the red devils were buffed because somebody on the team read that he's seen as one of the most annoying enemies in video game history and figured "hey, let's give them all more I-Frames and assure that magic doesn't do ♥♥♥♥ to them this time around just because. And while we're at it, let's make sure that you can only damage them when they're swooping." Which, as you said, might as well be 50-50 guesses. Yes, red devils were erratic in the classic games but at least they could be taken out with magic and didn't have so many I-frames. In Ghouls n Ghosts, they actually had recognizable patterns and nine times out of ten you could actually duck under them whenever they swoop. No such rhyme or reason here.

Glad to see the truth is coming out about this game. It has some good points, but it's poorly designed and for $30 it's just inexecusable. Doubly so when you consider that Cursed Castilla costs significantly less, could actually pass for a late 80's arcade or Genesis game and has been out for several years.

[CosmikOtter]

Originally posted by Axem Black:

Super Ghouls is nowhere near as hard as this, none of the other games are, except maybe the NES one? I never played it. no this is another level

I feel like this game is just a part of an on-going trend with remakes/reboots of classic franchises. Just making the revivals harder for the sake of making them harder without really understanding the other components that made the source material great.

Streets of Rage 4 added that annoying "break" mechanic when it comes to combos, Crash N Sane Trilogy tried to fix something that was never broken (the controls/physics), Crash 4's devs thought that everyone loved missing one box in the classics and decided to put them in the most obnoxious places to assure players would get that feeling/live the "100/101 boxes" meme through every single stage of the campaign. The Alex Kidd in MIracle World remake also had somewhat wonky controls and collision detection at launch, but I'll give the dev props- they actually did something about it instead of just abandoning the game post launch.

I genuniely don't get it.

[Axem Black]

Neither do I. I hate the Red Devil change. It's dumb, I never used the magic much anyways, but before you could steal a few hits when they were taunting you if you predicted where they would dodge a lot of the time. They could have increased health or made the dodge harder to predict, but they take the worst option and make them actually invincible unless they're doing an attack.... That's awful.

The annoying thing is it took me many hours to find out if it was a good challenge or a bad one, and now I can't refund it.

Originally posted by oldschool_BR:

Well, I have to agree that Legend is exaggerated. But then again, did you start the previous games on Professional? I'd guess not. The truth is new players should not start on Legend. The checkpoints are far from each other and there is a lot to memorize.

If you read you will see I went down to Knight only to find out that they just give you an extra hit and potentially more checkpoints (which I didn't use). But the awful game design is still there in terms of the boss attacks, enemy spawn frequency and just over all design of the levels. It feels awful if you don't use magic, and still pretty bad even if you do.

[DJMatus]

Wait till you get to the shadow stages on Legendary.

[HyDrone]

I've been seeing the RNG enemy claim come up quite a bit. What parts do people mean? I'm on Citadel Approach on Switch (and I did both paths), and I can't think of many, and I've died a lot on each level:
-Tornado enemies (which are in a short segment)
-Turtle stack at the beginning of the windmill level (Had some bad cases, but generally you could work around that fine)
-Fire foxes (which I believe come waves chosen from a few presets that you can learn)
-Yeah; Red Arremer properties are poorly balanced.
-Citadel Approach randomly selects enemies, but only when you hit the traps (which I think is a cool concept, but the execution sucks because most weapons can't avoid hitting the traps, and you really have to rely on medusa/frog).
Overall, the RNG that gave me the most trouble was just weapon pickup related.

[Deathraven13]

Originally posted by Axem Black:

I've been playing Legendary from the start and yep, it's hard.

Play on Squire difficulty then if you lack the skills to beat the game, honestly it's like if you wrote in a devil may cry forum "This is not how you make a game hard, I've been playing in hell and hell difficulty right from the start and dying in 1 hit isn't how you make a game hard".

Why do you play on legend if you can't beat the game in that difficulty ? The designers made the Squire difficulty settings for players like you to learn how a die and retry work, you'll learn the patterns then once you beat the game on that difficulty you can raise the difficulty a bit and after completing the game once again you can try Legend, so don't blame the devs because you can't complete the game on Legend first try just play on Squire and you'll be fine. ;)

[HyDrone]

Originally posted by Deathraven13:

Originally posted by Axem Black:

I've been playing Legendary from the start and yep, it's hard.

Play on Squire difficulty then if you lack the skills to beat the game, honestly it's like if you wrote in a devil may cry forum "This is not how you make a game hard, I've been playing in hell and hell difficulty right from the start and dying in 1 hit isn't how you make a game hard".

Why do you play on legend if you can't beat the game in that difficulty ? The designers made the Squire difficulty settings for players like you to learn how a die and retry work, you'll learn the patterns then once you beat the game on that difficulty you can raise the difficulty a bit and after completing the game once again you can try Legend, so don't blame the devs because you can't complete the game on Legend first try just play on Squire and you'll be fine. ;)

You're the one who has to learn to not use fallacies.