What do you dislike about soulslikes and games with soulslike elements?

Something related to gameplay, lore, story - whatever.

I dislike the huge onus that new soulslikes put on difficulty. Dark Souls was notoriously difficult for people new to the genre, and it definitely is punishing and difficult, but not to such an extent as players and media make it out to be. It's a pity that difficulty is what most contemporary soulslikes focus on, disregarding storytelling and level design instead. I enjoy the challenge for sure, but at some point, it just gets tedious to be stuck on a boss for multiple days. You're just glad it's over when it is.

What about you?

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Boss grab attacks. I've never once missed a roll and been locked into a long instant kill animation and said "wow that was so fun"
- I wouldn't even be so mad about them if the hitboxes were better on them but they're always so jank. I don't know what it is about grab attacks that makes them always required to have fucky hitboxes. So I get hit by the minute long instant kill animation from six feet away, teleported into the grasp of my opponent.
  
  EXACTLY! And it's always some looooong drawn out shit where you get lit on fire and jammed up the bosses ass then fired across the boss arena into a running blender
Artificial difficulty, controls that are designed to be frustrating unless you get the input perfect after multiple attempts.
It’s not skill but muscle memory and luck that leads to success. I equate it to a monkey being zapped enough times until it learns to push the correct sequence of buttons to get the piece of food.
Let’s add to this: Bosses that are so huge they go beyond your screen limit. Helps with scale but then the arm you can’t see one-hit kills you from somewhere you didn’t expect like some reverse deus ex machina.
Losing your progress for being unfairly killed in those ways should be added to this list.
There used to be a time where being unable to save your game unless it was at a specific place or time was considered bad game design. I’d happily go back to appreciating that instead of this horrid disrespect of my time.
- Let’s add to this: Bosses that are so huge they go beyond your screen limit.
  I'm playing through DS1 for the first time, the last boss I defeated was Seath and... what the fuck was that fight. The camera was a mess, clipping happening everywhere, half the time I didn't know what was going on, but thankfully he went down first try. ಠᴗಠ It gets a pass, 'cause its DS1 but still; I actually laughed at the chaos.
  Which makes me think, the camera is one of the reasons Ludwig is one of the best soulslike bosses ever. (At least it's my personal favorite.) The camera is SO fucking good in that fight.
- Dude, I agree with all of these.
  I also hate bosses that are too big. The fight against a certain dragon enemy in The First Berserker Khazan was horrible. I felt like it was made a little better than the average fight against a dragon or a very big boss, but it was still not nearly as fun as your average Khazan boss.
- I really liked the last Soulslike I played, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, because it improves precisely on many of these issues.
  A bit like Elden Ring, it offers many ways to "solve" bosses, so if you're not mechanically perfect you can try in another way (there are many, many viable builds, not all requiring perfect reflexes). For huge bosses, the camera zooms in and out almost seamlessly according to size and distance. You can save anywhere.
  I also hate features that punish you for fighting and dying (beyond losing souls/echoes/whatever), like losing max hp in Dark Souls 2 or dragonrot in Sekiro. Trying many times is the only way to learn boss patterns, and punishing the player for doing exactly what the game requires is awful. Wuchang handles that in a very graceful way, as dying raises Madness, which in turn raises damage done both by you and by enemies, which makes it more of a risk calculation than a disadvantage. There are even builds based around skills which activate once you reach 50 or 90% of Madness. Also, you can clear it easily if needed.
  Sadly, the last controversy (political/historical self-censorship) in patch 1.5 of the game makes it harder to recommend, though for me it was a 8/10, maybe even a 9, before this patch.
  
  More times than not, I see the term Soulslike and I back away in horror.
  Nope.
Don't make me refight bs enemies on the path to a boss if I die. The challenge is the boss, not avoiding combat leading back to it.
- DS2 made a good change to combat that in that the enemies just don't spawn anymore after doing a full clear several times
Bosses that are too big, and you need to hit the bottom part / foot but attacks come from above, so you need to do the dance of not locking on and moving the camera up and down while attacking and avoiding damage.
Repetition. I understand that some people like challenges, but I play for fun, not to pass a test. Even more annoying than losing to a boss (which is to be expected) is unlocking a shortcut and still having to go through a relatively long journey of attacking, dodging, and hiding from enemies to fight the boss again. Are you familiar with the dungeons in Skyrim? When you completed your mission, there was usually an exit immediately at the end. You didn't have to go back to the entrance just to get out. I don't know if any Soulslike implemented something like that, but it would make the experience more bearable.
- The worst is being dense and not finding the shortcut.
- Ooh, yeah, boss run-ups might be my entry for this thread. DS2:Scholar is my most played of the main soulsborne series and it inflicted some past trauma on me in that regard.
  Elden Ring was a good step forward on this, I hope restarting right outside the boss gate is something with traction in the genre.
I like the way Elden Ring provided a lot of options allowing the player to basically pick their difficulty, either by choosing a different build or going somewhere else or grinding levels.
It might not only be a souls thing, but using darkness as difficulty is the worst game design choice ever.
- Oh, I agree. Maybe not the worst and it can make sense to create a tense and dangerous atmosphere, but sometimes it's just too dark to see anything to a detriment
Some people like extremely difficult challenges, others don’t. There’s enough games in the world you couldn’t possibly play them all, might as well play just the ones that match your play style.
I think the bigger problem is jank in a lot of games ruining the experience, so you die from unfairness rather than from being unskilled. No one likes to die because the dice rolled poorly.
My first reaction: the camera
Idk, i think just hidden mechanic numbers. Iframes come to mind, mostly because of DS2/ADP, but it just feels like an important defense stat obscurred from player view. Another one is just co-op/ invasion ranges. Yes, that info is on a wiki, but it would just be nice for people to see they're summoning between levels X-Y with people who have Z strength highest upgraded weapon. The minmaxers are already looking at that for invasions so might as well make it more accessible.
In general i like the obscurity around stuff in souls games but i do think making those numbers more accessible doesn't reduce the game anymore than having access to the rest of your mechanics like damage or resistances.
I agree the focus on difficulty is a problem, and I don't love how Fromsoft deals with "Legacy Skill".
Let's say that Dark Souls 1 players get really good at Dark Souls 1. Now you're making Dark Souls 2, and it has to be hard for old and new players, so you can't have the mechanics be exactly the same, otherwise the game won't be hard for returning players. So, change the parry timings, and tie i-frames, casting speed, and item usage speed to a garbage stat! Then, when Dark Souls 3 comes along, you keep player speed roughly the same but turbo-charge enemy speed, and give them all infinite stamina and poise! Or else returning players won't find the game hard and it's got to be hard, or else it isn't Dark Souls, right?
I hate the way the games have come to prioritize "faster", "twitchier" gameplay over time. Same with Monster Hunter. I hate how inevitable it is that as games with slow, careful, deliberate gameplay grow in popularity, they always get faster, twitchier, and more "arcadey" to appeal to the mainstream, least common denominator of gamers, leaving me with nothing to play.
The absolute worst culprits in this are DS3 and Elden Ring, which have taken the round peg of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 gameplay and forced it into the square hole of modern "fast" gameplay, resulting in an absolute mess of a combat system. I also hate rolling 50 times during 30-hit boss combos with a fiery passion. It's just so boring. At least Elden Ring made greatshields viable again.
The only good "fast" FromSoft games are the ones that are designed for it from the ground up, namely Sekiro (which solves the rolling problem by making parries actually contribute to the fight) and (to a lesser degree) Bloodborne.
Basically, I hate how all of my favorite game series jebait-and-switch me with weighty, consequential, satisfying gameplay initially only to eventually devolve into Devil May Cry.
- Dude, 100% agree on MH. The gameplay was a lot slower and felt more methodical. You were and only a select few monsters broke the mold of slow and calculated movement and presented a challenge. Nowadays, new monsters are faster, deadlier, perform combos, fucking teleport (???) to keep up with all the options hunters have at their disposal now, and all of that to a huge detriment.
  I wouldn't necessarily agree that it's to do with appealing to more casual audiences since the skill ceiling is way higher in newer titles and allows for more skill expression than before, but it definitely fits recent trends of more stuff needing to happen on screen to satisfy the average consumer and their ever-waning attention.
  Or maybe it's because MH fans had 20 years of adapting and getting better at the game so they need to keep up cranking up the difficulty to still pose a challenge to veterans, similarly to how new soulslikes get more challenging to give veterans something to chew on.
  I just want a remake of MHFU and I'll be happy :c
I've seen a few faux pas in design. Thymesia had damage values cranked way too high for the narrowness of its parry/dodge windows. Elden Ring undertuned its items to account for an inevitable and insane amount of optimizing it would expect from its players. it's assumptions were correct but it meant new players would inevitably be funneled into copying those builds from youtube videos instead of ever experimenting and just playing the game. these are just math errors though, no really big deal.
The only really bad mistake I ever saw was Lords of the fallen which couldn't nail a consistent tone or level of engagement with the narrative. It oscillated between trying to be inscrutable ala From Soft and dialogue rich with a populated hub world. Still enjoyed it though

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