#fromplaining

The first major boss in the game is a rhythmless mess with more follow-ups than punish windows, attacks for every distance, instant heal/spell punishes, overtuned health and damage, and all the other stuff that people claim "comes out of nowhere" in the endgame. The difference between Margit and Malenia is that you can explore a good 40% of the map before fighting Margit, meaning, you can massively overshoot the level the developers expect you to fight Margit at. You can brute force his design issues into irrelevance. The intended level for Malenia is the level you will be at the very end of the game—you can't patch over the devs' mistakes by exceeding it.

People praise Margit's design for "encouraging players to explore more"—I reject this framing. I say that Margit is designed so incompetently that players assume they must not be meant to fight him. If you were meant to handle bosses by exploring more after trying them, the endgame wouldn't be a straight path through five required boss fights.

But, because the criticisms are just true, attempts to defend against them necessarily slip into dishonesty. A key example of this, that has bothered me for years, but that I've only just learned how to articulate, is the myth of a "loud minority."

This argument posits that the caustic parts of the fandom are not representative of the whole. They are a minority opinion, held by few but propagated widely by those few, highly dedicated believers. It's a myth that is, by no means, exclusive to the Souls fandom; it didn't originate there, and it appears frequently in any sort of discussion of a given fandom's issues, because it's a comfortable way to dismiss criticism without feeling like you are dismissing it. It's also, as I alluded to, difficult to break down in the moment. It takes thought to understand why it's wrong.

And that's why I'm here to help.

The most foundational problem with the argument is that it's metaphorical. By attributing the unavoidability of the toxic tendencies to a "loud minority," defenders reframe the conversation of a tangible issue (observable attitudes in posts, videos, etc.) into an allegorical scenario, where all of us are people in a physical space, each able to spread our opinions further simply by raising our own voice. In reality, though, we are on the internet. Screaming into a microphone will not grant your video any more reach than if you had whispered. The key difference here is that being loud is a choice you can make on your own, but in online fandom, reach is, by and large, a factor of agreeability. This post came to you either because you are following me—probably because you agree with my other, similar takes—or because someone you do follow agreed with me first. This isn't unique to Tumblr; YouTube videos gain more reach the more views, likes, retention, and comments they have. Reddit comments, by default, are transparently sorted to make the most widely-agreed-on opinions most readily accessible. Social media, where online fandom thrives, is a fundamentally consensus-dependent medium.

So, is it a "loud minority" who pushes to the top the comments that deny all design issues in Elden Ring, Dark Souls, Sekiro, etc., and blame and degrade players who point those issues out?

It can't be.

If those opinions weren't at least tacitly accepted by the majority in the community, they wouldn't get the upvotes, views, reblogs, or what-have-you to be elevated above dissenting thoughts. If the majority agreed with the comments that say "Yeah, this is a problem, and the developers could have done better," then we wouldn't need to scroll down into the negative points zone on every Reddit post to find them.

The average Souls community member doesn't disagree with the "loud minority" on what they're actually saying, only that they choose to say it. Most people are not proud to be that obstinate at strangers; they find it embarrassing. The defining trait of the "loud minority" is not belief, but boldness. They are, in essence, the ones who say the quiet part out loud. And we see in the Souls community, as well as many others: the longer we let them do this without pushback, the more members of the majority will realize that they don't need to fear being loud.

That judgment is way out of place on a wiki page

At the moment, Suncatcher's damage is just unhinged. I'm not that fussed about the counterattack—it's a bit much, admittedly, but it takes a lot of practice to access and use it safely—but the critical hits are just way too strong. Why am I deleting upwards of 20% of a boss' health per crit on the character who does as much stance damage as a whole team combined?

It used to be that Suncatcher was hardly ever a good option. You could use it to tank, if you really wanted, but its damage output was so weak that you'd always get better mileage out of dodging and using status weapons. This was exacerbated by the fact that drawing Suncatcher counted as switching weapons, meaning, it cleared all on-weapon effects and set you back to one-handing once you sheathed it. This was clunky, for one thing, and for another, Executor being so status-focused meant that it was a really steep price for very little return. Basically, you had a character who was clearly meant to have offense stance (normal weapon) and defense stance (suncatcher), but defense stance was so bad, and offense was so important, that no build ever wanted to switch into defense.

I just don't think that fusing those two stances was the right move, though. Now Suncatcher is everything. You only pick up weapons for their passives, and passives that buff Suncatcher are universally the best. Executor is basically not a dex/arc character anymore. He's just a slightly less engaging version of Sekiro.

I recognize that this stuff being so deeply rooted in the game means that it would probably be hard to change, but, I maintain that they should have just fixed how switching weapons works. Make it no longer set you back to one-handing automatically; that's always annoyed me, even before Nightreign. And for Executor specifically, make switching to Suncatcher no longer clear your weapon effects. That would have kept the core idea of the character intact: a fighter who switches fluidly between a slow, limited, defensive stance, and a fast, versatile, offensive stance.

It's unfortunate, too, cause a lot of the bosses ported from DS to NR are good. Nameless King is one of the best Night 2 bosses. Smelter Demon has a wonderfully creative gimmick that's fun for most characters to play against. Dancer's only issue is slightly overdone damage, and it's not like that's unique to her.

Artorias, though. Artorias is shit. Depending on the attack, he's either not moving at all or sliding around the arena like an air hockey puck, and the closest thing he has to a gimmick—his front flip ignoring invincibility frames—got broken in the transition between games. For some fucking reason, they jacked up the tracking on the move whose entire point was that it could only be avoided by strafing. There're distances at which the front flip is literally unavoidable for anyone but Executor.

In sum, Artorias has an inconsistent vibe when he's moving, he's basically impossible to sightread, and one of his two most iconic moves is impossible for nine of the ten Nightfarers to consistently deal with. And he suffers, on top of all that, from the same bizarrely high stats as all the other night bosses added in The Forsaken Hollows.