Topic: Hollow Knight

Even once you know their patterns and habits it still takes work to get the timing down (usually). Right now I'm banging my head on the metaphorical wall with the crystal covered laser firing boss (first encounter). And I'm annoyed that to get a more convenient bench I have to beat the sucker the first time.

Hollow Knight is tough indeed. As someone who grew up with Castlevania (both classic and Metroidvania) and Zelda II (which I stand by being the best Zelda game until BotW), the bosses do require a lot of careful readings of their telegraphs and on my first playthrough I died quite a bit against the bosses. At times it can be even harder than Dark Souls (although I played Dark Souls after Hollow Knight and didn't find Dark Souls very "challenging") because healing in Hollow Knight is a lot riskier to do compared to Dark Souls where nearly every boss will do an attack and take an eternity to regain their footing. A lot of bosses in Hollow Knight don't really let you a lot of opportunities to heal, like the Mantis Lords (at least when there's two of them) and The Radiance.

I stopped playing Hollow Knight for Octopath Traveler and I have no idea when I can pick it up again (or want to).

The difficulty is really throwing me off even though I enjoyed some of it, but the amount of difficulties just made me weary in the end @_@ (At least I defeated most of the bosses I fought? Feels glad that I defeat that mage boss first try though~)

In the end, good game, bought it twice, but I wish there's choice to make it easier for us that isn't as good in gaming.

Dark Souls also has bosses that are stupidly hilariously easy, such as the Gap Dragon. No, seriously. The hardest part of that boss fight was reaching the boss fight.

@FaeKnight What are you talking about? Pinwheel and the Gaping Dragon are the hardest bosses in Dark Souls 1. :^]

And the Bed of Chaos is a good fight. :^]

When I got to the Gap Dragon (finally, after many many many deaths) I was all panicky since my flask was empty and I had a decent number of Souls built up from fighting my way there. Then the fight started and I quickly ended up going "Wait, what? Is that it? Where's the difficult to time attack sequence? Where's the frantic dodging? I just... strafe and launch magic missiles?!"

@NEStalgia My advice is to spend some time with each boss learning how to survive. Don't even bother trying to get any hits in, just learn the patterns of the attacks. Once you can dodge them most of the time then actually defeating the boss is much easier.

Spend all your geo. Don't worry about what order to buy things in, you'll buy everything eventually. (And losing 300 is really insignificant in the long run, even if it doesn't feel like it now.)

I'd also recommend looking up guides or videos. Normally I try to avoid using them but there's so much good stuff in this game that getting a bit of help with the tough parts is well worthwhile.

@FaeKnight Yeah I beat the Gaping Dragon fairly easily. He hits hard and admittedly I did die once or twice, but his attack patterns are incredibly slow and predictable. When he throws himself down on the ground, that just gives you a bajillion opportunities to attack as he tries to pull himself back up.

Hollow Knight is a lot different though. You're about as free as any Metroidvania character like Alucard and Soma Cruz and Shanoa with a LOT of movement options like the dash and extremely quick attacks. Bosses are also even more aggressive and have a LOT more health than your average boss in Dark Souls. You may die quickly in Dark Souls, but so do your enemies so if you get to stagger them once with a well-timed hit, you can follow up with another hit to smite them. 90% of common enemies die in two hits. No such thing in Hollow Knight where there is no staggering and they take more punishment too (at least before any nail upgrades).

Gap Dragon's even easier if you're build has Sorcerer as it's starting point (and central method of fighting bosses). But that's neither here nor there. Yeah, Hollow Knight's bosses can be pretty brutal. Even the easy ones (so far) can take you out in just a few hits. And the more difficult ones rarely give you enough time to heal without Balder's Shell and Quick Focus. But even that may not be enough to let you heal.

@FaeKnight I actually went with a melee build, which is my preferred method of fighting in any game. Being able to use a jump slash to destroy pretty much everything is so nice.

In Hollow Knight? No such thing. But just equip the charms that boost your range, attack speed, and width and watch as you beat the ever living **** out of anything.

@FaeKnight Its been awhile since I beat the crystal covered laser firing boss, but if I remember correctly I would jump and glide behind him and get in about 3-4 hits. If I was too far away to do that, I would jump up as he was aiming so it would fire it's laser up where I was when I jumped and I would either get a few hits in or that would be a good time to heal up if I needed to.

If you need help with the second time you fight this guy just ask me. I found a way to beat him that made him laughably easy. It might be cheap but it got the job done.

Yeah from all this discussion HK exists as one of those "hard for the sake of being hard" games, apparently even worse than the infamous Dark Souls. I don't think I'm going to bother with any more of the game. I have a 200 game strong backlog including soon-to-be-added Dark Souls itself. Ain't got time for replaying the same boss 500 times

Honestly I don't mind dying and retrying a lot. But what grates on me like a mosquito forever buzzing in your ear is backtracking/redoing what I've already done. If it started me at the entrance to the boss fight just watching the boss entrance animation would have me fuming. Putting me at a bench 3 rooms away with enemies in between sets me into a raging fury....I start running THROUGH the enemies to get there....I can't stand repeating things in games. Ever. Let me save right at the boss room and I'll eventually power through it. Make me repeat and I'll get worse and worse and more careless and rushed each time I die. I never finished DQBuilders for that same reason. The final boss fight made me go through stage 1 and 2 to get to the stage 3 that was giving me trouble. After 4 times or so of that, nope, it's going to the "completed" pile and I'll watch the ending on Youtube. Not worth the stress.

@EvilLucario I loved OG Castlevania and Super. Never played the PS1 metroidvania ones though. Zelda 2 I never got far past the beginning back then....not due to bosses. Due to getting lost in Death Mountain, then finding I needed some item to progress and had to do it all over again and was like "nope!" I do NOT like to repeat things. (Except Nioh, somehow...) You having me looking more forward to DS now though! Still it's a shame the art in this and sound design is so gorgeous. If it had an easy mode I'd play it just to see the whole beautiful world they built.

@darkfenrir It's not even about not being good at gaming. I do feel most of the people that are hyped about it play a lot of retro and indie games and are still conditioned for "Nintendo Hard (TM)" platformers. Back in the 80's I was the platformer king. But it's not the 80s, and I effectively never touch indies/retro, so tapping into 30 year old skillsets just isn't happening. Shovel Knight frustrates me as well, though I eventually handle that well. I'm still decent at platformers but not in Olympic training shape to tackle one intentionally trying to be frustratingly difficult.

Thanks to you lot, I just started googling the Gap Dragon in Hollow Knight, wondering how I'd missed that boss... (I've never played Dark Souls, obviously - although I've had it on preorder for the Switch since March!)

Finally wrapped up Hollow Knight last night with 106% completion after circa 60 hours. However, I couldn't be bothered with the final tournament stage (though I may go back to it), and the idea of boss rushes in Godmaster makes me break out in a cold sweat. However, I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed the game. Literally have no idea how many times I died against Knightmare Lord Grimm - think it was at least two or three hours broken up over about three sessions - but finally beating him and with skulls to spare was my most satisfying moment in gaming this year.

Also, I haven't even gotten to charms yet other than the compass

@NEStalgia To be honest, the going back isn't too bad- most of the time there's one close by, and they do said the reason why they don't put it too close is that they want the world to feel organic + that you can think slightly before hitting your head back into the boss. (half agreeing there)

But other than that, I think the hard part isn't only for people that loves those hard retro/indie games XD

Just that some people have more patience + better reflex in doing some things than others, that's what I think anyway.

In the end, I never really enjoyed any platformer games (have tried multiple games, but they never give me the charm other people got), so the platforming section in Hollow Knight also... frustrates me. Some of them are already hard with how the enemies already hit you while you are going through, and the platform itself being gone so you can't go back or stay on it for too long... o+<

Too many things I want to complain, but that's all stems from I don't enjoy hard things.

I'm sure this has been asked before, but is there ever a better way to travel than the Stagstations or the tram? Honestly, I think this game is tough but not that bad (yet). I have yet to die a second time before recovering my shade. The worst part is simply getting to a place where I have nowhere left to go, having to check my map for anyplace I can see a hole where I haven't been yet, then making the long trek to the nearest Stagstation just to get to the same area as the place I'm going, then another long trek to that place. It's super annoying. I wish you could just warp between benches or something like that.

Would that be "more invulnerability frames+more health+stability" then just pounding the crud out of him and eating the damage? That was, to an extent, my strategy against Hornet when I finally beat her. I'd eat 3 masks worth of damage before she'd take a knee, have enough time to heal those three masks, and then rinse and repeat.

@Xyphon22 You do eventually get an ability to leave a single, but movable, warp point, so you can warp back to certain areas, which could be handy if you want to warp nearer to a boss than any particular bench. TBH, I hardly ever used it - you've got to remember to place it where you think you might need it.

@NEStalgia The game's not so much "hard for the sake of being hard" but a deliberate callback to the NES/SNES era where platformers were brutally hard due to the people making the games being use to making arcade games which had to be brutally hard to squeese more money out of players. Not to mention NES/SNES games were often fairly short, maybe an hour or two of game play to them, assuming you could make it through the game to begin with. This meant the difficulty had to be high so players would feel they're getting their money's worth out of the game.

And sometimes the game was insanely hard because the guy making the game was just that good at video games and set the difficulty at a level that would be able to challenge himself. Battletoads is an example of that, according to Rare employees.

Hollow Knight is a very fair game. The controls are extremely tight and vary responsive. Which means that when you die (and yes, you die a lot) it never feels like a "cheep" death. Rather, it's your own fault and your need to get better at timing your evasions, attacks, and (if you can pull it off) your parries. But if you hate Hollow Knight and it's need to backtrack every time you die, you'll absolutely hate Dark Souls. That game makes you backtrack even farther, and every enemy can easily kill you if you get careless. Which means that each time you die you have to carefully fight your way back to where ever you died, or die trying. Because the last bonfire? It was probably a decent ways away from where you died. There's a reason why Blighttown is recognized as such a bad place, and that reason is narrow walkways and nastily difficult to fight enemies.

@darkfenrir Yeah I'm somewhat with you on some of that. In my case I can be very impatient but only if I feel like I'm making progress. I'm persistent if I can keep retrying something until I finally get it in rapid fire. But if you make me backtrack over things I've already successfully done to retry I will be in full fury mode by the time I get to the thing I was supposed to do. Like if I just just restart in the boss room each time I'd grind through the game uninterrupted. I could figure out the timings (probably.) But the backtrack breaking my rhythm...I could hear the joycons creaking under stress in their hinges by the 3rd try and the room suddenly felt 10 degrees hotter.

@FaeKnight NES/SNES era platformers were my specialty. Back in the NES/SNES era.... But that was a long time ago. Then again even then I considered the unfair "difficulty" a design flaw to work around not a feature to emulate. But back then I could certainly do it better!

It is indeed possible I'll hate DS. Though EvilLucario believes it's easier. Nioh is the same, yet somehow I don't hate the backtracking as much there as I do in HK. My only DS experience so far is the beginning of 3. We'll see. I may indeed hate it.

Cat Quest helped unwind me after my Hollow Knight woes, at lest Thank goodness for nekkos.