A thread where we share our pain and triumph. I've recently been on a souls binge and can't get enough of a good digital ass spanking, the harder the battle the better, the longer the task takes to beat the sweeter the victory, there is no pain only degrees of pleasure. So let's share our hardest gaming moments, doesn't have to be a boss or level but any gaming task that is or was significantly difficult for you to overcome. 

For example, I find whistle skipping to world 8 in Super Mario Bro's 3 and conpleting it to be impossible and have always wanted to try it but never sat down to invest the time and can't stand replaying world 1 after defeat. I might just try it to post a completetion video in this thread. One person might find that easy but if a task like that is difficult for YOU and it took you significant investment and skill to complete then post it here in video form. 

Let's share. I'm currently trying to beat the Shura ending boss of Sekiro on NG+3. A middling challenge but one that is testing me. 

Most difficult boss I've ever fought. Took me three days and roughly a dozen hours or more to badly finish him. I can't even bring myself to replay this fight, it sends shivers up my spine. Only Metal Gear Rex as an 8 year old took me longer. 

My most recent victory in Sekiro, took me 8 hours or so and many deaths to relearn this fight after playing the game through to get a certain ending I went to my old save where I found this boss awaiting me on NG+2 and just had to beat him. He's a beast but now I can beat him with ease. Can't remember how long it took me the first time around, I don't remember this much trouble. 

The only video I had of Bloodbornes hardest boss, I beat the boss but saved the wrong video. I can't remember how long this took but I remember spending a full Sunday attempting to simply look for a window to attack and figure out a strategy for getting some hits in. The boss is difficult because your health bar gets halfed as soon as you enter the arena and until you find a way to dodge into him he is extremely hard to punish or even get an attack on without getting hit yourself or sent home. 

These days I'd usually rather enjoy a good story than beat my head against a wall repeating hard sections of games for hours at a time, but growing up the most masochistic thing I probably did was 100%ing Stuntman on PS2. While a lot of fun the physics in that game are very temperamental and the slightest misstep will ruin a run. Was pretty proud of my highlight reels in the end, though.

Watching Sekiro I dont even know whats happening. I know the gameplay is blocking, dodging, parrying and attacking, but I dont get it. It looks and feels like you are doing nothing to him. A lot of that because of that metal hitting metal sound. In every other game that means you are doing no damage and are doing it wrong. I just cant get past that. Its so baked into me as a player.

There are two health meters. The main health and the posture health, you can chip away at the main health if you can get a cheeky hit in without the enemy deflecting and this will make posture bar harder to replenish or you can try and fill the enemies posture bar through deflect alone or a mix of both, every hit of the sword adds posture damage and this will lead to a death blow regardless of the main health. Bosses usually have two death blows you have to achieve. All the while, you have to manage your own posture bar and main health bar which works the same, the lower your main health the faster your posture will fill and the slower it will deplete. You get two trys like the boss does putting you on as even as feild as possible. Also, every deflect and sword hit fills the enemies posture bar, same for you as the player and once the posture breaks you get the death blow. 

It's actually an ingenious system because you have to time your posture to break at a point when the boss won't do a follow up attack while you're stun locked and decide on what's the best option at any point in the battle on the fly. It is one of the simplist combat mechanics in a game, there is little depth even though it seems there is on a systems level aside from what I mentioned but it leads to an extremely deep experience all the same. What really opens it up is there are peralious attacks  that you can't deflect (the red kanji) or can counter using a specific skill, then there are attacks you have to doge and skill arte attacks that go wild completely that you have to figure out a strategy with tools or some other means that works best for you. The RNG is incredible in the way that nothing becomes formulaic and you must be paying attention to make a split second decision at all times. If you can get this system to click for you, it really is worth the hump and time it'll take to do so, it's incredible and never gets old.

In this game, you aren't going to win by RNG fluke, nor over leveling (cause you can't) nor out building again cause you can't even though tools and skill based weapon arts can be considered a kind of build. What you will win on, is learning the fight and as they say "gitting gud". 

Video or it didn't happen. Jk. Sounds like a feat, I vaguely remember that game as being very annoying with BS failure states. 

I like a challenge but not punishing. No boss in Souls ever took me more than 6 tries. Sekiro wore me out, Butterfly took like 18 tries. The flaw in sekiro is having to clear out enemies near a boss to retry. Souls is better because you can speed run to the fog wall.

You can speed run in sekiro too but there is usually an idol right beside every major boss. I suppose you mean the mini bosses, yeah on my first run that pissed me off too but on subsequent runs I just run past fodder enemies and go straight for enemies with deathblow circles. On NG+3 now and pretty much skipping many of those too. If you make it to Genichiro and beat him you've learned every system of the game and it becomes less punishing and every time you die it's a mistake you made yourself (aside from the Fromsoft camera which can get you killed) and you never feel like anything was designed to be difficult for the sake of it, something that is implemented into soulsborne quite a lot like some silly long string of animations or boss reach that is arena wide. Sekiro is a much tighter experience once you have the basic skill set down after Genichiro. 

If you're dead set on killing every enemy or grinding for skill points you can pretty much, 90% of the time stealth everything if you feel like it, Ai is super forgiving in that regard allowing you to rush enemies too.