RE: OMG! This game is SO HARD!!!
Game difficulty nowadays has become sort of a clusterfuck. While most games are just stupidly easy, a lot of others have a great challenge to them, but give you too many chances to opt out. Take Fire Emblem: Awakening for example, which has become hands down my favorite 3DS game as of late. The game has several difficulty options, and while playing on Hard-Classic, there is a great difficulty balance to it, where you have to take everything into consideration, it become like an exponentially more badass version of chess. That being said, there are some maps you can replay and grind on continuously, there are maps in DLC form that are specificially designed to be replayed constantly for XP and for Gold, which, while usually precious commodities, are just handed to you in a fancy little six dollar package. This is Awakening's problem, and while you don't have to play the DLC maps, the looming option there is just too tantalizing. When you get your ass kicked, there's always that option to ease the pain, like a snake whispering to you This could be so much easier, just take my hand... (BY THE WAY, Talking snake with a hand is the best simile ever.). The DLC temptation can be ignored, but it's challenging to do so in the first place. Ideally DLC should add content and more options and replayability to a game, this just makes the game less engaging.
That being said, the highest difficulty, Lunatic, sort of irks me. While Hard is, well, Hard, Lunatic is just weird. Obviously it's supposed to be more difficult, meaning that enemies hit harder and you need to formulate strategies more carefully, but after playing it for a while, I noticed a weird pattern, there always seems to be just one or two ways you can move without losing. Seriously, if you move slightly out of line in one turn, you're done. This is irritating not because it's difficult, but because it feels like the game is forcing you to only choose the one move, and while you could argue finding it is part of the fun, it just seems to detract from the experience in general.
Rant over, MH3 Ultimate demo time.
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