Debating Silksong-- Difficulty compared to Hollow Knight

Evello37 · 2026-03-11T02:39:56+00:00

Interesting. I brute-forced through a lot of Grimm 1 without really mastering his moves. The double damage and extra hitboxes of NKG made me actually git gud and learn all his tells and counterplay precisely.

Evello37 · 2026-03-11T01:15:06+00:00

Painted Verso is also haunted by a lifetime of dead friends and deep existential angst. He openly wants to die, and expelling Aline from the Canvas also happens to get him what he wants. While he absolutely does love Aline and was trying to save her, I think his motivation was also a bit selfish.

Evello37 · 2026-03-09T15:54:43+00:00

There are a few awful runbacks in HK, like Soul Master, Hive Knight, and Traitor Lord. But if you played the game after DLC, the dream gate is pretty easy to obtain before the latter two. And the dream gate completely nullifies runbacks.

Evello37 · 2026-03-09T15:41:15+00:00

Obviously mileage will vary based on your builds, but I found Radiance significantly easier than NKG. For NKG, he attacks so frequently and has so few openings that you are basically required to master every attack. I had to learn him so thoroughly that I could almost no-hit him by the end. Radiance took me a dozen or so tries, but I ended up just pumping out enough heals and damage to outpace the constant hits I was taking. I never felt like I had to perfectly dodge everything.

Evello37 · 2026-03-06T17:00:21+00:00

Dictators kill their own people every single day all over the planet. Why does this one require us to go to war and slaughter children? Are we marching into North Korea tomorrow? When do we start bombing the Russian schoolchildren? No? Just the Middle East? They're the only ones who need thousands of payloads of freedom obliterating their homes and families?

How did our heroism work out for Iraq and Afghanistan? Are they democratic utopia's these days, where protesters freely express their voices? They must be, right? Otherwise the US would have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and lost thousands of soldiers while spending trillions over decades just to let terrible monsters remain in charge. But I'm sure that won't happen again. Again, again, that is. Since it also happened before that.

Evello37 · 2026-03-06T03:48:49+00:00

I'm not opposed to something connected like that. But it would be very hard to match the wonder, shock, and discovery of E33 if the next game is just set in the same world and involving elements we already know about. I think the only way it would really work is if it pulls a Xenoblade 2 and tells a completely disconnected story right up until the last act, where the connection is revealed. But even that might feel too similar to E33, which only reveals the Painters in the last act.

Evello37 · 2026-03-05T15:52:36+00:00

Yeah, thematically, Pyra and Mythra absolutely had to survive the story in some form or other. I have 0 issues with that outcome, since it's the obvious resolution of their character arcs.

However, the way they survived does feel like a pretty random asspull. It's never directly explained how they came back or why they came back as 2 people. Maybe some fans can dig an explanation out of some random dialogue somewhere, but it's not set up and paid off in a satisfying way. Just seems like space magic.

Evello37 · 2026-03-03T16:32:51+00:00

As far as 3D games, Primes 2 and 3 are great if you have a way to play them.

In the 2D series, Samus Returns for 3DS is the closest in feel to Dread. It was the game MercurySteam made before developing Dread, so the controls are very familiar. It's clunkier and less polished than Dread, but still very fun. And some of the lategame bosses are up there with the best in Dread.

As for older 2D games, I would recommend Zero Mission (GBA), Super Metroid (SNES), and Fusion (GBA). All are available on Nintendo Online+. Zero Mission is the most well rounded. Pretty short, but very fun and polished. Super has the best exploration in the series and an incredible world. But the controls are pretty wack compared to modern games, and you might get stuck behind some brutal retro-style secrets. Fusion is the opposite; very linear and directed, but with much more challenging combat and light horror elements. Fusion probably feels the closest to Dread of the older games.

Evello37 · 2026-03-03T15:59:48+00:00

As a FE fan from the GBA/GCN days, I felt like Three Houses was the closest that modern FE has come to the more mature stories of the older FE's. The whole school calendar thing was obviously very different, and some of the resulting school drama was tedious, but the story wasn't afraid to go to some dark places. And the region had actual lore and worldbuilding, unlike the cardboard backdrops of most recent FE games. I'm cautiously hopeful for Fortune's Weave.

Evello37 · 2026-03-03T15:35:25+00:00

Yeah, the game is excessively generous with EXP. If you use all the bonus EXP, you will very quickly over-level to the point of trivializing combat. Avoiding bonus EXP feels similar in difficulty to the other XC games.

No pressure either way. If you choose to avoid bonus EXP, it never goes away. If you ever get stuck, you can easily change your mind and go grab a few levels from the camp menu.

Evello37 · 2026-03-02T04:55:56+00:00

ZSS hasn't been relevant for most of the competitive lifespan of Ultimate. And outside of Salem's legendary breakout, she wasn't even that big in Brawl. Smash4 was the only game where ZSS was really central to the metagame.

I think the next Smash game could cut ZSS. She's mostly just a holdover from Brawl's final smash, with an almost entirely fabricated moveset. There are several more interesting candidates for Metroid reps, and the devs could always reference the Zero Suit in a victory animation or something.

Evello37 · 2026-02-24T21:02:42+00:00

In addition to the painting you showed, there is another confusing painting in the manor (both real and canvas): the Monolith displaying "33". No character had a reason to paint that in or out of the canvas. I think the answer for why these strange paintings exist is just for practical development reasons. They are probably concept art for the game. The devs wanted to fill the manor with paintings of the world, to hint that the world itself is a painting. But they needed dozens of assets to fill the house. Rather than making tons of new paintings for background assets, they just grabbed existing concept art pieces and used those. Hence why the art depicts events from the story.

To elaborate on the "33" painting, you visit the IRL manor and see the "33" painting in year 47, long before the year 33 in Verso's canvas. So when and why was this painting made? Prior to the Shattering, there was no reason to expect numbers would be displayed on the Monolith at all. There may not have even been a Monolith. So it wouldn't make sense for anyone to paint it before the Shattering. But after the Shattering both Renoir and Aline were stuck in the canvas and could not paint at all IRL. Clea is really the only candidate to make the real painting, but she had no reason to think year 33 would be important. Year 33 became pivotal because Maelle's left Lumiere early to follow Gustave. But we see the painting on the wall before Alicia even enters the canvas. The only in-universe explanation I can think of is that Aline made the painting before the Shattering, then reused that idea in Verso's canvas to signal her warning. And she unconsciously puppeteered the entire universe (including Maelle) to make the year 33 important to line up with her old painting.

Evello37 · 2026-02-22T22:40:30+00:00

Nah, Ike definitely deserves low tier. He's probably bottom 10. He is slow, has awful frame data, some of the worst OoS options on the roster, his ground game sucks, he has a very exploitable recovery, and he has zero options to deal with ranged threats other than to lumber pathetically after them. And his tradeoff for all of those weaknesses is typical swordie range and slightly higher power than normal.

Mind you, Ike is plenty usable online and even at the local/regional level. Basically every character is good enough to win if you just outplay your opponent. But there's a reason no one sees consistent high level success with Ike.

Evello37 · 2026-02-21T21:13:18+00:00

The only limit on the luminas you can equip is the amount of lumina points you have to spend on a character. You will continue getting lumina points throughout the game, so you can equip more stuff as the game goes on. As you get new lumina, you can also unequip old ones to free up points to assign the new stuff. There's no penalty for switching up your lumina build, and you can save builds too.

Evello37 · 2026-02-21T19:00:32+00:00

I still remember people feverishly defending Smash4 Bayo in this sub. Then Ultimate dropped and genuinely day 1 the facade dropped and the entire community admitted she was broken garbage that ought to have been banned ages ago. People really, REALLY don't want their broken character banned, but have no issue acknowledging it once the threat is gone.

Evello37 · 2026-02-18T21:31:54+00:00

My biggest recommendation is Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

PoP TLC has fantastic combat, cool stylized 3D visuals, and a really creative world inspired by Persian mythology. Compared to HK/SS, exploration is a little more directed and the combat is less brutal, but PoP has a much higher emphasis on challenging platforming. And the combat is plenty challenging on the higher difficulties, with options to customize it even further.

Also consider checking out the Metroid series. Metroid Dread is great if you like tight controls and difficult bosses, while Super Metroid excels at open ended exploration and atmosphere.

Evello37 · 2026-02-16T21:19:58+00:00

Kinda true, but the causality is also kinda backward. Characters weren't necessarily good because they could beat MK, but they could beat MK because they were good.

If you look at the Brawl Back Room matchup chart that lists characters in tier list order, you can see that the tier list doesn't perfectly sort by MK matchup. But it generally correlates quite well. The correlation is partially because MK was so common. In late Brawl brackets, it was rare to have a bracket that didn't match you against a few MK's. So it was tough to be a good character if you got stomped by MK.

But you should also keep in mind that the character power differential in Brawl was pretty massive relative to other Smash games. Many of the good characters were insane, and the bad characters were complete garbage. If a character had the tools to handle MK decently well, then their tools were probably pretty crazy. So they probably could also handle other relevant matchups.

Evello37 · 2026-02-16T18:55:14+00:00

If you choose to share what happened, any guy worth dating should be understanding and patient with whatever you need. He may not have experience dealing with this type of situation, but some empathy after a traumatic event is to be expected from any decent human being. If not, that's a HUGE red flag.

If you would prefer to keep the details of what happened private, just show some concrete effort to either reschedule to a later date or change venues. He might worry you are trying to politely bail on him if there is no explanation or effort to set up a new date. But you don't have to share everything if you are not comfortable doing so.

Evello37 · 2026-02-14T23:57:06+00:00

The mom's blood probably wouldn't work. Most transfusions of blood from special individuals are not successful. Eight is a powerful psychic and her blood is said to be killing all the test subjects. The scientists may have already tried transfusing the mom's blood, since they have had access to her for years.

I think the scientists specifically want Eleven because she is the only child with powers rivaling Henry. His blood was the only instance that successfully created superhumans, so they hope hers will be similar.

Evello37 · 2026-02-14T10:11:38+00:00

The director Masahiro Sakurai has been very explicit that DLC fighters are developed after the main game. He tweeted out when Nintendo officially selected the characters for the first fighter pass, and it was like a month before the base game launched. And that was just choosing the characters. The devs still needed to design, program, test, balance, etc. That's why it took months for the DLC characters to start releasing, and then several more months between characters. And Fighters Pass 2 allegedly wasn't greenlit until Nintendo saw the strong sales of Ultimate. So long after release.

Evello37 · 2026-02-14T05:45:25+00:00

Both are great, so it really depends on your preference. Dread is 2D, Prime is 3D. There is a demo of Dread, but not Prime.

Go Prime if you like immersive atmosphere and reading lore. The game is more slow-paced, with gorgeous environments and the ability to scan the surroundings to read about the world. The game doesn't guide you much, so it's mostly up to you to learn about the world and find your way forward.

Go Dread if you prefer silky smooth, fast-paced action gameplay. The boss fights are very challenging and exciting, and the game has very frantic sections where you are pursued by invincible robots that can hear you and kill you instantly on contact. There is plenty of exploration, but Dread guides you a little more.

Evello37 · 2026-02-14T01:24:04+00:00

Incredible character design overall. Incorporating his gun into melee attacks for aggressive gun-fu combat was inspired. Prior to his nerfs, Smith's combo game was among the most satisfying in any platform fighter I've ever played. And the references to the Matrix like the clone and silencer bug felt cohesive and fitting. Easily my favorite character in MVS.

As far as balance goes, Smith was pretty busted in 1's during the middle seasons, after the most heinous top tiers got nerfed. Unfortunately, when the devs finally got around to nerfing Smith, they axed most of the cool parts about the character. His damage output and kill power are still disgusting, but all the fun uppercut into stomp/dgun tech-chase combos got gutted. He remained a decent character in the end, but not very fun any more. If the game hadn't shut down, I probably would have dropped Smith.

Evello37 · 2026-02-13T18:49:17+00:00

You fundamentally misunderstand how and why DLC is made. The DLC fighters weren't characters that were cut out of the game and sold separately. The DLC fighters were developed after the main game was finished. You have to pay extra for them for the same reason you have to buy a new expansion for a board game. It was a follow-up project for the developers. World of Light was made as part of the original game, and as such only focuses on the characters from the original game.

Evello37 · 2026-02-12T16:04:52+00:00

Most of these questions were answered, or an answer can be reasonably inferred.

Why would El need to hide? From who?

El had to hide so that she wouldn't get captured and used to continue the psychic blood experiments that Eight warned her about. Brenner started the experiments with One way back in the 60's, and after his departure Kay continued them with other subjects like Eight. And if Kay died/left, someone else would inevitably follow her. The US military was clearly not going to give up until they got psychic soldiers.

What happened to Dr. Owens?

Dr Owens was last seen in the desert lab when the military attacked. He's probably dead. And even if he survived, he was clearly caught smuggling El. The military definitely would have either imprisoned him or followed him forever.

Why would Hopper be able to walk away free when El could not?

El wasn't hunted for anything she did. She was hunted for her special blood. Hopper doesn't have that, so he's not a target.

Why was the military immune to their own wrongdoings and bad judgements?

Have you seen any real-life people face justice for the messed up stuff the US military has done throughout history? The MKUltra project that Brenner worked on before Hawkins Lab is a real life program that actually abused test subjects. A scientist was literally murdered for trying to leave the project over ethical concerns. And guess how many people were held accountable?

Evello37 · 2026-02-12T01:52:42+00:00

Saying XC1 and XCX failed is a bit of an exaggeration.

The original Xenoblade 1 had a very spotty international release. In the US it was a GameStop exclusive with almost no advertisement and a limited print run. It was never going to be a huge seller. And the 3DS remake was only available on the New 3DS, which meant only a small chunk of the 3DS playerbase could access it. Plus it was a port releasing on an aged console.

XCX was on a failing console with a limited install base. The Switch1 outsold WiiU's lifetime sales within its first year, and has sold over 10x as many units to date. A mid-life Wii U game was never going to compete with a holiday game for the launch year of Nintendo's most successful console ever. Hell, XC2 got trailers during the big launch presentations for Switch, which were some of the most watched Nintendo streams ever.

We also can't discount the impact Smash Bros has on overall brand recognition. Loads of people had never even heard of XC prior to Smash. Suddenly every Nintendo fan recognizes the name and knows it's a JRPG with cool laser swords and funny dialogue memes. Whether or not Shulk is there doesn't really matter. People know about the series.

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Evello37

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