Nintendo Hard and Git Gud Hard (Dark Souls Hard)

[marurun]

Nintendo Hard and Git Gud Hard (Dark Souls Hard)

Listening to an old HG101 Top 47k Games podcast episode got me thinking about difficulty, as I am wont to do. For a couple decades now there have been debates over whether games should or should not have easy modes for some players, with folks falling on both sides of the debate for a wide range of reasons. But that debate is talking about games that are typically perceived as too hard or demanding for some players. What we hear less of is the side saying they don't typically like games that give you a easy, or at least easier, way to play. In the podcast episode aforementioned Bobinator was the lone dissenter of Symphony of the Night having RPG elements. He felt it didn't require players to learn skills to overcome challenges because they could level up or get strong equipment and just push through it by brute force. The counter offered is that you don't HAVE to play that way. You can eschew grinding and exploration and challenge yourself to beat the game in a more difficult manner. The choice is available to you. And that has me wondering if some people need their games to require them to face a challenge in order to do so. Are they unable to voluntarily take up a challenge and so must have the game make that choice for them?

This got me thinking about the nature of difficulty and my own relationship to it. I have started to internally categorize hard games based on a couple categories I call Nintendo Hard and Git Gud Hard, though most people might understand the latter better as Dark Souls Hard.

Elements of Nintendo Hard existed before the Famicom, but the Famicom and especially the NES in the US really cemented what I consider the essential pieces. A Nintendo Hard game must be a relatively short game, completable in about an hour, give or take, by a skilled and knowledgeable (or cheating) player. The challenge of the game comes from one or both of two key elements: rushed development and attempts to stretch the play time. Nintendo Hard games often have design elements like jumps that require too much precision, poor hit detection, delayed input response and or slow frame rates, enemies that deal too much damage, knockback that can turn a tankable hit into a death from falling into a pit, lack of damage feedback or invincibility window, enemies that spawn or respawn right at the edge of the screen, and bosses that just take too many hits to kill. These are all elements that appeared before the idea of Nintendo Hard existed, but Nintendo Hard is the perfect storm of games that were developed in a hurry with too little testing, if any at all, and a desire to provide value. How does making a game frustratingly difficult provide value? It stretches play time. While game rentals were not permitted in Japan they were, for a time, a large market in the US. From Blockbuster down to local video rental stores, there was always a wall of NES games you could rent. Parents would grab last year's blockbuster and maybe a drama and the kids would beg for an NES game or two to play over the next 2-3 days. Nintendo and other game companies were worried. Most of their games were relatively short, from 5-9 levels that would take maybe 45 minues to 2 hours to complete. If players could beat the game in a rental they were less likely to buy the game, making for lower sales numbers. So developers looked for ways to stretch their short game. There was no shortage of hard games on the Famicom, as often by accident as by design on account of small teams with rushed timelines and little or no testing, or even due to limitations of the Famicom hardware. But many developers took extra steps, making enemies deal more damage or take more hits to kill. They wanted to ensure that US players would be less inclined to finish the game on a rental.

Over time, as memory got cheaper and hardware got more powerful, games became longer. People would often evaluate the value of the game as how much play time they got for their money, sometimes putting play time above the quality of the experience. And it is in this environment that Git Gud Hard emerged. The phrase Git Gud possibly emerged from online gaming in the late aughts, but the sentiment has been around as long as competitive gaming has. If you're playing against or with other people and you're outclassed or not doing well, your only real option is to get better: Git Gud. The phrase could be adversarial or it could be supportive, but either way, it meant put in the time and effort to master what you need to master. That makes sense in a competitive space, where the skill gate is other people, and if you want to be competitive you have to develop your skills to match your opponents. But with the advent of Dark Souls people started using that term a lot for the single player experience as well. Games that challenge players in the way Dark Souls does have existing long before Dark Souls. This kind of challenge is very different from the Nintendo Hard constellation of difficulty elements. This is a single player challenge that requires you to master a set of gameplay skills requiring you to learn tells, develop quick response times for a variety of moves, and yes, do some memorization. These are a lot of the skills required in competitive gaming, especially fighting games, but this time the opponent is the game itself. This difficulty is one that requires more careful design. Nintendo Hard was sometimes deliberate, but equally often it was just something that happened. Git Gud Hard is something that is baked into the design itself and carefully curated. It isn't a consequence of hasty or bad design and it isn't there to stretch something short into something long. It's part of the experience itself, and as a result the most devoted fans of Git Gud Hard games rail against the idea of "watering down" that design with easy modes and accessibility. But there's a consequence to Git Gud Hard that people often overlook. Most games are longer experiences now compared to the NES days.

Nintendo Hard was annoying, even frustrating, but overcoming it was a matter of replaying the same things over and over. And those things you were replaying were short experiences. Sometimes there were even level select codes to help with practice. Speedrunning a NES game can be a sub 20-minute experience. So while Nintendo Hard can be "cheaper" difficulty compared to a more thoughtfully crafted difficulty, it is in some ways more manageable. You can sit down and practice for 15-30 minutes and experience a decent portion of the game while doing so. With games that are Git Gud Hard the game may be a lot longer, meaning the skill curve is slower. The skills you have to develop are less memorizating a specific timing for a specific moment and more reactive and holistic. This also means that Git Gud Hard is a more difficult hard for some players who may have hard limits to their perceptual response times. Nintendo Hard is, in a way, both less fair but also more reasonable to overcome for a certain set of players. Git Gud Hard games can therefore be a harder gate on enjoying a game. Git Gud Hard has invaded the Metroidvania genre, for example. I used to pick up Metroidvanias because I thought they were fun, but they've become something more demanding in recent years and now the Metroidvania tag on a game might actually discourage me from picking it up. And while I'm not going to pick up a modern game that might be considered Nintendo Hard, I think the time of Nintendo Hard being acceptable for anything other than classic/retro games has long passed, I am actually more willing to engage with older games that are Nintendo Hard because they'll be a short experience and I won't feel denied if I can't progress in them, whereas I will avoid games that are Git Gud Hard because I simply do not have the time to invest nor the reflexes to spare for a modern multi-hour game that expects me to be ON the entire time. I just can't do that and don't enjoy that. I am glad people who enjoy that kind of game exist, and I think there's always a place for them, but I think there's also a place for modulated difficulty and voluntary challenges, and that gets drowned out in many modern discussion of difficulty.

Let me know if you have any thoughts on this or opinions to share.

[Syndicate]

...definitely an interesting take. While I'm aware of the Nintendo Hard from the sidelines, I grew up w/a 7800, it wasn't something that I was too familiar w/other than a game couldn't be too easy b/c it could be finished in a rental window. Even though I had a Genesis and rented a bunch of stuff, I was also in the arcade playing a lot of SFII against college kids that I didn't stand a chance against lol, but it made me want to really learn the game. As I got older and spent more time w/SFII and other fighters from Capcom and SNK getting good was just part of the deal and honestly a lot of fun imo as my friends and I progressed and helped each other out w/technique, combos, and etc. As adulting and everything it involves, I honestly haven't had the time to invest in learning a lot of fighting games, but the same "git gud" moves over nicely to longer action and rpg games like most everything that From Software has done and other games like Nine Sols or Clair Obscur. I will admit that I think "gut gud" it can suck, but getting those systems down and gaining skills needed to proceed is very rewarding. That's the biggest difference imo, Nintendo Hard can be fun, but if you invest the time Git Gud Hard feels more fair to me.

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

Good point. Playing UFO 50, I realize there's a welcoming attitude. Most games only require overcoming two or three spiky challenges. There isn't a single one that requires me to stay alert the whole time, like in fighting games and shmups.

[MrPopo]

I think there's more overlap than you might be considering. When I think of Nintendo Hard games, I think of Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden. While you definitely can benefit from memorizing where enemy spawns are, having the general sense of the types of traps the devs like to put around pits and being prepared to attack upon seeing an enemy spawn in those situations can go a long way. I think back to the first time I managed to get to stage 5 of Ninja Gaiden 2; I managed to clear it blind without mishap because I had gotten into the game's groove of how to react to the various expected traps.

Similarly, Dark Souls is the epitome of Git Gud style, and that has a similar level of "if I memorize stuff I can do better" and "if I keep the dev tendencies in mind I can react well". If you rush through a new area you'll probably be ambushed by an enemy around a blind corner and take a hit; you'll remember for next time. Or you can remember that the game likes to do that sort of thing, and so you treat corners with more respect in new areas. For a specific boss, you can learn all the attack tells and the right way to react, but most bosses you can have a good chance of one-shotting blind if you've learned to approach the game with caution and the general stratagem of "wait for an opening, then strike".

[marurun]

Oh, I'm definitely over-generalizing. The arcades sort of sit in the middle. They're typically shorter experiences but align a little more with Git Gud when designed well, and a lot of them are meant to be re-played and honed, not just to "complete" (not even an option for older arcade games) but to go for a high score or a 1cc. A lot of arcade games did have "cheap" difficulty, reflecting some of the shabbier tendencies of Nintendo Hard, but many were also carefully designed to both steal credits AND reward careful play and learning. And some of that design aesthetic carried into early console games as well, so there's definitely some elements of the arcade and the earliest hints of Git Gud in Nintendo Hard in certain instances. If you look at the original Ninja Gaiden, there is a lot of the instant enemy spawns (and respawns) and trolling, deliberate attack patterns and enemy placement. So the original Ninja Gaiden thus has some Git Gud but also a lot of Nintendo.

[o.pwuaioc]

They're typically shorter experiences but align a little more with Git Gud when designed well, and a lot of them are meant to be re-played and honed, not just to "complete" (not even an option for older arcade games) but to go for a high score or a 1cc.

I think you're right that Nintendo Hard like Contra or Ninja Gaiden was often tied (at least in part) to rental culture, but I'd place that in a different category from poorly designed or janky games. Yes, the difficulty spikes were there to stretch things out a bit, but that was part of the challenge in itself. Also, a lot of early NES games (and even SNES) games were designed with points in mind. Nintendo Power kept charts of high scores that people sent in, but "Completed" as an achievement was rarer. It's not enough to beat a Nintendo game, you also tried to beat it with a high score, and that is where the difficulty really came through. Oh, you beat SMB? Great. So did everyone else. Your low score though means you used Warp Zones to do it.

Yeah, sometimes hit detection or flickering or whatnot would be there, but I don't think things like "enemies that deal too much damage, knockback that can turn a tankable hit into a death from falling into a pit, lack of damage feedback or invincibility window, enemies that spawn or respawn right at the edge of the screen, and bosses that just take too many hits to kill" count, as often these are design decisions, not rushed mistakes.

There's also a regional difference to be taken into account. Ninja Gaiden III JP is easier than NG3 US. It wasn't poor programming that made the US version harder, it was a deliberate choice, again, probably because of the rental market.

But MrPopo is right that a lot of these decisions are surmountable if you treat the game with respect and don't rush it. It definitely takes dedication and a good memory, but I still think "janky" is a separate category.

[marurun]

I'm lumping them together, early NES jank and deliberate design decisions, because those design decisions were usually not well-tested, and the actual output of both were often the collective result of rapid design cycles and turnover. Arcade games typically had more testing due to site tests. Home games often had minimal testing, focus primarily on whether the game actually work and does anything truly bizarre happen.