PartridgeSenpai wrote:My biggest problem with the Demon's and Souls-like games (with the exception of DS3, since it apparently fixes this) seems to be most of the stuff you like about it. That really unforgiving NES-level difficulty where if you don't know what's coming you're almost definitely gonna die. How your first character almost definitely won't win you the game. For a NES game that can be beaten in a couple hours if that, that's not such an awful thing. For a 7th-gen RPG that's gonna take you like 20+ hours at least on your first runthough, that's a HUGE fault to me. That your first runthough can die half-way through once you realize your character is terrible, forcing a restart (more or less): That's a game that really doesn't respect the player's time in any way.
I'd say that your first character likely won't be sufficient isn't particularly accurate. They can be beaten without leveling at all. Leveling up doesn't so much make beating the games possible as much as it makes it easier - though I'd be the first to say that relatively few would be inclined to do SL1, or find it fun.
I would agree that there can be more effective builds, particularly for certain fights, so it's quite possible to have yourself spec'ed in such a way that some of them wind up much harder...though I've yet to find things to get entirely unworkable. I haven't really done NG+ much though, or done something like put points into Resistance.
DS2 and 3 do allow respec'ing, albeit a limited of times per NG cycle, so yeah, if that's an issue for you, then those do address it. Hard to really go wrong with simply pumping up HP/Stamina (and Adaptability in DS2) early though.
