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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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Categorically not true. Enemies can attack through walls while you can't. Enemies can attack through each other while you almost never get allies in the first place (at least prior to ER). Grab hitboxes are notoriously terrible. DS2 has a large emphasis on groups of enemies which is the literal definition of unfair.

First of all, when people say "fair" in the context of single player games where it's player vs AI, that doesn't mean having the exact same mechanics available to the player and AI or having the exact same number of enemies as the player (i.e. 1 on 1). The point of fairness in these games isn't to put each entity on equal footing, but rather to have the player experience a challenge where failure is the result of their own mistakes. DMC games are generally regarded as very fair, and the vast majority of the non-boss gameplay is centered around defeating large groups of enemies. All 3 From Soft games I've played have their moments of unfairness, but all have tended to be far better at fairness than most similar games of similar genres.

Second, it's simply not true that you can't attack through walls. I've cheesed enemies in Bloodborne and Elden Ring by attacking them through walls. Your weapon swings sometimes bounce off the wall in both games, but not always.

I actually was going to agree that grab hitboxes are notoriously terrible, but the only ones that really stick out to me are Genichiro's running grab and the Guardian Ape's leaping grab. For most grabs, I'd say it's the tracking that's complete BS, such as with Emma's. I can't speak to the latter half bosses in Elden Ring (I've just gotten to the royal city, having defeated Godrick, Rennala, and Radahn as the main big bosses), but I can't recall a single grab that struck me as being off compared to their character model. Godrick's grab was really frustrating to me, as was the Fallingstar Beast's (rather well-telegraphed) one, but both matched their character models quite well, especially for Godrick where I could just step back a foot and punish the grab by slashing his arm.