this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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Was in a comment section about designing games to respect the player's time and mentioned I never finished Hollow Knight because it makes you fight the final boss again each time you want to give the secret boss another shot.

Someone jumped in literally telling me "GET GOOD" and when I told them there were other things I'd rather be doing, they followed up with "so don't get hard games just to complain about." They never responded when I asked them how I was supposed to know exactly how hard everything in the game would be before I ever played it.

Every fucking time. I swear I can set my watch by it. The Dark Souls series has earned my undying enmity for what it has done to gaming discourse.

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[–] FunkyStuff@hexbear.net 15 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

unsolicited advice

If you ever go back to it, using the unbreakable strength charm (get the money for this from doing the second trial in the arena a couple of times) with quickslash makes the THK fight considerably quicker, and it helps with Radiance too. Regardless of your skill level, by the time you have a chance to beat Radiance you'll breeze through THK so fast it won't be a considerable amount of time. Radiance herself is a fight that I found to be much easier when I approached it very slowly and methodically, first learning how to survive in each phase without dealing damage before I started trying to work in more places to DPS.

[–] FunkyStuff@hexbear.net 12 points 3 weeks ago

And you can always go for Nightmare King Grimm too, that fight is pure gasoline and it's super challenging and worthwhile right from the start.

[–] SerialExperimentsGay@hexbear.net 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I find THK to be a very easy boss, it's rare that i don't beat it. HOWEVER, i do not think that is OPs point. In any case, it wouldn't be my critique of that fight.

Having to do an easy miniboss first every time before i get to work on the actual challenge i care about is a waste of my time.

It's just how it is. This would have easily been mitigated if Radiance would just work like any other dream boss. I get there are plot reasons why i have to fight THK again before i get to dreamnail it, but it still means i have to redo a time consuming task i have already achieved and that has become really unrewarding over and over again until i get nauseated by it. Some amount of that kind of thing is ok-ish, but i always found this approach fairly pointless, it doesn't have the same payoff that beating a hard boss or a tricky plattforming segment delivers. I also do not find it adds significantly to the payoff of these challenges when they get obstructed by routine rote tasks.

More importantly, beating THK shouldnt be turned into a repetitive rote task. It cheapens that part of the lore.

Edit: After reading the post upthread about the same situation, i get why people would disagree on this

[–] FunkyStuff@hexbear.net 3 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah you're right, it doesn't feel great. But if it's a matter of difficulty rather than satisfaction there's steps to mitigate the difficulty so you can still get to see the true ending, and I wanted to help OP with that!