Recently finally gotten around to playing Lies of P, and I’ve been enjoying my time a lot - I’d probably put it right between Sekiro and Bloodborne for my favourite Soulslikes. The boss fights have been pretty cool throughout the playthrough. However, the last few bosses, especially Laxasia and Simon, have been kicking my teeth in, so I used a summon to kill both easily.
Now, when people complain about players not playing “the right way” - aka bashing your head in for 10 days straight, using melee only, no summons, magic, cheese, whatever - I’m the first to say that it doesn’t matter how people play the game as long as they enjoy it and that they don’t have to prove they’re “more” of a gamer than someone who did adhere to these self-imposed rules.
After finishing these two fights (I’m at the Nameless Puppet now🫠), however, I kind of feel like I’ve robbed myself of a “worthy” victory because it was soo much easier with the summons than without them. Like, 30+ tries without and basically first try with a summon. It kind of took away the whole challenge and doesn’t feel like I’ve actually beaten them.
Ultimately, thinking that I’ve spent so much time learning their patterns and trying to kill them “the proper way”, it doesn’t feel as bad since I had grown frustrated quite a bit by the end, so I just wanted an easy out. Still nagging on my mind.
What are y’all thoughts on this subject? Is it warranted that I feel like I robbed myself of a proper victory? Should I just get over it? Anything similar happen to you?
Thanks!
Edit: Just remembered that I used summons quite a lot more often than initially thought. I used a summon for both Rabbit Gang fights as well as the Puppet King and the Green Swamp Monster too.
The Rabbit Gang fight felt quite cool like that, especially the first one, since it felt like a real brawl of two equal parties. I consistently got to phase 2 of both Puppet King and Swamp Monster easily but always ended up dying quickly, so the summons took the edge off quite a bit.
Edit 2: Beat Nameless Puppet, probably got a bad ending with Gepetto dying and calling me a useless puppet. But idgaf - I beat that fucker 😎
I cheesed the game using throwables and summons and I absolutely loved it. Without those I would’ve been frustrated and spent quality time on ignoring the tools that help me finish the game and compensating with my hard labour.
Feel that! I mostly stick to “traditional” gameplay personally because I like it that way the most, but it’s absolutely hilarious to see what people concoct when they’re creative. I’ve watched a couple cheese videos for Laxasia, for example, and outside of people like Ongbal who make any boss look like a clown, there were a lot that were using the Legion Arm or consumables a lot and to great effect. Pretty awesome, really
Yup! In the latest friends per second podcast the podcasters were talking about how From Software games (tbh Lies of P is a love letter to bloodborne) don’t explicitly give you a difficulty modifier but the games themselves have several things/objects/weapons that can modify the game difficulty for you. It’s like the setting is hidden within the game, rather than on the menu.
This idea really clicked with me. So if gamers want an easy mode, they use the “cheeses”, if they want hard mode, they ignore that, and if they want to change difficulty, they simply equip/unequip the cheese.