LogFAQs > #958394683

DirtBasedSoap posted...

adjl posted...

it immediately tells people that don't like the games to which it's being compared that there's nothing of interest for them in the rest of the review.

very poopy take homie

He's not wrong, though. Any time I hear someone describe a game as being "like Dark Souls", I pretty much stop caring about that game entirely. Because the comparison is usually used to describe what I generally refer to as "frustration gaming", and I fucking loathe frustration gaming as a genre.



DirtBasedSoap posted...

genres are stupid and Im really not seeing how labeling everything as either Zelda-like or DarkSouls-like is useful to anyone

Genres exist for a reason, though.

You can describe a game as a "platformer", and you've just told me with a single word exactly what sort of gameplay a given game has. Call something a "turn-based RPG" or a "bullet hell shooter", and you've just explained more or less exactly how the game controls and plays. If a game isn't a pure example of the genre, you can easily add extra descriptors to elaborate.

Rather than spending an hour explaining each individual facet of gameplay, mechanics, and design, you can just as easily say "It's a third-person hack-and-slash Metroidvania collectathon with RTS elements" and tell me exactly what sort of game something is.

As people have pointed out in the past, before FPS became the preferred term for the genre, most FPSes were referred to as "Doom Clones". It's possible that "Rogue-like" or "Dark Souls Clone" may eventually evolve into their own clearly defined genres with more generic names. But even if they don't, "Rogue-like" still tells you exactly what you need to know so long as you understand what the term means.
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