The Problem With "Soulslike" 

fire video. subscribed, liked, commented, clicked the bell, shared it to my family, played it at my grandma's funeral (she was resurrected), this video cured my stage four terminal cancer, my depression, and fixed my unrelenting habit to call shitting while constipated a souls-like experience. cant wait to see more

Poker is like the Dark Souls of Uno

The real problem is that most developers miss the real point and don't even put a single barefoot maiden in their games, like c'mon guys! it's called soles like for a reason!

Fun fact: FPS used to be called "Doom clones".

"Souls-like parenting" killed me. Very souls-like humor.

I am calling abusive households: "soulslike parenting" from now on

"Demons Souls is the Dark Souls of Souls games" is something my friends and I like to say to mock the over-use of soulslike

I'm a huge fan of soulsbornekiroring and i'm so glad miyazaki invented difficulty, this is truly a soulsbornekiroring moment.

your voice is so calming i fell asleep, not in a bad way. you could talk about your what tea you like the most and i would still listen

Everyone knows that Kirby's Dream Course was the first Souls-like game. Why do you think Miyazaki made Mimic Tear the strongest thing in the game? Because Kirby does the same thing and he's the strongest character in fiction. I rest my case, OJ didn't do it.

The first and most influential videogame of all time is Pong, so I'd say Dark Souls is a Ponglikelikelikelikelikelike-lite

I agree that genres are antithetical to creativity, but they are a convenient shorthand that's used by people to discover your game. I think you have to take the bad with the good here: ignore genre completely while creating and be thankful for it afterwards.

hey Nasu! great video bro. just love the tone of your voice makes it so easy to listen, and i really admire this presepective and agree with it completely. even as a hardcore fromsoftware fan i agree that putting lables on any artform limits the potential of its creators and also tunnels the expectations of what people think a game Shoul be played like. beautiful talk. thank you!

In Japan they are called "shinige" (dying games or something like that), games where dying and coming back, learning from your mistakes is part of the mechanic and usually it's implemented in the story as well.

“and really makes you feel like you have the exaggerated swagger of a medieval fantasy protagonist” is probably the best thing ever said

Incredible video, can't wait to see your other content. You're an amazing content creator.

That Gris music caught me off guard and almost activated the tears fountain, how dare you. Very thought-provoking and well-structured video, was a pleasure watching.

Remember when all FPS games were called "Doom Clones"? Edit: The point I tried to make here is that as the FPS genre evolved, Doom's copy-cats took fewer and fewer elements from the Doom gameplay loop. As a result, the only similarities Doom shared with these other games (post-1996 when "Quake" was released) was that they were in first person and had shooting-based combat, thus narrowing down the definition to an extremely flexible category. As for how this relates to Souls-Likes, FromSoftware made more and more changes to the Dark Souls formula in subsequent games, adding and subtracting various features, like adding rallying in Bloodborne and removing the stamina bar in Sekiro. As a result, we ended up with games that played very differently as a whole while still having the same core mechanics.

Lies of P unironically goes hard af

Bro... as someone who completed Cuphead, that person not being able to get past a NORMAL video game obstacle hurts me on a physical and mental level.

I always thought a "soulslike" game was when enemies respawn each time you "rest" or level up, and losing your level up points each time you died. Dark Souls was the first game to introduce me to those mechanics.

this is the exact premise of my research paper im writing for college and helped me a lot for points i wanted to cover, thank you !

It also has managed to trap fun action gameplay in dark settings. Heck, I'd go so far as to say the better the 3D combat system, the more it's expected to be in the goriest most gritty style imaginable.

2:20 abused by your parents? Sounds like a skill issue. I could parry dads belt by the age of 9

“When developers stick firmly to a blueprint, they’re designing backwards, creating a game that conforms to establish game mechanics rather than designing elements that’ll best compliment their game.” This is a brilliant quote, and has been at the forefront of my mind as I try do create my own small, passion projects.

This was too funny, I swear these videos are motivation for me to wanna put out great funny and amazing content myself

I agree with everything you said, but i can see why games cling to hard to tags and genres and sub-genres compared to movies. As games live from their interactivity, it is harder to judge what they are all about from just watching images or a video about it (And there might be hunderts of hours of game experience in it, how do you describe all that to somebody else?), so tags and genres help to identify quickly what this game is all about. We should not do it and let games stand for themselves, but languages always tries to be simplistic and efficient, so when i recommend games to my friends i will probably say something like: "Yeah try that game it is like darkest dungeon, but has a bit more metroidvania in it."

It's really sad any time a game that hard is instantly a souls like even if there nothing alike

As stupid as it sounds, I would have thought part of the things that make something “soulslike” would be the fact of dying and losing your souls/runes or whatever it is

This video's message is incorrect. That's not the problem with "Soulslike". The problem is people use it incorrectly. They drastically overuse it. That's the problem. You got it all wrong. The terms Roguelike and Roguelite and Soulslike are fine. It's people that are dumb and ruin it.

Great video! Also love the channel profile pic 🙌

I think "Soulslike" will eventually give way to a proper genre name, after all, every first person shooter used to be a "Doom Clone"

the problem with "soulslike" is it gets slapped on any game that has any similar mechanics no matter how unique the game is. the only soulslike i've played that feels anything like a souls game is code vein, and that's because it is literally just anime dark souls

GREAT video! Saw some cool looking games i had never heard of before! 😄

This video genuinely changed the way I think about game genres so much, thank you for this. I really appreciate it.

I don't think that people are calling "Rouguelikes" like that because they are derivatives of Rogue, but more because Rogue was the first game with random level generation and that forces you to restart from the beginning if you die, so it's more like people defined a genre with those specific characteristics and named it "Roguelike" in honor of the first game that brought those on the table If a game does not have those two characteristics it is not a "Roguelike", just like a film that doesn't evoke fear isn't an "horror", that's why the term "Roguelite" was invented, to classify games that don't force you to restart completely anew every time you die, instead having a semblance of slow overall progress, wich admittedly made them more popular than regular "roguelikes" Same with "Metroidvania", people usually use it to refer to any 2D open world game with zones blocked behind certain abilities, but it usually isn't for comparing it directly with the source material, but instead to say that: "it's a 2D game that instead of many levels it has a big map with certain zones blocked behind certain abilities", so unless it ticks all of those boxes it isn't considered a "Metroidvania" These terms serve to help define what the game is about, because to a game there's more than just "horror" and "thrill" there is also gameplay elements, people use these terms to quickly describe what's the feels like, just as they would use "platformer" or "RPG" The problem with "Soulslike" is that dark souls has too many characteristics, wich makes it unclear wich of them are necessary to define a "soulslike" game, so people just began to give that adjective to any game that had any of those characteristics in it, and that instead of using it to help define a genre, but mostly to "accuse" other games, as if using any of those elements was bad in any way

Why do people call it soulsbornekiro when soulsborne die twice sounds so much better?

great video, love your sense of humor

Honestly I find this -like classification a very useful way to get a quick gasp of what a game is

You did a great job on this Dunkey-like video. Thanks.

See, this is also my problem with “lifelike” items. The cops always come around and say things like, “man, that manakin is so lifelike,” and “what lifelike hands your doll has.” It’s really frustrating both because they’re always bothering me, and my art of taxidermy never gets the appreciation it truly deserves.

"Before Demon Souls, games were easy, they basically played themselves." Excuse me sir, I believe I finished Ghouls N Ghosts.. and by finished I mean I broke the f*n cartridge when not getting past the second level after several weeks

This video is perfectly hilarious. The satire is spot on

It's just a matter of convention. When someone asks you "what kind of game is x?" You can say that it is sort of soulslike in combat but with emphasized platforming for example. Linguistic tools like these are always handy to express fairly complex concepts without going into too much detail, and that's what it is all about.

I remember that it actually pissed me off when I was enjoying Hollow Knight because of the atmosphere and exploration and a friend of mine came out saying that "Cuphead is just better because both are games about evading difficult attacks but Cuphead has better looking graphics"

Awesome way to put on you'r opinion, must say that I've fully agree with u!

In my mind, a "Soulslike" is a game where there is action combat centering around learning enemy patterns and avoiding attacks while looking for openings to attack, which has checkpoints that restore your health and your healing potions but also causes enemies to respawn (and enemies generally don't respawn other than using a checkpoint and dying), and dying has a cost in resources that can be recovered if you make it back to where you died. This includes Hollow Knight, Salt and Sanctuary, and Tunic. S&S is the most souls-like of these without borrowing much from other genres (though has a few Metroidvania elements) , whereas Hollow Knight is a full fledged Metroidvania, and Tunic is more like a Zelda clone. I've probably played others I've forgotten about (other than the From Software games themselves), but those are the ones that stand out.

good video, subbed. Thank you for pointing this relevant issue out without sounding aggresive or using lame arguments

I loved it at "We all know difficulty didn't exist until Miyazaki invented it in 2009" It really feels like there is just this shared mass psychosis over this game. It is literally just a moderately difficult medieval fantasy game that doesn't have a baby mode. I have no fucking idea how it became synonymous with difficulty.

good quality content plus good critique, thanks for the video man

I just love Soulsbornekiroring games so much❤

This was a very video and made me feel emotions. I will be calling all videos like this Nasulikes from now on.

I once read something along the lines of "genres are for the person in the video games store to know which aisle to put them in". In other words, they shouldn't be a guide for the designers. Instead they are a (very rough) guide for the buyer.

Wow I didn’t realize there is a game called Rogue that spawned the genre Rogue-like. I prob should have known but I just learned this from the video so thanks.

2:30 yeah, like, who’s gonna call breath of the wild soulslike? *stares at Master Mode* ignore that.

The "aspects" of a souls game -limited healing -stamina bar -emphasis on animations -storytelling through experiences What should define a souls game -groundhogs day. Fight die learn After I beat sekiro, I looked into ghost of tsushima. I looked into reviews and people called it a soulslike. And it was a very similar game. It's japanese... that's all there is that's similar between these 2 games. Ghost of tsushima would be closer to batman arkham and assassins creed. People try to piggie back on the bacl of the success of other devs. Just look at what the dceu tried to do, copy the mcu instead of making its own path.

1:30 Can we give this man some credit for the time it must have taken to layer the player above the text here. It's a great touch.

"Oh you are poor? But have you tried dark sou-"

With all these new genres that look suspiciously familiar, I thought I don't know games well enough... But thanks to this video I understood that it's just that people don't bother to look back 10 years and god forbid more😭😭 When I opened Dark Souls, it reminded me of the old pixel platformers, but in cool graphics. ngl, the experience is frustrating, but at the same time kind of nostalgic. It appears that I've been missing the times when I knew the levels by heart😁

Loved the tone, the analysis, the pace, the quality of both the voice record and editing, and the fact and the way I learned things! 🖤

I don’t mind calling something a soulslike but I think people use it too often I don’t think that most games categorised as one are too close to dark souls

I think part of the problem is when a game comes out and gets labled as something because it shares things; it is automatically compared to the game prior. This can be a bad thing becauae some games would be seen as better if they werent compared to other games just because it is similar in some ways

It’s crazy how just today I was thinking exactly about this (the way game genre names are just about comparing games to others that came before)

2:10 Then she took the kids, the house, all my money, and feels like my soul too. Soulslike?

Just discovered your channel. Thank you for the thought provoking and entertaining work. Love it!

Thank you for this, I always thought 'rogue-like' were just games featuring a rogue character class, and I swore I've heard 'lite' hundreds of times from others but thought maybe i heard different, but it was about a game 40 years ago, which I think people who use the term 'rogue-like' has ever played, thank you for being with me in this journey of understanding.

Who calls cuphead a soulslike lol?

This video is so well done, when we got to the outro I was surprised and wanted more, good job.

Good stuff man, looking forward to seeing more Nasu-likes in the future.

very interesting. I thought rogue-lite just meant it was a rogue-like with a substantial meta progression system & power scaling between runs. The more you know!

since the video doesn't mention it, but nobody seems to mention the hard-lock on, idk why people don't mention it: hard-locking onto an enemy doesn't automatically make a game a souls-like game (people are calling the upcoming Stellar Blade a "Souls-like Nier Automata), yet when I do see a game with deliberately paced animations and a hard-lock on to an enemy my brain goes: ah yes, dark souls

I literally liked the video for your voice alone, but stayed for the content. Awesome video! I laughed so hard at some parts 😂

Just recently bumped into your channel and all I can say is all your videos are so well made. Plus your voice is like velvet mate

I have just started trying to create a video game, and have been describing it to my friends when I tell them, I want to take this aspect of Metroidvania. Still, also I want to take this from a souls-like game, can't seem to understand that I don't want to be constricted to the borders of what people have already done, and they tell me, "Well you can't do that, then it's no longer a Metroidvania!" I am trying to be creative and unique, not same-old same-old, this video inspired me greatly, more people should watch this, it certainly inspired me to not be repetitive, and to create something new.

Great video but I was completely pulled out for a minute when I heard the Catherine music playing while "Dark Souls" was being used in a sentence. Great taste in games my guy.

This was a really good analysis of the genre. I absolutely adore Nasulike videos

If a game is labeled a metroidvania or a soulslike or a roguelike or a rougelite, I generally know what to expect, and just need to check reviews for details / quality. That's what labels are for, and I like it that way.

Very solid video!

Megaman wasn't easy unless you played it or got all the power ups

Great video, i'm really happy this was randomly recommended to me because believe me brother, this exact same thing grinds my gears and makes me mad so it's nice to see someone finally making a great point about it.

i love your video , i totally agree with what you're trying to say im also very excited to see your future videos oh and your voice is so relaxing

Man, i love the ending. You totally get the soul of this game!

Please do not replace the Pope holding up the Blessed Sacrament with Dark Souls. That is literally Jesus Christ.

Thank you for bringing up Gris, never got in contact with the game before and it just looks amazing. Will play it soon!

i disagree with your opinion on rouge-lite, just because i think the category diference helps people when searching for particular traits. that (at least i think) should be the main point of the concept of genres in the first place, a tool that helps people find games with the traits they like

They do be soulslike though. Miyazaki invented an entire genre. Diminishing that fact is disrespectful to his art

Alright this was good. Subbed.

In the end, I still think that the problem largely lies within people, but not in the genre/games itself. People should allow themselves to express their thoughts and ideas more freely, instead of confining them within the word "soulslike". Or something like that

Great video ! I'm making games on my free time and always end up in the safety of a well defined genre. After watching your video, I want to be more experimental and try to do some things my way

It was so nice to listen you thx

shoutout to the genre CoDlike for bringing shooting from a first person camera out.

I'm sure someone's already mentioned this but the distinction between roguelike and roguelite is not based on how different it is from rogue, but whether or not there are upgrades that persist between runs. Few games these days are true roguelikes (noita is an example where the lack of progression between runs is shown mainly in the larger role that knowledge of the games mechanics plays compared to other games.)

im from another country and tbh u made me laugh the shit out of me. this video was amazing keep doing content in that way with ur awesome and hilarious editing i loved it! +1 sub

Hill of Tartarus is a nice name for the genre. Referencing the everlasting pain we make ourselves get through.

There are the "Doom Clones" too, like Quake, Call of Duty, Conter Strike and Portal. (Emphases on Portal)

The essence of Dark Souls is not found in one dissected aspect of its gameplay, but rather the entire thing. Every mechanic in Dark Souls games, or any Miyazaki game, is used to give the player an intended, deliberate experience. The Soul of these games lies in their say, what they want to say. It's a narrative of themes told through their gameplay. And what they say is meaningful and compelling. The Fire Fades. Mechanics in video games need to be seen as tools and foundations that will work to the benefit of the game narrative or world.

That's really clever video. I also see this problem and I see this in other medias than games. I would say that there is so much stuff now, while also being so different, that not everything really suits for an existing genre, while we also need some names to know beforehand what we deal with. Just because there is so much things it is so important to have some genres/types/names, because it is impossible to go through everything, so we filter stuff based on the search preferences. Music shows this well too. If something is similar to a genre, but not quite it, they are just called indie/alternative-[put normal genre name here]. I feel like this is a kind of problem, because with the more game derives from the "original" that the genre name was based off, the more it looks like it should not be in that genre, but then without it it could lack one and creating totally new genres all the time, figuring out what elements make it that certain genre etc. would just bring more mess. I thing that more generalised ideas of genres are better and instead of looking at a thing(be it a game, book, music, film, whatever with different types) as just that one genre, it would be better to look at elements of it and describe it by many different, but generalised types, that could give us some of the information what to expect from a title. It is already in use, like for steam you have those tags and many different websites with game catalogs also use it for years where you just have those longer lists with "action, platformer, 3d, something, something, something". Sometimes games can really make their way in a community and it feels normal that there might be influences and things called from those, but like it was said before, everything derives from something, so having more generalised terms that can describe certain mechanics/styles is the way to go in my opinion, instead of creating "just like this other game" type of description.

I think a big thing you are touching up on, and this comes up a lot in all mediums, is symbolic processing. Where we see the object/stimuli as reflective of a previously established symbol or mental representation. I think people like to categorize as it allows them to feel in control of their choices without needing to analyze all the details, and that is why a lot of game companies are forced to make games that triggers previous neruons or make a game like Omori or Celeste that advances so far beyond a platformer or JRPG they arent categorized because of accommodation. I think gaming is becoming so advanced and widespread we are now having the issue of categorization and top-down processing rather than actually looking or describing the game/thing in front of us; stating something is like dark souls is far more vague and nuanced than people realize and I think the generalizations you discussed are fueling/driving the phenomena.

I appreciate you mentioning that every single game is derisive, because that is so true of every art form. As an artist I get in debates all the time on whether or not you should use samples in your production, but I've always argued exactly what you said - EVERY piece of art was inspired by something, almost always another piece of art

This channel is awesome, I can’t wait till you blow up so I can have more good content in my feed.