![]() Malenia, however, is more or less totally lucid, angrily awaiting the return of her missing twin brother and liege lord, Miquella. When Radahn is found, Malenia’s power, the same power that has scarred the landscape around Radahn has left him ‘divested of his wits’, and fighting like a wild animal. There is a secret and hidden boss, however, another demigod called Malenia, who is still alive. There are harder bosses, but none that require so much backup to defeat, nor any nearly as hobbled with injury as poor Radahn. Radahn is oft touted as the strongest of all demigods – he holds the stars in stasis by his own power – he takes an entire platoon of elite soldiers in gameplay just to take down! This assertion that Radahn is the strongest remains more or less unchallenged for some time. The demigod Radahn fought his half-sister Malenia to a standstill. In Elden Ring, all of your primary boss characters are demigods, children of gods, who once fought over the shards of the titular ring. The idea that difficulty in gameplay can be a narrative tool should be fairly straightforward to grasp when looking at a couple of examples. I wanted to look at an example of a game where difficulty is an intimate part of its narrative design, where the reactions it illicit is very much a product of how difficulty is utilized. What I’m specifically focusing on in this article is how difficulty can be deployed with purpose, and often has more relevance to the overall design than is often attributed to it, as a simple measure of player competence for the purposes of challenge. These are very complex subjects that deserve their own discussions. To be unambiguous here – difficulty is a very nuanced and at times personal subject in design that touches on a host of other things such as game balance, technical depth, general play enjoyment, and of course accessibility. This article contains major spoilers for Undertale and mild spoilers for FromSoftware’s Elden Ring. ![]() I’ve had this thought for a while, to do a write up about how difficulty can be, and is, deployed in design to affect the greater experience. I’ve also been replaying Toby Fox’s Deltarune with a friend, another game that uses difficulty in interesting ways. I’ve had some stuff on the brain lately, in regards to difficulty’s place in design, which is what tends to happen when you play Elden Ring for so many hours straight.
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