As many of you will surely know, Crash Bandicoot is officially back. With the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, the most famous marsupial in the world has once again landed on Playstation 4, with a completely rejuvenated look. Waiting to understand what will be the destiny linked toexclusivity of the title, part of the community has started making a strange juxtaposition. Many gamers, in fact, have encountered many difficulties in dealing with the three adventures of Crash included in the Trilogy and, for this reason, they have begun to compare the Activision game to Dark Souls. Crash Bandicoot difficile come Dark Souls? Many think so, and the arguments they bring are also quite complex.
However, the comparison does not hold up. Approaching Crash to such a different game is not only a understandable gamble, but it leads to completely wrong evaluations.
Crash Bandicoot as Dark Souls: Here's how it all started
Let's try to go in order. Where did the Crash - Dark Souls combination originate? From some similarities that link the two titles. As some have noted, in both games the player, after a small cutscene, is catapulted into a world of which he knows little or nothing, and must make his way to the next stage. As in Dark Souls souls are gathered to be able to level up, even in Crash Bandicoot apples are harvested, even if the aim, in this case, is to get an extra life from the hundredth apple accumulated.
However, the point of similarity that many gamers have stressed is only one: the difficulty. Many players have stated that they have encountered many difficulties in completing the various stages, underlining certain extremely punishing game mechanics. The jumps must be calculated to the millimeter, you cannot touch an enemy without dying instantly and, once your lives are exhausted, the words "Game Over“, Which forces us to restart the internship from the beginning.
According to these players, the step from “Game Over” to “You Died” is short. This Crash Bandicoot, therefore, is punishing, frustrating and extremely penalizing. In short words: Crash Bandicoot is hard, hard like Dark Souls. Needless to say, the web has caught the ball. On the net you can find dozens and dozens of memes, in which we find our beloved Crash equipped with the objects that made the Souls saga famous.
But is it really like that? Can we really consider Crash Bandicoot as difficult as Dark Souls? But let's go further: can we really consider Crash Bandicoot difficult? In our opinion, the answer is no.
Did I ever tell you the definition of "difficulty"?
To try to understand what we are about to tell you, we must start with a question: what is a difficult game? The answer may seem simple, but it is not at all. Can we define a "difficult" game when we do not proceed fast? Is a game difficult when there are particularly tough bosses to beat? We don't believe. Each game features a certain challenge level, designed and based for a certain type of audience. A video game for a young audience will have a low degree of challenge, while a video game aimed at adult users will be more challenging. But all video games, in order to be at least attractive, must have a minimum level of challenge guaranteed. Who would ever play a game where everything is simple? Where does even the bosses fight easily?
A difficult video game is for sure a video game that makes life difficult for the user, especially when compared with other titles published in the same period and of the same genre. A difficult game is a game littered with traps, with mangy enemies on every street corner, with few save points, with hard-to-beat bosses, where one wrong move is enough to do everything from the start. Finally, in a difficult game, the protagonist often has no second chances: it is enough to receive a well-aimed blow to leave us the feathers ... in a figurative sense, of course. The question then arises spontaneously.
Is Dark Souls a difficult game?
Any Souls fan would say yes without thinking twice. Our answer is YES, but only if we consider the era where the From Software title was released. Gentlemen, we live in 2017 where it is possible finish an Assassin's Creed without ever dying, where the games all have maps with well-highlighted objectives and even the GPS that shows us the way to reach them. Precisely for this reason, Dark Souls, and the Souls all, are to be considered difficult games, but only if we use 2017 as a "unit of measure".
If we were to be precise, more than a difficult game, Dark Souls is a no-help game. Forget the perfectly visible maps, forget the objectives with a lot of GPS and the weak points of the perfectly highlighted bosses: to make your way into the hostile world of the Souls, you'll have to get by on your own. Dark Souls is a return to old-fashioned video games, in which no help of any kind was received, where one was free to make mistakesindeed, he had to be wrong. To this old recipe, the From Software franchise has added an open world component, which allows the protagonist to explore, right away, the vast game world he is in… at his own risk, of course. Put simply, Dark Souls did not invent anything, it simply (re) introduced an ancient ingredient that had been lost in recent years: the total absence of aid. So, let's move on to the next question.
Can we consider Crash Bandicoot difficult?
In this case, the answer to be given is more complex. The N. Sane Trilogy had the merit of making one of the most loved protagonists in the world of video games playable again, giving the possibility to the youngest enjoy the masterpieces of the past, as any remastered should do. But we must not forget one thing: Crash Bandicoot is an old game. The first chapter landed on PSX way back in 1996, and had all the strengths and weaknesses of the games of that era. A wacky camera and not at all adjustable, a not indifferent level of challenge, gods commands not always responsive. Many of these elements have been preserved in the N. Sane Trilogy, causing the disappointment of many.
But back to our main argument: can we consider Crash Bandicoot difficult? If our yardstick is the games of the last generation, we can answer positively. But its difficulty level is perfectly in line with that of any platform released in the 90s. Also in Abe’s Oddyssee we had a considerable level of challenge, perhaps even greater, the same goes for Spyro the Dragon.
The new Crash, however, has come to meet the new generations. As the older players will surely remember, in the first episode of the saga, the game saves were carried out in a particular way to say the least. If our marsupial had failed to complete the bonus level after collecting the three Tawna icons, the game could not have been saved. All of this has been revised by inserting a rescue system, also introducing the autosave, to keep up with the times. But it wasn't enough. 2017 gamers consider Crash Bandicoot difficult, so much so request a patch to developers to decrease the challenge level. Perhaps now we are starting to find the answer to our initial question.
Crash Bandicoot difficult? No, lazy gamers
You will not like what you are about to read, but it can only be the simple consequence of what we have explained so far. Crash Bandicoot has nothing in common with Dark Souls, there could not be two more different games. The only thing that, perhaps, unites them is an above average level of challenge, but here too we make a mistake. Dark Souls is a "child of our day" game, deliberately going against the trend and capable, at the same time, of creating a trend. Good old Crash, on the other hand, is one milestone of the past, whose level of challenge is perfectly in line with that of any other game of his "age".
To think Crash Bandicoot difficult is to admit that you are lazy gamers, means wanting the victory served on a silver platter. In other words, it means not understanding the nature of the product you have in your hands. A little camera like this and some controls like this can make the game a little more difficult, and certainly the job of Vicarious Visions he was not without criticism. However, from here to requesting a patch that "lowers the challenge level" there is some. Precisely for this reason, what we feel like telling you is to play Crash Bandicoot for what it is: a nice old joker which, despite the facelift received, has been affected by the passage of time. Enjoy her adventures without being too angry if you lose a few more lives than expected, if you fall on deaf ears due to a badly calculated jump, if you die just from just touching an enemy. On the other hand, to such a nice old man you can forgive everything.
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