Soulslikes are just 3D Classicvanias.
I mean, I get it. You use the name of the game that made the thing really catch on.
I guess I should expand on that quip by saying that if a genre is defined by its philosophy (idk why not) then a castlevanialike/classicvania is a game that uses animations with slow windups that require timing and commitment, as well as how the player’s movement functions in relation to the movement of obstacles. The emphasis is on the player trying to understand how they can fit themselves into the environment, as opposed to, say, a Banjo Kazooie where the world is clearly intended as a playground for your avatar. Other things in classicvanias involve stuff like scrutinizing geography/architecture for secrets, though that’s something a bit more common in exploration focused games.
A soulslike definitely seems to be about those things, plus that death gimmick. Honestly I played Nioh for about an hour and it weirded me out how few liberties it took on souls design. It’s almost not a soulslike, but just a souls clone.
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Berserk on the Dreamcast is a proto-Souls you heard it here first
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If we switch out the explicitness of the death gimmick for its concept of being put back at a check point and having to catch up to your own progress, then Monster Hunter is a soulslike, in that you’re pressured to return to where you fell to pick up with the monster before it moves on and regains stamina.
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pitfall: the mayan adventure felt sorta soulsy but you should not claim that you heard it here first because that’s a terrible opinion never to be repeated
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I think it’s the stamina bar. That’s like 90% it for me anyway when I think about a Souls or Souls-like. The stamina bar means it’s not just God of War or even Devil May Cry where you just hit buttons really really fast and still do ok most of the time. It means it’s an action game but you have to be mindful of every move you make.
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The Staflos fights in Zelda 64 are really the only proto-Soulsy things in the entire Zelda series. Z targeting is really all it has going.
Blade of Darkness has the stamina bar.
Zelda 2, though!
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The ‘level’ design, aesthetic, economy/death mechanics define these games as a series and singular whole; the combat system probably is what constitutes an imitable genre. The stamina gauge the critical element, emblematic of the philosophy. Interactions simplified, explicit, telegraphed, quantified, knowable, finite, consistent, cyclical.
Agree.
It’s the PS2 one.
checkpoint based dungeon crawler with castlevania bosses.
It’s not a new genre, it’s just a genre that has been half-dead since the ascendancy of first person shooters (which combined the innovations in level design brought on by dungeon crawls with tense shooting and movement mechanics, making the older genre seem slow and stodgy) and now that those are fairly completely restricted to open world lawnmower sims and hyperlinear action story sims, the dungeon crawl has returned.
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Are you talking about Zelda 2’s Iron Knuckles or the lose unspent xp when you die mechanic? Because I could see either of those.
And aren’t dungeon crawlers things like Swords and Serpents, Eye of the Beholder, or maybe Ultima Underworld? There was that non dungeon crawler dungeon crawler podcast…
This is literally only true of playing easy auto mode in DMC (which even the game tells you basically plays the game for you) or DMC2 (which just had no difficulty balancing at all and is mostly kinda garbage). Like the 3 other main series games, this will just get you killed. This is what makes DMC work as a game, and why that shitty western reboot was just the worst (among many other reasons). God of War is basically easy auto DMC, though actually it is closer to like an easy auto version of Ninja Gaiden in how the moves work.
I will say that, despite the difference in how they control, DMC3 does have a boss concept similar to the Souls games in terms of learning their moves and reacting, but shit, that is just Mega Man and any number of boss based games, really.
“Soulslike” bothers me because if you try to separate out most individual elements of a Souls game you can pull dozens of examples that may or may not have been influential/influenced. What made Demon’s Souls remarkable was the way it synthesized its influences into a compelling whole. There’s bits of Castlevania and Zelda in there, there’s the King’s Field->Shadow Tower lineage, there’s Berserk and architecture geekiness and game book nostalgia. It’s in a sense a very “literate” game.
When i show Dark Souls to people for the first time, usually after describing it glowingly as my favorite game, they typically go “oh, well, it looks cool but isn’t this basically Zelda?” It’s an elaboration more than an innovation.
The oblique multiplayer is the only bit that was really new and unusual (and imo it worked best in DeS, when it was a clever surprise and not a primary focus). The way death works is pretty fresh for an action game, and not a common system, but you can find reclaiming your body/supplies all the way back in Wizardry. Stamina is pretty similar to how it works in Monster Hunter, though Souls is more strict about it. i think a game that copies these elements could be considered a Souls descendant. High damage, low combo/cancel 3rd-person action, ehh, not so much?
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Both! Zelda 2 in general strongly evokes soulsness to me.
I’m home sick today so I’m going to type something really incoherent.
Demon/Dark Souls isn’t it’s own genre.
It’s a 3D action rpg with a set of well coordinated design decisions that emphasize a risk/reward structure in both general progression and in individual combat situations. A lot of games are borrowing it’s formula, but it’s not really a you need a, b, and c to be a proper Soulslike or whatever. You can grab a dash of k, s, and q. That’s how you end up with everything from Lords of the Fallen (combat) to Link Between Worlds (indirect multiplayer elements) being post-Souls games.
I tried to come up with some antecedents for the major mechanics, and I’m sure I’m missing some important great grand pappies:
-checkpoints and enemy respawns -DS handles them more organically than your typical NES sidescroller by not requiring death to trigger them, but it’s an old mechanic. I think the check points replenishing freebie healing items is a nice bit of showmanship that reinforces how otherwise unforgiving the rest of the game is supposed to feel.
-currency/xp loss on death and corpse retrieval - The former is pretty standard, and Diablo 2 probably is the best touchstone for the latter. Happening across a old corpse in nethack (and I assume rogue) was more of an easter egg than a core element of progression.
-the stamina bar - It’s tempting to mention Secret of Mana’s bar but I’m blaming Blade of Darkness for this one. It forces your combat maneuvers to be closely considered and ties in with…
-an emphasis on defensive play - I know it’s probably cool to not play like this, but I can’t think of a game where the shield was as vital. Stuff like the Ocarina of Time Staflos fights laid the ground work though.
-multiplayer - I think this is the most revolutionary element. Nethack’s shared bone files let you come across other players’ remains and ghosts but they didn’t serve the same kind of warning role as the stains do in Dark Souls. I think the summon and invaision elements are completely fresh. The invasion element does kind of make what a lot of griefers would do in other games an official part of DS. Think of dealing with the asshole who joined a L4D game in progress to team kill or something like that. Maybe you could even make an argument someone popping a quarter into Street Fighter while you’re in the middle of a fight is similar too.
There’s a bunch of window dressing elements to talk about too but I find using the word “lore” as video game jargon to feel really gross and nerdy.
I think I’m all done talking about video games for this year. I’m going to go back to bed rather than proofread.
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Yeah guess I should mentioned I was talking about the reboot but I knew talking about DMC in the same breath as GoW would summon you 
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Oh yeah, if you are talking about the reboot, you are not wrong at all,
all of this has brought me to a disturbing conclusion that we still do not know what the word ‘genre’ means in the context of video games
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Yeah, so… we have people with graduate degrees in literature here, right? (you?) What does genre mean anyway?
Klepek’s assertion that “clones” give way to a genre after enough iteration is intuitive to me.