So i've been watching Jeff Green playing this game, but i'm not totally convinced. plz GAF sell me on this game. Why everybody is talking about it?
Everything you do matters. There's no regenerating health, so every bit of damage you take either puts you closer to death, or requires you to heal yourself with non-abundant healing methods (which you can only do a finite number of times). Every attack you perform must be committed to as you can't cancel out any moves until they're finished; if you attack at the wrong time, you can get hit which puts you closer to death because there's no regenerating health. Because the hitboxes are exactly where weapon/character models are, during battle, positioning, stance and the frame your character is in during a given movement all determine whether you'll get hit, which contributes to you getting closer to death. Enemy positions are always the same, so every bit of progress you make teaches you what to expect on subsequent run-throughs. Every step must be earned, yet every step gives you something.
The reason all of this is so popular is due, in part, to many mainstream games being designed to make moment-to-moment gameplay meaningless, in that combat/traversal/exploration/decisions are all void of recorded failure. If you get hit, you'll regenerate that health in a few seconds. If you slip and fall, you go back to the last checkpoint without losing anything. If you avoid exploration, you're only missing genuinely skippable stuff, if you can even truly pass something up at all. If you attack a friendly, the hit doesn't even register, and so forth. The Souls games aren't like that at all.
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