Listen. Before the Souls fanboys come at me with pitchforks, hear me out. I speak as an Elder Millennial of a bygone era, when video games were made by Boomers who were committed to destroying our childhood in preparation for destroying our adulthood. A tale as old as time.
Before FromSoftware was terrorizing gamers with bosses that hit like dump trucks, studios like Disney Interactive were where the heat was at. We had classics like Aladdin and perhaps just as notorious, The Lion King. Released on the likes of Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo in 1994, The Lion King follows the events of the film, with the player taking control of Simba as a cub who just can’t wait to be king, to an adult seeking vengeance against his Uncle Scar for the murder of his father Mufasa. From avoiding murderous vultures, to runaway boulders, to lava geysers, getting Simba from his cubhood to his adulthood is no easy feat.
So how does a colorful, pixelated platformer go down in history as such a notorious game? Surely, this is a game for children, a mix of lighthearted puzzles and a few hyena encounters to spice things up. But, no no. This game was designed to terrorize a generation, and remind you that your failures are eternal. Through all 10 levels, your patience, coordination, and reaction time are challenged, with the slightest failure punished by an instant death. While enemies can cause you to take damage (a perfectly normal mechanic), there are at least 17 other threats per level that can lead to an insta-death. Things such as: falling into water, getting run over by a boulder, getting knocked off a platform by a bat into a pool of lava (that last one is personal). There is zero room for error in this game. And, like most games of its era, you have a limited amount of lives that when exhausted, lead to a game over. But surely there is a save point, a checkpoint, right? Surely you wouldn’t have to start all over, right?
Oh, my sweet Gen Z child. FromSoft games may be brutal, but at least you wake up at your campsite two feet away from the boss room where you can try again. A death in The Lion King meant completely restarting the level, unless you were lucky enough to find the one checkpoint at the level’s halfway point. And if you were unfortunate enough to run out of all your lives, then you were back to level 1, as if none of the previous trials and tribulations had ever happened. You can die over and over again in any Souls game, but you’ll always wake up right next to that boss room, fully loaded with all your potions, weapons, and abilities you’ve earned from the grueling trials of combat. But no matter how many bugs Simba smashes, no matter how many hyenas he bonks, Simba doesn’t get a stat sheet you can build. He doesn’t get any sort of leveling at all. All he gets is harder levels, and higher stakes.
Now yes, there is a “cheat code” that players can enter on the main menu that allows you to not only choose which level to play, but turn on an “Invincible” mode. Well hey, in that case, what’s the big deal? Just turn on god mode and go for it. Alas, no. That “god mode” makes you immune to damage from typical enemies, but not from a fall into water or lava. You’re just as susceptible to failure if you’re not quick and painfully precise on your jumps, or swinging between hippo tails. Hours can be lost in a matter of minutes when fighting for your life through the Hakuna Matata level. Not that I know that from experience or anything.
One of my crowning achievements as a child is that I could beat the entire game in under an hour, thanks to endless hours of honing my skills. Sadly that skill has faded with age, but it is something I keep in mind every time I hear a Souls fan tell me to “git gud.” I did get good, youth. In the days of old, long before Radahn, when our greatest enemy was a boulder.
