I think I'm gonna try to 100% HZD now. ADHD brain will not let it go. Something in me just says "dive in" and I generally like the challenges, though a few of those hunting grounds challenges are so obnoxious to get the full medals for. It's at least two playthroughs to really do it, if we are counting NG+ stuff. But I'm pretty efficient and confident with the combat. I understand numerous ways to kill every robot in the game, depending on what I have and honestly just how I feel like doing it. I know how to work mixed mobs of different strong enemies, too... arguably the most arduous, as you need to be cutting through the chaos to execute multi-move strategies in these little several-second windows... just know that's what you're doing before you're even there and have it in your head... and know when you're not gonna be there and make whatever defensive or evasive move you need to make right then in order to reposition yourself and get yourself at the right vector relative to your foes.
It's a lot of learned instinct with this game, really. I think that's what makes the combat so great for me. Dark Souls 1 had that same deal going on with learning movements and weaknesses... 'threading the needle in dance' so to speak. If you stick with it and get better at riding the waves in the combat loops, even going outside of your comfort zone with different ways of getting in and out of situations, you start figuring out how to be more creative and opportunistic - and then it gets really fun because you can chain moments together on the fly, adapting your strategy more by learning to stack advantages in the moment. Maybe a secondary enemy does something you don't expect and you make the call that ends the fight even faster. You see the toughest enemies and rush to them, thinking about how you want to beat them, or what the path will be this time around. Dropped hundreds already but every fight still feels different and earned.
I know some people will crank the difficulty, but I've seen what this team's idea of difficulty levels is... which is basically just to unbalance the base stats increasingly more against player as you go up in difficulty... turning what were tense and engaging strategic sorties into mind-numbingly grinding scraps with one or two dominant strategies, which you will always use or die a bunch more. Listen, they're not killing me on the hardest difficulty - sincerely, it is not happening that often. I know how the armor works. I have a dodge reflex attuned to all of the different attack telegraphy whizzing by. So the fights just take a lot longer and the feeling is less of satisfaction and more of gratitude. Dodge, dodge, squeeze, run, dodge, dodge, squeeze...
And then you have to grind for more materials, as you get less damage out of each unit of ammunition. How fun is that? It's a downgrade AFAIC. There's no extra reward. It's not like you level faster, or your exploiting of weaknesses will suddenly give you new advantages that can only be seized by high skill (as in... what if exploiting the tougher, more complex weaknesses already existing gave a 2x damage boost over normal difficulties, but brutish tactics or using moves such as taking easy elemental shots at canisters simply became completely non-viable more often? What if a slow-mo slide to get at a big monster's underside weak spots became a guaranteed crit knockdown? Those are so hard to stick and are only that much more so when the damage stakes are so high for you - you could always get squished and die instantly after failing so hard to time it that you have nothing left to do! Stick it and take the fight over if you're so damned good! GL pussy.)
Granted, some stuff like this happens organiically, just as a consequence of upping stats. But it sucks. For instance, Thunderjaws become a lot harder when 3 Tearblast arrows no longer remove a disc cannon. And on harder difficulties, those things just go to where you are and cook you from above in a second flat. You need to remove them as soon as soon as possible after being noticed, as they will inevitably kill you. But the thing is... there's not a smarter, more skilled alternative you need to execute, now that you are barred from that simple strategy. You now NEED the damage from every round in those two canons. So you're just gonna start off blowing through more tearblast and dodging a couple more times. And then you're gonna get those cannons, use them, and proceed to work through the remaining 3/4 of health it has left by slowly picking the thing apart with arrows, traps and elemental tricks. It's the same game with less fun stuff in it. No longer are you able to be as crafty.... you are funneled out of more interesting strategies by way of the stat imbalance with nothing better to come along with the increased challenge. Shitty, lazy concept for difficulty IMO but still immensely popular. I think some developers just put the difficulty settings in because it's a norm... so it ends up being an afterthought. I mean, they already balanced it once. To do it 5 times in detail? Yeah... I wouldn't bother either.
I mean... they aready have an adaptive difficulty system. For instance, if you always shoot canisters of a particular 'breed' of bot, eventually there will be no variants of that particular robot anywhere that don't have guards on the canisters. You can knock them off, but before the guards were there, you could smack the canisters of 3 or 4 bots before detection, which would blow and potentially kill 10 bots on the spot. You get used to that, and then they take it away from you by making it functionally impossible to lean on that so definitively. They will also become more aggressive, where previously only 1 might've attacked while the others fled, 3 might now try charging you at once. So the first time you try with the new guards fitted, you get a nasty surprise. Watchers gradually become Redeye Watchers, with a new and very mean eye cannon attack, better LOS detection, heavy armor for the head/eye that requires a perfect strike to the eye to get past in one shot, tougher to knock down, fewer open body spots... hard to discern from normal Watchers at first, but you learn to do so quickly, as it changes your entry strategy. When those Redeyes spot you and you can't dispatch them, they become the deadliest distractions from the two Ravagers (or whatever) you also need to tangle with. It all manifests across different enemies in different ways, all of these things that change battle dynamics as you progress in skill and combat ability. They all get physical and behavioral buffs as you level - and it's specific to what you kill and I think sometimes even how you kill. That's a cool system. The enemies you try to grind the most learn to be less grind-able. The options in the menu pale in comparison to what that adds.
So yeah, screw the ultra-hard mode. It's not a pride thing. It's more like my brain will no longer let me let this game go until I do and see everything in it. So I don't need to master every challenge to the utmost... just complete them all in service of learning and experiencing everything the game has to offer.
