When I started playing Black Myth Wukong it was clear that the main mechanic of the game was dodging at the perfect moment like it's with Sekiro, parrying at the perfect moment.
To overcome mistakes made along the way the game also gave you heals and most importantly, spells that aren't finite but can be recharged. So in a battle even if you used the spells, a few moments later, they were recharged and you could use them again.
Makes sense, right?
What doesn't make sense is my consistent need to try-hard all games by handicapping myself with the given abilities. For Black Myth Wukong I didn't use these spells at all when these are literally the core-mechanic of the game as the game teaches you again and again.
Take Sekiro for example, I not only started playing game on harder difficulty(Bell Demon) but also added extra handicaps by not using consumables which includes heals but get this, even attack. Yes, in a game about sword fight, I didn't attack wherever I could and once I would be done with these battles that took hours, I would record the footage upload to YouTube and watch it again and again.
The problem is, the game wasn't supposed to be like this. Take the consumables that are finite for example which increases your stats for a time being. I beat optional hard bosses in this games to get infinite number of uses of these and still I wasn't using them at all.
I had intentionally made the game much harder but more importantly much more dull in this pursuit of perfection or something else, maybe youtube clips or something, I can't really say.
Whereas I should have used those little buffs given by the game, also a whole mechanic that I completely ignored, the prosthetic tools which are at the centre of the game. You could get quite a few uses of these prosthetic abilities in game and the game had taught you over time what works with what and what doesn't and yet I refused to use them at all.
This was my first play through by the way. And I think the reason started with the fact that I had completely spoiled the game for myself by watching many videos of the gameplay by many many people online years ago because I really thought I might never actually be able to afford the game.
Now even I am unsure what made me do it. Maybe one of it was that I had spoiled the game Sekiro for myself and so I had to do something else maybe to even show-off rather than enjoying gaming. This shift happened inside me a few years ago when I started live-streaming games on Twitch with hardcore PvP games where I basically ignored all life and focussed completely on showing my skills off which required a lot of hours of persistently training myself everyday again and again. I guess it was the need to get attention that drove all this. I had been in a terrible relationship at that point and another one before that and I guess all I was looking for was validation. That's the closest I can come to it.
Recently however when I moved to Single player games, I started doing stuff no one was doing on the internet at the time not because I thought it was going to be fun but because maybe I thought it was going to be a pain. I guess I keep looking for pain. I am unsure but I like to think that views don't matter to me but then I keep doing stuff to show the opposite so I am unsure about that anymore.
Now when I was at the last two fights of the game, yesterday, I completely lost it but there was something else that bothered me.
That something else was a look at someone else's profile which showcased a lot of achievement and many hours in game but when me and my friend did the maths together, it didn't add up. In the last ten year his account was created, he need to play 8+ hours of gameplay everyday to genuinely get so many stuff on his profile.
That's when on the last night stream I learnt about fake steam achievements and fake increase watch time of your account on Steam, and when I saw it, I lost it completely. I even tried it yo see if it works which I reverted later(DON'T TRY IT. IT'S AGAINST STEAM TERMS OF SERVICE, however they don't do anything about it).
Also I learnt there are cheats disguised as mods too that make it seem your skills look amazing to an outside player without anyone realising.
This is the reason I don't trust anyone's gameplay if I don't see them live-streaming with their face on. Something I realized when I started my other youtube channel that people trust a video with a facecam more than they trust a normal video. Also when you livestream people can see the actual hours went into perfecting what you have done. Take my last boss-fight in Sekiro for example, considered to be the toughest boss fight in game: 450 deaths: Owl(Father) +Demon Bell, No Heals, Prosthetics, Sugars, Buffs or Cheese . Now if I hadn't had my face on the video people might trust me less but the fact that I had livestreamed all the 450 attempts to actually get to the boss for the fight and are linked in the description it means without a doubt that I did this honestly maybe with handicaps but I did it nonetheless.
Now let's assume what I saw on the internet was true. Yes, there are people who master these things, look at my own channel so maybe, just maybe, some of them are correct.
Then someone sent me their video in response to the previous video where they fought this boss with the initial health and ability and the whole fight was like 22 minutes whereas this fight should technically take 3-4 minutes at maximum and when I saw that video something broke inside me completely. Before this point I was ready to take on a challenge with more handicaps than anyone had imagined but watching that video shattered something inside me. I lost it, quite frankly, I lost it.
A little voice inside me said, "Is this what I have become? Is this what I will have to show at the end of my life on earth? Is this what I really want to do with my free time? Try-harding in single-player video games? Putting handicaps in video games and then showing them off to other people and be like, 'See you can't do this because you are not insane. This requires countless hours of pain and suffering and misery which you wouldn't do because you are in your right mind.'"
I had to make a decision right then and there and I did, right away. I installed mods to make the game basically a child's play, completed the game within minutes where it technically should have taken me another 50+ hours or so and I won't even bother making it more difficult for me with New Game Plus with even more handicaps than I already had. I used speed mod too BTW where I ran at 5 times the normal speed and I had most fun in this game than I ever did all those other times.
Because as Reginald Fils-Aimé rightly said:
Also I watched Asmongold's rage quit on Sekiro at the very end he said:
good run but it I'm done the dis [ __ ] is like I'm just gonna play like [ __ ] like I mean I I suck at this game like straight up I just suck at this game I can sit around and pretend and play and I'll probably beat him in like 50 tries or something but I don't want to do that like it's just I'm sound really having fun you know like it's just not fun so I appreciate everybody watching it was a good time but yeah I'm just not having fun and I told myself whenever I was gonna start doing these like I'm not gonna play the game like just to to for the sake of playing the game and like to stick there and do something where I don't have fun and it's just I don't enjoy it it's like why might why why even try like I don't really give a [ __ ] honestly I don't so I I do appreciate you guys watching I did kind of appreciate like I mean I enjoyed like the beginning of it but like it's just too many like really really quick reaction things that it's gonna be too hard for me to do and I just don't care honestly like it's frustrating I get frustrated because I'm not doing it well but I don't care enough to do a better I guess what that makes sense so yeah sorry boys thanks all for watching I do really appreciate it well it's like a mental breakdown or anything like that I'm just I just don't want to okay I don't want to spend the time I'm like we're in it and figure it out it's just not it's not really fun
And that pretty much sums it up. I did what he didn't. I made the game harder for me by going extra steps than the game even asked to and I had a miserable experience for hours and maybe a few minutes of victory. It's that same PvP games agenda again. It's too much time for too little fun.
Fun/Time is too low. It's even lower than watching mind-numbing TV shows and that's what I actually did.
Right now while I was writing this, I went back into this game, removed all the extra handicap (Kuro's Charm and Bell Demon) and then started using consumables and prosthetic tools and actually had fun for the first time in this game.
And that's what I am going to do from now on. Have fun. My life is already miserable, the last thing I want to do is make it more miserable when I a supposed to be having fun for a few hours.
Also, will drop this game altogether since I have already ruined it for myself years ago. Time to move on.
Just one more thing before I leave, I want to try hard and persistent in the face of overwhelming defeat, but I will do that in real life and not in a game. I did learn something about myself that I have immense perserverence, all I have to do now is apply that to real life and probably get back to doing what I should be doing, making actual content on youtube.