How much easier than Mega Man is Shovel Knight really?

So I've been thinking about Patrick's minor complaint that Shovel Knight is too easy, as I recently finished it, and I'm starting on some of the trickier achievements for beating the game without dying, etc.

Patrick's complaint seemed to be that he didn't like that it's relatively easy to finish a normal playthrough, and that the devs made the challenge "optional" by putting in achievements such as "beat the game without dying" or "beat the game without spending money". He has also made this complaint against the recent Mario games, in that finding the hidden star coins (or equivalent) in New Super Mario Bros. games or 3D Land/World were the only places where there was much challenge to be had. (Shovel Knight has this to a degree, in that the hidden areas in levels that contain relics or song scrolls are often more challenging than the main stage).

Is Shovel Knight really that much easier than Mega Man of old? I'd argue that they're very similar levels of difficulty, just with all the bullshit game design removed that gave the illusion of difficulty.

In many games of the NES era, if you lost enough lives to falling in a pit, you would run out of continues and have to start much farther back (possibly the beginning of the game), or at the very least fall back on a password save. This made you have to repeatedly play through sections of a stage that you have already demonstrated you can pass multiple times. This is tedious, and seems like a poor hold over from the coin-op arcade days. Games in general have veered away from this, and Shovel Knight is no exception. The checkpoint system removes any need to tediously keep replaying through 80% of a stage you've already mastered just because you happened to run out of lives on the final jump before the boss.

Shovel Knight also doesn't feature any trial and error sequences, that you'd never be able to beat on your first try without an extraordinarily lucky guess or flawless reflexes. Hell, even Capcom learned that lesson by the SNES era, as nothing in the X series or the later Mega Man games is as cheap and unfair to the player as something like Quick Man's stage. Quick Man's stage is infamous not because the enemies are huge dicks (or even that numerous), but because dodging the Force Beams has an incredibly narrow allowance for player error, and most players will likely sink 5, 10, 20 lives into that stage before they've memorized which direction to run to successfully dodge all of the beams. It's nearly inconceivable that you would pass that sequence on your first try, since you have so little time to assess each screen before you have to start avoiding the beams.

I'll admit that aside from the checkpoint system and lack of bullshit trial and error, Shovel Knight is still pretty generous in not putting enemies on incredibly inconvenient ledges, nor giving Shovel Knight himself silly amounts of hit stun and knockback, which Mega Man has in spades. And the game is pretty generous with giving you turkeys all the time.

Still, if reviewers like Patrick want to complain about a game's difficulty because it doesn't stand up to how they remember Mega Man being, they should examine their options more carefully. If you destroy every checkpoint, guess what, it plays a lot more like a Mega Man or Castlevania, and if you fall in a pit, guess what, you fucked up big. The game gives you a choice to challenge yourself like an NES game of yore, but no, it's not the "default" difficulty, because the developer realizes that not everyone is 25+ years old (anyone under that age likely started playing on the SNES/Genesis, or later consoles) and not everyone has the inclination to have to redo massive parts of levels because of one mistake. It's the right move to not force the player to beat stages without checkpoints, if they want younger players to actually like their game, and not just put it down due to old-fashioned game design that they can't relate to.

So I think Giant Bomb's general stance on just playing the game on the "default" difficulty continues to be problematic.

I just think the complaint is unfair in general. Shovel Knight isn't easy, it just checkpoints really well and there aren't any cheap sections. I kinda get the feeling that Patrick's recent interest in Spelunky and 1001 Spikes - levels of difficulty led him to be a little disappointed by Shovel Knight's lower skill requirement.

Could it be more difficult while still being fair? Probably, but what I've played of NG+ is pretty hard. They cut the number of checkpoints in half and doubled the amount of damage you take - if Patrick wanted Nintendo Hard, I hope he at least tried to get through NG+.

As a huge Mega Man aficionado, Mega Man 9 and 10 were overblown and made way more frustrating/difficult than the old games ever were. Heck, they were kind of crappy games that didn't capture anything other than the literal look of the original NES games. I think at least as far as Mega Man 2-6 go, Shovel Knight is fairly similar in difficulty level. It just doesn't have the frustrating "restart the entire level after dying only three times" thing that a lot of old games had. That was just an arbitrary thing, not actual difficulty.

On another note, Shovel Knight is not as hard as Zelda II by any means. Which is a good thing, because that game is messed up.

This is only somewhat related, but you did mention it in the post, but I don't think New Super Mario Bros. U is an easy game. I dunno, maybe I'm just terrible at it.

But as for Shovel Knight specifically, I sadly haven't played it yet, but I will. Eventually.

You can kind of break the whole game with the Phase locket. Shovel Knight is a pretty rough game if you're going for the no relics achievement.

I just watched Alex beat 90% of Mega Man 2 in the span of an hour, but Patrick thinks Shovel Knight is too easy. Despite the fact that some of the later stages can take close to a half hour to beat, and have some tricky sections (there's one screen on Tinker Knight that gave me some real trouble). Bosses don't have rock-paper-scissors weapons that make them jokes (or do they?).

Imagine this, I disagree with Patrick.

Patrick has been known to enjoy games that are really difficult. I think mentioning difficulty in a review is always tricky, because everyone's bound to have a different level of skill.

@mormonwarrior: Haha, no doubt, Zelda II pulls some real dick moves. And it's kinda just relentless in general.

I thought that complaint nearly invalidated all of Patrick's review for me. I never felt he supported that it was in fact easy or that that "ease" somehow cheapened the game. That's not a wrong opinion to have, just one I think requires an explanation.

As someone who gamed through the old NES era, a lot of the old NES artificial difficulty is something best left in the past. There were reasons why those games were as tough as they were, and some of those reasons were not good ones (e.g. Arcade quarter pumping mentality being ported to consoles, save system limitations etc). Just because something is old doesn't mean it's better.

The thing is I think Shovel Knight would be perfectly fair and difficult if it didn't have checkpoints, and I truly find it lame that devs make that kind of challenge optional, it should be the other way around, the regular game should be the throwback difficult version and checkpoints and the like should be relegated to some sort of casual mode.

I never really used the Phase Locket except in one case that you probably know about. I feel like maybe Patrick did as he suggested to Alex that he could use that in a bind. And if he did use it more often, the game could definitely be made a lot easier. It's not that it doesn't make sense and I probably should have used it here and there, but I just forgot about it. I mostly swapped between 2 other relics other than the healing items.

I never got this from Patrick's review. I love tough platformers..I've beaten yama in Spelunky etc...but Shovel Knight is NOT easy at all. I find it pretty hard at times. You could tell even Alex was struggling with the difficulty at parts when he was explaining it to Patrick. I don't know, I think only Patrick and select few think Shovel Knight is easy because I don't think it's even close to easy, its just as hard as Mega Man it just has checkpoints.

Wait, are you saying that games are better designed and less punishing than when we were children and perhaps our memories of those games' difficulty is overblown? Get outta here.

That's really silly, and albeit quite insensitive towards people like me that actually enjoyed the checkpoints. There is nothing more infuriating then repeating content over and over just to get to the part where you failed, and be called a 'casual' for it. When you learn guitar, you don't play the entire song to perfect a specific part you've been having a hard time on. You allow yourself to focus on that portion, and push through. The same can go for this game. It would be ridiculous in this day and age to force a player to trudge through content they've already proven accessible at, just for the sake of calling it 'more difficulty,' or getting rid of the illusion of 'casual mode.'

The 'difficulty of yore' has been repeatedly beaten down as outright unfair and pointless. After watching Vinny's play-through of Castlevania, that idea bears even larger fruit. The game was inherently unfair, and even developers admitted that a lot of those mechanics were to force a player to throw down some more cash, or to artificially lengthen a short game.

Shovel Knight incentivised players that wanted a little more risk (not challenge, risk) to their game-play by allowing you to destroy the check points and get a reward. Asking them to do the opposite would be the same as asking the Dark Souls developers to make it default that you cannot level your character, or wear any better gear than what you got in the beginning, instead of allowing the player to customize his experience to make it harder.

This 'hard core' crowd is a much smaller niche than the ones that just want to enjoy a game. So, developers like Yacht Club games focusing on the larger picture on the larger crowd is not only the right thing to do, but also the sane thing to do.

@counterclockwork87: The only thing I can actually muster from his review is that maybe he finds the frustrating ways to die in old NES/SNES games a form of difficulty. He must've beaten it relatively quickly, and people generally associate that with difficulty in games as well.

So, what Patrick was trying to tell us is, he wants bullshit mechanics found in games like Megaman, to force him to rage quit from the game for a day, in order to not only lengthen the game, but also boost its difficulty? That's my understanding at least.

FYI I'm still on the last level and haven't beat it yet. I also have never really played Mega Man for whatever reason, SMW is my classic platformer of choice.

Patrick saying things like that makes me feel inadequate, haha, or he's just really good. Shovel Knight is way harder than your average platformer. There is something about the lack of a run button that makes every jump feel treacherous. Also there is some real tricky stuff where you have to chain jumps across multiple enemies, while not killing them but killing other ones, oh and some disappearing timed platforms, and so on. Add in the armor upgrade that makes you not take knock-back damage but gain "weight" momentum, so every surface becomes kinda like ice? Yeah, it's not easy. I am quite happy with the difficulty! Now gotta go grind out more gold to buy that last armor set... :)

That's an interesting bit of psychology; don't tell some people they're doing better than normal, tell most people they're doing worse than normal.

I do hope Patrick reads this thread, he seems to be the kind of guy that'd take this criticism on board.

I play through Mega Man II every few months. It's easily one of my favorite games. And I played it soon after it came out back in the day so nostalgia is in full effect for me.

And it would absolutely be a better game if it had more checkpoints/extra lives.

Correlating "difficulty" with having to trudge through gameplay that you've mastered ad nauseum just to get to the part where you instantly die and have no chance to figure it out... is absurd. Game design has learned from those mistakes and evolved for the better, and it really baffles me when people hold those still great, but still hugely janky/unfair, classic games in such flawless regard.

Overall, I was quite satisfied with Shovel Knight's difficulty. It was challenging, but never to the point of being frustrating. I did feel that the boss fights were fa too easy. Staying with the Mega Man comparison, the series' Robot Masters were, generally, fair. They were difficult, but once you knew the set pattern (or had their weakness in your arsenal) it wasn't too difficult to take them down. I didn't ever feel challenged against Shovel Knight's bosses, as it was simply too easy to take advantage of the game's mechanics (Polar Knight is an exception for me, the floor spikes made him tougher).

I like the destroy checkpoints for score mechanic a lot. There's a good risk/reward balance there that makes you feel in control either way you choose. And there is of course NG+ and the wide variety of challenges if the vanilla NG playthrough isn't enough. I like the way it's done in Shovel Knight better than, for example, Dragon's Crown, where the casual assists are so plentiful it is a bit of a chore just to turn them all off in the early game. With that game, I would have appreciated some sort of difficulty option that makes it automatically 1-player solo, no AI partners, no pay to respawn, rather than having to opt out of that stuff when it comes up.

I really enjoy this game.

I like the risk/reward balance with the checkpoint system. And new game + disables turkeys, doesn't it? Would be nice if that was just a higher difficulty from the start, but its better than most games give you.

Above all, the hardest thing about Mega Man, was running out of lives. Having to re-fight everything and repeat loads of content just to get another shot at the spot thats troubling you was annoying. One old school mechanic i'm happy we left in the mid 90s.