Enough of the ‘Git Gud’ Mentality – Cold Take

When I first played Armored Core 6 I nearly fainted from how sluggish and janky the controls felt. I failed my first attempt to get on the tutorial platform designated for teaching you how to gain elevation. Oh no, everyone was going to make fun of me like that Cuphead guy that couldn’t get through the tutorial. It doesn’t matter if he was a hardware reviewer– the internet never forgets to misremember. I tried mouse and keyboard, and I wasn’t really feeling it. I tried controller. I was really feeling the carpal tunnel then, even though I was primarily raised as a console kiddie. I settled on mouse and keyboard and committed to learning the controls. I completed the tutorial perhaps five times before moving on to the main missions. It wasn’t so much an obsession with gitting gud as it was a desire to git comfortable. I learned enough from culinary and sports that the first thing you need to do is get your stance and form down. Progress will follow. So yes, to a certain extent you do need to git gud before judging a game.

But here’s the kicker, none of my opinions about the design for the tutorial changed after I mastered it. There’s too many unexplained mechanics that you learn in the actual training mode, which you unlock after you progress the story. I know it’s a Japanese studio and you’re supposed to read manga from right to left, but I don’t think the player fending for themselves first and then being taught helps the accessibility. That’s what it is, poor accessibility, and the FromSoftwareus Sapiens encourage it, chanting their new favorite phrase “Get Filtered.” Getting Filtered is a phrase used to denote the point where a player quits. It is similar to “git gud” in that it frames all of the failings on the player. It’s not that the tutorial does a poor job of teaching you how to play the game, putting bots in front of you and telling you to shoot them while downplaying the importance of mastering mobility, it’s that you weren’t good enough so you quit. You are the impurities in the water being removed by the game’s Brita filter leaving only the purest of gamers. 

I did get good enough, and I didn’t like it. That is also my fault. Of course you got sick of it, Frost, you played it too much. Honestly, you sound deranged. Who obsesses this much over a tutorial? Fine, I’ll let that go. I continued playing, and the game started to hit a pattern. It alternated incredibly simple missions, where you fly from one area to another while beating up robobros, and also simple missions, but this time it was just a boss fight. I was using the mech you get from the start and I hadn’t customized a single nut or bolt. If I thought it was simple and straightforward, I can’t imagine what the game felt like to someone who indulged in their Neon Evangelion self-insert fanfic. There were some crazy builds floating around on the internet completely trivializing Balteus, the boss I had set my sights on. Word on the street was he was the game’s first real filter that separated the hardcore gamers from the casuals. He was the reason my mech remained untouched and uncustomized. I was saving myself for him. Also worth noting, this was before the patch that nerfed him and made him easier.

Our battle was legendary. Balteus is, without a doubt, one of my favorite boss fights of all time. And the reason why, is because it holds up at all skill levels. Your first time fighting him, when you have no idea what’s about to hit you, it’s like driving through a freak lightning storm. The missiles are streaming out in every direction. He moves around the entire arena with mobility you haven’t seen before. You aren’t obliterated. You’re undone. I couldn’t ask for better funeral music. Even as you’re figuring him out, he never loses his elegance. He makes you use the entire arena and all the buttons and motions in your arsenal. This isn’t one of those boss fights where you lock on and spin around in circles until one of you spanks the other’s exposed derriere. It was a majestic dance, and with each attempt I was getting further into the score until it came down to a few hits left on both of our health bars. But I didn’t want it to end. I powered off and let him kill me. I went again. I experimented with different openers and timings while I improved my overall driving. I didn’t leave when I won. I left when I had my fill, and it was well after the first time I beat him. Balteus was more than just an obstacle to overcome, another box in the checklist to mark off and say “yeah I beat him.’ He gave legitimacy to Armored Core. This is what makes fans.

I can’t say that for the rest of the game. The levels stayed simple and the other bosses were more tedious and one dimensional. Clearly the focus of the game was to customize your mech to overcome the problems that arose, but the only problems that ever made me consider breaking my vow of mech celibacy was the ever increasing amount of armor or my lack thereof. The bosses didn’t get more interesting, they just got tankier, and I was painstakingly aware of it at all stages of the git gud graph. But I was also aware that at this point in the game my skill level had overshot the average demographic. How many people had made it this far, let alone without upgrading their starting character? It’s not that my points of criticism are invalid, it’s that they’re not relevant to a vast majority of players anymore. That’s the problem with using skill as a barrier for criticism, it isn’t linear. If anything it’s a horseshoe that peaks as you start breaching competence. The low ends would be on either side where you don’t know anything of what’s going on or you know too much to the point where you can see the cracks in the walls everyone else would be passing by. 

Personally, I don’t care about gamers pretending they’re in search of the Goldilock-skilled reviewer, who is just good enough to overcome shoddy introductions but not too skilled to lay into their favorite game. It’s just another goal post people like to move around if your kicks are getting too close to the truth. Once again, no one ever tells you to “git gud” if you tell them you loved the game beforehand. What I do want to do is get the conversation rolling around games that are intended to be a little more difficult than the average. I’d call this a Microwaved Take, because it’s cold all around with a hot gooey center, but I think a lot of difficult games as of late are piling on the difficulty and dismissing genuine design problems. I, a man of the Latino influence, love the spice. But when the spicy became the trend I noticed companies kept pumping up the Scovilles on all kinds of food. Chips, wings, candy, burgers, all of it kept getting hotter but the flavor took a backseat. No more complimentary flavors like chile limon, mango habanero, or sweet tajin. We went ghost pepper, scorpion peppers, and then just extract to appeal to the spice heads. Likewise, developers kicked up the heat with no regards to amusement. Yeah, throwing me into a small room surrounded by a hundred bots is hard. Yes, making me run to the spot I died with less resources adds a challenge. Where’s your flavor? Where’s the map design that compliments the heat?  Difficulty itself is not fun, and you don’t have git too gud at video games to recognize when it ain’t enjoyable.

I pick on FromSoftware fans, because they are by far the most notable and timely, but GitGudGamers pop up anytime there’s criticism of any game or genre that has notable difficulty. Examples being games like Cuphead, Blasphemous, or almost any roguelike. Someone having a problem with a game doesn’t mean they weren’t good at it. My being good at a game doesn’t mean I can’t be wrong either, and I’m okay with that. Good games shine regardless of a player’s skill in the way Balteus was exemplary at all stages of my burying him with the starting punch buggy.– I didn’t even have a left shoulder weapon for crying out loud. If you think you need to git gud to get a video game, you need to git a grip.