I consider myself to be a fairly patient person. In the past 5 years or so, only two games have really tried that patience and pushed me to my limits. I'm talking about swearing at the tv at the top of my voice (I swear my neighbours think I beat my girlfriend) or even coming close to tossing the controller across the room. Demon's souls is one of those games, and recently, RoF (Resonance of Fate) has joined the fray.

Admittedly, I fell in love with Demon's Souls immediately. The art style and music, the ambience and atmosphere, the combat system, and enemy AI / behavior, it was all awesome. It was also quite unforgiving right from the beginning, unlike most games these days (read, this is a GOOD thing). With Demon's Souls, once you learn the combat system (which compared to RoF is a walk in the park) it's basically trial and error from there. Of course, many gamers were shocked and hated on the game because they were not used to using their brains and certainly not used to ZERO hand holding. Having a keen memory and remembering the levels and their traps, or figuring out boss patterns certainly helped of course. I'm certain most of us screwed many things up on the first go, such as eating a boss's demons soul instead of crafting with it.

Things are quite different with RoF. Success is this game is largely accomplished by having a firm understanding of the combat system. Sure, you can mod your guns, but if you don't understand how all the elements come together and when to use said elements, certain encounters will rape your soul. The misleading part is that you'll breeze through quite a few fights, giving you a false sense of confidence, and then you get owned at a random spot and start banging your head against the wall in frustration.

First thing first, I find the tutorial to be lacking. It's one of the very few things about the localization that I dislike. The rest though, like the voice acting for example, is superbly done. The problem with the tutorial is that many of the basic elements of the combat system are not properly explained or just plain vague. I had to go on several forums, ask questions, watch a Sega battle tutorial video (which wasn't all that great TBH) and go through random guides in order to fill in all the blanks. Now, some of this stuff may have been obvious to people who reguarly play turn based RPGs with strategic elements. Problem is, this is the first time in over a decade that I stray from my usual action/RPG comfort zone.

Yesterday before my shift, I put the game up for sale on a local website. When I got home, I played after having read tons of stuff and figuring out what I had done wrong, and played for a few hours and honestly enjoyed myself. Many things makes sense now, or at least I think they do. Only time will tell.

Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying the game and I certainly enjoy challenging video games. I just think for me, it was a rather rocky start with RoF, to the point where I wanted to drop it after a few hours. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. But, I'm not willing to give up just yet.