Difficulty in games

Today I finished The Wonderful 101: Remastered and, at the end, found out I played most of the game on very easy without knowing. I did not selected at the start of the game and was struggling in the beginning of the game. Eventually I stopped dying and started to get higher scores at the end of every level, but I did not changed the difficulty, or at least I totally did not noticed. In the end, the game shows you a summary of your scores and then I saw it, most of it was on very easy.

At first I was kind of ashamed. "I play a lot of games", I thought, "Very easy is almost insulting". But, the more I think about it, I don't think it mattered to my enjoyment of the game at all. There is a case to be made that I even could have enjoyed it more after the change, but I think that happened because of how the game scaled.

The thing is, without the frustration that comes with the repetition caused because you die, maybe you can appreciate more some other aspects of the game. The flow of it feels more natural, in a way, as the story being told is not so easily interrupted. It really got me thinking.

Now, I don't think every game should be played on very easy from now on, because there really is a lot of fun on mastering a game and its mechanics, even through frustration, but I think it may be better in some cases. The Wonderful 101 has kind of a simple smash same buttons combat, but it is the variety of weapons that is compelling. Alternate between the best weapons is not that difficult and does not even require good timing, só I feel like the difficulty ended up being kind of irrelevant, because there was no depth in combat and it was still fun on very easy.

I will probably still play every game on normal, because I feel like it usually is a good balance, but the very easy thing is almost a taboo. No one will admit to play on very easy, or even on easy. There is some kind of strange honor in not lowering the difficulty, even when the game sends you a pop-up message to do it after many deaths. And, again, I understand that, but I will now look with other eyes between this honor and my possible enjoyment of a game.

Coming to this conclusion just make me more sure that I will never like Dark Souls.