When Demon's Souls first came out, I remember being trepidatious about buying into the game despite the interesting things I had heard about it because of the reputation it had not for being difficult, but for being frustrating. At the time, frustration was something that I tried to avoid at all costs, but I found it was not induced through difficulty alone. Despite the immense challenge, I didn't find Super Meat Boy frustrating, but the last boss of Uncharted 2? Screw that poorly checkpointed, instant-kill-dealing piece of garbage.

Demon's Souls and Dark Souls after that are games that are often described as "frustrating," but I didn't really find that to be the case. Actually, I think a lot of the appeal of the Souls series has been in how unfrustrating the games generally are in spite of their obvious challenge. The difference between a fair challenge and frustrating difficulty is often in specific, small details like the ways that enemies telegraph big attacks and how the game teaches you to be cautious about corners, chests, and trinkets in the open by putting you in tough, occasionally deadly, situations but not far from safety at first.

However, there is something else that breeds frustration: the reason that other people described these games as such in the past and something that I've noticed myself in Dark Souls III, and that's expectation. I came into Demon's Souls expecting to get wrecked at every corner, so I wasn't frustrated when I did, and when I didn't beat it before Dark Souls came out, it gave me the excuse to feel the same about that game. Even as late as Dark Souls II, I only had a single Souls game under my belt and as for Bloodbourne, well, that's kind of it's own thing isn't it? But going in to Dark Souls III, I had a different notion: I've beaten every Souls game up to this point, I'm a veteran of the series, this game shouldn't be that hard. So I felt frustration, true frustration for the first time in the series because of my own dumb self. Reality didn't match my assumptions, in short my familiarity had bred this resentment. Because I had that past experience, I found myself thinking that I KNEW what DSIII had to offer and getting inordinately upset when those views were challenged by the inherently unforgiving nature of the game. I had to consciously step back and evaluate my expectations, recalibrate my brain. Just because I've beaten 4 games doesn't mean the 5th one will be a cakewalk. This game probably won't be as challenging because certain things carry over: you still have to check your corners and smack every treasure chest, but significant things like enemy patterns and level layouts can present huge obstacles that are as fresh to me in this game now as they were in Demon's Souls back in 2009. I guess that I have to keep in mind that despite the similarities, Dark Souls III is a new video game and I probably should have given it a little bit more respect than to assume it wouldn't be.