The Fiend's Cauldron: a perfect fit for a topic in the Game Essence category. What is it, you ask? Find out by either playing Kid Icarus: Uprising, or by watching this video!
I feel like he may have asked Nintendo, only to be told there wasn’t high enough demand. So, what better way to create demand other than asking a group to demand something? I suppose he could have demanded it from us but that’d have been a bit too forward.
"I wonder if someone out there will ever port it? 😏" Sakurai, you can't do that to us. You can't just drop a tease like that and expect us to move on with our day.
Kid Icarus: Uprising is such an excellent game. The only thing that held it back was the system it was on, IMO. One of the rare instances where I would buy a re-release or remaster.
I wouldn’t mind a port, but stuff like this makes me doubt it will happen and I don’t want to fall into any false hope like everyone else does for everything they believe in.
ikr? one of my new favorite games of all time. I also wonder how different the tone is in Japanese, cuz I feel they pretty much had to get a whole new script for the English release.
Sorry, I just saw that abbreviation, and thought "Killer Instinct Ultra"? ...but yeah. If anything, putting it on a console with motion controls would at least make it more tolerable for lefties.
nintendo launches a 3ds virtual console, which you must pay for. edit: when I pressed the post button, Nintendo send me an email. guys, I think I'm getting assassinated.
It won’t be virtual console, but a third tier of switch online priced at $80 for a year. Access to DS and 3DS titles. No family plan option would be available nor would a month or 3 month options
I like how Sakurai himself pointed out that there were ideas/features he wanted for Kid Icarus Uprising that didn't make the deadline. Scope is a real consideration that needs to be made, even with a dev as talented and with as many resources as Sakurai. Not every game can have everything fans want. And chances are most developers are aware of the problems/missing features of a game, but didn't have time to fix it/include them
As someone making a modpack for Minecraft and many small projects that comment you made hits home. I love when people lash out like; "Just make it work." and I am like; "I would love for it to work it just doesn't."
"It would be nice to play KI:U on a home console." I have to agree, that would be a fantastic idea. Maybe Sakurai-san can message Mr. Nintendo and get it happening.
The game felt waaaay too well made for the limitations of the 3DS. Even the controls were awkward. I think importing the game onto Switch would really maximize its potential.
@@Laughy-Flaaffy it felt like a game with the scope of a home console game, which both makes sense with the hardware being pretty much between the GameCube and Wii, but doesn't make sense in the context of a handheld. Such is the result of being released early on in the system's life, I guess.
(Spoilers for Mario Movie that further proves this) And with how Mario was specifically playing the original Kid Icarus at the beginning of the Mario Movie, and not any of the other well known Nintendo games, makes me think that its actually coming back
Kid Icarus Uprising is the reason why I became a Game Developer, and also the inspiration for the game I'm working on. This just brought a tear into my eye.
Since this channel launched, I’ve been so excited to learn more about the development of Kid Icarus Uprising. It’s an absolute masterpiece and criminally overlooked. Fiend’s Cauldron was one of about one hundred brilliant and original ideas featured in that game.
If I had a nickle everytime [game X] was called an absolute masterpiece, criminally overlooked, I probably wouldn't be muttering about nickels lol. Fiend's Cauldron really is a cool idea, though. Maybe more games could take after the Smash Ultimate version of it. Better rewards for higher difficulties, with special items available to not lower the level after a Game Over. Beginners can reach for the sky and assess themselves, and pros got themselves a fun farming mechanic. I think the basic idea of a difficulty slider's pretty unique.
@@mmmmine5439 Exactly what I was thinking. every time someone talks about a game that isn't currently mainstream it's an immediate brilliant masterpiece that we should feel ashamed of not having played lmao. I played Kid Icarus and it was good but not a masterpiece as this guy protrays it to be. Or at least its my opinion on it.
I like it but my hands find it difficult to play (they don't like SNES controllers, original GBA, or PSVita either), which is really annoying as I really wanted to continue playing...
the cauldron mechanic in uprising and smash may have taken years off my life trying to do 9.0 for every character/stage but i cant deny its a concept we dont see much
Right? If you're truly dedicated it makes beating the game on the hardest difficulty an absolute nightmare, a total challenge, a complete ordeal. Your highest difficulty gets recorded, but dying denies you from that sweet sweet 9.0 showing up as your high score, so it turns every stage into a deathless challenge
I think the most novel approach to difficulty I've ever seen is in The World Ends With You. You have easy, normal and hard, of course, but you can also temporarily lower your level and chain battles together in increasing difficulty to drastically increase item drops. My favorite part about this system is the customization. Every bit of the difficulty is yours to control, and I couldn't think of a better mechanic for a game all about trying out new things.
Yes, I wanted someone to mention this, glad you did. It wasn't necessary at all, bit some battles had rewards with abysmally low drop rates (like under 1%) and if you wanted the reward, you had to crank up the difficulty.... OR you could do the battle a hundred time at normal intensity. Rewards were obtainable, just more available to players who put in some challenge
Kingdom Hearts re:coded has something similar too - certain sections of its level up board allow you to adjust drop rates, health percentage, difficulty, etc and enable how rewarding it is.
Yeah, TWEWY I feel has the best difficulty system in video games. You want to just enjoy the story, go on easy mode, max your level, and breeze through the game. You want to die, go on Ultimate, set your level to 1, and challenge the secret boss for his rare drop
I appreciate how TWEWY combines many ways to modify difficulty and unifies them under drop chance. There's four difficulties (easy to very hard), the level slider, AND the chain mechanic. This makes completionism challenging but doable all with in-game information. Uprising is nebulous in comparison. You just sorta... randomly get better loot. Once I tried the first mission at 9 difficulty, got an amazingly high level Medusa Claw, and couldn't find or fuse a weapon anywhere near as powerful for hours playing in the 6-8 difficulty range.
4:35 Why would Mr. Sakurai say this and smile like that I'm SCREAMING right now, I've been asking for a Kid Icarus enhanced edition ever since the Nintendo Switch was announced They could even add a parallel route for Dark Pit's story so players from the original had something new to look forward to, it would be so crazy good And the multiplayer, oh my lord please Nintendo I'm on my knees
This hurts because like. I don't think Kid Icarus is the same game experience at all if you port it as a dual stick shooter and it'd lose a lot of it's Unique Game Feel from it and you'd get a vastly inferior product out of it But also it'd be literally less painful and some people just want the story out of it so there's still a Reason to it
The Fiends Cauldron was indeed smart. But the best part about it was the “Try This” feature, which suggested a difficulty automatically based on your previous performances.
Yes, me too, actually. I tried playing the pvp option back then. I got my ass kicked. That was some powerful long range homing shot from hardcore gamers. Great game, but punishing for your wrist. I wish they would port it though.
Not Sakurai's call. Nintendo is the one who owns the game. They also obviously flip the bill for ports, and produce them. And even if Sakurai, for whatever strange reason after suffering sequel purgatory for 20 years, wanted to develop a port of all things himself, I doubt Nintendo is going to allow their biggest dev with the fattest paycheck to spend his clock-in hours on a port. I think his closing statement was more like a wink to fans and an informal request at Nintendo to get to work on that port already.
In all honesty, its probably the best implementation of difficulty ever. It gave me the freedom to say "hmm I should challenge myself" and "that last chapter was a bit much, let me lower the difficulty" without ever feeling bad or stupid for lowering the difficulty at certain times
It was such a shame that Kid Icarus: Uprising never got as popular as I think it deserved. It was such a great game, and I’ve been saying for years it deserves a modern port.
Please make it happen ♥️ Kid Icarus Uprising was, and still is, one of my most played games as a kid. I had 200+ hours in it, and I replayed it over and over again. It also realy helped me to improve my English. Oh yeah, and don't forget the fantastic online modes. Even today it is still in my Top 5 games of all time after I replayed it reacently.
What I really like about the super smash bros intensity slider is that as you increase the intensity slider, the background gets more intense along with it.
Kid Icarus Uprising is such a masterpiece on every level, awesome gameplay, awesome story, awesome music, awesome menu interfaces, awesome multiplayer....
damn near worshipful respect towards Sakurai for being willing to make short but informative videos about game design. another irregular but perssistent reminder that I want to play kid icarus. practically wheezing at him going "damn, imagine if someone put kid icarus on a home console".
I like how Sakurai~san hints subtly at the dilemma of difficulty systems enabling accessibility to the game for all kinds of players, but how it still locks how many players on rewards that are tied to the highest difficulty levels. I wonder if that is something he'll be talking about in a future video? And yes, I hope Kid Icarus Uprising gets ported to a home console!
The difficulty system I liked was in The World Ends With You where you had a literal sliding scale you could adjust at any time and it determined how rare your drops were as well if you wanted to gamble with a harder challenge or stack back-to-back fights.
Supergiant games has had some version of letting you tweak the difficulty in all of their games, and it's a really nice system. The best part about it is that you can customize it based on your playstyle, like choosing to make enemies move faster in Hades if you're comfortable with your reaction speed.
Supergiant really understands the nuances of game development, they're a small indie studio but only put out premier-quality games. It's super impressive.
Hades has decent difficulty customization but it takes away from the genre-specific mechanic of scaling difficulty modifiers in roguelikes that was introduced by slay the spire and dead cells. Because the game incentivizes you to only increase the difficulty 1 tick at a time (with a maximum of 55!) the game actually scales far too slowly in difficulty, and some modifiers are significantly more impactful than others. Ascension in Slay the Spire was far more effective imo in slowly pushing you toward the game's hardest difficulty with a steady curve as you learn to play more effectively.
They did something similar with Transistor where you can put "Limiters" on Red that make the game harder in exchange for her leveling up faster. Similar to the Heat mechanic in Hades
@@lordmango6060 Literally all of their games use this mechanic, just with different names. Limiters in Transistor, Idols in Bastion, Titan Stars in Pyre... the list goes on.
Also KI:U's story goes through a lot of arcs. The difficulty (disregarding the Fiend's Cauldron) scale's according to the story, so that fighting Medusa in chapter 9 is one of the hardest levels, despite it being only a third of the ways into the game. In my most recent playthrough I was able to beat most levels at about 7.0 and it was very fun, intense and satisfying. A lot of games with harder difficulty modes are not worth it because the mechanics tend to breakdown under so much stress. You die in a few hits and the enemies take forever to defeat but the game is not built for this when playing normally. You tend to end up just looking for the exploits (i.e slowly sniping the enemy from a safe distance or turtling across the map) which is not very fun. KI:U was very fine-tuned in even the highest difficulties.
You are my favorite troll on the internet sir. That ending was perfect. Kid Icarus was SO good specifically the multiplayer, if that was ever ported. I think it could become a seriously competitive game.
It sure would be great if a company were out there porting Kid Icarus: Uprising right now. It's one of my favorite games and it's a shame that it's locked on a small handheld like that. It'd be especially great considering that you clearly have ideas for how it could be improved. Hm.
Surprised that he didn't mention how higher difficulties would let you access optional areas! It was a cool concept that could only be done with this kind of difficulty settings in mind
I admire that Sakurai is willing to acknowledge the shortcomings of Uprising as a title, like his comments on the land stages. If there is a port like he potentially teased, I hope he's able to tweak those more to his liking.
Kid Icarus: Uprising was truly one of the best games on the 3DS. Not only did it have a great story and gameplay, but the multiplayer was really fun and the first Nintendo title that made me say "okay, I think they're finally starting to figure out online play." Sakurai is truly a legend.
I think Sakurai makes some good points here, but I also think the way the game is made more difficult is important too. From my perspective, the naive way of increasing difficulty is to simply make the enemies have more HP and higher attack stats. While this does definitely make the game "harder", it's hard to say whether that is a rewarding kind of hard. In the worst case, it only annoys skilled players because it simply means doing the same maneuvers they were already doing but just keeping it up for longer- I remember getting into over-leveled bosses on accident in Kingdom Hearts and memorizing a 2-3 minute pattern where there was only time to deliver one or two hits safely at the end. The best way to handle difficulty is to create challenges that are original and unique to higher difficulties- enemies where there previously were none, perhaps extra restrictions to the gear you can bring or skills you can use, etc. Of course some HP/ATK scaling is okay in moderation, but completely relying on it is a trap I see a lot of indies fall into. In Uprising's case they use a blend. There are certain "snap points" of difficulty where original enemies are added in, but in between those points is still just jacking up HP and attack- however they don't have to do is as hard as they would if there wasn't the previous element. That's why I have trouble recommending a system like this to beginners. It's easy to assume this is simple to implement, but on the contrary, it requires a deep understanding of how to make difficulty fun before you can utilize it without fear of misusing it. In addition there's other ways to do this, and you can make a game with a singular difficulty system that still caters to players of different skill levels- for example, in Klonoa/Klonoa 2, for "Easy" mode you can just complete the course and bosses, for "Medium" mode you can collect the 6 collectibles scattered around each stage that often require taking a detour or completing an extra challenge to obtain, and for "Hard" mode you can try to collect 150 gems in each stage- which requires precision platforming and collecting almost to all of the gems, including maximizing your collection during 2x gem bonus mini-sections. TL;DR - A good granular difficulty system like the Fiend's Cauldron requires *a lot* of resources to pull off well and if you can't/won't full commit to it, it's better to just do Easy/Medium/Hard or only have one difficulty level and really fine-tune it. One good difficulty is better than 3 or 50 bad ones.
KIU suffers from a blatant overfocus of stat inflation. Enemy attack boosting is fine in the interest of calling out mistakes, as what effectively happens with Metroid Samus Returns, see what I had to say about that. However, enemy HP boosting means more time spent on individual enemies, and KIU on 9.0 has durability bloat that makes Metroid Samus Returns, which had been complained about for that, seem to have its enemy roster be made of tissue paper. And I will say that DEF boosting in a subtraction DEF game would be helpful by encouraging armor busting options better, which believe me would transform how the game would have to be approached. Although even that has to be handled with care. So yeah.
Mega Man Zero 1-3 gives bosses an extra attack if you're doing well enough for an A or S rank. Very useful in 2 and 3 because that's how Zero learns new attacks. In Zero 4 you get to choose the Easy or Hard mode of the stage manually.
I think KIU is a game that can use this system especially well because of its focus on hearts and weapon rewards. I didn't think 9.0 intensity was insane to achieve because you can grind weapons on lower difficulties to help you, and at the same time it makes the game replayable (intensity doors help with this too).
it frankly ONLY works in Uprising because of the weapon fusion mechanism, if we're being honest. The more powerful weapons you get as rewards for higher intensities do a lot of heavy lifting, and you can fuse them to get ones that are even better.
I love how the game tells you what your highest intensity was for the levels you completed. Despite only having 25 chapters, 1 of which you don't even use your weapon of choice, and ALL of which will have almost the exact same dialogue as you go through them, the game hardly gets stale. For one because there's tons of weapon variation even within the weapon classes themselves, but also the Fiends Cauldron pushes you to replay the levels. Clearing something on 9.0 is a huge achievement that you can and should be proud of. Some chapters just become insanely difficult lol. The Chaos Vortex stands out here.
My top 2 least favorite 9.0 levels. The Chaos Vortex for sure is one of them. The other? the one where you go inside Hades... Cuz the heart fight is the worst boss in the game.
It's good to know that Sakurai still remembers about Kid Icarus: Uprising, and yes it sure would be nice to play it and or another game on a home console.
Kid Icarus Uprising was such an incredible surprise and an amazing game. Would love to see Sakurai go back to the franchise and make a follow up with more traditional controls - as much as I love Uprising, I always felt pain in my hands after playing it.
It's nice to see him acknowledge that the system has its flaws. I like the scalability, but not being forced down in difficulty if I lose, particularly if I care more about beating a high difficulty for its rewards than the pacing of a story I've already finished.
I'd never played any game like Kid Icarus when I was younger until I picked it up when I was around 8. It immediately became my favorite game, and I think it did a great job at introducing new players.
Something I really like about the Fiend's Cauldron is the flexibility it gives you with choosing a difficulty by having it be a meter with increments instead of rigid "Easy", "Normal", and "Hard" modes. With the meter you don't get the issue one may have with less adjustable difficulty where you might think normal is too easy but hard is too difficult, which can take some of the fun out of a game being challenging. I like that the cauldron lets you choose from a wide array of difficulties so you can give yourself just the right amount of challenge to make the game fun for you, and the risk and reward add to it.
I love the Fiend's cauldron, it made me have some control on what rewards we want as well. I love how heart pounding it is to risk your own entry fee, every piece of loot in a one chance run that depends on both your skill and strategy. I wish we got this system on more games, I don't want the difficulty being lowered without telling me, watching that cauldron spill and lower the difficulty is both a relief and a disappointment, it is a bitter-sweet feeling but it helps me to measure how skilled i am at that game
A solution to the cauldrin could of been that when you do die and the difficulty lowers, you have the option of "resume" or "pay hearts" to bring the difficulty back up to where you died, so you are still risking hearts to keep going at that difficulty.
But then most optimally you would just farm hearts in the earlier stages, you could make it so that you can only pay hearts you accumulated in the recent levels, having them as some sort of "lifes" to allow for more leniency. But beating an high intensity becomes relative if you could just farm x amount of hearts never fearing running out of them once you're ready dying through an intensity 9 level. It would rather reward you for dull grinding instead for skill.
@@Ageleszly this only holds true if you care about the ingame rewards. Some people just genuinely want a tough game that they won't breeze through without dying. Lowering the difficulty after each death undermines the enjoyment for those players. Having a way to keep the difficulty high while still removing ingame rewards after a death would appeal to that crowd
@@vaskochris They're still right though. It would make clearing levels on 9.0 far less of an achievement than it is in the base game. You could in theory just make separate achievements for clearing a chapter on 9.0 without dying, but then you get pretty much the same result, just with extra steps.
4:38 *Hint, hint* 😏 Hmm we know you’re thinking of bringing it to the Switch, Sakurai-san! It will be worth it with two control sticks and upgraded resolution! 🙌🏼
@@Kiirabu197 I don't think that's the case as Nintendo was fine with Mercury Steam making Metroid Dread and they knew Metroid games usually don't sell like bangers.
The best difficulty is the one you self impose. You start to play the game and determine challenges based on some aspects of the game. It’s even fun to determine what challenges to focus on. Chain some of them together and you have a custom story you’re playing through. You can extend this to other aspects of life as well!
It's easier if the game itself is designed to allow players to easily set their own challenges. Two things stand out in my mind on this: Have many optional objectives of different difficulty to complete, and a clear way to indicate to the player optional stats which the player can utilize to make their own challenges. E.g. Many platformers have optional collectables with some being set to be inherently more difficult to find/collect, many games have achievements for more nuanced challenges, and etc. Of course, it's easy to make the mistake of making these optional challenges feel compulsary and/or being tedious instead of being merely challenging. This factor is particularly important for games which doesn't have a strict "win" condition, inherently relying on the players to set their own objectives. Open-ended sandbox games needs to pay special attention to adequately conveying game stats that players may want to use for deciding what "challenge" they wish to aim for (this goes the same for games which allows players to play past a win condition so they may set their own challenge condition past that point).
Wow, this is well timed in my case! I can relate this topic with the Ultimate chose mode in Kirby star Allies. There is a meter on how much spicy you want the boss rush to be from a spring breezy easy mode to a soul melting EXtreme difficulty.
Kid Icarus Uprising is such a great game! One of the best 3DS games I've played. The Field's Cauldron is a very clever mechanic indeed. I really liked it back then and in Smash. At the same time I was not able to complete the whole game on 9.0 because any death would made you lover the difficulty and I was a bit tired of these attempts. What might seem tough is the controls of Kid Icarus. But one has to get used to the controls to understand I all works perfectly fine. I can hardly imagine what control scheme might work better for an intensive game like this. The story, the music, the voice acting - everything is so cool. Plus the game has an wonderful multiplayer.
i love the fiends cauldron system he puts in his games. the challenges/chapters are already bite-sized so setting custom difficulty each time makes them much more replayable and challenging. and that ending... you cant tease us like that i want a KIU remake so bad
To a certain extent dying on an intensity 9 attempt is more stinging than an easy mode option, but it makes the glory of clearing a stage at intensity 9 all the more sweeter! Seriously love the Fiennd's Cauldron, such a cool way of adapting the difficulty to player skill.
I'm happy that Masahiro-san is talking about Kid Icarus Uprising. It is one of my favorite games of all time. I really wish there was a remake for Switch or a sequel.
MR SAKURAI YOU’RE TEARING ME APART 😭😭 Kid Icarus Uprising is one of my top favorite games of all time and I’ve been holding out hope for a switch installment in the series. At the very least, hearing the creator acknowledge its existence it nice. But on the topic of the fiends cauldron, it really was a great way to implement varying difficulties and goes a long way in helping make the game more accessible to a variety of different people. “Easy, Medium, Hard, etc” is a decent way to approach difficulty scaling in a game, but it also limits the player to just a few set difficulties. If “hard” is too difficult, but “medium” is too easy, then that can negatively impact the players experience. Having it on a scale lets the player customize exactly what they might want, while also encouraging them to push themselves just slightly more to increase the rewards. It also actively engages the player in the difficulty scale, so its actually part of the gameplay, rather than just an extra feature thats included in the options menu. I always had fun retrying levels and turning up the difficulty by a couple levels to see if I could work my way up to 9.0. Despite any of its flaws, its easily one of the most intuitive difficulty scales I’ve seen in a video game.
A series of games that did the Fiend's Cauldron system well is The World Ends with You. In those games there's not only a difficulty selection (which determines the selection of items you earn after a fight) but also a level selection (where you can lower your level and your HP in exchange for a multiplier for the drop rate of items, making the rarer ones more reasonable to grind for if you have enough skill). And there's also the possibility to chain encounters, which is a risk-reward strategy into itself - getting more and better drops as long as you can finish all the battles in a row without healing.
...Aside from the tease that Sakurai had at the end, if anyone hasn't played it yet, Kid Icarus: Uprising is a WONDERFUL game. I encourage anyone to play it.
This game was a masterstroke in design in many aspects, and we really need a new installment or, as Sakurai said, a port, which was very cheeky of him by the way!
I completely agree with the stance that harder difficulties should reward players, even if just the inability to raise the difficulty once lowered or a marker that indicates a high difficulty was used. One thing I didn't like about NieR Automata was that normal mode was way too easy and unsatisfying, but hard mode essentially just raised stats which made fights longer with no in-game benefit to doing so. I really loved the dynamic system of Kid Icarus Uprising, it gave a marker of what you have done, rewarded you with items for your efforts and added exclusive side rooms for those who hit certain qualifications. It always felt tense to play and rewarding to succeed with, but never extremely frustrating. I sincerely hope more developers follow the style of Kid Icarus Uprising's difficulty.
I still love the Fiend's Cauldron as a mechanic; it's a unique take on difficulty settings that makes the in-game currency more important and adds tons of replay value as you improve on previous runs. And yes, we ALL saw what you did there.
God Hand has my favourite difficulty system in a game, where it actively tracks your successes and failures, and shifts the difficulty in amusing and exciting ways appropriately. I'm not sure if it's a system that every game ought to adopt, but it really gets me engaged with the depth of its mechanics, and excited to see its most intense content.
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 Yeah, 4 does it secretively. In God Hand, there's an on-screen indicator of the game's current difficulty, and you're made very aware of how it's shifting. I think Resident Evil 4's approach of hiding that information from the player does well to heighten the tension, while not giving struggling players the impression that they're cheating their way through the game.
It’s also worth noting that strict currency isn’t the only way to make a harder experiencing more rewarding. I don’t know if other Platinum Games titles do this, but Astral Chain only assigns ranks on higher difficulties, and it feels GREAT getting an S Rank; you have access to the same skills, but you’re rewarded for skillful play on higher levels. The game also has missions requiring an S+ Rank on the “Pt. Standard” and “Pt. Ultimate” difficulties for all the files.
It's a really good thing to offer multitudes of ways to customize game's difficulty and also create incentives for players to try those harder challenges. While playing Pokémon Violet I do wish there had been similar difficulty customization settings as were demonstrated in this video.
One difficulty system i really liked is the one used in CrossCode, where fighting multiple hordes of enemies in a row without healing in between raises your heat meter, which makes enemies drop better rewards in greater quantities, it allows you to chose how long you want to keep fighting while allowing you to stop as soon as you feel you hit your limit.
Was a great feature but we really should have had the choice to respawn at the same intensity as long as we have hearts. It made dying to a Boss at 9.0 very painful.
My favorite thing about the cauldron is that if you want to complete the game on level 9, you must beat a stage from start to finish without dying, since that'd lower the difficulty. KI:U got me into the concept of trying to beat games without dying. Though sometimes frustrating, the pressure was addicting and the satisfaction of victory always made me want more.
Kid Icarus: Uprising is one of my all time favorite games, and the Fiend's Cauldron is part of the reason. I would love a sequel, but I'm not holding my breath XD
I love this Idea so much, I really like it when higher difficulty gives you better rewards so even if the the difficulty setting is punishing it still feels worthwhile to go through because you get better rewards which in turn helps you keep the game somwhat balanced. I wish more games did this it would make finishing a game on harder difficulties much more exciting and enticing.
It’s insane to me that a sequel for kid Icarus uprising wasn’t made. I wish I knew how to develop games because I’d definitely do it. It has soooo much potential as a modern series and I have so many ideas for it to continue
I appreciate the fact that he talks about the cauldron and game's shortcomings as well. I never thought about those points. Also some games, like Freedom Planet 2, do a good job in difficulty which is similar to the cauldron in some way, which is you can equip 2 items and each will give you a bonus/malus in terms of reward boost. Simple but effective to swap at any level
Happy to see Freedom Planet 2 getting mentioned for that. I initially felt that the game was too easy and changed the difficulty through these flexible mechanics to get a better experience. I like how you can sort of mix it up the difficulty in any way that you like.
i think the difficulty select screen for "Smash Bros. for Wii U" is my favorite use of this system it's very cool looking and makes it VERY clear what turning up the difficulty is going to do, even to younger players who might not be able to read yet
I loved Uprising because I didn't hold my 3DS like a psychopath who was afraid it was going to leap out of his hands, but it's nice to see Sakurai acknowledge that the land stages were too big.
Big fan of Kid Icarus Uprising here, I've completed all the chapters at 9.0 back then, and still today, I replay the chapters at 9.0 and still manage to beat them almost all the time (except chapter 18, that one is a pain at 9.0 because of the boss...).
I'd love for more games to utilize this mechanic; while it makes them a little less approachable, the feeling of being rewarded for performing well under pressure is truly amazing!
Something that I liked with the cauldron was making some extra or alternate path depending of the difficulty, offers replayability and rewards people playing on harder difficulty too
Hmm... That's an interesting system. Though if someone wants to play the hardest difficulty, isn't it only natural they can't beat it the first time? Someone who really wants to invest into it wouldn't want it to go down and it'd feel punishing for even trying in the first place. They should be given more tries before the cauldron spills.
My issue with this Cauldron system is that it doesn't ask the player if they WANT to lower the difficulty. It just does it. People who WANT a challenge and fail won't be able to play a challenging level over and over until they pass, they're just thrown into an easier level.
I don't disagree, but because lowing the difficulty makes you effectively lose the hearts you put in to reach that difficulty, that's part of the "risk" in the system. Not only is the game harder to play, the punishment for losing is losing more hearts. So you'd better make sure you're really prepared to play it on the higher difficulty.
I think it's a feature to kind of "protect players from themselves" I have watched a lot of streamers playing these sort of games that ask you to lower the difficulty when they lose a lot, but i found that most players (if not all of them) have an Ego and won't ever choose "Yes, reduce the difficulty" which is fine except that on top of that they complain about the game "being too difficult" and end up leaving a negative review on steam just because they couldn't eat their pride and choose a lower difficulty and complain how the game "is badly designed" and all sorts of non-sense, it grinds my gears when people do that to indie games that have few reviews but are actually good games, hurts their momentum. But i agree with you, if i wanted to play "Hard mode only" then it takes away my ability to choose which difficulty i want, it automatically biases/favors itself to more casual players, but at the same time it biases itself to very hardcore players because in order to keep that Hard difficulty you must not lose not even a single time (That's what Sakurai was talking about). It's as if the game had only 3 difficulties: Very Easy, Normal and Harder than Hard. To me it would be fine if that system was on by default, but somewhere somewhat hidden in the options you could disable it, hidden enough to make it less likely that you turn it off on your first playthrough (but still available since the beginning in case that's exactly what you want)
this is a good point, although personally i like the idea that if i want to complete a stage on 9.0 difficulty that I need to clear it almost flawlessly. perhaps the solution would be to knock the hearts out of the cauldron as it does now, but give you the option to top it back up to maintain high difficulty, or to lower the difficulty to match the new cauldron level, so then you're still somewhat punished for mistakes??
Oh, I would love a sequel. But starting with an enhanced re-release of Uprising is definitely the way to go, so they can reintroduce the world and expand the player-base!
The raw, unfiltered insight on world-class game design is what makes this channel so special. Learning about a game's development is great already, but hearing Sakurai humbly reflect on them to the point of highlighting their flaws and shortcomings is honestly unreal.
I like Halo's Skull system, once you find them(something you only need to do in the first few) you can turn it on to add difficulty, one disables a random part of your HUD, one sends you back to the begging of the level when you die, one requires you to get a melee kill to get shields back, and once you have them you can turn whatever one on at any difficulty
![Risk and Reward [Game Essence]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/FXqEykD5Ub4/mqdefault.jpg)
![Risk and Reward [Game Essence]](/img/tr.png)
![Kid Icarus: Uprising [Game Concepts]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/p-uwRfckTs4/mqdefault.jpg)
That closing remark from Sakurai is a bit like if Reggie Fils-Aime ended a Nintendo Direct by saying "I wish someone was able to localise Mother 3..."
Potentially takedown immunity like the Mother 3 fan translation? Though, doing something like that would be on a whole other scale to a GBA game.
I feel like he may have asked Nintendo, only to be told there wasn’t high enough demand. So, what better way to create demand other than asking a group to demand something? I suppose he could have demanded it from us but that’d have been a bit too forward.
I NEED a Kid Icarus Uprising 2, or at least a port of that game for the switch with graphics increases.
@@Dopeguy420 Operation Rainfall 2: Uprising Boogaloo
Except that Reggie is a giant piece of crap that gets inserted into companies to bankrupt them from the inside out.
"I wonder if someone out there will ever port it? 😏" Sakurai, you can't do that to us. You can't just drop a tease like that and expect us to move on with our day.
Click Bait Nintendo website article and TH-camr video in 3... 2.... 1.... 😅
Kid Icarus: Uprising is such an excellent game. The only thing that held it back was the system it was on, IMO. One of the rare instances where I would buy a re-release or remaster.
fr i'm gonna be thinking about this all day and probably for days after 💀
i'm not excited for all the click bait articles tho lolol
I wouldn’t mind a port, but stuff like this makes me doubt it will happen and I don’t want to fall into any false hope like everyone else does for everything they believe in.
Bandai Namco earlier this year was recruiting staff for a remaster/remake of a 3D action game contracted by Nintendo...
Sakurai baiting us with the “It would be nice to play KI:U on a home console”
Please make it happen
ikr? one of my new favorite games of all time. I also wonder how different the tone is in Japanese, cuz I feel they pretty much had to get a whole new script for the English release.
Sorry, I just saw that abbreviation, and thought "Killer Instinct Ultra"?
...but yeah. If anything, putting it on a console with motion controls would at least make it more tolerable for lefties.
@@NukeOTron I mean, there was the circle pad pro, for anyone who remembers what that was, but your point still stands if we're being honest.
nintendo launches a 3ds virtual console, which you must pay for. edit: when I pressed the post button, Nintendo send me an email. guys, I think I'm getting assassinated.
It won’t be virtual console, but a third tier of switch online priced at $80 for a year. Access to DS and 3DS titles. No family plan option would be available nor would a month or 3 month options
"But it's not as bad as bluntly asking if you'd like to switch to Easy Mode."
Vergil moment.
Roses are red
Chocolate is delectable
You are not worthy as my opponent
Easy mode is now selectable.
More like Phantom moment
It's nice to hear a game developer who understands how much that pisses me off.
You are not worthy as my opponent.
@@heavylobster4339 I mean, that was designed to piss you off
I like how Sakurai himself pointed out that there were ideas/features he wanted for Kid Icarus Uprising that didn't make the deadline.
Scope is a real consideration that needs to be made, even with a dev as talented and with as many resources as Sakurai.
Not every game can have everything fans want. And chances are most developers are aware of the problems/missing features of a game, but didn't have time to fix it/include them
As someone making a modpack for Minecraft and many small projects that comment you made hits home. I love when people lash out like; "Just make it work." and I am like; "I would love for it to work it just doesn't."
"It would be nice to play KI:U on a home console."
I have to agree, that would be a fantastic idea. Maybe Sakurai-san can message Mr. Nintendo and get it happening.
The way he smiled while saying it he's gonna do it I think
i could tell he wants to do it bc of that smile
Pit: Thank you! Thank you!😂😂😂🥹🥹🥲😇
Pit: Everyone, we have a new job!
That tease at the end 😭 Kid Icarus Uprising really is one of my favorite games of all time and I'd love it if the game got a remake
The game felt waaaay too well made for the limitations of the 3DS. Even the controls were awkward. I think importing the game onto Switch would really maximize its potential.
@@Laughy-Flaaffy it felt like a game with the scope of a home console game, which both makes sense with the hardware being pretty much between the GameCube and Wii, but doesn't make sense in the context of a handheld.
Such is the result of being released early on in the system's life, I guess.
Better yet, a new game entirely
KID ICARUS UPRISING TURNED 11 YEARS OLD LAST WEEK
i got my 3ds fixed earlier this year to play it again
(Spoilers for Mario Movie that further proves this)
And with how Mario was specifically playing the original Kid Icarus at the beginning of the Mario Movie, and not any of the other well known Nintendo games, makes me think that its actually coming back
Kid Icarus Uprising is the reason why I became a Game Developer, and also the inspiration for the game I'm working on. This just brought a tear into my eye.
What’s the game your making? What genre and what’s it about? I’m interested :0
I'm also interested
Since this channel launched, I’ve been so excited to learn more about the development of Kid Icarus Uprising. It’s an absolute masterpiece and criminally overlooked. Fiend’s Cauldron was one of about one hundred brilliant and original ideas featured in that game.
If I had a nickle everytime [game X] was called an absolute masterpiece, criminally overlooked, I probably wouldn't be muttering about nickels lol.
Fiend's Cauldron really is a cool idea, though. Maybe more games could take after the Smash Ultimate version of it. Better rewards for higher difficulties, with special items available to not lower the level after a Game Over. Beginners can reach for the sky and assess themselves, and pros got themselves a fun farming mechanic.
I think the basic idea of a difficulty slider's pretty unique.
@@mmmmine5439 Exactly what I was thinking. every time someone talks about a game that isn't currently mainstream it's an immediate brilliant masterpiece that we should feel ashamed of not having played lmao. I played Kid Icarus and it was good but not a masterpiece as this guy protrays it to be. Or at least its my opinion on it.
I like it but my hands find it difficult to play (they don't like SNES controllers, original GBA, or PSVita either), which is really annoying as I really wanted to continue playing...
@@iplay4us It's one person's opinion, people can have opinions man.
@@TeruteruBozusama Aww ^^' I hope it does come out on a home console, then! 💜
the cauldron mechanic in uprising and smash may have taken years off my life trying to do 9.0 for every character/stage but i cant deny its a concept we dont see much
Right? If you're truly dedicated it makes beating the game on the hardest difficulty an absolute nightmare, a total challenge, a complete ordeal. Your highest difficulty gets recorded, but dying denies you from that sweet sweet 9.0 showing up as your high score, so it turns every stage into a deathless challenge
We didn't have a cool secret boss in Smash Ultimate for playing 9.0. That's what I loved about Smash Wii U. Shame they didn't keep that idea.
Some minor nitpicks, but in Ultimate, max difficulty is 9.9, and you only needed 8.0 to unlock master fortress on Wii U.
I'm honestly not a fan of it
Wish you could dump even more currency to keep the intensity up. Because I frankly don´t know what to do with them anymore.
I think the most novel approach to difficulty I've ever seen is in The World Ends With You. You have easy, normal and hard, of course, but you can also temporarily lower your level and chain battles together in increasing difficulty to drastically increase item drops. My favorite part about this system is the customization. Every bit of the difficulty is yours to control, and I couldn't think of a better mechanic for a game all about trying out new things.
Yes, I wanted someone to mention this, glad you did.
It wasn't necessary at all, bit some battles had rewards with abysmally low drop rates (like under 1%) and if you wanted the reward, you had to crank up the difficulty.... OR you could do the battle a hundred time at normal intensity.
Rewards were obtainable, just more available to players who put in some challenge
Kingdom Hearts re:coded has something similar too - certain sections of its level up board allow you to adjust drop rates, health percentage, difficulty, etc and enable how rewarding it is.
OMG A TWEWY FAN
Yeah its difficulty system is very interesting, and anyone seeking to complete the game will have to understand how to manipulate it
Yeah, TWEWY I feel has the best difficulty system in video games. You want to just enjoy the story, go on easy mode, max your level, and breeze through the game. You want to die, go on Ultimate, set your level to 1, and challenge the secret boss for his rare drop
I appreciate how TWEWY combines many ways to modify difficulty and unifies them under drop chance. There's four difficulties (easy to very hard), the level slider, AND the chain mechanic. This makes completionism challenging but doable all with in-game information.
Uprising is nebulous in comparison. You just sorta... randomly get better loot. Once I tried the first mission at 9 difficulty, got an amazingly high level Medusa Claw, and couldn't find or fuse a weapon anywhere near as powerful for hours playing in the 6-8 difficulty range.
4:35 Why would Mr. Sakurai say this and smile like that
I'm SCREAMING right now, I've been asking for a Kid Icarus enhanced edition ever since the Nintendo Switch was announced
They could even add a parallel route for Dark Pit's story so players from the original had something new to look forward to, it would be so crazy good
And the multiplayer, oh my lord please Nintendo I'm on my knees
it would be so good to have a revived multiplayer !!
This hurts because like. I don't think Kid Icarus is the same game experience at all if you port it as a dual stick shooter and it'd lose a lot of it's Unique Game Feel from it and you'd get a vastly inferior product out of it
But also it'd be literally less painful and some people just want the story out of it so there's still a Reason to it
I can already imagine what Light vs. Dark would be like on the Switch...
A communication error has occurred.
You aren't screaming, don't be ao dramatic.
@@MemeinAndDreamin You must be fun at parties
The Fiends Cauldron was indeed smart. But the best part about it was the “Try This” feature, which suggested a difficulty automatically based on your previous performances.
Makes me want to play Kid Icarus again. Such a fun game!
*I f o n l y s o m e b o d y w e r e a b l e t o p o r t i t*
Yes, me too, actually. I tried playing the pvp option back then. I got my ass kicked. That was some powerful long range homing shot from hardcore gamers. Great game, but punishing for your wrist. I wish they would port it though.
As you should. It’s Sakurai’s best game
I will pay for a port or sequel. This game is literally one of the best.
Sakurai speaking of Kid Icarus Uprising and giving a little hint of an eventually port is more than I would ever imagine.
Not Sakurai's call. Nintendo is the one who owns the game. They also obviously flip the bill for ports, and produce them. And even if Sakurai, for whatever strange reason after suffering sequel purgatory for 20 years, wanted to develop a port of all things himself, I doubt Nintendo is going to allow their biggest dev with the fattest paycheck to spend his clock-in hours on a port.
I think his closing statement was more like a wink to fans and an informal request at Nintendo to get to work on that port already.
In all honesty, its probably the best implementation of difficulty ever. It gave me the freedom to say "hmm I should challenge myself" and "that last chapter was a bit much, let me lower the difficulty" without ever feeling bad or stupid for lowering the difficulty at certain times
It was such a shame that Kid Icarus: Uprising never got as popular as I think it deserved. It was such a great game, and I’ve been saying for years it deserves a modern port.
Please make it happen ♥️
Kid Icarus Uprising was, and still is, one of my most played games as a kid. I had 200+ hours in it, and I replayed it over and over again. It also realy helped me to improve my English.
Oh yeah, and don't forget the fantastic online modes.
Even today it is still in my Top 5 games of all time after I replayed it reacently.
Those last two lines lmao, he's such a troll and he knows it, and I love that
Love how Sakurai’s the type of person to not only point good game design in other works, but admit when he feels he did well or needed improvement.
What I really like about the super smash bros intensity slider is that as you increase the intensity slider, the background gets more intense along with it.
Kid Icarus Uprising is such a masterpiece on every level, awesome gameplay, awesome story, awesome music, awesome menu interfaces, awesome multiplayer....
damn near worshipful respect towards Sakurai for being willing to make short but informative videos about game design. another irregular but perssistent reminder that I want to play kid icarus. practically wheezing at him going "damn, imagine if someone put kid icarus on a home console".
I like how Sakurai~san hints subtly at the dilemma of difficulty systems enabling accessibility to the game for all kinds of players, but how it still locks how many players on rewards that are tied to the highest difficulty levels. I wonder if that is something he'll be talking about in a future video?
And yes, I hope Kid Icarus Uprising gets ported to a home console!
The difficulty system I liked was in The World Ends With You where you had a literal sliding scale you could adjust at any time and it determined how rare your drops were as well if you wanted to gamble with a harder challenge or stack back-to-back fights.
One of my favorites as well
Yeah, I didn't had the details exactly right, but I thought of it too
Oh, how I loved that system
Fighting is so much fun with all those stacked fights
yeah, kingdom hearts re:coded has a very similar system with its "cheats", which involve sacrificing one thing to gain another.
Loved that about that game.
Supergiant games has had some version of letting you tweak the difficulty in all of their games, and it's a really nice system. The best part about it is that you can customize it based on your playstyle, like choosing to make enemies move faster in Hades if you're comfortable with your reaction speed.
That's awesome! As everyone's different, even if it's a little bit..! And that's okay ^^
Supergiant really understands the nuances of game development, they're a small indie studio but only put out premier-quality games. It's super impressive.
Hades has decent difficulty customization but it takes away from the genre-specific mechanic of scaling difficulty modifiers in roguelikes that was introduced by slay the spire and dead cells. Because the game incentivizes you to only increase the difficulty 1 tick at a time (with a maximum of 55!) the game actually scales far too slowly in difficulty, and some modifiers are significantly more impactful than others. Ascension in Slay the Spire was far more effective imo in slowly pushing you toward the game's hardest difficulty with a steady curve as you learn to play more effectively.
They did something similar with Transistor where you can put "Limiters" on Red that make the game harder in exchange for her leveling up faster. Similar to the Heat mechanic in Hades
@@lordmango6060 Literally all of their games use this mechanic, just with different names. Limiters in Transistor, Idols in Bastion, Titan Stars in Pyre... the list goes on.
Also KI:U's story goes through a lot of arcs. The difficulty (disregarding the Fiend's Cauldron) scale's according to the story, so that fighting Medusa in chapter 9 is one of the hardest levels, despite it being only a third of the ways into the game. In my most recent playthrough I was able to beat most levels at about 7.0 and it was very fun, intense and satisfying.
A lot of games with harder difficulty modes are not worth it because the mechanics tend to breakdown under so much stress. You die in a few hits and the enemies take forever to defeat but the game is not built for this when playing normally. You tend to end up just looking for the exploits (i.e slowly sniping the enemy from a safe distance or turtling across the map) which is not very fun. KI:U was very fine-tuned in even the highest difficulties.
You are my favorite troll on the internet sir. That ending was perfect. Kid Icarus was SO good specifically the multiplayer, if that was ever ported. I think it could become a seriously competitive game.
Sakurai-sensei... is there something you're not telling us?
Kid Icarus port would be an awesome addition to the Switch! I didn't have the chance to try it on 3DS, but I would certainly get it now!
Sakurai knew exactly what he was doing with that ending tease
Kid Icarus is such a lovely game. The weapon fusion was really exciting too. I'd love to see more games implement systems like that.
Even Sakurai wants more from Kid Icarus, LET THE MAN DO ANOTHER KID ICARUS GAME NINTENDO, PLEASE
It sure would be great if a company were out there porting Kid Icarus: Uprising right now. It's one of my favorite games and it's a shame that it's locked on a small handheld like that. It'd be especially great considering that you clearly have ideas for how it could be improved. Hm.
Mr. Sakurai casually dropping a Reset Bomb at the end
Surprised that he didn't mention how higher difficulties would let you access optional areas! It was a cool concept that could only be done with this kind of difficulty settings in mind
I admire that Sakurai is willing to acknowledge the shortcomings of Uprising as a title, like his comments on the land stages. If there is a port like he potentially teased, I hope he's able to tweak those more to his liking.
... WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT WOULD BE NICE IF IT WAS PORTED TO HOME CONSOLES AND YOU WISH SOMEONE WOULD DO IT AHHHHHHHHHHHH
Wow cool. Kid icarus uprising!
Kid Icarus: Uprising was truly one of the best games on the 3DS. Not only did it have a great story and gameplay, but the multiplayer was really fun and the first Nintendo title that made me say "okay, I think they're finally starting to figure out online play."
Sakurai is truly a legend.
I think Sakurai makes some good points here, but I also think the way the game is made more difficult is important too.
From my perspective, the naive way of increasing difficulty is to simply make the enemies have more HP and higher attack stats. While this does definitely make the game "harder", it's hard to say whether that is a rewarding kind of hard. In the worst case, it only annoys skilled players because it simply means doing the same maneuvers they were already doing but just keeping it up for longer- I remember getting into over-leveled bosses on accident in Kingdom Hearts and memorizing a 2-3 minute pattern where there was only time to deliver one or two hits safely at the end. The best way to handle difficulty is to create challenges that are original and unique to higher difficulties- enemies where there previously were none, perhaps extra restrictions to the gear you can bring or skills you can use, etc. Of course some HP/ATK scaling is okay in moderation, but completely relying on it is a trap I see a lot of indies fall into.
In Uprising's case they use a blend. There are certain "snap points" of difficulty where original enemies are added in, but in between those points is still just jacking up HP and attack- however they don't have to do is as hard as they would if there wasn't the previous element.
That's why I have trouble recommending a system like this to beginners. It's easy to assume this is simple to implement, but on the contrary, it requires a deep understanding of how to make difficulty fun before you can utilize it without fear of misusing it. In addition there's other ways to do this, and you can make a game with a singular difficulty system that still caters to players of different skill levels- for example, in Klonoa/Klonoa 2, for "Easy" mode you can just complete the course and bosses, for "Medium" mode you can collect the 6 collectibles scattered around each stage that often require taking a detour or completing an extra challenge to obtain, and for "Hard" mode you can try to collect 150 gems in each stage- which requires precision platforming and collecting almost to all of the gems, including maximizing your collection during 2x gem bonus mini-sections.
TL;DR - A good granular difficulty system like the Fiend's Cauldron requires *a lot* of resources to pull off well and if you can't/won't full commit to it, it's better to just do Easy/Medium/Hard or only have one difficulty level and really fine-tune it. One good difficulty is better than 3 or 50 bad ones.
KIU suffers from a blatant overfocus of stat inflation. Enemy attack boosting is fine in the interest of calling out mistakes, as what effectively happens with Metroid Samus Returns, see what I had to say about that. However, enemy HP boosting means more time spent on individual enemies, and KIU on 9.0 has durability bloat that makes Metroid Samus Returns, which had been complained about for that, seem to have its enemy roster be made of tissue paper.
And I will say that DEF boosting in a subtraction DEF game would be helpful by encouraging armor busting options better, which believe me would transform how the game would have to be approached. Although even that has to be handled with care. So yeah.
Mega Man Zero 1-3 gives bosses an extra attack if you're doing well enough for an A or S rank. Very useful in 2 and 3 because that's how Zero learns new attacks. In Zero 4 you get to choose the Easy or Hard mode of the stage manually.
Damn you really wrote all that to basically say "I'm bad at games"
I think KIU is a game that can use this system especially well because of its focus on hearts and weapon rewards. I didn't think 9.0 intensity was insane to achieve because you can grind weapons on lower difficulties to help you, and at the same time it makes the game replayable (intensity doors help with this too).
it frankly ONLY works in Uprising because of the weapon fusion mechanism, if we're being honest. The more powerful weapons you get as rewards for higher intensities do a lot of heavy lifting, and you can fuse them to get ones that are even better.
I love how the game tells you what your highest intensity was for the levels you completed. Despite only having 25 chapters, 1 of which you don't even use your weapon of choice, and ALL of which will have almost the exact same dialogue as you go through them, the game hardly gets stale. For one because there's tons of weapon variation even within the weapon classes themselves, but also the Fiends Cauldron pushes you to replay the levels. Clearing something on 9.0 is a huge achievement that you can and should be proud of. Some chapters just become insanely difficult lol. The Chaos Vortex stands out here.
My top 2 least favorite 9.0 levels. The Chaos Vortex for sure is one of them. The other? the one where you go inside Hades... Cuz the heart fight is the worst boss in the game.
It's good to know that Sakurai still remembers about Kid Icarus: Uprising, and yes it sure would be nice to play it and or another game on a home console.
Kid Icarus Uprising was such an incredible surprise and an amazing game. Would love to see Sakurai go back to the franchise and make a follow up with more traditional controls - as much as I love Uprising, I always felt pain in my hands after playing it.
I always loved the aesthetic of the fiend’s cauldron when I used to play Uprising as a kid.
4:36 PLEASE BE FORESHADOWING!!!!
Oh yes please, we want to see the game back.
I wonder, if a port sold well, wether there would then be a Sequel to it...
It's nice to see him acknowledge that the system has its flaws. I like the scalability, but not being forced down in difficulty if I lose, particularly if I care more about beating a high difficulty for its rewards than the pacing of a story I've already finished.
Mr. Sakurai, you teasing a potential Kid Icarus Uprising port has taken years off my life, please I need it I can’t take much more of this
I'd never played any game like Kid Icarus when I was younger until I picked it up when I was around 8. It immediately became my favorite game, and I think it did a great job at introducing new players.
Something I really like about the Fiend's Cauldron is the flexibility it gives you with choosing a difficulty by having it be a meter with increments instead of rigid "Easy", "Normal", and "Hard" modes. With the meter you don't get the issue one may have with less adjustable difficulty where you might think normal is too easy but hard is too difficult, which can take some of the fun out of a game being challenging. I like that the cauldron lets you choose from a wide array of difficulties so you can give yourself just the right amount of challenge to make the game fun for you, and the risk and reward add to it.
Here's hoping we end up getting that Kid Icarus: Uprising port one day!
I love the Fiend's cauldron, it made me have some control on what rewards we want as well.
I love how heart pounding it is to risk your own entry fee, every piece of loot in a one chance run that depends on both your skill and strategy.
I wish we got this system on more games, I don't want the difficulty being lowered without telling me, watching that cauldron spill and lower the difficulty is both a relief and a disappointment, it is a bitter-sweet feeling but it helps me to measure how skilled i am at that game
A solution to the cauldrin could of been that when you do die and the difficulty lowers, you have the option of "resume" or "pay hearts" to bring the difficulty back up to where you died, so you are still risking hearts to keep going at that difficulty.
But then most optimally you would just farm hearts in the earlier stages, you could make it so that you can only pay hearts you accumulated in the recent levels, having them as some sort of "lifes" to allow for more leniency.
But beating an high intensity becomes relative if you could just farm x amount of hearts never fearing running out of them once you're ready dying through an intensity 9 level. It would rather reward you for dull grinding instead for skill.
@@Ageleszly this only holds true if you care about the ingame rewards. Some people just genuinely want a tough game that they won't breeze through without dying. Lowering the difficulty after each death undermines the enjoyment for those players. Having a way to keep the difficulty high while still removing ingame rewards after a death would appeal to that crowd
@@vaskochris They're still right though. It would make clearing levels on 9.0 far less of an achievement than it is in the base game.
You could in theory just make separate achievements for clearing a chapter on 9.0 without dying, but then you get pretty much the same result, just with extra steps.
Oh yes please make it happen! I love Kid Icarus!
Loved this video, but loved the game even more. Please don’t bait us, make it happen T_T
Difficulty setting in games are always important to either have a nice, casual gaming, or to test your limits.
4:38 *Hint, hint* 😏 Hmm we know you’re thinking of bringing it to the Switch, Sakurai-san! It will be worth it with two control sticks and upgraded resolution! 🙌🏼
And motion controls
I don't think it's in his control though, maybe he already asked Nintendo and they said it wouldn't be profitable enough.
@@Kiirabu197 I don't think that's the case as Nintendo was fine with Mercury Steam making Metroid Dread and they knew Metroid games usually don't sell like bangers.
@@Lalo-uu4dg but there was the Prime 4 hype as well so there's that. that game has still yet to come out ..
The best difficulty is the one you self impose. You start to play the game and determine challenges based on some aspects of the game. It’s even fun to determine what challenges to focus on. Chain some of them together and you have a custom story you’re playing through. You can extend this to other aspects of life as well!
I wonder what Sakurai's thoughts are on things like a Pokemon Nuzlocke?
It's easier if the game itself is designed to allow players to easily set their own challenges. Two things stand out in my mind on this: Have many optional objectives of different difficulty to complete, and a clear way to indicate to the player optional stats which the player can utilize to make their own challenges. E.g. Many platformers have optional collectables with some being set to be inherently more difficult to find/collect, many games have achievements for more nuanced challenges, and etc. Of course, it's easy to make the mistake of making these optional challenges feel compulsary and/or being tedious instead of being merely challenging.
This factor is particularly important for games which doesn't have a strict "win" condition, inherently relying on the players to set their own objectives. Open-ended sandbox games needs to pay special attention to adequately conveying game stats that players may want to use for deciding what "challenge" they wish to aim for (this goes the same for games which allows players to play past a win condition so they may set their own challenge condition past that point).
Wow, this is well timed in my case! I can relate this topic with the Ultimate chose mode in Kirby star Allies. There is a meter on how much spicy you want the boss rush to be from a spring breezy easy mode to a soul melting EXtreme difficulty.
Kid Icarus Uprising is such a great game! One of the best 3DS games I've played.
The Field's Cauldron is a very clever mechanic indeed. I really liked it back then and in Smash.
At the same time I was not able to complete the whole game on 9.0 because any death would made you lover the difficulty and I was a bit tired of these attempts.
What might seem tough is the controls of Kid Icarus. But one has to get used to the controls to understand I all works perfectly fine. I can hardly imagine what control scheme might work better for an intensive game like this.
The story, the music, the voice acting - everything is so cool. Plus the game has an wonderful multiplayer.
i love the fiends cauldron system he puts in his games. the challenges/chapters are already bite-sized so setting custom difficulty each time makes them much more replayable and challenging. and that ending... you cant tease us like that i want a KIU remake so bad
To a certain extent dying on an intensity 9 attempt is more stinging than an easy mode option, but it makes the glory of clearing a stage at intensity 9 all the more sweeter! Seriously love the Fiennd's Cauldron, such a cool way of adapting the difficulty to player skill.
I'm happy that Masahiro-san is talking about Kid Icarus Uprising. It is one of my favorite games of all time.
I really wish there was a remake for Switch or a sequel.
MR SAKURAI YOU’RE TEARING ME APART 😭😭
Kid Icarus Uprising is one of my top favorite games of all time and I’ve been holding out hope for a switch installment in the series. At the very least, hearing the creator acknowledge its existence it nice.
But on the topic of the fiends cauldron, it really was a great way to implement varying difficulties and goes a long way in helping make the game more accessible to a variety of different people. “Easy, Medium, Hard, etc” is a decent way to approach difficulty scaling in a game, but it also limits the player to just a few set difficulties. If “hard” is too difficult, but “medium” is too easy, then that can negatively impact the players experience. Having it on a scale lets the player customize exactly what they might want, while also encouraging them to push themselves just slightly more to increase the rewards. It also actively engages the player in the difficulty scale, so its actually part of the gameplay, rather than just an extra feature thats included in the options menu. I always had fun retrying levels and turning up the difficulty by a couple levels to see if I could work my way up to 9.0.
Despite any of its flaws, its easily one of the most intuitive difficulty scales I’ve seen in a video game.
A series of games that did the Fiend's Cauldron system well is The World Ends with You. In those games there's not only a difficulty selection (which determines the selection of items you earn after a fight) but also a level selection (where you can lower your level and your HP in exchange for a multiplier for the drop rate of items, making the rarer ones more reasonable to grind for if you have enough skill). And there's also the possibility to chain encounters, which is a risk-reward strategy into itself - getting more and better drops as long as you can finish all the battles in a row without healing.
...Aside from the tease that Sakurai had at the end, if anyone hasn't played it yet, Kid Icarus: Uprising is a WONDERFUL game. I encourage anyone to play it.
I love how the couldron actually explained what each level meant. Context is so important when explaining difficulty.
This game was a masterstroke in design in many aspects, and we really need a new installment or, as Sakurai said, a port, which was very cheeky of him by the way!
I completely agree with the stance that harder difficulties should reward players, even if just the inability to raise the difficulty once lowered or a marker that indicates a high difficulty was used. One thing I didn't like about NieR Automata was that normal mode was way too easy and unsatisfying, but hard mode essentially just raised stats which made fights longer with no in-game benefit to doing so.
I really loved the dynamic system of Kid Icarus Uprising, it gave a marker of what you have done, rewarded you with items for your efforts and added exclusive side rooms for those who hit certain qualifications. It always felt tense to play and rewarding to succeed with, but never extremely frustrating. I sincerely hope more developers follow the style of Kid Icarus Uprising's difficulty.
I still love the Fiend's Cauldron as a mechanic; it's a unique take on difficulty settings that makes the in-game currency more important and adds tons of replay value as you improve on previous runs.
And yes, we ALL saw what you did there.
I love the hell out of kid Icarus uprising it’s one of my favorite games of all time with only a few contenders
I'm so glad you mentioned Kid Icarus Uprising!
God Hand has my favourite difficulty system in a game, where it actively tracks your successes and failures, and shifts the difficulty in amusing and exciting ways appropriately. I'm not sure if it's a system that every game ought to adopt, but it really gets me engaged with the depth of its mechanics, and excited to see its most intense content.
Isn't it something one of the Resident Evil game (4 or 5?) did too?
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 Yeah, 4 does it secretively. In God Hand, there's an on-screen indicator of the game's current difficulty, and you're made very aware of how it's shifting. I think Resident Evil 4's approach of hiding that information from the player does well to heighten the tension, while not giving struggling players the impression that they're cheating their way through the game.
It’s also worth noting that strict currency isn’t the only way to make a harder experiencing more rewarding. I don’t know if other Platinum Games titles do this, but Astral Chain only assigns ranks on higher difficulties, and it feels GREAT getting an S Rank; you have access to the same skills, but you’re rewarded for skillful play on higher levels. The game also has missions requiring an S+ Rank on the “Pt. Standard” and “Pt. Ultimate” difficulties for all the files.
It's a really good thing to offer multitudes of ways to customize game's difficulty and also create incentives for players to try those harder challenges. While playing Pokémon Violet I do wish there had been similar difficulty customization settings as were demonstrated in this video.
One difficulty system i really liked is the one used in CrossCode, where fighting multiple hordes of enemies in a row without healing in between raises your heat meter, which makes enemies drop better rewards in greater quantities, it allows you to chose how long you want to keep fighting while allowing you to stop as soon as you feel you hit your limit.
Was a great feature but we really should have had the choice to respawn at the same intensity as long as we have hearts. It made dying to a Boss at 9.0 very painful.
My favorite thing about the cauldron is that if you want to complete the game on level 9, you must beat a stage from start to finish without dying, since that'd lower the difficulty. KI:U got me into the concept of trying to beat games without dying. Though sometimes frustrating, the pressure was addicting and the satisfaction of victory always made me want more.
I could truly die happy with a port of Kid Icarus Uprising on switch. That comment right at the end felt like a dagger to the heart.
“It would be nice if Kid Icarus Uprising was on home consoles”
Me: Yes! Please make it a reality!
Kid Icarus: Uprising is one of my all time favorite games, and the Fiend's Cauldron is part of the reason. I would love a sequel, but I'm not holding my breath XD
I love this Idea so much, I really like it when higher difficulty gives you better rewards so even if the the difficulty setting is punishing it still feels worthwhile to go through because you get better rewards which in turn helps you keep the game somwhat balanced. I wish more games did this it would make finishing a game on harder difficulties much more exciting and enticing.
It’s insane to me that a sequel for kid Icarus uprising wasn’t made. I wish I knew how to develop games because I’d definitely do it. It has soooo much potential as a modern series and I have so many ideas for it to continue
My boy is talking about his best game! 😍
I appreciate the fact that he talks about the cauldron and game's shortcomings as well. I never thought about those points.
Also some games, like Freedom Planet 2, do a good job in difficulty which is similar to the cauldron in some way, which is you can equip 2 items and each will give you a bonus/malus in terms of reward boost. Simple but effective to swap at any level
Happy to see Freedom Planet 2 getting mentioned for that. I initially felt that the game was too easy and changed the difficulty through these flexible mechanics to get a better experience. I like how you can sort of mix it up the difficulty in any way that you like.
i think the difficulty select screen for "Smash Bros. for Wii U" is my favorite use of this system
it's very cool looking and makes it VERY clear what turning up the difficulty is going to do, even to younger players who might not be able to read yet
Welp, now that closing remark is going to live rent-free in my head for the rest of the day.
I loved Uprising because I didn't hold my 3DS like a psychopath who was afraid it was going to leap out of his hands, but it's nice to see Sakurai acknowledge that the land stages were too big.
Big fan of Kid Icarus Uprising here, I've completed all the chapters at 9.0 back then, and still today, I replay the chapters at 9.0 and still manage to beat them almost all the time (except chapter 18, that one is a pain at 9.0 because of the boss...).
I'd love for more games to utilize this mechanic; while it makes them a little less approachable, the feeling of being rewarded for performing well under pressure is truly amazing!
Something that I liked with the cauldron was making some extra or alternate path depending of the difficulty, offers replayability and rewards people playing on harder difficulty too
Hmm... That's an interesting system. Though if someone wants to play the hardest difficulty, isn't it only natural they can't beat it the first time? Someone who really wants to invest into it wouldn't want it to go down and it'd feel punishing for even trying in the first place. They should be given more tries before the cauldron spills.
My issue with this Cauldron system is that it doesn't ask the player if they WANT to lower the difficulty. It just does it.
People who WANT a challenge and fail won't be able to play a challenging level over and over until they pass, they're just thrown into an easier level.
I think it's more of an encouragement to pass the challenge without dying
I don't disagree, but because lowing the difficulty makes you effectively lose the hearts you put in to reach that difficulty, that's part of the "risk" in the system. Not only is the game harder to play, the punishment for losing is losing more hearts. So you'd better make sure you're really prepared to play it on the higher difficulty.
Yeah, let me run that back at the same difficulty level! I died because I made a mistake, not because it was "too hard".
I think it's a feature to kind of "protect players from themselves"
I have watched a lot of streamers playing these sort of games that ask you to lower the difficulty when they lose a lot, but i found that most players (if not all of them) have an Ego and won't ever choose "Yes, reduce the difficulty" which is fine except that on top of that they complain about the game "being too difficult" and end up leaving a negative review on steam just because they couldn't eat their pride and choose a lower difficulty and complain how the game "is badly designed" and all sorts of non-sense, it grinds my gears when people do that to indie games that have few reviews but are actually good games, hurts their momentum.
But i agree with you, if i wanted to play "Hard mode only" then it takes away my ability to choose which difficulty i want, it automatically biases/favors itself to more casual players, but at the same time it biases itself to very hardcore players because in order to keep that Hard difficulty you must not lose not even a single time (That's what Sakurai was talking about).
It's as if the game had only 3 difficulties: Very Easy, Normal and Harder than Hard.
To me it would be fine if that system was on by default, but somewhere somewhat hidden in the options you could disable it, hidden enough to make it less likely that you turn it off on your first playthrough (but still available since the beginning in case that's exactly what you want)
this is a good point, although personally i like the idea that if i want to complete a stage on 9.0 difficulty that I need to clear it almost flawlessly.
perhaps the solution would be to knock the hearts out of the cauldron as it does now, but give you the option to top it back up to maintain high difficulty, or to lower the difficulty to match the new cauldron level, so then you're still somewhat punished for mistakes??
PLEASE! I adore Kid Icarus: Uprising! Mr. Sakurai, I don’t know what you’re hinting at there but oh my goodness I hope it’s what I think it is!
Sakurai passive aggressively mentioning that it would be nice to see a port of his own game gives me serotonin.
I'd personally like a new Kid Icarus all together.
Oh, I would love a sequel. But starting with an enhanced re-release of Uprising is definitely the way to go, so they can reintroduce the world and expand the player-base!
I for one think this is an absolutely genius system!!
The raw, unfiltered insight on world-class game design is what makes this channel so special.
Learning about a game's development is great already, but hearing Sakurai humbly reflect on them to the point of highlighting their flaws and shortcomings is honestly unreal.
I like Halo's Skull system, once you find them(something you only need to do in the first few) you can turn it on to add difficulty, one disables a random part of your HUD, one sends you back to the begging of the level when you die, one requires you to get a melee kill to get shields back, and once you have them you can turn whatever one on at any difficulty