The games can certainly be punishing in key areas, and it's better that newer entries and other soulslikes make an effort to make learning the games be more friendly. Death is punishing, sure. Losing consumables, fighting through the same enemies again, or even just having to run back to a boss - these are all sources of friction in this genre. Up front, I do wish these games had accessibility options, I do want more people to experience what they have to offer. But death really just isn't as punishing as a lot of people make it out to be. Dark Souls isn't that hard, in most cases. There's certainly bullshit, and it takes time to learn enemy patterns, and dying can be bad feeling. I think that without the friction, if you could overcome every location and boss on the first or second try, these games would just kind of suck. So it's a balance.
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Dark Souls 2 gives you a very large amount of human effigies that can restore your max HP, and in a very early game area there is a ring you can wear that limits how low your max HP can go. It's in a chest in a very early game area that you will walk by and see guaranteed in order to progress. What I think is more interesting is how you think it's the norm and expected that you should be able to play through an action game and rarely die. It's okay to enjoy power fantasy games, where dying means you fail - and you just get to retry the part you failed. But that doesn't mean that enjoying the process of learning an enemy patterns and overcoming adversity is insane. Those games are not power fantasy action games, you are supposed to feel weak. Because when you feel weak and then you kill that damn boss anyways, it's one of the best feelings ever in gaming. On top of that, a lot of the consumables that you're talking about you can buy infinite of. Like I said, the games aren't that hard, enemy patterns are usually pretty simple with only a few attacks, and as you move through areas you learn what gimmicks the enemies are going to abuse and can just adapt to them. Most enemies can be easily parried, or you can kill problem enemies with poison arrows or magic from a distance. Often I think that the people who are convinced that souls games are brutal and not fun are people who try to play them like they are some kind of action hero instead of taking advantage of the tools the games give you to use, especially the summons.