How hard do you think the Souls games actually are?
My first one was Dark Souls back in the early 2010's and it definitely jolted me out of what had become my then comfort zone, after around 5-10 years of easier gaming. I played it without a guide, and the initial learning curve was tough, I'd say 8/10. But once past that curve (around 10-15-ish hours) and outside the first game, most Souls games I've played have been around the 6 or 7/10 difficulty. With a guide you can easily drop this to a 5/10 (I used one for Code Vein as frankly it was boring me, and I just wanted to get it over with). And most normies who have now dogged onto the series use a guide for sure.
I don't think many, if any of them hold a candle to some of the older games of the 80's & 90's difficulty-wise. Twin Cobra (on the SEGA Megadrive, which is harder than the arcade), Chakan, DoDonPachi, Blades of Vengeance etc. if you're looking for genuine 9/10 or 10/10 difficulty....which is fair and mechanically sound...then I think all Souls games which I've played are still playing catch up to bygone eras by comparison.
Be interested to get takes from the likes of
Great Deceiver ,
Lyric Suite and
Nutmeg too.
I started playing with the Asian version of Demon's Souls (it was the first release in English) and at first the formula felt pretty hard, but fair. It rewarded the player for paying attention to his surroundings and not charging on like a retard. In hindsight Demon's Souls is the easiest game in the entire series by far, but it's still my favourite.
I consider each of the sequels worse than the preceding game (except for Bloodborne by sheer strength of setting + atmosphere), both because of the formula getting stale and because of increasingly silly solutions to fundamental mechanical problems that failed to address the root cause from a design standpoint (i.e. ubiquitous helicopter bosses to disincentivize roll spam instead of dealing with the fundamental issue of invincibility frames - except for DS2, which caused many people to cry).
But even at their peak difficulty, I don't think they compare to arcade games at all. You can suck donkey balls at any Souls game and still see everything the game has to offer by spending enough time to grind things out and/or look up an overpowered build online that will trivialize 99% of the content.
Shmups are very different - you can study superplays as much as you want, but the execution barrier is still incredibly (too) high for most people. So to me there's no comparison. Of course there are easier games, but even those considered to be on the easy side (i.e. Slap Fight, Deathsmiles) require sustained mental fortitude and execution that's simply absent from any modern games, Souls included.
