Delayed attacks as a form of increasing difficult are just extremely unfun. Yeah, you made the boss harder, you also made it extremely frustrating, congratz.
It’s literally helping you actually learn to dodge perfectly instead of just spamming it and getting lucky. Like instead of rolling when they do the back swing, you now have to actually wait for them to swing their attack.
If this was the first game like this you played, it wouldn’t even be that much harder to learn. It’s actually harder having played all the games prior to Elden Ring that conditioned you to dodge on the back swing.
It’s usually not a matter of just waiting - it’s a matter of memorizing. I get the impression if the AI bosses could manually set different delays on their swings after winding up each time, they would literally be impossible.
They can do that. And one of the first dudes you’ll see doing it is Margit. They only delay the time between back swing and the actual attack. So you’ll know it’s coming, you just need to dodge (or parry) when they take a swing at you, not when they bring their hand back. Shit, sometimes Margit will just do the back swing and if you stay away or calm long enough, he just goes back to an idle animation and doesn’t attack you.
In Elden Ring you can often attack during the windup and then dodge. Creating a posture break during those delays can be quite a fun experience.
Plus you can do things like jumping attacks to dodge and duck a lot more of those spinning combos than you’d expect.
The ascetic with the hoops at the very start whiffs most of his chained attacks without you even having to dodge once you figure it out.
FromSoft games are fun to learn, and that frustration is often the appeal as the tricks are discovered.
That’s my biggest problem with FromSoft games. They are not challenging, they’re just slow HP sponges that can one-shot you. That is not challenging, it’s just unfair, and frankly boring.
I think the game would be funner even with the simple tweak of making the animations faster. No fighter EVER wins IRL by telegraphing their attacks for three seconds.
Dark Souls also has slow enemies. Supposedly Sekiro is better in that regard, but meh.