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I find it odd that you have a very similar ranking of the FromSoft titles with Sekiro on top, yet you still disagree with my point. In my view, Sekiro is the best title in part because it is so tight. There is a limited amount you can do in terms of grinding to defeat the bosses. So you just have to... uh... git gud. In contrast, in Elden Ring you can basically make the game as easy or as hard as you want by using ashes or meta builds. This makes the game more accessible in the same way that a dedicated easy mode would have made it more accessible. At the same time, it creates the risk of having overtuned bosses like Malenia. You couldn't have a Malenia type boss in Sekiro because almost nobody would beat it. So it is exactly the tightness, that a bounded difficulty level brings, that may have made Sekiro the better game.
Full agreement on the second paragraph. Comparison with others is part of the enjoyment for some people.
Sure, the flanderization of Dark Souls is bad. Sure, some people have dumb opinions and justify it with git gud. I wouldn't blame it on the lack of easy mode though.
I am generally against taking an established franchise to a completely new direction that alienates many of it's old fans, whether that be adding an easy mode or making it insanely hard. Therefore, I would reject it on these grounds. A better example would be creating a new franchise that is so hard that I can't beat it. I am perfectly fine with this shrug
I personally liked Sekiro because it doubled down on what the Souls games did well while removing most of the crap. One of my biggest pet peeves, the instadeath pits, were removed. This is something that had bugged me since the janky platforming of DS1, but people always defended that garbage with the nonsense elitist difficulty argument. Unfortunately the pits returned in ER, and are actually a pretty big issue in that game despite its dedicated jump button. Sekiro compensated with higher base boss difficulty, but those bosses also felt a lot tighter at the higher levels of play as well. I can pretty consistently do Genichiro, Owl Father, and Inner Isshin damageless, and doing them gives a great sense of mastery. I never got the same feeling with Malenia. ER bosses feel like I'm cheesing an algorithm rather than dueling, and Malenia in particular never felt good even after a bit of practice.
It definitely doesn't help, as it helps to entrench the series as unwelcoming to players who can't adapt to the arbitrary difficulty. That's the elitism people are defending.
"It shouldn't have an easy mode because it didn't have one before" is a goofy argument. Further, I feel like you just ignored the point of my hypothetical, i.e. the arbitrary exclusion, rather than addressing it.
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I do understand that, but I think what the established fans forget is that when the game first came out, they were new players and it wasn't developed to the point it is now after several years. Now new players are coming in at the level of the established players, not the level at which the game was first brought out, and that's a lot of the disjunction between "this is too damn hard" "well just git gud, noob".
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