DRAGONSLAYER
Skyrim - https://youtu.be/gnCD0nmxpIc
I should have known that rushing the main story would lead to a hard finale. I trusted the idea that foes level with you a little too much.
At this stage in the game, dragons really aren't that hard. (They never were, honestly, but when you get the ability to force them to land it's just silly.) The two dragons guarding Alduin's fortress were so easy that I wonder if they were even supposed to be challenges: the undead are harder to handle. Sure, the dragons hit harder and have more health, but the undead keep coming whereas the dragons take off and give you time to heal. Maybe they'd be hard if you didn't use Restoration magic, but the game starts you with that spell. Why would you not use it?
Then again, I never used a shield after the intro. Maybe I wouldn't need so much healing if I blocked more.
And at the peak of the keep, I found this to truly be the case.
Kiting the basic foes isn't too hard since I have the dragon flame shout. It takes some time to get through them, but I never need to get within melee range and that's thankfully all they have to attack me with. But I sincerely thought I wouldn't beat the mage. And then the game stuck me in a tiny arena with a melee fighter that I couldn't just stay away from. That was awful. And then… then it followed up with a dragon no more difficult than any others. Truly, the final boss was well before the final boss.
On review of the game: I want to replay it, not just because I'm rather certain that my housecarl is dead, but also because I feel like fighting those final foes again when I'm not just praying that my meager stock of healing items is enough. I want to actually feel like I'd adequately prepared for the fights and didn't just barely squeak by. Also, I feel that running around discovering things and not warping around for objectives is probably the proper way to play the game. I came across so much that I wanted to explore and just didn't have the time to do so. I didn't even read hardly any of the books! The game obviously doesn't include full novels, but I missed a lot of text that probably would have helped me feel less lost. (And I know a lot of memes have been made from their contents. Fantasy within fantasy is a thing I struggle to make, but apparently the writers at Bethesda don't have that problem.)
