The Souls Game You’ve Never Heard Of (And Its Philosophy)

A Soulslike game is a game that’s kind of like Dark Souls. Maybe that means your character can roll around. Maybe you have to worry about a stamina bar. Or maybe big monsters keep trying to sit on you. There are a lot of videos on YouTube about playing Souls games that you’ve never heard of. And these games ARE >> SOMETIMES MAYBE GOOD, SOMETIMES MAYBE >> BUT YOU CAN ALWAYS tell that the inspiration for these games come from

Dark Souls. The games are intentionally made to play like a Dark Souls game. I want to talk about a game that was never trying to be Dark Souls in any way. No stamina bar, no dodge rolling, no bonfires, and no medieval fantasy. And yet, it might be one of the most soulslike games ever made. Hear me out. Punch Out. Not because of how it plays, but because of the deep philosophy and mindset it teaches you when things start

Going wrong. Punch Out is a boxing game for the Wii released in 2009 where you play as an underdog fighter named Little Mac. The fights aren’t really realistic boxing. They’re about pattern recognition. Every opponent has specific tells and attack sequences. And when I say tell, I mean you can tell which attack your opponent will do based on his visual or audio cues. If you rush in or panic, you’ll be punished for it. The only way to win is to slow down, learn

The fight, and wait for openings. Dark Souls and Punch Out on the surface level are already really similar. In Dark Souls, you fight bosses. In Punch Out, every opponent is basically a boss. Both games have visual and audio cues that act as tells. Both punish you when you get greedy and try to get just one more hidden. You’re expected to fail repeatedly. Losing is part of the fight. You’re supposed to remember patterns. The fight becomes easier once it clicks

And you get the hang of it, and then your mastery feels earned, not random. Dark Souls has a stamina bar. Punch Out has its own stamina system. Punch Out doesn’t have rolling, but it does have dodging. But, okay, I didn’t just make this video because I wanted to make surface level connections between the two games. I made this video because Punch Out makes a philosophy obvious that Dark Souls hides between layers of complexity. The main philosophy of Punch

Out that I wanted to say in this video is that even when you start the run in a rough way, you can still pull it back and win. A bad opening doesn’t mean that the run is over. Sometimes it’s just the beginning. The game makes this obvious through its mechanics. The only way you can heal in Punch Out is by knocking your opponent down. And then when he’s down and the ref is counting, then you can heal up by mashing all your buttons.

So even if you’re getting destroyed early, it’s too soon to say whether you’ve lost. You might actually just be getting started. But this is actually where a lot of people give up. It’s easy to think like, “Let me just restart so I can do a cleaner run.” And that sounds logical because yeah, like I want to be as prepared as possible when fighting my opponent. It doesn’t feel good when you’re having a hard time and then you

Take damage at a section where you should have been able to take no damage at all. You don’t want to get hit at the parts that you know you can do. You want to save that health for the parts that you know that you struggle with. You know, you want to save the health so that you can get hit at the parts that you are having trouble with. You know, but that mindset is exactly what keeps

You stuck. Both in the game and in real life if you always wait for perfect circumstances. You’ll never be ready. You only start learning when you keep fighting after you feel beaten and demotivated. And eventually something clicks, not because you suddenly got lucky, but because every attempt taught you something. When you try your ass off and keep fighting, even when the boss has got you beaten and demotivated, you start learning the boss. You learn which attacks are real threats, which ones are

Fake attacks, fast or slow, when to be patient, and when to strike. So when you lose, you’re not actually starting over from zero again. You’re stacking the information you’re learning from every attempt. This is true in Punch Out, and it’s also true in Dark Souls. You think you’re losing when you die, but what you’re actually doing is narrowing the gap between you and your perfect run. Every loss removes uncertainty. Every attempt sharpens your timing. You keep

Mastering every little detail, every little section, and you start to consistently get through more and more sections of the fight until all of your progress finally comes together in one perfect run. You use everything that you’ve learned perfectly and beat the boss. And when you win, it doesn’t feel like some random thing that just happened by luck. It feels like it was inevitable at that point. You finally get to have that perfect run that you were restarting the game over and over

Again expecting to get at the beginning. But you don’t get to have the perfect run at the beginning. You have to earn it. You learn the boss. You stop panicking and your runs start looking more and more perfect. Not because you reset until they were perfect, but because you earned that mastery through fighting, even through the ugly attempts. And the same philosophy exists in Dark Souls. But I feel like it’s easier to see what I’m trying to say

Through Punch Out because in Dark Souls, you’re basically forced to just keep trying through the attempt anyway. There was a long boss run to even get to the boss and reloading to the last checkpoint will just take too much time, like the loading screen. So, you kind of automatically have this feeling like, you know what, I’ll just try it anyway and see how far I can get, even if my Estus is low and my chances aren’t looking too good. So, you

Naturally experiment, push runs further, and learn while disadvantaged. Dark Souls forces resilience. Dark Souls forces you to just try it anyway. But Punch Out, you have a choice. In Punch Out, it takes no time at all to just reload the fight, maybe like 2 seconds, and then you can do it perfectly again if you want to. And honestly, you might be thinking like, well, what’s even the problem with that? What if I want to restart? What’s the big deal? There is

Nothing mechanically wrong with restarting, but the problem isn’t efficiency. The problem is the habit that restarting the game trains the player. There’s no friction at all. You can reset the fight the moment things start to look bad. When restarting is instant, you’re constantly tempted to avoid the uncomfortable parts of the fight. You avoid messy situations. You avoid learning while you’re at a disadvantage. You avoid fighting while you’re behind. You’re not optimizing for learning. You’re optimizing for comfort. And that’s the

Real problem that Punchout can teach us. Restarting skips the most important part of learning. Playing while things are going wrong. But the most valuable learning doesn’t happen when everything is clean and controlled. It happens when your health is low, your timing is off, and you’re already panicking because you’ve made mistakes. That’s when you learn which hits actually matter, which risks are worth taking, and how to stay calm under pressure. If you restart early every time, you only ever practice

Under ideal conditions. But real mastery isn’t built there. Real mastery is built in imperfect conditions. By staying in the fight long enough to adapt, even when things aren’t looking great, a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor. It’s fighting through the toughness and fighting through what seems like a loss, and learning and getting to your win. Anyway, in real life, we’re constantly looking for restart buttons. We quit the habit because we messed up the streak. We abandoned the project because the

Start of it wasn’t clean. You’ve heard of decision paralysis before, right? Like that’s part of it. We avoid doing something because we think we’re already behind or we don’t have the perfect conditions to do it. And just like in Punchout, restarting feels productive, but most of the time it’s just avoidance disguised as logic. But real growth doesn’t happen when conditions are perfect. It happens when you keep going even after things get messy. That’s the part most people skip because they want

The instant gratification of having everything perfect as soon as they want it. But the moment you feel behind, demotivated, or embarrassed, that’s not the signal to restart. That’s the signal to stay in it a little longer. Because learning how to operate while things are going wrong is the skill that actually carries over to real life, not just in Punchout or Dark Souls. If there’s one thing that you can take away from this video, I would want

It to be for you to remember. Don’t restart just because the run isn’t perfect. If you mess up your routine, don’t treat the whole day like it’s a loss. Now, if you fall behind, don’t quit. If you feel embarrassed, don’t disappear. Stay in the fight long enough to adapt and learn from. Everything doesn’t always need to be perfect. And the truth is that it won’t always be perfect. Life is pretty imperfect. But at the same time, if you can accept that

Everything in life can be a learning opportunity and a chance to grow and you fail enough times to learn how to do something the right way, then life can actually become perfect just like you’ve always wanted it to be. But you just have to earn it through failing and trying again and again and again. Just like Punch Out, life can be perfect, but you just have to earn it. If you like Dark Souls and self-improvement, I’ve started a new

Free community. You can join it. It’s just the link in the description. I also have a new course that I’ve made inside of the community. It’s like how to fix your life but explain with Dark Souls. So, if either of those sound interesting to you, then I’m not forcing you, but you can check it out. It’s just the link in the description. I really hope that this video can help, guys. Take care and don’t you dare go hollow.