The artful mincer
Member
To be honest what you say is all pretty reasonable. The main thing souls has that prevents this is leveling up your weapon.Although I have had some instances where it's felt like a bit of the grind. Demons souls and Bloodborne dlc stand out particularly but the souls trilogy are pretty good at this.Other than Elden Ring(since it's a special case) other Souls games did a great job of making sure if you sequence broke the game, that they wouldn't make the boss' health overly large to the point of extremely forcing you to level.
That's why I can go back and fight the Asylum Demon at a very low level and the fight not take forever(even though he can kill me in 2 hits), or why I can go fight in the pit in DS2 very early on if I take off my armor and jump down the well. Beefing up damage is fine but making it so that the health bar is so monumentally large that you have to grind for a long time to overcome it just sucks.
Most souls games made sure that the fights were short and sweet, and not necessarily a grind because you decided to go right even though they wanted you to branch left. GoW devs' answer to OP's problem is an incorrect one, but that doesn't make the game itself bad. It just makes it way more linear than some people wanted it to be due to bad reasoning. It's one of the reasons why the more forced linear Metroid games are divisive amongst fans.
Just be a better challenge that isn't based mainly on healthbars. Test OP to the extreme but not to a point of grinding. Make him feel like he earned the win more rather than feeling like he is slowly chopping a big tree.
I'am not necessarily against long health bars as a gameplay device ( It's what finally makes overcoming sigrun in 2018 so satisfying) but I see where you're coming from