Yeah, I get where you're coming from re: narrative. That's fair.
I honestly can't be bothered with Crushing. The Uncharted games always failed at balancing out the higher difficulties since they actively restrict your options in a shooter that is supposed to be about mobility and being quick on your feet in these versatile firefight arenas. 4 especially shines in this, I definitely agree with that, regardless of the shootouts being severely downplayed compared to older iterations, but Crushing has always punished you for playing the way Uncharted wants you to play. At least the stealth is more fleshed out though.
Granted, this is not a shortcoming unique to Naughty Dog's games; plenty of US / EU developers fail to realize what could hypothetically make higher difficulties far more enticing beyond arbitrarily upping health and damage values, with the number of Japanese developers who do have their heads on straight also dwindling. I wish more games handled difficulty increases like Ninja Gaiden Black or (to a lesser extent) Platinum's offerings where applicable, regardless of genre, since a lot of variables are tweaked there ranging from A.I. behaviour, enemy placement, brand new enemies, re-arranging item locations et cetera. More expensive and demanding for the dev team to pull off, sure, but it's worth it in the end.
A good chunk of those images are rather misleading with how some hitboxes do not correctly overlap with a move's corresponding animation frames.
