This review is for the Xbox 360 version of the game, played with no patches and online functionality disabled.

For better and worse, the seventh generation normalized patches. It is not all that uncommon for a game to release in a state that is totally removed from that which it may occupy years later. Content support, balance tweaking, level design, even whole story beats can be altered, resulting in varied experiences depending on when someone finally decides to pick a game up. No Man's Sky is perhaps one of the best examples of this, but my mind always goes to Mass Effect 3, whose Leviathan DLC attempted to better contextualize and alter its reviled ending. If you waited to play that game and started it with the Leviathan DLC installed, then you would have experienced the story differently than those who played through it at launch.

A point of conversation that has come up an innumerable amount of times between myself and my friend Larry is how much Dark Souls has changed over the years. It wears the same face, but the way it carries itself is all... wrong. Its reputation as a hard game is well known, but we've long insisted that Dark Souls as it exists today is perhaps the easiest game in the Souls series, so much so that we find little about it to be particularly compelling. However, at launch we both found the opposite to be true. It was hard. Too hard to be enjoyable, in fact.

It has long been my opinion that From learned the wrong lesson from Demon's Souls. They internalized that people liked Demon's Souls because it was hard, and so for the follow up, difficulty is what they decided to lean into. "Prepare to DIE." And then prepare to get incredibly frustrated, because unlike Demon's Souls, the constant loop of death feels less educational, and more irritating. There's a fine line between difficulty and challenge. A challenge is fair, it presents the player with a problem or an obstacle, and if you understand the rules well enough and apply skill built from that understanding, you can overcome that challenge. Conversely, a segment of a game that is merely difficult only exists through sloppy balancing or from a desire to kick the player down. This is how Dark Souls can be simultaneously too hard and too easy. Make enemies less tanky, give the player better stats, make upgrading more viable beyond a small selection of elements and weapon types, give the player more souls... Suddenly it's not hard anymore, because nothing about Dark Souls was ever designed in a way that was inherently challenging.

But, what if I was wrong about all of that. After all, that's an argument I've been making over a decade removed from the game's launch. Perhaps I find Dark Souls easy now because I am more familiar with Souls games than I was in 2011. That formed the basis of an absolutely terrible experiment: Buy a launch copy of Dark Souls for the Xbox 360 and slap that fucker in with the console's online functionality disabled. Yeah... Yeah I'm gonna play Dark Souls like my primitive ancestors did! I'm gonna put the theory into practice! I'm gonna be real fucking stupid and waste my entire weekend!

I was actually pretty excited to do this, because I've developed some strange brain condition where I've now formed nostalgia for specific patches (and lack thereof) for video games. Little bit concerning, that. Initially, I intended to spec my character into pyromancy, but decided it would be more appropriate to replicate my Dark Souls HD build in order to create a direct point of comparison. A cleric wielding the starting mace taken down the base upgrade path, although I did create a few others characters to mess around with in order to test the viability of other classes and weapons. Almost immediately, pre-patch Dark Souls feels noticeably different. Enemies are much more spongy and they drop less souls, and upgrading the mace made it feel like I was making substantially less significant gains with each subsequent level, to the point that it almost felt kind of pointless. This was, nevertheless, the point of this experiment, and so I pressed on... And as I did, I started to realize that perhaps I was right and also a bit wrong, because while the game is noticeably more difficult from a sheer numbers standpoint, I was able to make up for the fact that enemies were more resilient and my damage more feeble by having a far better understanding of enemy attack windows and animation timing. I know how long the wind up is on this mace, and I know when to parry a black knight. Those parts of the game haven't changed that much, or at least they're far less perceptible to me.

However, understanding the precise moment to roll towards Sif when she swings her sword means nothing when the game suddenly drops below ten frames per second right when you're getting ready to initiate the roll. Dark Souls may not be as obtusely difficult as I remember it being, but its performance more than compensates. The game can barely keep itself together anytime there's more than one enemy on screen, which results in a lot of deaths from botched dodge rolls, parries and attacks. The Belfry Gargoyles are so routine for me at this point that it never really takes more than a couple of tries to take them down with an un-upgraded weapon. This time around I died about ten times and decided to veer off to kill the Moonlight Butterfly, grind enough souls to get another five levels in strength, and upgrade my mace a few times. It wasn't because the pre-patch balancing made them that much harder, I just needed the extra damage output to kill the first one before the second could show up and bottom out the framerate.

I hit my breaking point in Anor Londo when Ornstein started teleporting around like a Dragon Ball character, which is something I observed happen several times before with random hollow soldiers blinking out of existence. On one especially buggy attempt against Sif, she started using her spin attack against an incline, which progressively pushed her model higher and higher up into the sky. It's not like I wasn't expecting some technical difficulties, after all I do remember Dark Souls running like crap back in the day, but I was genuinely surprised to rediscover how unplayable it was. Over ten years removed, it's hard to say how much that factored in my dislike of the game at launch, but then that does tie back into why I chose to do this to begin with. It's entirely possible later patches smoothed out some of the rougher areas on the Xbox 360 version of the game, but applying such a patch would also mean losing access to the game's original balancing, effectively rendering the whole exercise moot. But I'm also not having any fun with this, and that leaves me with two options: press on and get progressively more Mad about Video Games, or stop playing and do something better with my time.

Was this exercise worth it? Probably not! However, the way the conversation around this game was framed when it came out is only made more maddening for the experience. I remember people trying to gaslight me into thinking Dark Souls was a flawless masterpiece, a modern day classic, a perfect 5/5. These are the same people who would press that point while applying five different fan patches to the PC version so it could even go full screen; they were wrong then and they're still wrong today. I think some of my criticisms of the game's balancing issues stand, primarily in how certain weapon types and upgrade paths feel lackluster to the point of being actively harmful to spec into, and insipid enemy placement providing engagement only in terms of how hard they hit (and how hard you have to hit them.) It is merely the intensity with which I've internalized these problems that I think is wrong, and I'll admit that familiarity with the Souls series has partially resulted in me feeling post-patch Dark Souls is "too easy." However, the performance issues are so bad and so frequent that I can't believe anyone found them tolerable enough at the time to beat the game. Somehow I did! I think we just had different expectations for what was acceptable in the seventh gen, and though patches have become an ingrained part of gaming, thank God people are holding game performance to a higher standard today.

Dark Souls is cool because I've never had a particularly high opinion of it, but every time I played the game it seems I come up with a different reason why. 2011 pre-patch? Too hard. Post-patch on PC and the HD remaster? Too easy! 2011 pre-patch replay? This runs at 8fps and I want to puke all over my lap, also just not fun generally speaking.

Now that this sacred cow is well and truly dead, let me tell you why I think the original release Dark Souls 2 is fifty times better,

In the three-ish years between my friend from high school snapping my barely touched copy of Dark Souls III in half after I gave it to him and me giving Bloodborne a shot and falling head over heels for it, I had always been interested in at least giving the original Dark Souls a shot, and after beating Bloodborne twice and Elden Ring once, I decided that I was finally ready to give that game a go. After hearing people call the 2018 remaster a disappointment due to it not fixing any of the original game's issues, I decided that I might as well play the original version of the game anyway due to it being the cheaper option, and so I snagged a copy of the Prepare to Die version of the game alongside some other Xbox 360 titles and then spent just over a month playing through it. My roughly 25-30 hour playthrough of Dark Souls was one that was filled with a lot of anger, complaining, and me wishing outlandish things on Hidetaka Miyazaki, but it was also an immensely fun and rewarding experience, even if I wouldn't consider it to be perfect like so many others have.

Even when compared to the terrifying Gothic streets of Yharnam in Bloodborne or the vast and varied Lands Between of Elden Ring, there was something about playing Dark Souls that made its atmosphere feel so much more oppressive and bleak, and I feel like that can be at least partially linked back to the game's controls. In Dark Souls, you have to commit to absolutely every attack, dodge, and occasional jump that you make, as your Chosen Undead's limited range, delayed movements, and inability to adjust where their moves go in any way eventually makes fighting even one enemy require lots of attention and patience. The jump from the tough, but fair combat of Bloodborne and Elden Ring to the brutal and punishing combat of Dark Souls was an admittedly jarring one, but it greatly added to the satisfaction of actually overcoming whatever was in your way, as having the odds be stacked against your favor made finally getting to the next bonfire or beating that boss feel immensely euphoric after being beaten down so many times. The game's grim setting was a great backdrop for the unforgiving combat, as the artstyle's blend of grotesque dark fantasy and medieval romanticism made for levels that were both gorgeous to look at and suffocating in how constant the presence of death and ruin were. Usually, I really dislike having to backtrack in games, but my appreciation for the game's interconnectedness was at its highest whenever I had to trek through levels before I got the ability to warp to bonfires, as those trips made Dark Souls feel thick with existential dread, especially with the game's few friendly NPCs being hopelessly insane (except for Solaire of Astora, bless his heart). Despite how haunting and depressing this game can be, there were several moments in Dark Souls that were overwhelming in their beauty, with my first arrivals in both the Firelink Shrine and the fight against the Moonlight Butterfly genuinely making me tear up with how enchanting they were amidst Lordran's constant strife and decay.

What's frustrating about Dark Souls is that, despite how much this game manages to get right so effortlessly, it is also rife with bizarre and even outright bad design choices that made playing the game feel either annoying, dull, unfair, or some combination of the three, and these moments ended up holding the game back from being the flawless masterstroke that so many people have praised it as. For starters, both the combat and the general movement felt very janky to me, and a lot of my deaths just ended up coming from my character doing a move that was in the complete opposite direction of what I actually pressed on my controller or even just slipping off of the platform that I was on for no discernible reason. Aside from the Moonlight Butterfly, Ornstein and Smough, and Gwyn, I never really struggled with any of the game's bosses (Bed of Chaos somehow only took me three tries), but quite a few of the levels that led up to them were filled with cheap enemy placements and annoying gimmicks, with New Londo Ruins featuring ghosts being able to kill you through walls and the Duke's Archives being littered with Channeler snipers sticking out to me in particular. There were also entire levels that didn't feature a single bonfire in them, and while it did add to the tension of trying to avoid getting hit to either keep exploring or to find the next boss, they also meant that I had to run a marathon from a totally different area every single time I wanted to attempt the level again, and this got old almost immediately. Even with all of these flaws, though, Dark Souls was still a great game whose influence and painstaking craft can still be felt to this day, and since I've heard almost nothing but horror stories about Dark Souls II, I'll probably come back to it after playing through Dark Souls III first.

I tried to make my second run through Dark Souls a contrast with my first. I always go for dextrous katana builds in my first run through these games, so coming back I wanted to do a strength-oriented build instead with heavy armor and heavier weaponry. I knew the game by this point, so I allowed myself to skip bosses and areas I wasn't interested in refighting (so long, Lost Izalith; another time, Kalameet).

But the most impactful change was streaming my run to friends over Discord, including particularly my friend @zandravandra. Zandra knows this game back to front, and she gave me some context on it that really opened my eyes to what's special about this Souls. The way the game hides its meta progression asks the player not just to engage with the game on its own terms, but to understand it so thoroughly that they're able to use the grammar of the game to subvert the destinies that seem at first unavoidable. To save Solaire, you must not only follow his route, but understand how to subvert it. To find the secret ending, you must see the ways the game prevents you from moving forward, then probe the holes in those defenses.

This demonstrates a tremendous amount of faith in the player's willingness to engage with the game over and over in order to truly divine its secrets. The willingness to allow each player to experience a different subset of the game clearly still persists in the later games (Elden Ring in particular is a master class in this), but even there as long as you touch everything once you'll see all there is to see. Dark Souls takes one bold step further by making so much at the heart of the game's text so readily missable, thereby demanding that players not only engage thoroughly but thoughtfully as well.

Even if you wanted to do that today, I'm not sure it would matter. We live in an age of endless wikis and discords which instantaneously disseminate information to players. That's not necessarily a bad thing—to catalog a thing so painstakingly is another way to love it—but it does mean that vanishingly few players will play a game five times through without ever looking up its secrets on the internet. But still, Dark Souls remains, a brilliant monument to that moment when it was possible to make a game just like this.

restos de um mundo marginalizado feitos de templo pra sonhadores rezarem, o palco onde a interatividade 3D estabeleceu uma de suas maiores virtudes de acordo com a lógica e sensibilidade espacial daquele mundo: o tempo

dark souls é uma perda de tempo que encanta com suas diferentes facetas e formas de engolir o jogador para dentro de seu mundo. descer Great Hollow, chegar em Ash Lake e perceber que tudo aquilo era só uma de infinitas árvores expostas naquele ambiente exemplifica bem a magia do jogo

e o tanto que eu passei pelo vale dos dragões (mesmo não gostando da área) por questões de planejamento de rotas e a falta de um fast travel/a inclusão limitada de um... é um grande expoente disso tudo: o tempo é o maior inimigo de dark souls e isso é belo.

The Dark Souls of Dark souls games.

Dark Souls is a hard game if you've never played a souls title before. If you get frustrated at dying rather than more determined to progress stop reading and never buy this. For those that persevere, the sense of achievement when finally getting past a knight blocking your path, for finally beating that boss, for barely surviving to the next fire with your souls though is what makes this series shine. Dark Souls gives a sense of hard earned achievement at times that few games can match.

The gameplay is like a third person action RPG but it's so much more than that. Most movements are slow, especially slow when using heavier armor meaning every attack must be planned out right watching enemy movements as 1-2 hits can see you dead at times. Dark Souls is a game where defense is as important as the attack if not more so, shields, stamina and dodging are simply vital to vanquish enemies and I love it for the added tactics required rather than just mashing attack and bulldozing through foes a lot of RPGs are turning towards.

There are moments of safety to be found though few and far between in Dark Souls in Firelink shrines, bonfires that heal you, refill your limited Estus flask for healing as well as save your game. These fires allow you to see the faint ghostly image of other players sitting around it who are also playing giving a sort of feeling of distant comradely I really liked. Sitting at a fire does however reset every enemy in the area you just defeated, From Software (the developer) never gives anything to players for free.

The Firelink Shrine is also the place where you level up. Each enemy, (as well as some items) give your character souls, these souls act as your experience as well as your currency at vendors or magic users scattered around the world. Level ups don't automatically happen though so holding onto those souls can be a risky business especially if you have accumulated a large amount as if you die, you lose them. If you get back to your blood stain of where you died you can get them back but if you die before then you lose them permanently. Dark Souls is a constant struggle for survival and evolution. Keeping souls is hard, leveling up is slow with seemingly little effect at first, being strategic in battle is actually far more important and rewarding.

If you do die in Dark Souls all is not lost as you become undead so to speak, a zombie. You are a fair bit weaker in this state but there are several benefits which are all online related. Dark Souls like Demon's Souls before it allows living players to summon undead players into their game to help them, once the boss is defeated they are sent back to their world with a helping of souls as thanks. When living you can also get invaded by other players who intentionally try to kill you. This is a unique feature and can be fun for dueling it out with other people.

When playing with other players there aren't any headsets, just a lot of selectable actions. Even when invading players often stop to bow before fighting you. There is a sort of silent form of honour between players I really love, sometimes taking something away from a game rather than adding to it can really heighten the experience. Setting up co-op games with friends is incredibly difficult to impossible as players have to be on a similar soul level as well as server. It was sort of annoying at first but builds up a kind of nice form of solitude, even when with other people you are on your own.

Visually Dark Souls is absolutely stunning in places. Huge Gothic castles, towns, forests and ruins. Most of the enemies look as menacing as they are. Undead Knights that don't say a word, only a clank of metal as they run towards you, huge scaled dragons, benches smash when you roll through, the atmosphere and surroundings are fantastic and the soundtrack that goes with it while only played rarely is really superb. It is however, not perfect. when enemies die they have a rather weird physics to them that can send them into a spasm or tangled up in your characters legs if you walk over them. My biggest complaint of all though is in an area known as Blightown there is rather a lot of slowdown and occasionally in other areas when sprinting which really lets down the games otherwise great presentation.

Dark Souls is rather a large game, my first playthrough ran at 90 hours with lots of weapons to craft, spells to get and a few secret bosses or areas. Dark Souls also has a great new game + that makes all the enemies far harder each time to match your level and gear. My second run through with trophy mop up for the platinum was around 40 hours which is a more realistic time if you take out the deaths and exploration, this is a deep title with lots to find of which almost none is explained.

All in all I love the game and the series which in itself paved the way for Soulslike titles and influences even in the 2D plane over a decade later. It can be hard to get into but I recommend it as it may surprise you.

+ Rewarding in a way games aren't anymore.
+ Fantastic art.
+ Unique online features.
+ Excellent tactical combat.

- Some people may find it too hard.
- Slow down in places.

The sky streaks with incandescence, and the air is dragons and embers. A crackle from the dying kiln, a Lord of Cinder awaiting thee.
I remember being at GameStop years ago, I was picking out a game to buy and it was between a series I was familiar with and Dark Souls. It seems obvious now that I made the wrong decision then, but It's never too late to start. I think now was the perfect time for me. There's not much to say that hasn't been repeated a thousand times. Everything about Dark Souls is stellar. The story, world, music, art, gameplay, atmosphere, sound design, and so much more all leave me speechless. There is a slight washout of execution in the latter half of the game. Even still, those areas are a ton of fun. I can not consciously give this any less than 5 stars, Bed of Chaos and all. "Stay safe friend, and don't you dare go hollow"
Favorite area: Undead Burg | Honorable mention: Ash Lake
Favorite boss: O&S | Honorable mention: Artorias

in contrast to it's reputation in some circles as a sophisticated and unapproachable masterwork that only the most capable in the medium can dare claim to have really conquered, revisiting dark souls in 2022 has the same essential feel as revisiting elric of melnibone in the same year. dark souls is pure pulp fantasy, absolutely lascivious in it's enthusiasm to play the hits and delight in the playing of them. there's no attempt to hide the basic moods and beats the game is playing, instead it simply enjoys the classics with an infectious delight. about the only thing that isn't pulp about dark souls' fantasy is the sexism, which is mostly just deeply boring and conservative instead of being as weird and outrageous as a lot of those old paperbacks could be.

undead burg. darkroot basin. lord of light. the abyss. the dark. fire. the sun. demon ruins. Big Hat Logan. fuckin blighttown. it's deeply mundane in a way that really works. there's no Tarnished-esqe straining towards the illusion of novelty when there is none, none of the worldbuilding has any facade or pretense to it, it is what it is on the tin, which is exactly the spirit of a pulp novel that promises swords and legends and tits and proceeds to deliver exactly that, but with a visual artistry and methodically slow pace that all but forces the player to take the time to appreciate why we like these base concepts in the first place. getting Cursed in The Depths and having to spend not-inconsiderable time on a grueling backtrack up to The Undead Parish to talk to Oswald to get it cured is not a traditionally "fun" or "novel" journey but it is one that invites consideration of every step of that journey. it is sophisticated appreciation of "junk food" art, and that is just quintessential Video Games to me.

the game's writing is (mostly) wonderfully unpretentious, in stark contrast to it's most ardent fans, fans who have done a tremendous disservice to the game's narrative by archiving it in the form of videos and wikis that tear it from the aforementioned pacing and stunning visual direction that brings it life and meaning. a lore wiki about the primorial serpent kaathe and his darkstalkers in the abyss would read like the rote fantasy claptrap that it ultimately fundamentally is, but the way the game deploys it, the way it hides Kaathe and what he has to say from the standard progression of the journey of the Chosen, the way the Abyss and the Dark is depicted as a literally blank void, a Nothingness that exists totally apart from our conception of the world as we can possibly conceive of it, that is what makes these concepts compelling.

though admittedly, the game hardly does itself any favors in the honestly quite weak DLC, which recasts the Dark from a compelling evocation of the unknown, and literalizes it as a Spooky Cave with a Fucked Up Guy inside that spreads Corruption Juice that turns people into Monsters. dark souls works because it puts in the work to make concepts like this visually and poetically compelling, but the dlc is much more traditionally interested in the exposition of Lore as a beginning and end, and demonstrates the very thin line between Compelling Pulp Fantasy and Drearily Rote Pulp Fantasy. artorias of the abyss, for better or worse, for good or ill, feels completely haunted by the future of Fromsoft, and feels at odds with what I found so loveable about dark souls upon this revisit.

the story and world of dark souls is nothing you haven't seen before if you're even lightly read in fantasy and mythical literature. but because it deeply invests in the presentation of and love of these things without pretension or subversion, through the delightfully shonky and functional UI and the warm PS3 sheen, it works. dark souls knows that sometimes, we just want to read about elric of melnibone, the eternal champion, brooding on his ruby throne while the Lord of Dragon Cave scowls from across the court. i don't think i'll ever love it like i love it's younger, weirder, rougher, moodier sibling, but it'll always make me smile.

Only FromSoftware copy their own homework and get away with it. From Demons Souls to Elden Ring, the iconic brutal combat gameplay remains, only midly adjusted with each title.
I'll admit I'm late to the game, quite literally, but Dark Souls is my favourite of theirs so far, and maybe an all-timer.

The same level of immense satisfaction comes from conquering seemingly impossible forces, but it is the connectedness of the world here that makes you feel existentially insignificant and all the more bold in exploring unknown territory.
Whilst a notch down from the visual flair of subsequent titles - Bloodborne, Elden Ring, etc - the level design here is still superb: I think it is the vast size and sonic emptiness of places like the Demon Ruins or Great Hollow that make them utterly terrifying, especially upon uncovery of the indifferent creatures that lurk there. And if you don't have that special fast travel item, you must traverse between these places, miles sometimes deep into lava pits underground or at the peaks of castles in the clouds; I can't express enough that wondrously epic scale acheived here through such variation - it's probably not as big as Skyrim but by god it just feels bigger.

Another key strength is character design: from smaller, comical side characters such as the onion shaped knight Siegmeyer of Catarina to otherworldly beasts such as the primordial serpent Frampt (almost shat myself when I first saw him).

But essential to the bleak atmosphere of Dark Souls, alongside the sparingly used music and foggy, dingy locations, is the abundance of characters who simply sit there, beaten and tarnished - they have truly lost. In a game that places so much emphasis on dying, this highlights the whole point (of Souls games and gaming in general): you can die as many times as you like, but you only lose when you give up.

A revolution in game design, it's not hard at all to see why Dark Souls has been so influential in more modern games. It's so rare that you see a developer who are;

#1: So willing to let players miss out on huge swathes of content by tucking away entire, interconnected areas behind secrets, and;

#2: Willing to be so thoroughly, unapologetically evil to the player. Brutal boss fights, little to no handholding, enemies constantly ambushing you and hiding behind corners, NPCs who betray you and so much more.

You combine these things, and you have a recipe for player immersion. I'd be willing to bet that a large majority of the reason players talk up how consumed they were by Dark Souls is due to how "hands off" the game is. It never explains any of its countless nuances, it leaves the player to their own devices to discover how certain mechanics work; how to survive enemy attacks by using the I-frames on your roll, how to dual-wield weapons or use a shield in tandem with another one or use a single weapon with both hands. During my playthrough on stream, I shot arrows at the pressure plates in Sen's Fortress to trigger them without stepping on them, and my chat totally popped off. None of them had ever seen someone do that or even thought to do such a thing and it worked! That was so sick, and also I'm a genius! If more games were willing to trust their players to think for themselves and experiment, they might be hailed as just as immersive.

It's incredibly impressive how many builds and playstyles Dark Souls' combat and systems allow for, combine that with the non-linearity and potential for constant sequence-breaking with its world as open and interconnected as it is and you have a game that's also extremely replayable. At its best, Dark Souls honestly feels like an edgier and less clunky 3D Zelda only designed by people who hate you.

There are a couple things that hold it back from the complete top score for me. The second half of the game noticeably dips in quality from the first, it never quite reaches the heights of Anor Londo and Sen's Fortress again once those areas are over, and some areas like Tomb Of The Giants are outright unenjoyable for me, even as someone who likes difficulty. The Bed Of Chaos is an obviously awful boss in every regard so notorious that I hardly even feel the need to go off on it, the menu'ing is pretty clunky and unintuitive and I personally don't like having to do the "run up" to a boss again every time you die to it. I love difficulty, but I don't think that's interesting difficulty or gameplay - it just seems like padding to me, and it's especially frustrating against bosses like Gwyn who are pretty brutal and whose fight can be over in about 30 seconds, yet you have to do a like - 3 minute run-up to every time you wanna rematch him. Ugh.

Still though, anything I can find wrong with this game pales in comparison to its achievements. Very few developers have the balls to do the things Dark Souls does. In my playthrough, dastardly NPC Lautrec who betrays you if you let him live backflipped off a cliff during our fight and just died, I just got his item for free and the game just let me roll with it. Now THAT's game design. No restrictions, no refusing to let players cheese out a W, just dudes backflipping off cliffs. Fuck yeah, Dark Souls. Fuck yeah.

Some periods of my life, I identify with the Undead burg portion of the game--the sense that there's always something around the corner, the constant threat of the firebombs, the ways you can diverge off the beaten path and hit Blighttown, Darkroot Basin, or touch some of the Catacombs before anything. I also enjoy how openly some of the problems are positioned--there's a dragon torching all of the bridge, how are you going to get across? Just solid video game logic.

At other points of my life, I've identified the most with the darker, openly antagonistic areas of the late-game. The spookiness of Tomb of the Giants, the literal PS3 CPU scorching lava Lost Izalith, the deception of the Duke's archives; it's a game that assumes you're capable of handling it's more ambitious, difficult ideas of not just level-design, but also of narrative through level-design--even if New Londo Ruins is frustrating, the stillness that comes through the game in this section is so palpable, it feels only natural that there's just a black abyss at the bottom of it all.

At all points of my life though, I've always enjoyed Anor Londo, Sen's Fortress, and Ash Lake. The first two are self-explanatory, those two sections have more or less defined the Soulsborne genre, but Ash Lake also slaps just cuz it's got that rockin melancholic beach vibes that are hard to come by.

At no point of my life though have I fully enjoyed Dark Souls front to back though, there's always some point of 'disconnect' between what I'm feeling and what the game wants me to feel. Sometimes the early game just bores me to tears and I give up, other times the noticeable quality drop of the 4 Lords section slowly saps my will to keep playing, and other times I think "well, I haven't gone through Blighttown legit since my first playthrough, it can't be that bad' and immediately regret that thought as the framerate hits the floor. I can't really fault Dark Souls for this, its kinda how ambitious projects go, but it's a game I think everyone should play at least once, even if I have no specific drive to experience all of this again.

Off to the distance, in a cliff in Blighttown with a drop leading to certain death, a corpse rests. You approach it and pick up an item from it: "Soul of a Brave Hero"

This is how Dark Souls communicates that you are to persevere through its challenge and conquer its world by your might alone. The game is filled with moments and allusions to giving up. It by no means shames those who have given up, it honors them and uses their bravery to push you forward and help you reach your goal. This game is about persevering through pain and overcoming a challenge. It is also valid to say this game alludes to depression and suicide, with going hollow representing one giving up and losing the fight.

This game helped me cope with depression, at a time in which I had no one but myself to push through sadness, grief and guilt, I escaped to Lordran in a vague quest to ring the Bell of Awakening. Discovering the deeply connected world of Lordran and overcoming impossible odds gave me a sense of purpose in life. It helped me realize that my victories were mine alone and that by pure hope, bravery and patience I could triumph. Riding that elevator in Undead Parish to discover it leading into Firelink Shrine is one of the moments I will never forget.

With all the sentimental, thematic things aside, this game is a technical masterpiece. It has mechanics so deeply connected and complementary to one another it feels seamless everytime you play. The amount of choices a player has over their journey is what every role-playing game should aspire to. The world is beautiful, with hands down some of the greatest level design of all time. The lack of music throughout most of the game, with only the sound of your armor crashing against the floor before you encounter a boss and it erupts into an epic battle theme. The combat is fluid, dependant entirely on skill and can be enjoyed by everyone.

It's hard to say what Dark Souls' greatest achievement is, when almost everything in the game is refined to perfection. It would be more fitting for me to say Dark Souls as a whole is an achievement in itself. This is a game everyone can pick up, enjoy and master. This is a game which anyone can find purpose in and venture into a world that, just like real life, is scary and full of challenges, but you must unlock that potential within yourself to prevail. Even though sometimes it may be hard as nails, what matters is you try again... and again until you finally triumph, and when you do there's a chance you'll agree when I say Dark Souls is the greatest videogame of all time.

Don't go hollow... Praise the Sun!

There was something magical about games back when I was young and didn't understand how they worked, didn't understand their limitations. Back when I thought there would be secret areas out of bounds, behind doors you couldn't open, back when I convinced myself that games just went on forever if you could just run fast enough to break through the walls in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, walk through walls in Pokemon Gold to find Celebi, or go underneath Ganon's castle to find the Triforce in Ocarina if Time. I feel like retro game design, and how so little was explained to the player in-game, fostered that imagination in me, and I have been searching for games that spark that same kind of intrigue, and that is the key thing that made Dark Souls so special to me.
No other game has given me that feeling of childlike wonder so strongly before, and it's a big part of what makes me dislike the later Souls games and Elden Ring in comparison. The feeling of being completely lost and slowly trying to figure out how things like covenants worked, why I would only get invaded sometimes, what a Gravelord is, what that weird white circle that looks like the lock-on icon is, what the little crab phantom I only saw once was, all completely blind, no guides or prior knowledge of the game, took me back to a state of mind which I never thought I could return to again. The slow pace, obtuse mechanics and carefully curated snippets of story make this game ironically feel magnitudes more grand than a game like Elden Ring to me.

For me, video games are a social experience/lubricant first, and then an artistic medium with strengths not found in books/movies/etc, and then a source of comfort. There are games that I don't think are fantastic or that I don't actively play, but are games that I enjoy existing because I can connect with other people. We can have a chat and I can see what they value in media and we can connect from there, it's a nice time. The other day, I stayed like 30 min after my shift at work ended to talk to a coworker about Style Savvy. Dark Souls is a 0/5 game to me for how alienating of an experience it's been since this game blew up.

The presentation of the game doesn't do any favors. I don't like the visual direction of the game. I think the soundtrack is largely forgettable. I think the sound design in general is passable without leaving any notable impression. The enemy designs feel very bland, or what a teenager that just read the Golden Age arc of Berserk and didn't get it thinks is cool. It'd doubly frustrating because, even when they were less technically proficient, Fromsoft's audio and visual output in games like Lost Kingdoms or Armored Core resonated with me for years after I played through them.

The story of "you're a stranger in a dying world and any information you want has to be clawed out of the dead hands of its previous residents" is another aspect where, having played their previous backlog, it felt like EA version of a Fromsoft game. All of this atmospheric worldbuilding is in service to a stock dark fantasy setting and it's really hard not to compare those aspects to games that used similar approaches, but were alien enough to make the act of piecing everything together a unique experience, like Evergrace. So what you're left with is a largely empty world filled with NPCs that's hint of something more interesting.

Nothing about the gameplay works for me. The level design is one of those things where I'll hear people complain about basically every part of the game, or I'll watch them play the game and they'll just have this awful scowl on their face if it isn't a replaying of the game, but I get instant pushback if I point out that most of the "difficulty" either comes down to trial and error sections that lose all tension once you know the specific way the game's going to mess with you, or they're disasters like Blight town. I know they can have levels with decent flow, Bloodborne's level design largely (not always) avoided sections of the game that come to a screeching halt due to annoying enemy placement or stupid environmental gimmicks. The most praise I can give the level design is the interconnected nature of the game, but that's not a feature that Dark Souls does better than most games with similar structure, nor did I find it preferable to the menu system of Demon Souls.

The combat's way too limited to keep my attention. Weapons, outside of specific late game additions, have the same static moveset regardless of player or gear progression, and that moveset's too limited to warrant much outside of either "smack and run off to wait for stamina if you're unsure about the fight" or "aggressively position yourself to trivialize the encounter because all the tells are 90+ frames long". Player vs Player degrading into smacking your opponent into chugging potions is a telling sign. Magic might be the one saving grace of the game, I think access to these strong and possibly overpowered (they're not in Dark Souls) abilities in a RPG like this can change the way a playthrough is experienced and is cool, but still feels like a major step back from how it was implemented in Demon Souls, like they were worried about the player having too much fun and brought it into the same bland line as everything else.

The RPG mechanics in this game are just as dull. I do on some level appreciate how your progress isn't strictly tied to better gear, and if you find something that looks better than the most "optimal" piece of equipment, you can just keep wearing it with very little detriment to the overall experience. It does mean that every piece of gear I came across felt like either dull numerical increases or outright vendor trash, and the sense of progression that usually comes along with RPGs like this was totally lost. The souls system is in a similar boat. You're just increasing numbers with soul investment, you're not going to be able to spend your way out of a fight's gimmick. Death has less "meaning" when the thousands of souls you're supposed to be worried about dropping when banking up for an upgrade could be lost isn't actually that big of a deal. It deflates a lot of the progression or tension.

The community around the game is also a strong mark against the game. I have good friends of mine who really enjoy this game, even people who don't usually play a ton of video games. I don't mind those people enjoying Dark Souls, I like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, we can both enjoy some bad media. The diehard "my main interaction with this medium is Dark Souls and I have 2000+ hours in the series collectively" fans are some of the most universally repulsive and mean terminally online freaks I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with, and I played League of Legends for 8 years. Skeevy people with a laundry list of accusations if you're willing to hang around those circles for longer than a couple of hours.

If this game didn't become one of the most popular RPGs of the 2010's, it probably just gets a 2/5 and I forget the game exists. This game has influence. This game is the "Oh, I don't play hard games other than Dark Souls" option for a generation of people. It's influence on FromSoft outside of "it payed the bills" was a malignant one and we only recently just got out from under the shadow this game cast with AC6. There are games that wouldn't learn from this game's mistakes, but quadruple down on them, like the myriad of largely awful Souls clones that came out in the following years. It defined difficulty in video games going forward, not as a skill set that has to be developed and iterated upon like in fighting or rhythm games, not as a means to push yourself and compare your progress to your peers like shmups, but as trial and error, and if you don't get it then that's a personal failing on your end. I've ran into so many people in real life that play video games, and when I ask them what they've been playing lately, they say it's Dark Souls and I have to politely dance around the fact that I think this game isn't worth the disk it was printed on, or the bandwith required to download it off of steam.

My favorite thing about Dark Souls is that it probably kept a lot of people at FromSoft employed for years to come. Outside of the barest fact that "it existed and people didn't lose their jobs", I can't think of anything else I enjoy about this game.

Not a mad world, THE mad world. A nonsensical cumulus of places, still clinging after so many iterations of preserving a feeling, an element, an ember.

Replaying it after almost 8 years has been amazing. I remembered even the enemy placement, but almost forgot the sensations of the places themselves. There's been a lot of complaints about Blight Town, but i love how horrific it looks, how sick the enemies look, the platforms and the wood don't make any physical sense, you are able to pass through out of pure luck! It was one of the instances where I stopped and felt a sinking feeling in my stomach, thinking how many ages you would need to backtrack in time for any of this to make sense, any logical sense based on our world.

Also, I don't understand people saying this is TOO SLOW of a game. "I've played Dark Souls 3 and now I can't get back to 1". Like bitch, just go for endurance and dexterity, you can dodge anything and move gracefully, you can even get strong armour and tank many bosses while still moving a lot; that's how I killed the DLC bosses and Gwyn on first try.

More thoughts in my Elden Ring review.

It must be an unimaginably herculean effort to design a world so interconnected and with so many different areas seamlessly woven around the main hub, given that they pulled it off here and then said "let's never do this again". And don't give me that Majula thing cause listen, I like the place, but DS2 feels like it only included a central town out of obligation after the first game.

I'll always have a soft spot for DS1 because its systems all fall into place together so comfortably that a lot of the changes introduced with the later games almost feel excessive. Sure, it's been 11 years so now most of these boss and weapon movesets feel primitive and predictable, but this slow and deliberate clunkiness of everything somehow makes the game... tighter? There are very few extraneous mechanics or items so each swing, cast, block or dodge during combat feels purposeful, and every bit of the game during exploration is hand-crafted to amplify that sense of discovery. There are so many bosses with unique setups to their fights that even when you're getting your ass kicked, it's in a different way from the last time so all of them stay endlessly memorable; and honestly, you could say the same for most of the areas and the obstacles they put in front of you. The whole thing is brimming with personality and at times it makes you feel like a little kid on an adventure or playing around with medieval action figures, in the most sincere way possible.

I don't have much to add that you didn't already hear in every video essay under the sun. The later half is kind of ass, yes, if only by comparison to the first and it does unfortunately drag the game down quite a bit. The lore is good and all that, I particularly like what it does with the vagueness of religion and its different interpretations in-universe, but I never cared too much for this side of the Souls series as I do about the moment-to-moment experience of playing them and absorbing their atmosphere, and DS1 still kicks ass in that regard. Comfort food game.

This is the first one of these I've actually fully completed a low-SL run on, although I've done most of one on both Sekiro and Elden Ring. I loved those runs for how much they forced me as a player to reckon with the beating heart of the bosses and learn all their secrets. The Dark Souls 1 SL1 is... not really the same way. Even without making use of the massive damage pyromancy brings to the table, I was shocked how easy I was able to damage bosses and survive hits even through the late game. I won't say it was disappointing, exactly, but it wasn't revelatory in the way that other similar runs I've done were.

That said, there are a few bosses that I feel like I understand a bit better this time around:

• Demon (Asylum, Stray, Firesage): I just love these guys. A classic for a reason. Never hard but never trivial, always a satisfying fight. They chose to bring these back constantly game after game and they were right to do so.

• Bell Gargoyle: The more I play this fight the more I like it. It teaches you so much so quickly about how to manage health bars, staggers, and spacing. It takes more strategy than luck, and it's so satisfying once you nail it.

• Ornstein & Smough: My hottest take about DS1 is that I don't like this fight that much. I think it's interesting as the first draft of a full-on duo fight, and it's undeniably effective as a wall that is ultimately surmountable, but I think they handled this core concept much better in other games. There are so many small ways in which this fight looks like the player should be able to push at it that just don't work for annoying and opaque reasons. I think it serves its place in this game well, but coming to it as one of my later FromSofts I'm not terribly impressed.

• Four Kings: This was the hardest base-game fight for me in SL1 by a pretty substantial margin. I actually came away liking it a fair amount... my main complaint is that the orbiting projectile attack shouldn't just persist forever if it doesn't hit you. What on earth is up with that?

• Sanctuary Guardian: This is the boss that improved most in my estimation in SL1, I think. It's such a glass cannon that I've always crumpled it more or less immediately in my real runs, but in SL1 my damage output was low enough and my body fragile enough that I had to really think about it. It's pretty cool! A solid and fast-paced beast fight that definitely presages Bloodborne.

• Manus: This was the hardest boss for me overall, with six hours of total attempts, but I loved every minute that wasn't spent on runbacks. I came so close to a hitless victory because I really had to meticulously understand and think through every attack he could do and how to answer it, and that's exactly what I'm looking for from a run like this.

• Kalameet: I did also have to learn Kalameet pretty deeply, but I came away with a much worse impression of it overall. I feel pretty similarly here as I do about O&S: it's a really cool historical artifact as their first draft of a proper dragon fight, but it's overshadowed by all those fights after it. The hitboxes are janky, there's no reward for hitting the head, and even once I got the hang of it it felt like a third of my failures were something weird happening rather than my own fault.