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.

In my review of Demon's Souls, a point I brought up is that the battles in Demon's Souls ended before they begun, due to the reliance on deliberately sloppy balance that meant players either had all the tricks prepared beforehand, or there was functionally no way to win the battle regardless. This required you to assess situations and often genuinely look through all the tools you had, and this mattered in situations where you couldn't pause, so you'd have to pre-emptively critically assess what to do and how to do it. The immersion and engagement bolstered by the design of Demon's Souls is unmatched, especially when considering its sheer aesthetic in mind on top of that. The question is apparent then: how does Dark Souls improve, or at least, follow-up on that?

For the most part, the only real strong changes in overall design are a focus on world design (note: not level design) and a change of structure to remove the non-linearity. This changes the games flow significantly, since Demon's Souls balance relied on backing out of challenges and stocking up from another area on tools to get you the win. Dark Souls difficulty amounts more to bashing your face against the wall until it breaks, and granted: this can be engaging depending on the content itself, but I don't quite think Dark Souls sticks the landing. Demon's Souls style of challenges relied on variety; each boss has a different mechanic that required you to rethink how you played each time you arrived at the next fog door. The World Tendency system makes it so that enemies are haphazardly placed to blockade your path to the boss, and for all you could argue this is frustratingly unfair, it is variety and makes boss-runs fresh repeatedly, which are already not too bad given the games length and the boss-runs lengths themselves. It's all about offering new perspectives on different challenges and letting you do the thinking. Dark Souls' bosses aren't really... like that. You'll find yourself dodging behind them and dying repeatedly, but there isn't much thought to do often besides just mastering the reflexes, which are so consistent across the game that it can get quite easy once you know the exact rhythm of combat. This is a problem because difficulty aside, Dark Souls really doesn't do much to expand upon Demon's Souls, and it's style of difficulty is reliant on mindless tedium often within fights and general exploration. I'd like to remind everyone of the Basilisk which you'd often have to travel way out of any area where it's present just to cure the effect it gives you. There's nothing to think about when a Basilisk inflicts a Curse upon you, it just adds more length onto the game.

Length becomes Dark Souls biggest problem on the whole and it's fairly plain to see. Not only is it significantly longer than Demon's Souls, but the game doesn't warrant it in regards to richness of content. Even the most hardcore die-hard fans of the game will argue with each other over whether the second half is rough, but I'd argue the symptoms of stretching the content thin rear their heads quite early on. The game is mostly padded out by somewhat bland areas and boss-runs, but if you take a vague sense of "challenge" aside I'd argue it's not particularly engaging; which is fatal for a game centered around unique challenges - because a good challenge, to me, at least, relies on high reflexes, intense thinking, or ideally; a little bit of both. The general point is that Demon's Souls is overall just a tighter game and it makes coming back to Dark Souls feel exceptionally dull when you realize how tedious and bland a lot of the content is. There's less mechanical tweaks and additions as much as there's more mechanical reductions and content that actively was taken away from Demon's Souls (see: again, World Tendency, a system with huge potential which only saw the light of day once.) This leaves you with the world design as the only strong suit of the game, and it's gorgeous. The landscapes convey a sense of scale and decay that's unrivaled by basically any other game. The sense of how it all interconnects is breath-taking... if you ignore the fact that all it really has going for it is interconnection. Not many areas rely on very interesting level design themselves individually, and if you take the scenery aside, it's often very basic areas that are either labyrinthine, cramped or extremely open, and none feel particularly polished or thought-out to me outside of just looking pretty. The game carries itself on the sensation of forward momentum above all else and the interconnection is a sign of this, even if the level design and bosses and enemies are all tremendous downgrades, and it's true: no game does a sense of forward momentum better. But, at what cost? I don't hate Dark Souls, it's decently fun, but it's a poor follow-up in my eyes, and it feels like a weaker version of a game FromSoft already made before it. In spite of the fact I find it enjoyable, I find it functionally impossible to recommend because I can't think of any quality it does that much better besides a strong sense of progress - yet even if that's unmatched, there's still other games that come close, and I don't think it's worth slogging through Dark Souls for that alone.

Dark Souls is a beautiful forest full of ugly trees, a master's painting held together with duct tape and hot glue.

Coming back to Dark Souls and beating it for the first time in at least a couple years, it was honestly shocking how well-paced the game was compared to how I remember it. I remember the first time I played this game I spent more than ten hours just trying to ring the first bell, wrestling with complex, unfamiliar controls and the nuances of the combat. The latter half of the game is generally considered worse, though I've also generally considered it to be easier. I wonder to what degree that might have been warped by the fact that Anor Londo is, ostensibly, the last time in the game that the player is really asked to learn something new, the learning curve being mistaken for the difficulty curve.

Visually it's mostly aged surprisingly well, character detail and texture quality is largely more than acceptable, especially for the time. Even if the specular effects on reflective surfaces don't look particularly "natural", they look good, and definitely more striking than the more recent remastered version. The main blemish is that with the DSfix mod, playing with much greater visual clarity than any official release has offered (due to both resolution and adjustable depth of field), the pop-in is really noticeable; there are times when entering a small room, you will see objects appear in the opposite corner as you pass through the door.

Combat is the main area where I think the first few of these games don't quite knock it out of the park, though fighting regular enemies here is typically more than manageable. Boss fights are probably the single greatest weakness of this game. Many of them are total pushovers, and when they do present a challenge they either highlight how unrefined this is compared to future installments, or are just plain bad.

But, Dark Souls more than makes up for it by having one of the most interesting worlds ever seen in a video game, both in its narrative elements, and perhaps more importantly in its construction. From creation myth to conspiracy, from the cathedrals to the sewers to the rot, fire, death, and mysteries further down. Everything has its place, and every place fits perfectly together. Though, the individual areas themselves are often small or barren, with many failing to offer the same kinds of gauntlets seen in both Demon's Souls and in future games. Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith are the obvious worst offenders, and are typically argued to be flat out unfinished, though Darkroot and Blighttown don't feel much better.

Dark Souls is more than the sum of its parts though, and even when those parts don't shine on their own, they at least give a strong thematic support to the rest of the package.

Y'know, replaying this game made me realize just how truly special this game and this series of games in general truly is. I ask myself how can I give 5 stars to a game that isn't even fully finished and has a mediocre roaster of bosses. Well honestly I think i know why now, bc it's god damn DARK SOULS. A game that changed an entire generation of gamers, sparked countless discussions about the nature of games, created its own fucking sub-genre and made numerous other games try in vain to replicate what made this game work. And also it's really fun to play and has the best world design in any game ever made lmfao. One of the most important games I've ever played and while my heart goes more to it's successors I have a solid amount of gratitude and respect for it and is worthy of its status and popularity across the gaming pantheon of masterpieces.

Não tem muito o que falar de Dark Souls que todo mundo já não esteja cansado de ouvir, então nem vou me arrastar.

É um jogo muito importante pra mim que praticamente moldou meu gosto desde quando joguei ele pela primeira vez. A sensação de descoberta que o jogo traz é simplesmente ímpar, uma primeira jogada as cegas, sem informação, sem guia, sem absolutamente nada pra te ajudar, somente você sozinho tentando descobrir o que diabos tu tem que fazer e onde diabos tem que ir é simplesmente magíco. Desvendar onde ficam as bonfires, a antecipação antes de cada batalha contra bosses, a satisfação que é quando você finalmente mata um boss que te destruiu, sem falar na ambientação e atmosferas absolutamente incríveis que esse jogo tem. Sei lá, é um pouco difícil por em palavras todas as sensações que esse jogo passa, eu só sei que ele é absolutamente perfeito e não criou literalmente um novo gênero atoa, sempre vai ser um dos meus queridinhos.

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

Dark Souls is one of those games I tried when I was younger and could never get far into. I remember claiming it with Xbox Gold and not knowing where to go after beating the Gargoyles and just giving up. Nearly eight years later, I've had all the Dark Souls games in my library, sitting there for ages. I decide on a whim to load up DS1 and managed to beat the game in two days while hanging out with friends. There's something about this game that no other souls game has managed to get and it's by a massive amount my favorite game in the franchise. Literally never played another game that feels so satisfying to hit things with a massive stick

The Road to Elden Ring #2: Dark Souls

What can I possibly say about Dark Souls that hasn’t already been said in someone else’s review or a 3-hour long YouTube essay? At this point we all understand its importance, its influence, and its massive impact on the industry as a whole. I’m just going to take this review as an opportunity to gush about what I consider to be my favorite game of all time.

Dark Souls masterfully improves on nearly every aspect of its predecessor, Demon’s Souls. Continuing Miyazaki’s philosophy of challenging but fair, the game teaches the player what to do, where to go, and what they’re currently capable of handling through excellent world design that subtly nudges them in the right direction by placing more difficult challenges in areas intended to be tackled later on. I can’t beat these strong skeletons in the graveyard? I can’t even damage the ghosts haunting under Firelink Shrine? I must have to go where these weak undead enemies are and carry on from here. Some may dislike the game is significantly less clear and straightforward than DeS, but I think that it provides the player with an unforgettable experience of naturally learning your goals and destinations and I think that’s really satisfying.

Demon’s Souls levels were small, but gave us a taste of the interconnected design Dark Souls would perfect. The world design and architecture in Dark Souls are simply stunning. The player can look in the distance and see half a dozen other areas of the game from most others, and each one is placed in a way that logically makes sense to where they’d be if Lordran was real. Taking a look at a 3D map of the entire game, one can see that areas never overlap each other, and are instead logically and realistically placed. Exploring through a difficult zone and arriving at a shortcut elevator at the end that magically pops you back at home base is insanely satisfying and the game is chock full of excellent zone connections like this. I think that this peaks here at Dark Souls 1, and is never really matched in the future of the franchise, perhaps with the exception of a couple incredibly satisfying Bloodborne shortcuts.

Another aspect carrying over from Demon’s Souls is the impeccable item placement and descriptions. Virtually every item feels hand-placed and like it’s there for a reason. Reading the description of consumables, armor, and weapons paints a vast picture of the story and background of Dark Souls’s characters and areas, and lets players with imagination really put the pieces together in an otherwise barren plot.

Dark Souls’s non-linear and open design, just like DeS, allows for an absolutely incredible replay value. After arriving at the game’s home base, the player is allowed to go nearly wherever they wish, collecting items and killing bosses in any order they please. This contributes to the ability to build your character into any class or archetype extremely early on.

One of the issues I had with Demon’s Souls that I neglected to mention was its healing system. The healing grasses are farmable, therefore, your ability to heal is theoretically endless, provided you’re willing to do the farming. Dark Souls fixes this problem completely with the Estus system. The Estus Flask heals more than most grasses in DeS, but the player is limited in their uses until they rest at a checkpoint. I think this adds another layer to item management, with the player having to asses if it’s worth it to heal or save their limited Estus until they need it more.

The other greatest improvement over Demon’s Souls is the integration of NPCs into the world in a much more natural and deeper way. Characters are found and rescued all over Lordran and return to Firelink Shrine, providing wares and services. However, all of these NPCs feel like they have their own motivations and goals, and will often leave and return to Firelink as they complete their own quests. The NPCs in Demon’s Souls were memorable but often felt like they were simply beholden to the player character, whereas here they feel like they have their own agency. The NPC questlines here are also more in-depth and the player can grow attached to some of these characters, like Solaire of Astora and Siegmeyer of Catarina as they encounter them throughout Lordran over the course of the entire game, even summoning them to help with boss fights. Patches the Hyena from Demon’s Souls even makes an appearance here, the first of many cameos as a series regular.

I never spoke about multiplayer in my Demon’s Souls review, but I think it’s worth a mention here, especially considering how phantoms are now worked into the single-player more cleanly. Players can summon other players (or NPC characters) to help them fight bosses in their world, but also run the risk of other players (or NPC characters) invading their world to kill them. Dark Souls 1 isn’t very active anymore, but the decision to implement NPC characters into the summoning/invading system was a great idea and lets the concept live on a decade later.

The score, this time by Golden Sun and Star Ocean veteran Motoi Sakuraba, while sounding extremely different from Demon’s Souls (significantly less MIDI-y), is incredibly grand, orchestral, and intense, while also feeling beautifully melancholy. For every large bombastic track like the theme of Ornstein & Smough and the Belltower Gargoyles, there is a moving, solemn track like Firelink Shrine or the theme of Gwyn, Lord of Cinder. I believe this is still the greatest Souls game soundtrack. So many of these songs are iconic and seared into my memory – instantly recognizable. Demon’s Souls did this as well, but I want to mention the game has almost no music, allowing each zone to immerse you with its sound design, until you step into a boss fight and the music kicks in and makes the fight even better. The notable exception is Firelink Shrine, having a beautiful home base theme that makes you feel safe.

Pretty much my only issue with Dark Souls is the Demon Ruins/Lost Izalith area. It’s fairly common knowledge that Dark Souls was pushed out before From was entirely finished with it, and this is no more clear than in these aforementioned areas. Bosses are scattered throughout the area at a rapid rate, including a reskin of an earlier one, as well as other early game bosses copy & pasted throughout the Demon Ruins as common enemies. The zones themselves really are just two giant open rooms full of lava with an obnoxious bright texture, leaving a lot to be desired, especially with most of the other zones in the games being really creative and visually interesting. Not to mention the final boss of the area, the Bed of Chaos. Infamous within and outside the Souls community, the less said about this boss, the better.

With all this being said, Dark Souls is not a perfect game. It is clearly unfinished in some areas, lacks a lot of polish seen in later entries (mostly Dark Souls III), and at its core is definitely still pretty basic, a slight upgrade from Demon’s Souls in terms of gameplay and combat. However, the clear love, heart, and soul poured into this thing seen in its world design, challenging but fair philosophy, replay value, build and class variety, non-linear open world, incredibly memorable and iconic boss fights, and beautiful score all come together to make something that few would deny is an incredibly special game and experience. There’s a very good reason Dark Souls is cited as one of the most important and influential games of the previous decade.

Dark Souls is my favorite game ever made.

Bouncing off Elden Ring as hard as I did encouraged me to actually organize my muddled thoughts about the Dark Souls games that preceded it. And since my thoughts about the series namesake have always been the haziest, what better place to start.

Dark Souls is at its best when it feels like nothing, not even the game itself, was meant to be found. Going through Undead Burg and stumbling into out-of-the-way doors, ladders, characters, and side routes with only limited resources to rely on is always a delight. Those early hours capture that hard to pin down experience of playing some inscrutable solo-developer passion project included on a shareware CD your grandma bought at Office Depot. This feeling is so compelling that even though I know where everything is and how it all fits together now, the experience up to Anor Londo is still just as hypnotic as the first time through.

But you do eventually reach Anor Londo, and there the trance finally shatters. And I don't think it's because the new areas tied to the lord souls aren't as good. To be clear, those areas do mostly suck (albeit in compelling ways), but I think the problem is less with that and more with how your goal has changed.

Your directions have gone from "Here's a prophecy about ringing some bells, go see what happens," to "Please go kill 4 bosses so you can kill another boss". This change from a goal about a place in the world to one about fighting specific people warps the experience enough for me that the whole thing snaps under the pressure. I fight the Bell Gargoyles because I'm trying to get to the bell, not because they are the bell.

Only some little things really worth mentioning outside of that. Dark Souls combat is best when it's slow, which this game definitely is. The story is not real and no amount of item description reading has ever convinced me otherwise; the game is all atmosphere with little actual substance which is fine, but I hope that someday we can collectively move on from acting like it has incredible narrative delivery.

Overall a pretty good time.

I just beat Gwyn and I'm sitting here in awe. The area design in the game up until the very end was just perfect. I wish I could walk around in these places. There are these taut moments where every roll counts, yet there's also an eerie peace that cuts through everything. I think my favorite moments were when I could just stare into the game world and well, vibe. And mannnn that fire link music just oooo perfect stuff. Shout out to the onion armor guy you rule, but I stole all your honor....and shout out to the sun guy sorry I let you die too...but hey we made it! next playthrough I'll save the sun guy I swear. Oh and my favorite area would have to be Anor Londo that place just rules oh and the Darkroot Forest Sith was so sick oh oh and honestly the undead burg just for the memories kind of was missing that place in the last quarter! :) But yeah I liked it a lot, gonna need to watch all the lore videos now :p

A flawed masterpiece. Dark Souls changed gaming - its deep and abiding respect for the player is oftentimes conflated with its infamous difficulty in a way that is extremely unfortunate. What is really revolutionary about Dark Souls is the degree of trust it bestows on the player. The game trusts you to intelligently experiment with its myriad character builds and weapons. The game trusts you to navigate its expertly designed world without the aid of a map. The game trusts you to learn the patterns of the enemies and use those lessons to overcome obstacles that seem insurmountable at first glance. In many ways, what makes Dark Souls so special is simple: it is an action game that assumes the player is an intelligent human being with a decent attention span rather than a dimwit constantly seeking instant gratification. It seems so obvious, but it’s hard to overstate how much of a sea change this was - the action genre before Dark Souls was dominated by simplistic games that spent their entire runtimes content to dangle a carrot on a stick in front of the player’s eyes.

The first half of Dark Souls is quite possibly the most satisfying gaming experience I’ve ever had. The common criticism, which is that game’s quality declines after the midway point, is accurate, which is why I refer to this as a flawed masterpiece. But make no mistake, this is a very great game - both for its joy as a play experience and for its impact on a wide variety of future games.

What is there to say about Dark Souls that hasn't been said already? It's fantastic. It may be the best game ever made. Who cares about how ugly the characters look sometimes? Who cares about the stupid-ass Blighttown poison? Who cares about the slightly-awkward button mapping or the fact that half of the starting gifts are functionally useless? Who cares about the hilarious death-cam glitch you can use to break the game in half? All of that is honestly irrelevant, because Dark Souls changed the face of gaming in 2011. It cannot and should not be understated just how much of a literal game-changer this shit was. Dark Souls became such an integral and inseparable part of gamer and pop culture lexicon that merely calling something "the Dark Souls of [its genre]" is something you just immediately understand the connotations behind (even though just calling Dark Souls 'hard' undersells the beauty of it). Hell, I bet twenty years from now, people will probably still be talking about how hard Dark Souls rocked the cocks of everyone it reached. Fromsoftware's darling pet project shook the industry in ways that its Triple-A contemporaries simply couldn't. It was difficult, sometimes ferociously so, but it was also quiet, brooding, subtle, and willing to let its moody atmosphere speak for itself.

The dilapidated, medieval stoneworks of its world just kind of silently exist, making their grandeur known to the player without screaming for your attention, likewise for the unhinged and cryptic beings that inhabit this mystifying and uncanny fantasy realm. Dialogue is sparse and nondescriptive. Lore is mostly communicated via loading screens. Fire, a destructive and all-consuming force of nature, is a welcome sight for sore eyes, a chance to cool your heels, take a deep breath, and level up a little before pushing forward. And push forward, you will. Something about Dark Souls' enrapturing scale, scope, and sense of difficulty keeps you moving, makes you want to master it. The mechanics, though demanding, are captivating because of the methodical challenge they present. Dark Souls is harrowing, depressing, and sad, but glimmers of hope, glinting in the dark like the bonfires you learn to love like your own bed, keep you going through the blood, mire, and ruin. You keep going. Dark Souls keeps you going in spite of its brutality, simply because there's nothing quite like feeling the electrifying thrill of a hard-earned victory after spilling gallons upon gallons of your own blood. I don't like difficult games, but I love Dark Souls, because I never think of it as a 'difficult' game. I merely think of it as a rewarding one, a game that's more than willing to let you know exactly how proud it is of you for trying your hardest and powering through even the roughest patches of your life.

And that right there is exactly why Dark Souls cured depression for so many people. Darkness and misery permeates throughout the entire game, and yet the game itself, through the peaceful ambience and quiet celebration of your small victories, always finds a way to smile at you and whisper 'well done', a reassuring voice that gently crackles in your ear like the soothing wicks of a bonfire. 5 / 5.

When I first played through this game I didn't think about anything else for about three months. It set up shop in my brain in a way that very little has ever done. I could tell you everything about the weapons, the lore, boss strategies and routes through the game. I was a total scholar, trying to hoover up every single bit of information on the game I could find, until I became a master, able to share knowledge with first time players. I made ACTUAL, REAL LIFE friends because of Dark Souls and the way that by limiting obvious information, it encourages discussion within the community. Actual Jolly fuckin' Co-operation!

From a critical standpoint, there's nothing more to be said about Dark Souls and, if we're being honest, it is starting to show its age a little and many aspects of it have been bettered by From Software's later games, so I figured I'd just share what the game means to me.

It's a special one, for sure. One I'll never forget.