So, in talking about Dark Souls I have to discuss how much this game means to me as a person. I started Dark Souls years ago, got stuck and frustrated and put it to the side, always recognizing its greatness while never understanding it myself truly. What is so interesting about this is that I came back to it on a whim, something to try out for the hell of it, and I was engrossed.
This game consumed me for a solid three weeks, and in retrospect I feel as if I needed it. In some ways I found that playing a game this good made me want to clean up my act, get my shit together, and pull my life back up the bad spiral of poor mental health and self hatred I had been down. In the end, this game is about the love of being alive, holding on to the importance of life and living for the sake of it. You come from nothing and eventually you kill God. I can't explain the feeling of euphoria I felt finishing this game. I had my duty and I had fulfilled it, and the fun only started there. In learning the unique, intentionally vague lore, an entirely new appreciation was brought for the people who are just trying to survive in this world and their stories.
And so I say, if this is a game that can exist, a game with so much passion (and not always polish), then I think I can too. I can hold on to my life and try to scrape out a semblance of meaning for it. It is obtuse, it is difficult, it is insanely rewarding.

What more can be said about Dark Souls at this point? It paved the way for a whole breed of styles that would seek to capture its charm, and a whole bunch of games that realized that it is infact fine to be difficult.

I've always thought that the level design was pretty overrated myself. It is kind of a cool look at what metroidvania design would have been like if it survived the transition to 3D, but I find the levels themselves to be pretty.. cobbled together and empty of things to find. Like, it's cool that you can go throuhg the valley of drakes to get to different spots, but the valley of drakes sucks. And this isn't even mentioning how obviously half finished the 2nd half of the game is.

It is still the parent of not just a game style, but also a meme. And for good reason, too. Praise the sun and all that.

Pretty cool world at first, but the excessive amount of backtracking you have to do, even with warp unlocked, becomes more tedious than anything. The bosses are largely quite bad, and even the few that aren't (O&S /Artorias/Kalameet ) were still too easy to feel engaging. Not much to say about the 2nd half that hasn't been said already, and the lack of music also makes the game feel empty (and not in a good way). At the very least, though, I'd recommend trying DS1 since it's become the template for a genre (moreso than DeS) and still offers an incredibly engaging and rewarding experience in the first half.

It doesn't even feel worth writing a review for Dark Souls 1. This is probably the most discussed game in the past 10 years, and in another 10 years when you see interviews with breakout game directors and devs a lot of them will be listing this game as one of their biggest influences, which is a testament to the impact of this game despite its flaws.

I can give you the same opinions that people have been discussing for like 10 years; the combat is a great straight forward to understand but a combination of build variations and punishing encounters elevates it, there's some fantastic level design in the early half of the game but its sketchy development lead to good chunks of the later half of he game being either uninspired or just bad. but all thats been discussed, you probably knew all that. this is my third playthrough of this game man.

Dark souls 1 changed people's views on difficulties, story telling, open-ish world level design, game replayability and even just action game combat, for better and worst. It's been discussed for 10 years, and will continue to be discussed and few games, whenever you like it or not, will ever have an impact on the gaming ecosystem like DS1. You owe yourself to throw yourself into it if you somehow haven't given it a try by now.

Will never forget my first playthrough of this one. It not only was the first FromSoft game I played, but I was playing on my old laptop that could barely run the game at around 15-20fps (that means everything else ran just as bad as Blighttown the whole time) and my only controller was a shitty joystick that the game had problem reconizing and the right stick just didn't work at all, meaning that I could not move the camera for the whole game (I just kept clicking the stick to center view). I like to think my first trip to Tomb of the Giants was... unique.

Dark Souls isn’t hard or unfair, you just need a whole playthrough before you have a decent character. Can’t believe all the times Seath wrecked me, how did I even manage to suck so much?

But that is not what I wanted to discuss here, there are already far too many dank memes about Dark Souls to just imitate other funny reviews joking about the learning curve of the game. What I wanted to focus on was what hooked me initially to the game and what I came to appreciate the most about the series as a whole (yeah, including Demon’s and Bloodborne): the storytelling.

It all begins with the simple fact that I am a huge fantasy fan when it comes to narrative, and Dark Souls does something that I have rarely seen in fantasy in my recent memory, especially eastern made: it does something original. We are all too accustomed to Tolkien and D&D’s pastiches to realize there is something more to fantasy than just adding alien species which still act and think like humans, sucking every sense of wonder from the experience of exploring a fantasy world. Orc, dwarves and elves are as familiar to us as dogs, cats and other house pets: sure, they are alien to us humans but we grew used to them being there and they don’t give us any sense of discovery or surprise.

Dark Souls subverts this by building a world devoid of species inspired by such mundane mythologies, or villains striving for world end or riches, and instead focuses on a far more attractive premise: the world was once empty, void, there was no life or death to speak of and the only living beings were immortal Dragons whose main occupation was to just chill around for all of the eternity. Until, that is, evolution happened, in the form of a flame which symbolizes disparity, and that disparity holds an immense power. Then came the Lords, the rising gods of this empty world, using the flame to challenge the Dragons and claim their role as sovereign of all creation. After a long, brutal war, the Gods came out victorious and built their reigns while still holding the power of the fire, nurturing it so that it shall never fade. That’s the intro of the game, and basically the only time the game will spoon-feed you with important informations. Not that anything more is needed because any major point is eventually subtlety conveyed to the player, but by talking to characters you will meet during the game and reading item descriptions (or by just simply exploring and being observant) you’ll receive much, much more: in depth details about where exactly are you, who the being surrounding you are, what are their goals and motives and what is your role in all these plays among Gods. It is a world as subtle and as mysterious as Nihei’s Blame was. The game director Miyazaki mastered the art and meaning of show-don’t-tell in this series, which in itself is amazing, but what made it so much more than it initially appears is the actual content.

What is the player’s role in all of this? The protagonist is just an unnamed, weak human, now undead, who just kind of arrives at the land of the Lords and wander around killing (or rather, being killed by) everything in sight, no much story to be told about him. Yet, while you’re slowly descending in a hell of decay and undead, crawling through ruins and slaying god-like beings, it is unavoidable to start wondering “Why is everything falling to pieces, and why a single strip of bacon such as myself is able to single-handedly stab a God until it dies?”. That is, my friend, because they are Gods no more. Playing through the game and meeting the right characters will let you realize that you are no more in the ancient era of the Gods, but millennia after, their powers are now fading and what was once luminated by the light of the fire will inevitably succumb to darkness once the fire ceases to shine. You are exploring through a lie, a deception the Gods created to protect themselves from the unavoidable. They have gone mad, once terrific beings now by comparison powerless, now scared to lose everything they created, to die and be no more as the Dragons they themselves slaughtered. Which bring us to the player role in all of this, what exactly do you have to accomplish? Basically, some sort of doom is imminent upon the world and all humans, something so jarring even Gods are unable to deal with it. Is there a way for you to salvage the situation and bring a happy ending?

No, there is not.

Because you are not the hero, you are not the knight rolling in town with a shining armour and master sword. Rather, you are the judge. Dark Souls is a trial, a trial where you are presented all the evidence of a case of mass murder, crime against humanity and hoax, with aggravations such as intentional deception, hubris, arrogance, cruelty, the list goes on. You are not slaying the Lords to correct the inequality and injustices in the world, in fact many of them you could just avoid to fight at all. You are being shown their crimes and have to bestow judgment upon them. By the ending, when you face the final boss, this is all the clearer as you think back on your journey and realize exactly what you are facing, and that’s where you have to decide based on what you’ve seen, what you’ve been fighting. Did you murder senselessly what was already dead? Did you bring castigation upon being undeserving any mercy? Or maybe you put them out of their misery? Or, as I did in many playthroughs, you left them where they are, silently condemning them but understanding why they acted that way and, in some way, respecting the gentle illusion they were trying to protect. The Gods in Dark Souls are flawed Gods, they built a world which wasn’t perfect or eternal, they believed they had the power it took to rise above ground and strike for the sun, just to burn and fall down on earth again. These are Paradise Lost’s Satan-like Gods, who are not faulty for what they attempted to do, for their pride and their ambitions, after all they are just as human as the beings they tried to corrupt.

Dark Souls is filled with the moral ambiguity this realization holds. It shows you the aftermath of a glory that once was and let you decide its worth.
I love this moral ambiguity.
Thus I love Dark Souls.