What is there to be said about this absolute flawed gem, the most influential game of the past decade?

I played this game two, maybe three years away from DS2's release. It was still fairly unknown among gamer circles in my country. Browsing through the internet I would often see 'discussions' about it. And, of course, those two cursed words - 'git gud'. Being just a kid with self-esteem problems, I was no stranger to the need to impress anonymous people on the internet. So I bought it.

One day it arrived by mail and I started playing. I think my first impression was of the open-ended nature of the narration in the opening cinematic. I do recognize it's immense beauty today - but then it just striked me as bizarre, somewhat ankward. Naturally, this feeling of alienation would only deepen with the nature of the game.

'Why am I a wrinkled old poop? I thought I was a cute dude.'
'Why this guy just threw a corpse from the ceiling?'
'There was a key? Why didn't he just threw the key?!'

And so on.

Oh, the animations were clunky. The lightning and textures we're just fucking awful. 'Why is this game so popular?', I thought. Eventually, after a lot of spaghetti, I got to the Taurus Demon. Being a little baby raised by Skyrim and Devil Mary Cry on potato-easy mode, I got my ass handed back to me multiple times. It got so unbearable that one day I just shelved the game for, no joke, maybe 6 months. I would try again, fail, shelve it back again. And one day I did it, and it just clicked. It just fucking clicked. I started to understand the game's punishing yet fair language. I started to truly obsess over the game. It became all I wanted to consume for months and months. To this day, almost ten years later, I buy and obsess over every From Software game as soon as it releases.

Of course, it's not just the mechanical loop of dying, learning, dying, learning, [...] and eventually succeding. It's about the aesthetic too. From the encounters to the colors, from the item descriptions to the architecture, Dark Souls consistently oozes the same feeling: that this is a world that should have died a long time ago, it's nature tampered by the hubris of a god-man.

Of course, one needs to mention how these two factors, gameplay and aesthetic, converge beautifully: nothing in this game that makes it a game goes unexplained. Why do you keep spawing in a checkpoint after getting killed? There's an explanation for that, integral to the plot in fact. Why do you consume health potions and how are they possible? Same thing. The game simutaneously explains that which for long in games has never been explained and does not explain that which is not necessary, leaving you to fill those gaps.

And the level design! The first time I kicked down that ladder and saw that I was back into the Undead Burg, I came with my brain. It's a shame that in all othe games From Software went hard with the teleportation thing, which didn't made the tightness of Dark Souls 1's level design a necessity any longer, because I do miss it.

By far the dubious part of this game is the broken multiplayer. I had a lot of fun with it, but it's just bad in terms of balancing. But maybe balancing was never the point? I don't know, all I do know whas that this game was way too lenient on back-stabbing and INT/DEX builds.

In the end, Dark Souls is a beautiful meditation on the ambivalence of persistence. It is in one hand what keeps this crumbling world in agony. But it is also the hope that everything can be made anew and fresh again. Or is it all for nothing? Such as in life, you will never know.

Dark Souls is The People's sacred cow, and I can't stand it. Dark Souls is the reincarnation of the NES game, and like its spiritual predecessors, it is riddled with problems.

The area in which Dark Souls succeeds is the same one first prodded by The Legend Of Zelda and its contemporaries in 1986: Dropping the player into a mysterious, hostile world, and daring them to conquer it. Much like that game and much unlike later Zelda titles, combat IS the puzzle. Dark Souls found an innovative way to re-implement the old status quo of enemies respawning as soon as a player leaves the screen, and to my overwhelming chagrin, delights in its use.

I have thought long and hard about exactly why I do not love the Souls games that I have played thus far, by which I mean Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2. The truth is that with one simple change, my enjoyment of these games would spike radically: Put a bonfire in front of every boss. I like a challenge from my games, but I am only willing to give my time and effort when I feel like it is being respected, and the long, grueling runs back to bosses in the Souls games are absolutely the biggest obstacles to my enjoyment.

While I'm on the topic of my most subjective grievances, The slow, deliberate, methodical combat present in Dark Souls 1 threatens to put me to sleep. I don't like it Monster Hunter, and I don't like it here. I have long gravitated toward the faster, twitchier action of something like a Devil May Cry or Kingdom Hearts on Critical.

If I need to defend my Souls ambivalence in more objective terms... please consider for a moment how much of the content in Dark Souls feels unpolished or half-finished. Is The Tomb of Giants -actually- a good, well designed area? How about Lost Izalith? Blight Town, perhaps?

Simply put, even if I put aside the things that make Dark Souls "not really for me", I cannot in good conscience laud a game with this many "the bad parts" as the greatest game of all time, or even put it anywhere close. There IS a lot to like here, obviously, but Dark Souls 1 especially is too mixed of a bag.

Writing: 3/5
Gameplay: 5/5
Art Design & Visuals: 5/5
Voices & Sounds: 5/5
Atmosphere & Immersion: 5/5

I want to give it 5 stars, one of my all time favorite games, but I can't ignore some of the poor design choices near the back half of the game. But what an unforgettable experience.

My first Souls game, and the one that has always stuck with me. The continuous world that constantly expands & unfolds in front of you is the most impressive thing about this game. You actually feel like you are exploring a world, a nomad out by yourself. With every release in the series I always hope for them to go back to that continuous world, but I know they won't.