i owe you an apology miyazaki, i wasnt really familiar with your game

i have learned to love dark souls. the atmosphere is great, the way the world is connected is amazing, and i love the combat system. almost everything is amazing, except lost izalith which is the worst shit ever.

o&s and gwyn are awesome. pretty much every boss is. excellent game.

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.

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 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 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.

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

Não quero nada.
Já disse que não quero nada.
Não me venham com conclusões!
A única conclusão é morrer.
Não me tragam estéticas!
Não me falem em moral!
Tirem-me daqui a metafísica!
Não me apregoem sistemas completos, não me enfileirem conquistas
Das ciências (das ciências, Deus meu, das ciências!) —
Das ciências, das artes, da civilização moderna!
Que mal fiz eu aos deuses todos?
Se têm a verdade, guardem-na!

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.

I just played this for 12 hours straight thats how determined I was to finish this game personally rank it my third favourite fromsoft game for the time being still gotta play dark souls 2 and 3 and bloodborne if it ever arrives on pc the worldbuilding and lore is definitely a strong point here combat was not as refining as we would see in later titles felt slow and not that fun. I enjoyed most boss fights, except for Bed of Chaos, which was the worst boss fight I've ever fought on a fromsoft game. Unfortunately, I got the bad ending because I was stubborn and refused to look at guides for help except for one or two things, so my next playthrough will be me going for all achievements/trophies.

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.

Dark Souls is, in a word, magnificent. I'd lived my entire life yearning for something like it, but due to the reputation it's garnered I thought that it wouldn't be something I'd enjoy. Not necessarily due to the overall difficulty of the game, but I had perceived that there was a complicated barrier to entry in order to play and enjoy the game. This game is shockingly simple to play on the most basic level, but the game's difficulty invites the player, or perhaps forces the player, to gain an intricate knowledge of the game's world and systems.

I'd never played a game that demanded so much from me before I played Dark Souls. A game which places a great barrier before you, and says, in a stern tone, you don't get to see any more of me until you can figure this out. I was instantly enraptured with the setting of Lordran, a setting at times both majestic and miserable. I powered through this game over the course of a week, living and eating and breathing Dark Souls.

I love absolutely every second of this game, including Lost Izalith and the Tomb of the Giants, because this game encapsulates the idea of an adventure so well. It doesn't feel like a world in which my triumph is an expected and obvious outcome. It's unfair, uncompromising. It's almost unbelievable how thrilling it feels to be well and truly challenged by a game.

I love the quirkiness of the game's mechanics, I love how there's a Resistance stat that seemingly does absolutely nothing. I've never once invested in the stat, but its appearance on the level up screen makes me happy in some unexplainable way. Dark Souls is a truly secretive game, in an era where every minute detail of a game is thoroughly and completely explained. Modern games have "secrets", but they feel intended to be found on some level. Dark Souls' secrets feel enthralling to come across, with entire areas and dedicated development time behind places where the average player may never come across. I never found Ash Lake on my first playthrough, and when I heard it existed I immediately started a new run, and beelined my way over.

Dark Souls is difficult and frustrating at times, but it's also a deeply joyful game. Beating a hard boss, finding a Bonfire when you have no more flasks, or even just finding a cool weapon feel one hundred times more rewarding than contemporary titles because the stakes of the world surrounding your gameplay make them feel like genuine victories on a personal level. I nearly cried tears of joy the first time I beat Ornstein and Smough. No other game has made me FEEL in the ways that Dark Souls has.