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.

Por muito tempo me mantive longe de Souls Like por dificuldade de jogar, o jogo era muito difícil e eu desistia fácil. Algum tempo depois resolvi dar uma chance novamente e me forçar a aprender o game e isso me apresentou o meu gênero de jogos favorito.

O que me fez apaixonar pelo game foi é claro o combate, rápido (mesmo o DS1 tendo hoje em dia um combate mais travado), sempre tentativa e erro, aprendendo os padrões de ataques dos inimigos e chefes e quando enfim derrotava aquele chefe extremamente apelão vinha o sentimento de recompensa, isso junto a exploração do game trazia simplesmente um jogo incrível, aquele jogo em que você simplesmente esquece da vida e se afunda naquele mundo tão mágico que tez querer explorar novos lugares, cada cantinho atrás de itens e inimigos.

Simplesmente uma obra prima!

I love this game, and was my first foray into the souls series, so I may be a little biased. It's areas are compelling, but bosses struggle and miss the mark at times [there are 3 copy paste bosses, and bed of chaos exists]. Game would honestly be better without lost izalith, but the atmosphere and storytelling, with challenging gameplay and [mostly] interesting bosses make it worth it.
PC Release is notoriously bad, even though as I'm writing this, the remaster has already been released and PTDE has been de-listed off of steam, if you ever play it with PTDE, just make sure to install DSFix.

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.

The game that kickstarted it all. FROMSOFT's Dark Souls 1 is a janky classic and was my first experience with FROMSOFT's "soulsborne" genre. My first attempted playthrough ended in undead burg, and it wasn't until 2 years later that I finally picked it up again and fell deeply in love. Once familiarized and trying to master the mechanics, I was deeply grabbed by the setting and overarching narrative, aesthetics, and symbolism of the game in a way that few other games can. To date, FROMSOFT's unique take on telling a story is unmatched and has inspired countless games in such a style, with few succeeding. This was my favorite game of the series at one point, later being succeeded by Sekiro and Elden Ring, but it's nonetheless my subjective brutal masterpiece.