Over 10 years later, it's practically impossible to have a new take on Dark Souls, or to ignore the colossal reputation it has accumulated over the years, so I will not attempt to do either. Finally, after repeatedly telling myself I'd never touch it, here I am: 58.1 hours of game-time and 100 levels later, staring at the credits. My hesitancy to give this fan favorite has always been rooted in that unescapable element: The fans.
To many it can seem silly to have a "fans ruined it" mentality to just about anything, and I largely agree and personally place a high value on having your own experiences. But with Dark Souls, this is not just an impossible task thanks to the game's notoriety, but because of the very nature of the game itself.
Someone had to be the first person to play Dark Souls. Being a successor to the PS3's Demon's Souls, this was never 100% uncharted territory, but the unrelentingly obfuscated and fiercely punishing game world had to be discovered for the first time by its players. Duh, this is how brand new games work. But even in those first few virgin playthroughs in 2011, it's hard to imagine whatever the player-base looked like back then not collaborating at every corner, both within the game itself, and outside of it. Whether its players communicating through the in-game messages to aid or deceive fellow players, or literally being summoned into their game world to help them with a boss, or ruin their day with the questionably balanced Invasion PvP aspect of its multiplayer. This emphasis on collaboration and subterfuge combined with unfunny memes or difficulty slider discourse ad nauseam makes jumping into Dark Souls a deceptively herculean task for someone who can't be bothered to go out of their way to, uh, be bothered by other people. You could deal with the army of people that make this game their personality when you have any sort of question, comment, or criticism, or you can just avoid it altogether and touch grass instead.
The only way to win Dark Souls, is to not play Dark Souls!
Maybe this reputation is unfair, maybe it's alluring and part of the Secret Sauce. I don't care, you decide. Whatever makes you happy please do not leave comments on my post blahblahblahblahblah
Casting my mind back to ~2011-2012: I was in middle school and all the dorks I knew were into gaming, of course. I always avoided the Dark Souls kids for reasons that may be more correlation than causation, but I had stayed close enough to be able to get a surface level understanding of what their takes were. Buzzwords and phrases like "This game's combat is so much more realistic than Skyrim!" "This game is super hard like how video games used to be!" and "It's basically like Skyrim but harder." embedded themselves into my skull as the pop cultural consensus on Dark Souls. Astonishingly, these takes are all pretty much wrong for a number of reasons. I guess Skyrim was pretty new so that became the point of comparison for every middle schooler who had played maybe 2 RPGs before in their lifetime. But these dumb kids as it turned out, were simply parroting the never-ending waterfall of takes that have not once ceased to permeate online spaces. The most enduring of these is the point on Dark Soul's difficulty level.
If nothing else, Dark Soul's is a game known for being incredibly difficult. You could use all sorts of other descriptors for the same general idea, too. Frustrating. Punishing. Bullshit.
I'll put a little bit of my own weight behind each of these columns; I've definitely felt that those descriptors were apt at some point during my playthrough. But ultimately, none of these options are my word of choice.
Dark Souls is involved.
Especially when comparing the game's combat to other titles like Skyrim, Assassin's Creed, or Arkham Asylum, It's easy to see this particular game as a shock to the system offering something different, something harder. The game asks quite a bit of you when it comes to learning mechanics and the attack patterns of enemies without much in the way of tutorials or easing you into it. Layer the actual Souls mechanic that often will pump the breaks on your progression onto it, and the Dark Souls identity quickly emerges when it forces you to explore this mysterious and dangerous world without the greatest sense of what it is you're actually meant to be doing. Dark Souls greatest asset is its core combat and exploration loop. Because of how involved combat is, you always have to be engaged with the enemy on some point, until you become overpowered to a point where it becomes comical and satisfying to transition from feeling like a rat stuck in a maze to the protagonist of a Dynasty Warriors title; But because of the many secrets and traps littered throughout the environment, you can never quite rest on your laurels even-so. Repeating this cycle in the early game is when all the joys and frustrations of the difficulty of Dark Souls peaks. I have my favorite zones and my least favorite zones, but I can sort of pinpoint exactly when the game somehow makes a fundamental change, without really changing all that much. Post-Anor Londo, which sounds like a nonsense Star Wars phrase, the game begins to quite rapidly un-click with me.
Dark Souls is hard, until it isn't.
By the nature of being an RPG, it's maybe inevitable that despite being a skill-centric action game, Number Go Up trumps all. Overlevelling for a particular zone absolutely can happen, making quick work of would-be gauntlets, but to my surprise, this was not the Number Go Up that really mattered. The real Number Go Up that changed everything was how many Souls it takes to level up. As is common in just about every video game ever, Dark Souls' level up system is structured so that you need more souls to level up every time you do it, in order to dictate the pace of progress so that you don't break the balance of the game, or at least so you don't break the balance so easily. On paper, this is sensible. But the effect that you have with this system coupled with the idea that you can permanently lose this progress in-between gaining levels or spending it on items funnels the player into an inherently risk-averse playstyle. This is super intentional and forces the player to think, or plan ahead, or hone their skills as much as they can before being reckless. This would not be so bad to me, if the rest of the game facilitated this. Thanks to just how tight-lipped the game is about explaining pretty much any mechanic outside of your basic movelist is, oftentimes there's no real way to even know what to plan ahead for, or what skills to hone. The in-game message system works very basically on a micro-moment level, but is practically useless for any long-term or important strategy.
The game goes so far into being extremely risk-averse that it constricts player expression in a game world that is largely trial-and-error and obfuscated by mechanics it never tells you about. It pretty much never not makes sense to retreat to go level up or upgrade a piece of gear when you're in front of a boss door and you have a high number of souls. It pretty much never not makes sense to just look up a guide or a wiki on an area with some otherwise restricting gimmick like being in pitch-black darkness, or having enemies that are untouchable by normal weapons when the game doesn't offer up that information in its own interesting way. It pretty much never not makes sense to spend some time grinding away at high-souls/low-effort enemies in the forest every time the game has a boss that cheats you out of souls.
The game at its half-way point transitions from testing your patience on the micro-scale through its involved combat systems, and becomes more about testing how much patience you have with the medium of video games as a whole, and the numerous and asinine sins that Dark Souls specifically commits, but somehow gets a pass for in online discussion. It's maddening, and my brain becomes mush as I rapidly bounce from Lord Soul to Lord Soul, now having the power of fast travel and hindsight. Each new zone in the second half feels less interesting, and frankly less finished than the last, all while upping the goofiness in its approach to difficulty and losing the spark of real peril. I start to get sloppy with my moveset, as I've been using the same Halberd from the first act of the game, seldom finding any reason to swap out weapons or adjust my playstyle outside of accommodating gimmicky zones. The magic of the involved combat and the return on investment of exploration have plummeted, and are nowhere to be seen. I defeat the final boss to a nice piano track, but am ultimately left unfulfilled.
As the credits roll, the impact of Dark Soul's greatest flaws begin to click with me.
The Soul of Dark Souls is strictly in other players. Sure, Dark Souls is a massive RPG experience that not only can be played beginning-to-end offline and in singleplayer, but actively makes online Co-Op a complete chore to undertake. And yet, this often tumultuous, janky, and frustrating online element is what makes the whole damn thing tick for me. I have some nitty gritty nitpicks, such as how Invasions seem an utterly pointless balancing countermeasure with way too much variability in character power, online connection, and overall game knowledge to feel good half the time. But I've enjoyed the multiplayer mechanics of this game far more than I ever could have imagined. As I cast my mind back to my opening hours with the game and the first half of my Dark Souls journey, the mortifying realization that the game's co-op mode is what makes it worth playing at all hits me, and I've just spent a depressing number of hours forgoing these modes because the game was so oppressively funneling me into being risk-averse that the idea of dying to yet another janky invader that shows up at the worst possible time in the worst possible area, especially through the second half of the game, sounds like hell not worth spending the Humanity on. Ironically, I was left feeling utterly and completely hollow.
I do not find the boss fights of Dark Souls to be very exciting nor rewarding to fight. That's the crux of this whole game, isn't it? The reward that you earn for overcoming this difficult challenge. Maybe that's an in-game item, a high number of souls, or just the self-satisfaction of "I did it!". But just about every boss that I completed while solo, I felt none of this. I didn't feel the satisfaction of learning a difficult fight and mastering it, nor did I even really feel the satisfaction of breaking the game and cheesing any of the fights. I did not record any video of my boss fights very intentionally, save for the final 30 seconds of the final boss fight. In the clip, I'm sometimes just straight tanking damage while I brainlessly spam my attacks and eventually get the W. No parrying, no frantic rolling, nothing. Each fight with a black knight on the way to this boss room was more immediately dangerous. Maybe I was over-levelled and over-geared for the fight, but honestly, I was relieved after winning, and I don't think I would've been any happier if the fight was any more difficult. I didn't want a harder fight, I just wanted the fight, and frankly the rest of the game to be over.
Thinking about it, pretty much none of my favorite boss fights were particularly elegant or cinematic in nature; They were just as bumbling and uninteresting. But all of my favorite bosses are ones that I finished with the help of a player summon. In fact, all of my favorite moments were whenever I was partied up with at least one friend and one stranger. I can't remember the names of these anonymous online heroes nearly as well as the in-game bosses, and yet I can recall the unique one-time interactions way more than the boss fights that took multiple tries to pass. It's true that the moments of Dark Souls that were the most frustrating to me were related to player Invasions, and as upsetting as those moments are, those feel the most satisfying to move past, even if I die to the invaders and don't get a second chance to fight them. I'm not even advocating for this specific mechanic all that much, but the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of the online component on the whole offer so many more emotionally charged moments that are so much more intensely potent than anything the game's world itself can offer, that it frustrates me to no end how much it seems like the game doesn't even want you to play in this way, given the limited-by-design implementation.
I wanted to write a super brief splash-page review for Dark Souls, but to its credit, Dark Souls is an experience that demands a little bit more. Is it a good game? I don't know. Having played a supposedly remastered version of it, I would have honestly no idea if you told me I was playing the 2011 release so that itself is maybe not great. For a lot of people, the boss fights will click and each difficult encounter will have that sense of reward. I can see what makes it tick for those people. I can see all the pieces just ready to be put into their place. They didn't for me.
All I know is that, the real Dark Souls was the friends we made along the way. And I'm so bummed it took me until the end credits to get that.
To many it can seem silly to have a "fans ruined it" mentality to just about anything, and I largely agree and personally place a high value on having your own experiences. But with Dark Souls, this is not just an impossible task thanks to the game's notoriety, but because of the very nature of the game itself.
Someone had to be the first person to play Dark Souls. Being a successor to the PS3's Demon's Souls, this was never 100% uncharted territory, but the unrelentingly obfuscated and fiercely punishing game world had to be discovered for the first time by its players. Duh, this is how brand new games work. But even in those first few virgin playthroughs in 2011, it's hard to imagine whatever the player-base looked like back then not collaborating at every corner, both within the game itself, and outside of it. Whether its players communicating through the in-game messages to aid or deceive fellow players, or literally being summoned into their game world to help them with a boss, or ruin their day with the questionably balanced Invasion PvP aspect of its multiplayer. This emphasis on collaboration and subterfuge combined with unfunny memes or difficulty slider discourse ad nauseam makes jumping into Dark Souls a deceptively herculean task for someone who can't be bothered to go out of their way to, uh, be bothered by other people. You could deal with the army of people that make this game their personality when you have any sort of question, comment, or criticism, or you can just avoid it altogether and touch grass instead.
The only way to win Dark Souls, is to not play Dark Souls!
Maybe this reputation is unfair, maybe it's alluring and part of the Secret Sauce. I don't care, you decide. Whatever makes you happy please do not leave comments on my post blahblahblahblahblah
Casting my mind back to ~2011-2012: I was in middle school and all the dorks I knew were into gaming, of course. I always avoided the Dark Souls kids for reasons that may be more correlation than causation, but I had stayed close enough to be able to get a surface level understanding of what their takes were. Buzzwords and phrases like "This game's combat is so much more realistic than Skyrim!" "This game is super hard like how video games used to be!" and "It's basically like Skyrim but harder." embedded themselves into my skull as the pop cultural consensus on Dark Souls. Astonishingly, these takes are all pretty much wrong for a number of reasons. I guess Skyrim was pretty new so that became the point of comparison for every middle schooler who had played maybe 2 RPGs before in their lifetime. But these dumb kids as it turned out, were simply parroting the never-ending waterfall of takes that have not once ceased to permeate online spaces. The most enduring of these is the point on Dark Soul's difficulty level.
If nothing else, Dark Soul's is a game known for being incredibly difficult. You could use all sorts of other descriptors for the same general idea, too. Frustrating. Punishing. Bullshit.
I'll put a little bit of my own weight behind each of these columns; I've definitely felt that those descriptors were apt at some point during my playthrough. But ultimately, none of these options are my word of choice.
Dark Souls is involved.
Especially when comparing the game's combat to other titles like Skyrim, Assassin's Creed, or Arkham Asylum, It's easy to see this particular game as a shock to the system offering something different, something harder. The game asks quite a bit of you when it comes to learning mechanics and the attack patterns of enemies without much in the way of tutorials or easing you into it. Layer the actual Souls mechanic that often will pump the breaks on your progression onto it, and the Dark Souls identity quickly emerges when it forces you to explore this mysterious and dangerous world without the greatest sense of what it is you're actually meant to be doing. Dark Souls greatest asset is its core combat and exploration loop. Because of how involved combat is, you always have to be engaged with the enemy on some point, until you become overpowered to a point where it becomes comical and satisfying to transition from feeling like a rat stuck in a maze to the protagonist of a Dynasty Warriors title; But because of the many secrets and traps littered throughout the environment, you can never quite rest on your laurels even-so. Repeating this cycle in the early game is when all the joys and frustrations of the difficulty of Dark Souls peaks. I have my favorite zones and my least favorite zones, but I can sort of pinpoint exactly when the game somehow makes a fundamental change, without really changing all that much. Post-Anor Londo, which sounds like a nonsense Star Wars phrase, the game begins to quite rapidly un-click with me.
Dark Souls is hard, until it isn't.
By the nature of being an RPG, it's maybe inevitable that despite being a skill-centric action game, Number Go Up trumps all. Overlevelling for a particular zone absolutely can happen, making quick work of would-be gauntlets, but to my surprise, this was not the Number Go Up that really mattered. The real Number Go Up that changed everything was how many Souls it takes to level up. As is common in just about every video game ever, Dark Souls' level up system is structured so that you need more souls to level up every time you do it, in order to dictate the pace of progress so that you don't break the balance of the game, or at least so you don't break the balance so easily. On paper, this is sensible. But the effect that you have with this system coupled with the idea that you can permanently lose this progress in-between gaining levels or spending it on items funnels the player into an inherently risk-averse playstyle. This is super intentional and forces the player to think, or plan ahead, or hone their skills as much as they can before being reckless. This would not be so bad to me, if the rest of the game facilitated this. Thanks to just how tight-lipped the game is about explaining pretty much any mechanic outside of your basic movelist is, oftentimes there's no real way to even know what to plan ahead for, or what skills to hone. The in-game message system works very basically on a micro-moment level, but is practically useless for any long-term or important strategy.
The game goes so far into being extremely risk-averse that it constricts player expression in a game world that is largely trial-and-error and obfuscated by mechanics it never tells you about. It pretty much never not makes sense to retreat to go level up or upgrade a piece of gear when you're in front of a boss door and you have a high number of souls. It pretty much never not makes sense to just look up a guide or a wiki on an area with some otherwise restricting gimmick like being in pitch-black darkness, or having enemies that are untouchable by normal weapons when the game doesn't offer up that information in its own interesting way. It pretty much never not makes sense to spend some time grinding away at high-souls/low-effort enemies in the forest every time the game has a boss that cheats you out of souls.
The game at its half-way point transitions from testing your patience on the micro-scale through its involved combat systems, and becomes more about testing how much patience you have with the medium of video games as a whole, and the numerous and asinine sins that Dark Souls specifically commits, but somehow gets a pass for in online discussion. It's maddening, and my brain becomes mush as I rapidly bounce from Lord Soul to Lord Soul, now having the power of fast travel and hindsight. Each new zone in the second half feels less interesting, and frankly less finished than the last, all while upping the goofiness in its approach to difficulty and losing the spark of real peril. I start to get sloppy with my moveset, as I've been using the same Halberd from the first act of the game, seldom finding any reason to swap out weapons or adjust my playstyle outside of accommodating gimmicky zones. The magic of the involved combat and the return on investment of exploration have plummeted, and are nowhere to be seen. I defeat the final boss to a nice piano track, but am ultimately left unfulfilled.
As the credits roll, the impact of Dark Soul's greatest flaws begin to click with me.
The Soul of Dark Souls is strictly in other players. Sure, Dark Souls is a massive RPG experience that not only can be played beginning-to-end offline and in singleplayer, but actively makes online Co-Op a complete chore to undertake. And yet, this often tumultuous, janky, and frustrating online element is what makes the whole damn thing tick for me. I have some nitty gritty nitpicks, such as how Invasions seem an utterly pointless balancing countermeasure with way too much variability in character power, online connection, and overall game knowledge to feel good half the time. But I've enjoyed the multiplayer mechanics of this game far more than I ever could have imagined. As I cast my mind back to my opening hours with the game and the first half of my Dark Souls journey, the mortifying realization that the game's co-op mode is what makes it worth playing at all hits me, and I've just spent a depressing number of hours forgoing these modes because the game was so oppressively funneling me into being risk-averse that the idea of dying to yet another janky invader that shows up at the worst possible time in the worst possible area, especially through the second half of the game, sounds like hell not worth spending the Humanity on. Ironically, I was left feeling utterly and completely hollow.
I do not find the boss fights of Dark Souls to be very exciting nor rewarding to fight. That's the crux of this whole game, isn't it? The reward that you earn for overcoming this difficult challenge. Maybe that's an in-game item, a high number of souls, or just the self-satisfaction of "I did it!". But just about every boss that I completed while solo, I felt none of this. I didn't feel the satisfaction of learning a difficult fight and mastering it, nor did I even really feel the satisfaction of breaking the game and cheesing any of the fights. I did not record any video of my boss fights very intentionally, save for the final 30 seconds of the final boss fight. In the clip, I'm sometimes just straight tanking damage while I brainlessly spam my attacks and eventually get the W. No parrying, no frantic rolling, nothing. Each fight with a black knight on the way to this boss room was more immediately dangerous. Maybe I was over-levelled and over-geared for the fight, but honestly, I was relieved after winning, and I don't think I would've been any happier if the fight was any more difficult. I didn't want a harder fight, I just wanted the fight, and frankly the rest of the game to be over.
Thinking about it, pretty much none of my favorite boss fights were particularly elegant or cinematic in nature; They were just as bumbling and uninteresting. But all of my favorite bosses are ones that I finished with the help of a player summon. In fact, all of my favorite moments were whenever I was partied up with at least one friend and one stranger. I can't remember the names of these anonymous online heroes nearly as well as the in-game bosses, and yet I can recall the unique one-time interactions way more than the boss fights that took multiple tries to pass. It's true that the moments of Dark Souls that were the most frustrating to me were related to player Invasions, and as upsetting as those moments are, those feel the most satisfying to move past, even if I die to the invaders and don't get a second chance to fight them. I'm not even advocating for this specific mechanic all that much, but the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of the online component on the whole offer so many more emotionally charged moments that are so much more intensely potent than anything the game's world itself can offer, that it frustrates me to no end how much it seems like the game doesn't even want you to play in this way, given the limited-by-design implementation.
I wanted to write a super brief splash-page review for Dark Souls, but to its credit, Dark Souls is an experience that demands a little bit more. Is it a good game? I don't know. Having played a supposedly remastered version of it, I would have honestly no idea if you told me I was playing the 2011 release so that itself is maybe not great. For a lot of people, the boss fights will click and each difficult encounter will have that sense of reward. I can see what makes it tick for those people. I can see all the pieces just ready to be put into their place. They didn't for me.
All I know is that, the real Dark Souls was the friends we made along the way. And I'm so bummed it took me until the end credits to get that.
LordDarias
1 year ago