Dark Souls III is all killer, all filler, and I'm dead and stuffed.

Regardless of one's opinion on this or any of the other more recent From Software games, I think it somewhat uncontroversial to say that the somewhat polarized reception of its sequels and successors only serve to highlight the strength of the original Dark Souls. Despite whatever imperfections it may have had, Dark Souls was a game that did so many things right that a lot of people found wildly different reasons to love it. Dark Souls is in so many facets so close to the absolute essential core of what makes video games great that even if another game could get even closer in even one aspect, it would always come at the cost of something else.

Dark Souls III's core gameplay is most similar to the original Dark Souls, but with its animations and character control fine-tuned to perfection; this is the first From Software game where it feels good to simply move around. The game has all of the quality of life improvements that began as band-aid fixes in Dark Souls II. Every level in the game is as detailed, sprawling, and multi-layered as one of Bloodborne's best, yet their arrangement within the world as a whole is as transparent as in the first game. Speaking on gameplay specifically, calling Dark Souls III a "greatest hits" of the series is still selling it short. It's not just borrowing the most memorable situations and set-pieces from previous games, it's picking and choosing elements of the games' systems and structures themselves, and still building upon them yet.

One of my favorite moments in Dark Souls was on my second playthrough, reaching the tower before the Taurus Demon boss fight, and realizing just how much of the world I could see. Picking out landmarks and realizing how (despite being rendered in much lower detail than it would be up close) decidedly congruous the world was, and more importantly how intentional it all felt. The popular phrase when showing a game's scale is to point at something in the distance and say "you can go there", but "there" is often not a place of any import, and the "go"-ing process is rarely anything all that special. One of Dark Souls III's earliest moments is the game giving the player a similar view of virtually every above-ground area of the game, with only a couple of places barely obscured (though one should not assume that the game has nothing to hide, as it in fact has some of the most obtuse secrets in the series). At virtually any point in the game the player can look around, see where they've been, where their goal lies, and think of all the challenges they overcame to get to where they are. While Dark Souls may have had a more interconnected world and the potential for more diverse routes, I genuinely believe that Dark Souls III surpasses it in both level design and in its believability as a space.

While the player's quest is ultimately to defeat all of the Lords of Cinder and link the first flame once more, the bulk of the journey through the aforementioned spaces is spent hunting down one in particular: Aldrich. A web of interconnected side-quests eventually narrows into this encounter, chasing him from the Cathedral of the Deep to Irithyll of the Boreal Valley. A trek that lasts the better part of the entire game ends in Anor Londo, perhaps the most hallowed location from the original game, its cathedral now stripped from its original context, a sort of museum artifact for some invading heretic. The player finds within an avatar of pure consumption, puppeting around one of surprisingly few named returning fan-favorite characters. The message could not be more clear, the anti-climax could perhaps only barely be more intentional, this is an absolutely naked indictment. Dark Souls has to end, because if it continues it will turn to sludge and cannibalize everything you love about it.

The heart of Dark Souls III's narrative is, like Dark Souls II before it, ultimately about the futility of this whole sequel project. Dark Souls II did do the roar, but it also smashed the cake, all the while yelling "Ya like that!? Huh?!"

As Dark Souls III plays its hand it feels more like the game has sat you down to sternly say "listen, we know you like this, and we'll give it to you one more time, but this is it." I personally think that video games' status as commercial entertainment products has been pretty much a disaster for their ability to tell stories, and a side effect of this is that some of the most potent stories they can tell are often bittersweet metanarrative musings on this predicament. Dark Souls III may not be the absolute strongest example of this, but you absolutely could do so, so much worse, and its real triumph is in delivering a compelling version of this story in balance with just being a plain fantastic gameplay experience.

The DLC only makes it more clear, with its principle locations being another world, plagued with rot and its denizens begging for death, and the entire Dark Souls universe compacted like trash. Dark Souls III's world, the "converging lands", was already a kind of new Pangaea, the different continents of the Lords of Cinder merging together into a tangled mess of ravines and canyons. By the end of the Ringed City DLC, everything has compressed together to the point where all that's left is an endless desert of ash. The final goal of these DLC areas, the finale of the entire series, is to help a certain NPC paint a new world. What is this world? It doesn't matter. Giving some clear-cut explanation, like "It's Bloodborne! Or Demon's Souls!" would completely undermine the entire conclusion.

The only thing that matters is that it's new, that it's something else.

One NPC in the Ashes of Ariandel DLC says, specifically, that the player must "make the tales true, and burn this world away."

This is the real curse of a zombie franchise, the lack of any real finality will always give every element of its story a kind of impermanence. Without an absolute true ending, anything in the narrative is up for debate, can be rewritten and ret-conned to suit a new installment. Dark Souls II was itself an admission that its own existence meant that there could be no true tale of the original game, and while it initially tries not to let the cat out of the bag, Dark Souls III's grand anti-climax also invalidates a particular player decision in the original game by canonizing only one particular option.

Dark Souls had to end, absolutely end, so that it could be anything at all.

It could have been a fine, if straightforward, retro-inspired throwback, or perhaps even a memorable adventure game. Instead it's weirdly action oriented and surprisingly modern, trendy in ways that do it no favors. The fictional language barrier and in-game instruction booklet are the most interesting ideas that game has, but it doesn't lean far enough into these aspects, they're too secondary to the actual play experience. And unfortunately the act of playing the game is itself totally unsatisfying, completely lacking the tight, tactile punch of the games it's so nakedly inspired by. Its audiovisual aesthetic is inoffensive in a way that makes it feel less like an actual video game and more like a graphic for a youtube channel's title card or in-store advertising. I wish it had either been more focused in its original elements, or more brazen in being an obvious rip-off, but sitting somewhere in between the two it just rings hollow.

And now, today's episode of "Wait, Microsoft Owns THAT!?"

I've always really liked Hydro Thunder's aesthetic. It's arcade feel and exaggerated depiction of boat racing gives me almost an unintentional sci-fi vibe, imagining what kind of technology could allow boats to do these things and still work. Such cartoonish approximations of speed boats that they make Star Wars' podracing seem quaint and realistic. While the more modern rendering techniques of this sequel give its environments an obviously 7th Gen appearance, I think it still carries enough of the old arcade spirit in its colorful boats and outrageous set-pieces.

Initially the game seems dead simple. You steer, accelerate, and boost, but the real complexity comes from the fact that you can jump only while boosting. Jumping typically allows you to reach power-ups and paths that you couldn't reach otherwise, and there are tons of paths to find. The depth comes from a combination of learning the tracks, managing your meter, knowing the particularities of how your boat handles, and the precise execution of timed jumps. At a certain point it feels less like a racing game and more like a platformer with particularly unique controls.

Hurricane is a surprisingly beefy single player experience; there are only 8 tracks, but their use is pushed to the limit (perhaps beyond). Races and time trials are pretty standard, and while any class of boat can be used the pro and expert classes will offer more points. Points will unlock new boats and tracks, with the difficulty slowing ramping up. While the player is able to grind, simply playing each event as they unlock is usually enough to open the next.

The bulk of the game's single player events are "Ring Master" levels, which could be uncharitably compared to Superman 64's flying segments. Their real utility comes from teaching the player where the alternate routes, shortcuts, hidden power-ups and secrets are. Additionally, the reason there are so many of them is that each of them requires that you use a particular class of boat, meaning that they can also help you adjust to the particular eccentricities of each vessel.

The championship events are by far the weakest, being comprised of several previously completed challenges stitched together and requiring a high cumulative score to pass. At times the degree of high performance required to beat later stages is frustrating, with small mistakes typically prompting a retry, though at least the championship events will restart you from the beginning of the same track rather than the start of the entire cup.

It's genuinely odd to think this is a Microsoft game. Obviously Hydro Thunder was a multiplatform arcade conversion but I can't help but think of it as tied to the Dreamcast's launch lineup. It's a shame they've sat on it for so long, but at the very least, if this is the end of Hydro Thunder it went out with some dignity.

My two main takeaways:

1: The bosses in this game are the best that any Kirby game has had in a long time, maybe ever.

2: Way too many collectables. It's not DK64 by any means, but man the climb to 100% is probably the roughest that Kirby has ever been. Not because getting everything is particularly challenging, but because it's just time consuming and repetitive.

I would like to apologize for all the times I said "Dark Souls II is bad for a Souls game, which is still pretty good."

It's truly incredible that a game which so obviously prioritizes quantity over quality still manages to feel so small. Every level is little more than a series of hallways connected by elevators, tunnels, trenches, and canyons. There is never any sense of place. When I played Bloodborne again recently, I constantly felt tricked by the sheer amount of detail outside of the play area, that the game was compensating for something; it's incredible that Dark Souls II came out only one year earlier and tries to cover the same tracks with little more than JPEGs of mountains. It's a PS3/360 game, sure, but it's still the most ugly and empty Souls game of its generation.

Combat is basically ruined. Positioning-focused playstyles are virtually useless because of how strong the enemies' rotational tracking is, not to mention many enemies have a slam attack that limits your walking speed even if it doesn’t make contact. Parrying has been slowed down to the point where it can't really be used reactively to most attacks. Dodging has had its effectiveness tied to a stat that most players won't understand the significance of unless they read a wiki or otherwise engage with a community outside of the game itself (undermining both the combat and the game's own integrated social features), and the hitboxes are sloppy enough that it doesn’t feel right anyway. Every aspect of Dark Souls II's combat design discourages active play; the shield is more central to the game's "conditioning" than in any other From Software game simply because it’s the only effective defensive option left.

Dark Souls II's ending is the same as the first, the player's character is given a choice; unlike the original however, the player does not actually choose, the choice is only implied. The fact that there is a Dark Souls sequel at all in the first place has already invalidated the player’s decision at the end of the prior game. Link the fire or let it die, the curse will return all the same. The entire game seems dreadfully aware of how pointless the endeavor of making another Dark Souls was in the first place. Its world has no believable structure, its characters have no memories and only sparse motivation. The gameplay has changed form not to try to be interesting on its own merits, but to induce the same feeling as the first game to the detriment of all else.

Dark Souls’ bloodstain system was an effective way of encouraging the player to learn the game; your souls are left wherever you died, and surely since you got there once before you can do it again, and probably have an easier time of it with newfound experience. Dark Souls II does everything it can to reproduce this effect not on the player-end, but within the level design. The game is full of dark areas, but if the player lights a torch it stays lit forever. Some areas have as many as four NPC invasions, but a defeated invader stays dead. Even regular enemies will stop respawning if the player kills them enough times. Dark Souls might have felt like a wall that you were chipping away at, but the change wasn’t happening in the game, it was happening in your head, in your hands. Here, the gameplay absolutely is just an obstacle to whittle away at.

Towards the end of the game, the player travels into the memories of dead giants. Their tree-like corpses give off some strange glow, like the insects in the game’s intro cinematic. To some extent I wonder whether this is meant to imply that the entire game takes place within a mere memory, that the lack of insight into the characters and the fragmented geography is meant to represent things not remembered. Perhaps too, the only value of the game is its intellectual property, the memory of Dark Souls.

People have always speculated about or wished for a sequel to Demon’s Souls or Bloodborne, but the conflict of those games is over, the threats which drove their premises are out of the picture. Dark Souls was itself the same, a total work, and making a sequel was always a fool’s errand. Some complain that the diegetic emphasis on dying and losing you souls is some kind of cheap marketing ploy, leaning into the games’ reputation for difficulty, but the very use of the Dark Souls brand was in the first place a cynical decision. What else was there for them to do?

Quelaag was a spider lady because the first flame was fading, and the witch of Izalith tried to conjur a new one; this artificial flame became chaos, a cursed lava that transformed people into insectoid demons.

Najka is a scorpion lady because Dark Souls had a bug lady too, and they want to do another one like that.

Sure, in the beginning Quelaag also probably started out as “just a cool idea for a boss”, but what made Dark Souls truly special was that everything, even silly video game bullshit like the monsters you fight, had its place in the world. Why was Blighttown poisonous, and why did the people in Blighttown look the way they did? Because Blighttown was in the runoff of the Lordran sewer system. Why are the Gutter and Black Gulch poisonous? Because it’s Dark Souls! There has to be a dark and difficult poison level! Why do the people of the Gutter look all sickly and green? There is no particular reason, every hollow in Drangleic looks like that. It’s interesting that Hidetaka Miyazaki has said that he tries to make sure that even the monsters in his games have a sort of nobility, and that the only game in the series that he did not direct immediately took the sharp left turn of making the undead look like stupid green zombies.

Dark Souls II makes a lot of great quality of life adjustments that would carry over into future entries, but virtually all of them feel like bandages on mortal wounds dealt to Dark Souls’ design. You can re-spec your character, likely because by the time you realize how important adaptability is you’ll be so far into the game that you’ll need to kill multiple bosses to add a single frame of invincibility to your dodge roll. Changing or removing weapon infusions no longer requires lowering your weapon level, and it better not since they got rid of the actually useful scaling infusions and replaced them with the brilliantly useless “mundane” weapon.

The environmental design and aesthetic of the DLC areas is absolutely the highest point of the game, but it isn’t enough to save it. It’s the same game, with the same combat system, and the same types of encounters seen in the base game.

You could do worse, and many trying to ape the Souls style certainly have, but this one is really only recommended as a curiosity.

One of the most interesting Kirby games, and one of the most interesting metroid/vania games. The non-linear format makes the special properties of copy abilities all the more meaningful. Fantastic visuals, top-tier soundtrack, great levels. The main bosses are some of the most memorable Kirby has ever had in my opinion, though the mini-bosses feel a little undercooked (aside from Bonkers who I think is the only one returning from the previous game). I'd love for this concept to be revisited because I think it's just a few tweaks from being a masterpiece.

Bloodborne is a trick, and I have enough insight to see through the illusion. 😎

The first area of Bloodborne has a variety of enemies that can all be sorted into 3 types. Large enemies hit hard and can't be staggered through normal attacks, but they have predictable moves that can be easily parried (and half of the large enemies in this area leave themselves open to backstabs). Animals attack with quick lunges that are hard to predict and avoid, but they have little health and are usually relatively docile until provoked, which teaches the player to actively chase down enemies and get the first hit in. The rest of the enemies, the normal humanoids, the townspeople and beastmen, are particularly interesting. All of these enemies can be easily staggered, and the windups on their attacks are so slow that even if the player runs out of stamina, the player will always get their own hit in before the enemy can retaliate. All the player really needs to beat the majority of the enemies in the opening stage is to run up to them and mash R1.

And for awhile, playing the game the way that it trains you to really is infectious. Hurtling through levels, ripping and tearing until it is done. There really were times where going through levels killing everything in sight gave me the same kind of feeling that Doom does. Unfortunately this feeling never lasts; Bloodborne has always failed to keep my interest to the same degree that other From Software titles have.

The enemy roster is quite limited. You'll fight the same townspeople, beastmen, dogs and crows throughout the entire game. In the forbidden woods they won't stagger as easily (despite having no visual indication that these particular enemies will behave differently), and in Yahargul they'll respawn indefinitely until you kill the enemy summoning them, but ultimately the models and movesets stay the same. Very few areas have truly unique enemies. Even the hallway leading to the (first) final boss is occupied by pigs, which have been around since the first level, and a mid-game boss repurposed as a regular enemy.

Bloodborne's focus on bestial foes means its most interesting combat encounters are more classic Souls fights, which is to say they are much less about reflexes and counterattacks, and much more about careful positioning. This is fine, though it makes the exceptions to the rule (such as the particularly famous DLC bosses) particularly grueling by comparison. The main issue with the beastly bosses is the fact that dealing enough damage to one of their limbs will induce a heavy stagger. In Souls, the main difference between fighting the same boss at a high or low level is going to be quantitative; if you have more health you can make more mistakes, if you deal more damage the fight will end sooner. In Bloodborne, the difference is qualitative. Dealing enough damage to be able to stagger the boss completely mechanically alters the fight, sometimes trivializing battles which once felt impossible.

The result is that despite Bloodborne's apparent downplaying of the RPG elements common to these games, the few numbers that you do still have to care about are much more important. Changing any gear besides your melee weapon isn't going to change much, ranged abilities aren't really viable enough to be your primary focus, and spells may as well not exist. Increasing your health, stamina, and attack power are the only real options you have, but doing so is more vital than ever.

While Bloodborne's weapon selection is slimmer than average, each weapon has an array of interesting and unique moves. Light, heavy, jump attack, attacking out of a roll or running, transformed versions of each of these, and an attack triggered by transforming your weapon mid-combo. Unfortunately none of these options are any better than just spamming R1, and the saw-cleaver, a starter weapon, has better DPS than anything I've ever wanted to experiment with.

Bloodborne's level design is on the better side of the spectrum, but the main path through the game is both shorter and more linear than any other. You only need to visit 5 areas, and you only need to kill 8 bosses, and aside from your second boss all of them need to be defeated in the same order in every playthrough. There is quite a bit of optional content, but the question "where should I go next, and why?" is never as interesting as in the other games. In Dark Souls you can kill both mandatory and optional bosses in a variety of orders, and there are reasons for why you might want to do one boss before the other. Most people fight Pinwheel or Dancer of the Boreal Valley late in their respective games, but there are reasons to kill them earlier. Why would I kill blood-starved beast, Amygdala, or the witch of Hemwick at all? Definitely not for access to the copy-and-paste chalice dungeons, and probably not for the ability to equip miniscule buffs. The optional content in Bloodborne mostly renders itself a checklist of stuff to do if I feel like I need to grind more money.

Some people have argued that the chalice dungeons are fine because Bloodborne's combat mechanics are deep enough to carry uninteresting level design. Though again, the most basic attacks with the most basic weapons are both the safest and most effective. And because the exact punishment for failure (losing your echoes, not only one of your main methods of getting stronger, but effectively your most important resource since you need to buy blood vials) is antithetical to the reason for doing these areas in the first place (grinding for echoes), using the chalice dungeons as a place to experiment isn't really worth it.

The game’s aesthetic is very consistent, and is very visually busy in a way that makes it look good in screenshots. Though there’s very little reason to peer into many corners, because most of that extreme architectural detail is just window dressing, even more so than usual. The “impossible geometry” on display might add to the Lovecraftian charm for some people, but for me it just means that Bloodborne is the only one of these games that I genuinely find myself losing my sense of direction in. The skyline of Yharnam is such a mess, further marred by extreme post-processing and LOD’s that I genuinely can’t tell what’s supposed to be a landmark. The game being so dark doesn’t help anything; even what variation does exist between areas is made less striking by the fact that your screen is mostly shades of black and grey regardless of where you are.

The performance is terrible, basically inexcusable. Even when it manages to hit 30fps it can’t deliver those frames consistently. It doesn’t even matter what system you play it on, it’s the same regardless. This supposedly “fast-paced” take on Souls-style gameplay ends up feeling like wading through the same old swamp. You practically have to be telepathic to react to the more challenging bosses. I would add half a star if they ever released a version of the game that properly worked.

The soundtrack is quite good. Ludwig’s theme might be my favorite boss fight music in any From Software game. The sound design in general is nice, even if a couple stock sound effects are a bit jarring and feel out of place.

Generally speaking, Bloodborne is just a fine game. It hints at having something greater under the hood, but in my opinion it never really delivers in the way that other games from this developer have.

Metroid Dread is not fucking kidding me right now.

I don't like playing 2D platformers with an analogue stick in general, but Dread offers multiple reasons for it to bother me here. For one thing, regardless of how little you tilt the stick, you are always moving at a full sprint. The more important change though is the 360 degree aiming carried over from the 3DS game. The 8-direction aiming from the SNES and GBA games might have been a limitation at the time but it created interesting combat scenarios that were less focused on being frantic firefights, and were more about careful positioning. I will say though that this game's controls are nowhere near as frustrating as Samus Returns, but that's really only because you can play this game with a real controller.

I don't like the boss fights in this game very much. I pumped like 300 missiles in Experiment Z-57 and only found out why it wasn't dying when I read a walkthrough online. I honestly prefer the days when Metroid bosses could basically be trivialized by collecting enough items; Dread is the first and only Metroid game I have ever gathered 100% of the items in, and I still felt like my HP was a little underbudget. These over-choreographed precision endurance tests are ridiculous enough on their own, but the fact that some straight up require parrying is absurd. I do want to be clear though that I don't think these fights are straight up bad, they just aren't in the slightest what I expect or want from this series.

It's both clever and a little lame that every time you get the beam that kills the EMMI you have to use the weapon to break a tutorial door. On one hand, opening special doors with weapons is standard fare for Metroid. On the other hand, it's obviously just there to remind the player how to use an ability that is almost never available to them.

I don't like the EMMI. Nintendo seems to have wanted to take the SA-X concept from Fusion as far as possible, and the result is that the first "real" EMMI encounter is about as hard as a mid to late-game SA-X encounter. They are frankly, brutally, unfairly challenging in a way that simply wouldn't have been acceptable with an old-school Metroid save room system. I really wonder if the reason that Dread was seemingly in development hell for so long is that the DS and 3DS couldn't really pull off the snappy checkpointing and quick retries necessary to ease player frustration.

Everyone hyped up "late morph ball", but it's only like, the fifth item you get? Bombs didn't seem particularly late either. What WAS shockingly late was the Pulse Radar, especially considering that item was practically the only reason that Samus Returns was an acceptable modern entry point for series newcomers.

If the gear acquisition rhythm of games like Zero Mission and Fusion could be described as a tension and release, Dread is just a winding mess of tension. When I get a new item, I don't immediately know what to do with it; there's rarely an "aha!" moment where I recall an obstacle I couldn't pass before. Every time I open a new path, another gets blocked off by debris, or wildlife, or any other excuse the game can come up with to try and railroad you. Fusion's clear segmentation and barely obscured linear level structure made this more bearable, as the implication was somewhat obvious that your goal lay in another sector, and that you would be returning. In Dread, figuring out where to go doesn't feel like exploration, but a process of elimination. There's rarely more than one path forward, and it's much easier to identify wrong than right.

During the few segments where the game does let you off the rails, I constantly found myself checking the map. In some games of this genre, this could be a good thing. One could be excitedly wondering where new paths could lead them, or contemplating where to go next; that's not it though. I knew exactly where I wanted to go, but never developed any sense of how to get there, both because of how the EMMI generally force you to run through the levels at a strained pace, and because you're never really sure whether the last thing you did blocked off another path somewhere on your route.

Samus' suit seems a bit more... sexual (?) than usual. The layers of her armor have been adjusted, the orange armor has crept up her legs while the undermost layer has also crept down. In the gravity suit, the outer layer flares out before it hits her hips; in certain vernacular, they've given her "absolute territory". Samus' death animation has always left little to the imagination, but here the lighting of the game over scene is angled to emphasize the point where her legs meet. The green lights of her suit eventually zig zag down her trunk and point right at her crotch. Any time the game shows her face it looks overly shiny or plastic, her eyes doing all the work to try and exaggerate an expression, in a way that makes me think of a certain team based shooting game for some reason.

Also her pose in the elevator loading screens reminds me of that old youtube animation "Batman eats a hotdog".

In general the game looks really good. Part of it is obviously down to the forced perspective of a 2D game giving the developers more control over the rendering budget, but I think it also has to do with excellent art design and use of color. Its honestly consistently shocking how good a lot of the Switch exclusives manage to look.

The most fun I had with the game was the late-game cleanup (like I said earlier, this is the only game in the series I have ever bothered to find all the items in). When you finally have all of your tools and can just explore and engage with challenges knowing that the world won't twist around you to try and confine you to the main path, when you don't need to worry about running into boss fights, you find that there really was a fine platformer hidden in here the whole time. It's just a shame that there wasn't more of that.

Dark Souls is a beautiful forest full of ugly trees, a master's painting held together with duct tape and hot glue.

Coming back to Dark Souls and beating it for the first time in at least a couple years, it was honestly shocking how well-paced the game was compared to how I remember it. I remember the first time I played this game I spent more than ten hours just trying to ring the first bell, wrestling with complex, unfamiliar controls and the nuances of the combat. The latter half of the game is generally considered worse, though I've also generally considered it to be easier. I wonder to what degree that might have been warped by the fact that Anor Londo is, ostensibly, the last time in the game that the player is really asked to learn something new, the learning curve being mistaken for the difficulty curve.

Visually it's mostly aged surprisingly well, character detail and texture quality is largely more than acceptable, especially for the time. Even if the specular effects on reflective surfaces don't look particularly "natural", they look good, and definitely more striking than the more recent remastered version. The main blemish is that with the DSfix mod, playing with much greater visual clarity than any official release has offered (due to both resolution and adjustable depth of field), the pop-in is really noticeable; there are times when entering a small room, you will see objects appear in the opposite corner as you pass through the door.

Combat is the main area where I think the first few of these games don't quite knock it out of the park, though fighting regular enemies here is typically more than manageable. Boss fights are probably the single greatest weakness of this game. Many of them are total pushovers, and when they do present a challenge they either highlight how unrefined this is compared to future installments, or are just plain bad.

But, Dark Souls more than makes up for it by having one of the most interesting worlds ever seen in a video game, both in its narrative elements, and perhaps more importantly in its construction. From creation myth to conspiracy, from the cathedrals to the sewers to the rot, fire, death, and mysteries further down. Everything has its place, and every place fits perfectly together. Though, the individual areas themselves are often small or barren, with many failing to offer the same kinds of gauntlets seen in both Demon's Souls and in future games. Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith are the obvious worst offenders, and are typically argued to be flat out unfinished, though Darkroot and Blighttown don't feel much better.

Dark Souls is more than the sum of its parts though, and even when those parts don't shine on their own, they at least give a strong thematic support to the rest of the package.

It's Super Metroid. It's The Good One. It's The Speed Run Game. It's The Sequence Break Game.

It has the most interesting controls of any of the 2D games. I hear the haters cry "it's floaty, it's clunky." You are a robot lady in space. It does commit a control scheme sin though: no game should ever put you in a position where you even consider the idea of pressing three face buttons at once, but to shoot while jumping out of a run you will have to do just that (unless you rebind things, which you really should).

Its level design and exploration have been talked to death. It's the kind of game where after playing through it a few times it starts to become unclear what the "intended path" really ever was.

The bosses are generally a weak point, each usually being either being a simple test of patience or a total pushover. Great music, some of the best sprite-work on SNES, though performance does take a hit in later levels which can make time-sensitive maneuvers like the space jump somewhat frustrating.

I beat the game with 69%, AND I got to see the lady in her under wear lololol

As I said in my review of Forza Horizon 5:

[Forza Motorsport 6: Apex] is like eating at a fancy restaurant on a half-hour lunch break.

I suppose I should say "was" now that the servers are down.