This review contains spoilers
Ah, Dark Souls. The game that broke gaming journalism forever.
In 2011, the Wii was at its strongest: family-friendly and “easy” games were pumped out by the dozen, and mobile games became more popular. Xbox started heavily marketing the Kinect, and more and more games would include extra difficulties and excessive hand-holding through tutorials, non-punishing death mechanics and extra lives. Now, I'm not on of those neckbeard gatekeepers against making gaming as a medium more accessible and inclusive, but the market at the time was over-saturated with easy, more forgiving games and the concept of the truly "hard" game was beginning to die out. What I'm saying is that there's gotta be a balance so everyone has something to appeal to them.
Dark Souls began the painstaking work of restoring that balance. It took what worked about Demon’s Souls and began improving on it tenfold, bringing a brutally difficult experience that was so refreshing in an environment that had become increasingly more casual, that it created an entire “Souls-like” genre where apparently every hard game is “like Dark Souls.”
Each entry in the Souls series has its strong points and weak points, but there are 4 aspects of Dark Souls that really make it stand out against other games in the franchise: it’s nonlinear interconnected map and excellent level design, the atmospheric storytelling, it’s difficulty through lack of information, and subtle combat mechanics.
Dark’s Souls drab medieval kingdom of Lordran is one of the best and most immersive game worlds that I have ever played through. There are so many branching pathways, shortcuts and alternate routes you can take, especially if you picked the Master Key as your starting gift. (Do yourself a favor and pick it as your starting gift, don't make the same mistake as me.) The map is truly expansive, and the game rewards an intuitive player for exploring every nook and cranny for better items, ways to skip boss fights, shortcuts, and even entire hidden areas. The moment I fell in love with the game was when I finally fought my way to the church in the Undead Parish. I was panicking, with no estus and low on health, and I ran into the church with about 15 guys swarming me. I paid no attention to them, blindly scrambling to an elevator that took me down, to my amazement, all the way back to Firelink Shrine. Lordran is filled with these shortcuts that you slowly unlock to make travel between areas easier, and as you figure out the branching pathways backtracking becomes a sinch. There are shortcuts that take you to a bonfire you'd never expect to be back at, there's a ladder that takes you all the way around to the beginning of a level. There's a tower in the first part of the game with a powerful knight and a locked door at the bottom which connects to a late-game area where you get DLC. There is a moment where after unlocking the elevator from the cathedral, you can hop off it early onto the ceiling of a temple, platform across the ruins of the Shrine, curl up into a ball at a nest and return to the fucking tutorial area. No other game does this kind of interconnected level design like Dark Souls, and I wish the entire game was like this as some late-game areas are comparatively linear.
Dark Souls is always lauded as a difficult game. And sure, even basic enemies can kill you fairly easily, there are some very tricky platforming and combat encounters, and the bosses are challenging walls. Some would say Dark Souls is “bullshit,” but I don’t really think so. What I think makes Dark Souls difficult, and why some players might think the game is being a bastard, is the lack of initial player knowledge. Dark Souls gives you nothing in terms of help, except the basic controls. No tutorial screens, no characters explaining what to do, no explanation of the level-up system, mechanics, enemies, or where you had to go: the player had to figure that out by themselves. All you are given in terms of a goal was to “Ring the Bell of Awakening,” and even that is unclear because it turns out there are 2 bells. Rather than using tutorial screens, Dark Souls guides the player through death and trial and error. For the first section of the game, Dark Souls just kicked my ass over and over. It’s unrelenting in it’s enemy placements and maze-like areas such as the Depths and Blighttown. Aside from some late-game jank, enemy placement is excellent and level design feels natural, whether you’re snakeing (pun entirely intended) your way through Sen’s Fortress, dodging archers in Anor Londo, exploring the verticality of the Undead Burg, or fighting your way through the Painted World: there aren't as many points where you go “that’s completely bullshit” as you’d expect (though there are a few), and each new place, each unique enemy connects to the lore of the game.
What I like about the story of Dark Souls is how the handle it. They set up the basics for you with a short opening cutscene, showing off the Four Great Lords and how they defeated the Ancient Dragons to begin an Age of Light, and how the Darksign has plagued humanity. Through the environment, sparse dialogue, and flavor text, the player had to piece together the story themselves.
The player figures out the story through playing the game and reading flavor text. In an environment where games deliver their stories through extensive use of cutscenes, Dark Souls is refreshing by allowing the player to decide whether or not they want to care about the story. Many games like God of War and Spider-Man have a core story where if you dislike it, you dislike about a third of that game. Fro an example done poorly, as much as I love Monster hunter World, you have this really, really bad story told through unstoppable cutscenes that bog the pacing of an otherwise excellent game. If you don't like the story, you're gonna be sitting there bored as fuck waiting for characters to finish vomiting exposition for at least a few hours of your experience with the game. With Dark Souls, if you don't like the lore, it doesn't impact the gameplay at all! There are skippable cutscenes that only occur during extremely important events or before some bosses, the aforementioned opening cutscene and endings, and that's about it. The game focuses more on environmental storytelling, introducing settings and enemies and item flavor text that begin to clue you in on Dark Souls’ larger story.
The atmosphere of Dark Souls is-well-Dark. It's usage of drab grayish color gradient and a general lack of brightness lend to the image of this Age of Fire collapsing in on itself in an attempt to prevent and Age of Dark, so when you find those brief moments of light and warmth and color with the bonfires you breathe a sight of relief.
Another excellent worldbuilding technique that Dark souls uses is by actually connecting the standard gameplay mechanics, such as healing, checkpoints, and respawning into the overall story. Where some games are content to just keep “respawning” as a game mechanic, Dark Souls goes as far as giving a canonical reason as to why the player respawns when they die. It's not “respawning at a checkpoint” in this game: it’s a curse of undying, where the souls of the curse-bearers are drawn to Gywn’s fire only to repeat this cycle until they go insane from Hollowing. This is one of the many, many examples of how Dark souls allowed me to get lost in the world of Lordran and attempt to piece together the fragments of lore supplied by flavor text and dialogue.
Another aspect that really helps set the mood of the game is the music, which the game uses very sparingly: Aside from boss fights most areas are silent, so when you do come across an area with music it’s usually to set the overall tone. The only two areas that have background music utilizing Motoi Sakuraba’s excellently epic and melancholy music are Firelink Shrine and Ash Lake. The former’s music is that iconic, soothing, string-heavy, sorrowful track, insinuating that this is the one safe place left in this broken world. The latter uses the intense chanting vocals of the Everlasting Dragon in order to emphasize that the Ash Lake is a truly majestic and ancient place, a forgotten memory of a bygone era. Despite these two outliers, music only ever kicks in during boss fights. This restraint in how Dark Souls uses music allows bosses to feel more important and grandiose, especially with how intense they are. The boss themes of this game also perfectly encapsulate boss personality or how the fight plays out. Ornstein and Smough have this regality to their theme, as well as a sense of pride and power. The Four King’s theme is intense and filled with dread, further escalating the dread the player feels as they’re overwhelmed by more than Four Kings. Seath’s theme is a strange, zany piece with ear-peircing violins and an off-beat xylophone, highlighting the bizarre and grotesque nature of the Scaleless dragon. Knight Artorias has a very subtle and sad theme, contrasting the intense, face-paced battle while emphasizing the “fallen warrior” feel of the lost knight. The final boss of the game rather unexpectedly has this somber, beautifully depressing piano piece, which has become the iconic Plin Plin Plon of Gwyn’s theme. Even the first boss in the game has this intense, bombastic soundtrack, perfectly setting the tone and pretext for this game as the dread seeps as you realize that you have this hulking demon in order to progress.
This brings me into my next point: the unrelenting difficulty (or rather challenge) of the game. Right off the bat, right after giving you a starter weapon and some basic tips, you’re thrown up against the Asylum Demon, which you need to fight in order to continue. No buffs, stats or equipment: fight this fat-ass demon with what you’re given. Almost every encounter is designed to test your skill and deepen your understanding of the game, and due to the sheer amount of tools at your disposal and the variety of enemies, the same encounter can play out completely differently between each player. The stamina bar and equip load are also a genius way to introduce difficulty: every action consumes stamina, so the player must think carefully about their next action in order to manage stamina effectively. A limited equip load means that you must think about what you’re wearing: a light armor set or weapon gives you more mobility but sacrifices defense or damage, while heavy armor sets or more powerful weapons will sacrifice mobility and iframes. Two-handing, blocking, backstabbing, kicking, and parrying also bring more depth and nuance into the combat puzzle, as you slowly master these mechanics. Two-handing does more damage and makes swings faster, but at the cost of shielding and more stamina usage per attack. Kicking can break a guard against defensive opponents but has a long startup and insignificant damage. Parrying is a high-risk, high-reward mechanic that encourages a player to learn their opponent’s moveset and punishes over-offensive players. Backstabbing, in my opinion, doesn’t really fit into this puzzle: with such a low-risk, high-reward mechanic it undermines the point of parrying or kicking opponents in favor of running around them, fishing for backstabs. Despite this, the combat is very nuanced and rewards intelligent players, and the sheer amount of equipment and stat allocation possibilities really adds to build variety and player preference.
As a player, you’re not shoehorned into just “attack with sword.” Sorceries , Miracles, and Pyromancy are high-damaging ranged attacks, but usually because of the extra stats you have to invest in such as attunement, intelligence or faith you have to sacrifice equipment load, health, and strength just to use these powerful spells, resulting in many “glass cannon” builds. There are a ton of options for melee as well: Most weapons have certain stat requirements, scale better with certain stat, or give you a buff, so if you find a couple that you like, upgrade stats accordingly. Maybe go in on equip load and midroll your way to victory with even the heaviest armor sets. Between starting classes, rings, weapons, armor, and spells, there are so many ways you can approach the game, which brings me to my next point. I like when games allow me to express myself and play the way I want to, but also restricts me from being too crazy with builds. In Dark Souls, if I want to invest in one stat, because of the genius way leveling up works I'm sacrificing what I could've spent in another, so it' sa constant management of which stats I want to prioritize, or which stat is the best tor most "fun" option for me.
I feel like most of the difficulty of Dark Souls isn't from “bullshit” or “unfair” mechanics: it’s that you know nothing and are told nothing. It’s up to the player to find out what to do or where to go, and the game guides you on the right track rather than outright helping you by... well, killing you. For example, the Firelink Shrine has multiple different areas to go to, a few of which are late-game areas that you could explore early if you want to. But if you enter the graveyard by the shrine early, seemingly unbeatable skeletons will swarm you. If you go down the lift at the base of the shrine, a bunch of unkillable ghosts will swarm you. This is the game’s way of telling you, "bro. You’re not ready for this yet. Try another place." And eventually, you’ll find yourself at the Undead Burg. But, if you persevere, and you do go through these areas, you’re rewarded with some neat stuff: go far enough into the graveyard and you can find a VERY good sword that can be used very early if you two-hand. Go even farther into the Catacombs, you’re rewarded with a Pinwheel fight that’s actually challenging due to low-level gear, and have access to Rite of Kindling early.
Dark Souls encourages you to experiment, explore, and learn the game. Having a tough time with a certain area? Look around: maybe you can find a shortcut somewhere. Is a boss killing you over and over? Explore the area for better armor or a ring, find a route back to a blacksmith to upgrade your regular gear. Maybe the boss has a weakness to magic or fire or lightning, find some resin to coat your weapon with. Maybe find an NPC summon. Or, just leave. Come back when you’ve fought some other bosses and gotten better equipment.
Sen’s Fortress is one of my favorite places in the game for this reason: for some fucking reason snakes are everywhere and they use lighting, as the sounds of clanking machinery and the grinding of boulders rolling through the castle. Why are there a bunch of lightning snakes? Fuck if I know! If I wanted to I could look into it, but what matters is that it's FUN! It tested my limits as a player, testing me if I had remembered the lessons the game has taught me, and whether I was ready for the next half of the game. Dark souls is a difficult game if you're not paying attention, but rewards players for figuring out it’s obtuse mechanics and puzzles.
Another good example of Dark souls subtly teaching you these mechanics are with boss fights. Ornstien and Smough was my first wall, as it was with many players. So I decided to look for better gear, and I found the Ring of Favor and Protection and Havel’s Armor, which with Havel’s Ring allowed me to mid roll with the armor equipped, allowing me to secure a victory after multiple failures and breeze through the rest of the game with a tanky Strength build and a +15 Zweihander, to the point where I deleted the Sanctuary Guardian and beat Artorias first try.
Boss fights are a highlight in Dark souls: so many memorable and intense fights, like the Four Kings, Ornstien and Smough, and Gwyn. These fights act as a rite of passage for the player: overcome this wall, and you can overcome the challenges ahead. By having these well-designed bosses kick your ass over and over again, the game encourages experimentation: maybe try a new set of armor, use an elemental buff or spell, learn boss patterns to know when to dodge. Most of them are fun fights, are excellently designed in gameplay and visuals, and serve as challenging yet mostly fair battles. The DLC bosses especially are brutally challenging and excellently designed. Kalameet and Manus in particular destroyed me over and over with how ridiculously large their movepool was.
Although Dark Souls harbors some mediocre fights (such as the Moonlight Butterfly and the Firesage Demon and… well, I’ll get to that soon), and a handful of endgame fights are a bit boring or too easy, Dark Souls also boasts some of the most memorable and incredible bosses of any game.
Despite its interconnected and vertical world map, despite the great bosses and level design, Dark Souls also harbors some of the lowest lows the series has to offer. For one, there are a lot of weird jank moments and, for some reason, a lot of platforming for a game with fall damage and no dedicated jump button. There are annoying enemies such as the Basilisks and the Wheel Skeletons, and occasionally the game can be bs. Crossbows are also laughably weak and bows are a niece tool rather than a viable weapon to use. There are also a few rings that are so good that it’d be stupid to not use them. Finally, some of the late-game content ranges from mediocre to dogshit. Later areas are very linear without any shortcuts or branching pathways unlike the amazing early game, because at that point the player would already have the Lordvessel. Some of these areas are still great, like the Tomb of the Giants and the Duke’s Archives, but others are just…. Meh. First off, the Crystal Caves. It’s fine. It's a linear walk with annoying invisible pathways. There are like 4 clams and 2 golems to fight and that’s it. Then there’s Chaos Ruins. Ugh. It’s a huge area that hurts to look at and is annoying to traverse due to the sheer amount of copy/pasted enemies, bad pacing, and 3 mediocre bosses, one of which is literally the third Asylum Demon. There are like 14 Taurus Demons and Capra Demons, 2 enemies that were early-game bosses, that are a chore to take out because you need to take them out one by one. The only other enemies are these ugly, fat fire demons and these really annoying worm things that break your weapons. (Also, weapon durability really isn’t a huge deal in the game and more of an annoyance unless you're using a crystal weapon.) Chaos ruins is definitely a low point in the game.
Then there’s Lost Izalith.
Hoo boy.
The entire place just screams “We ran out of money.” So, the moment you enter this place, you have to deal with this annoying mechanic where you have to use a ring to walk on lava, except there’s still a huge danger of dying despite “protection,” and the sound it makes when you walk on lava is really annoying. As you walk across this lava, there are about 2 dozen of these giant, ugly… things that are just chilling there that look incredibly out of place and just copy/pasted there. They’re like, the bottom half of a dragon, have insane amounts of health, and can one-shot you. Once you get to the temple, all there are are these weak, uninspired fat fire demons once again, and the Chaos Eaters… are actually pretty neat, but there’s not alot of them.
And what do you get for getting through this boring slogfest? Oh, only the worst fucking boss in the series. Seriously, Bed of Chaos is the jankiest, most unfair, uninspired boss I have ever had the displeasure of fighting, to the point where even FromSoftware realized it was bullshit and threw the player a homeward bone, so that the boss has “checkpoints” and you don’t have to slog through it longer than you need to. In all, Lost Izalith is just an ugly, boring experience, and represents the worst of the Souls franchise.
Souls is a special game, one with an extreme amount of jank and some really low lows, but the highs of this game are some astronomically high that no other games in the series has quite recaptured yet, and set a precedent that changed the face of gaming forever, with the help of it’s older brother Demon’s Souls. I for one am glad that I got to be a part of this community, with so many incredible content creators, animators, artists, and modders, and I hope that this convinced others to pick up this game and experience the magic for themselves, because I feel like I haven’t done this game justice with words alone.
In 2011, the Wii was at its strongest: family-friendly and “easy” games were pumped out by the dozen, and mobile games became more popular. Xbox started heavily marketing the Kinect, and more and more games would include extra difficulties and excessive hand-holding through tutorials, non-punishing death mechanics and extra lives. Now, I'm not on of those neckbeard gatekeepers against making gaming as a medium more accessible and inclusive, but the market at the time was over-saturated with easy, more forgiving games and the concept of the truly "hard" game was beginning to die out. What I'm saying is that there's gotta be a balance so everyone has something to appeal to them.
Dark Souls began the painstaking work of restoring that balance. It took what worked about Demon’s Souls and began improving on it tenfold, bringing a brutally difficult experience that was so refreshing in an environment that had become increasingly more casual, that it created an entire “Souls-like” genre where apparently every hard game is “like Dark Souls.”
Each entry in the Souls series has its strong points and weak points, but there are 4 aspects of Dark Souls that really make it stand out against other games in the franchise: it’s nonlinear interconnected map and excellent level design, the atmospheric storytelling, it’s difficulty through lack of information, and subtle combat mechanics.
Dark’s Souls drab medieval kingdom of Lordran is one of the best and most immersive game worlds that I have ever played through. There are so many branching pathways, shortcuts and alternate routes you can take, especially if you picked the Master Key as your starting gift. (Do yourself a favor and pick it as your starting gift, don't make the same mistake as me.) The map is truly expansive, and the game rewards an intuitive player for exploring every nook and cranny for better items, ways to skip boss fights, shortcuts, and even entire hidden areas. The moment I fell in love with the game was when I finally fought my way to the church in the Undead Parish. I was panicking, with no estus and low on health, and I ran into the church with about 15 guys swarming me. I paid no attention to them, blindly scrambling to an elevator that took me down, to my amazement, all the way back to Firelink Shrine. Lordran is filled with these shortcuts that you slowly unlock to make travel between areas easier, and as you figure out the branching pathways backtracking becomes a sinch. There are shortcuts that take you to a bonfire you'd never expect to be back at, there's a ladder that takes you all the way around to the beginning of a level. There's a tower in the first part of the game with a powerful knight and a locked door at the bottom which connects to a late-game area where you get DLC. There is a moment where after unlocking the elevator from the cathedral, you can hop off it early onto the ceiling of a temple, platform across the ruins of the Shrine, curl up into a ball at a nest and return to the fucking tutorial area. No other game does this kind of interconnected level design like Dark Souls, and I wish the entire game was like this as some late-game areas are comparatively linear.
Dark Souls is always lauded as a difficult game. And sure, even basic enemies can kill you fairly easily, there are some very tricky platforming and combat encounters, and the bosses are challenging walls. Some would say Dark Souls is “bullshit,” but I don’t really think so. What I think makes Dark Souls difficult, and why some players might think the game is being a bastard, is the lack of initial player knowledge. Dark Souls gives you nothing in terms of help, except the basic controls. No tutorial screens, no characters explaining what to do, no explanation of the level-up system, mechanics, enemies, or where you had to go: the player had to figure that out by themselves. All you are given in terms of a goal was to “Ring the Bell of Awakening,” and even that is unclear because it turns out there are 2 bells. Rather than using tutorial screens, Dark Souls guides the player through death and trial and error. For the first section of the game, Dark Souls just kicked my ass over and over. It’s unrelenting in it’s enemy placements and maze-like areas such as the Depths and Blighttown. Aside from some late-game jank, enemy placement is excellent and level design feels natural, whether you’re snakeing (pun entirely intended) your way through Sen’s Fortress, dodging archers in Anor Londo, exploring the verticality of the Undead Burg, or fighting your way through the Painted World: there aren't as many points where you go “that’s completely bullshit” as you’d expect (though there are a few), and each new place, each unique enemy connects to the lore of the game.
What I like about the story of Dark Souls is how the handle it. They set up the basics for you with a short opening cutscene, showing off the Four Great Lords and how they defeated the Ancient Dragons to begin an Age of Light, and how the Darksign has plagued humanity. Through the environment, sparse dialogue, and flavor text, the player had to piece together the story themselves.
The player figures out the story through playing the game and reading flavor text. In an environment where games deliver their stories through extensive use of cutscenes, Dark Souls is refreshing by allowing the player to decide whether or not they want to care about the story. Many games like God of War and Spider-Man have a core story where if you dislike it, you dislike about a third of that game. Fro an example done poorly, as much as I love Monster hunter World, you have this really, really bad story told through unstoppable cutscenes that bog the pacing of an otherwise excellent game. If you don't like the story, you're gonna be sitting there bored as fuck waiting for characters to finish vomiting exposition for at least a few hours of your experience with the game. With Dark Souls, if you don't like the lore, it doesn't impact the gameplay at all! There are skippable cutscenes that only occur during extremely important events or before some bosses, the aforementioned opening cutscene and endings, and that's about it. The game focuses more on environmental storytelling, introducing settings and enemies and item flavor text that begin to clue you in on Dark Souls’ larger story.
The atmosphere of Dark Souls is-well-Dark. It's usage of drab grayish color gradient and a general lack of brightness lend to the image of this Age of Fire collapsing in on itself in an attempt to prevent and Age of Dark, so when you find those brief moments of light and warmth and color with the bonfires you breathe a sight of relief.
Another excellent worldbuilding technique that Dark souls uses is by actually connecting the standard gameplay mechanics, such as healing, checkpoints, and respawning into the overall story. Where some games are content to just keep “respawning” as a game mechanic, Dark Souls goes as far as giving a canonical reason as to why the player respawns when they die. It's not “respawning at a checkpoint” in this game: it’s a curse of undying, where the souls of the curse-bearers are drawn to Gywn’s fire only to repeat this cycle until they go insane from Hollowing. This is one of the many, many examples of how Dark souls allowed me to get lost in the world of Lordran and attempt to piece together the fragments of lore supplied by flavor text and dialogue.
Another aspect that really helps set the mood of the game is the music, which the game uses very sparingly: Aside from boss fights most areas are silent, so when you do come across an area with music it’s usually to set the overall tone. The only two areas that have background music utilizing Motoi Sakuraba’s excellently epic and melancholy music are Firelink Shrine and Ash Lake. The former’s music is that iconic, soothing, string-heavy, sorrowful track, insinuating that this is the one safe place left in this broken world. The latter uses the intense chanting vocals of the Everlasting Dragon in order to emphasize that the Ash Lake is a truly majestic and ancient place, a forgotten memory of a bygone era. Despite these two outliers, music only ever kicks in during boss fights. This restraint in how Dark Souls uses music allows bosses to feel more important and grandiose, especially with how intense they are. The boss themes of this game also perfectly encapsulate boss personality or how the fight plays out. Ornstein and Smough have this regality to their theme, as well as a sense of pride and power. The Four King’s theme is intense and filled with dread, further escalating the dread the player feels as they’re overwhelmed by more than Four Kings. Seath’s theme is a strange, zany piece with ear-peircing violins and an off-beat xylophone, highlighting the bizarre and grotesque nature of the Scaleless dragon. Knight Artorias has a very subtle and sad theme, contrasting the intense, face-paced battle while emphasizing the “fallen warrior” feel of the lost knight. The final boss of the game rather unexpectedly has this somber, beautifully depressing piano piece, which has become the iconic Plin Plin Plon of Gwyn’s theme. Even the first boss in the game has this intense, bombastic soundtrack, perfectly setting the tone and pretext for this game as the dread seeps as you realize that you have this hulking demon in order to progress.
This brings me into my next point: the unrelenting difficulty (or rather challenge) of the game. Right off the bat, right after giving you a starter weapon and some basic tips, you’re thrown up against the Asylum Demon, which you need to fight in order to continue. No buffs, stats or equipment: fight this fat-ass demon with what you’re given. Almost every encounter is designed to test your skill and deepen your understanding of the game, and due to the sheer amount of tools at your disposal and the variety of enemies, the same encounter can play out completely differently between each player. The stamina bar and equip load are also a genius way to introduce difficulty: every action consumes stamina, so the player must think carefully about their next action in order to manage stamina effectively. A limited equip load means that you must think about what you’re wearing: a light armor set or weapon gives you more mobility but sacrifices defense or damage, while heavy armor sets or more powerful weapons will sacrifice mobility and iframes. Two-handing, blocking, backstabbing, kicking, and parrying also bring more depth and nuance into the combat puzzle, as you slowly master these mechanics. Two-handing does more damage and makes swings faster, but at the cost of shielding and more stamina usage per attack. Kicking can break a guard against defensive opponents but has a long startup and insignificant damage. Parrying is a high-risk, high-reward mechanic that encourages a player to learn their opponent’s moveset and punishes over-offensive players. Backstabbing, in my opinion, doesn’t really fit into this puzzle: with such a low-risk, high-reward mechanic it undermines the point of parrying or kicking opponents in favor of running around them, fishing for backstabs. Despite this, the combat is very nuanced and rewards intelligent players, and the sheer amount of equipment and stat allocation possibilities really adds to build variety and player preference.
As a player, you’re not shoehorned into just “attack with sword.” Sorceries , Miracles, and Pyromancy are high-damaging ranged attacks, but usually because of the extra stats you have to invest in such as attunement, intelligence or faith you have to sacrifice equipment load, health, and strength just to use these powerful spells, resulting in many “glass cannon” builds. There are a ton of options for melee as well: Most weapons have certain stat requirements, scale better with certain stat, or give you a buff, so if you find a couple that you like, upgrade stats accordingly. Maybe go in on equip load and midroll your way to victory with even the heaviest armor sets. Between starting classes, rings, weapons, armor, and spells, there are so many ways you can approach the game, which brings me to my next point. I like when games allow me to express myself and play the way I want to, but also restricts me from being too crazy with builds. In Dark Souls, if I want to invest in one stat, because of the genius way leveling up works I'm sacrificing what I could've spent in another, so it' sa constant management of which stats I want to prioritize, or which stat is the best tor most "fun" option for me.
I feel like most of the difficulty of Dark Souls isn't from “bullshit” or “unfair” mechanics: it’s that you know nothing and are told nothing. It’s up to the player to find out what to do or where to go, and the game guides you on the right track rather than outright helping you by... well, killing you. For example, the Firelink Shrine has multiple different areas to go to, a few of which are late-game areas that you could explore early if you want to. But if you enter the graveyard by the shrine early, seemingly unbeatable skeletons will swarm you. If you go down the lift at the base of the shrine, a bunch of unkillable ghosts will swarm you. This is the game’s way of telling you, "bro. You’re not ready for this yet. Try another place." And eventually, you’ll find yourself at the Undead Burg. But, if you persevere, and you do go through these areas, you’re rewarded with some neat stuff: go far enough into the graveyard and you can find a VERY good sword that can be used very early if you two-hand. Go even farther into the Catacombs, you’re rewarded with a Pinwheel fight that’s actually challenging due to low-level gear, and have access to Rite of Kindling early.
Dark Souls encourages you to experiment, explore, and learn the game. Having a tough time with a certain area? Look around: maybe you can find a shortcut somewhere. Is a boss killing you over and over? Explore the area for better armor or a ring, find a route back to a blacksmith to upgrade your regular gear. Maybe the boss has a weakness to magic or fire or lightning, find some resin to coat your weapon with. Maybe find an NPC summon. Or, just leave. Come back when you’ve fought some other bosses and gotten better equipment.
Sen’s Fortress is one of my favorite places in the game for this reason: for some fucking reason snakes are everywhere and they use lighting, as the sounds of clanking machinery and the grinding of boulders rolling through the castle. Why are there a bunch of lightning snakes? Fuck if I know! If I wanted to I could look into it, but what matters is that it's FUN! It tested my limits as a player, testing me if I had remembered the lessons the game has taught me, and whether I was ready for the next half of the game. Dark souls is a difficult game if you're not paying attention, but rewards players for figuring out it’s obtuse mechanics and puzzles.
Another good example of Dark souls subtly teaching you these mechanics are with boss fights. Ornstien and Smough was my first wall, as it was with many players. So I decided to look for better gear, and I found the Ring of Favor and Protection and Havel’s Armor, which with Havel’s Ring allowed me to mid roll with the armor equipped, allowing me to secure a victory after multiple failures and breeze through the rest of the game with a tanky Strength build and a +15 Zweihander, to the point where I deleted the Sanctuary Guardian and beat Artorias first try.
Boss fights are a highlight in Dark souls: so many memorable and intense fights, like the Four Kings, Ornstien and Smough, and Gwyn. These fights act as a rite of passage for the player: overcome this wall, and you can overcome the challenges ahead. By having these well-designed bosses kick your ass over and over again, the game encourages experimentation: maybe try a new set of armor, use an elemental buff or spell, learn boss patterns to know when to dodge. Most of them are fun fights, are excellently designed in gameplay and visuals, and serve as challenging yet mostly fair battles. The DLC bosses especially are brutally challenging and excellently designed. Kalameet and Manus in particular destroyed me over and over with how ridiculously large their movepool was.
Although Dark Souls harbors some mediocre fights (such as the Moonlight Butterfly and the Firesage Demon and… well, I’ll get to that soon), and a handful of endgame fights are a bit boring or too easy, Dark Souls also boasts some of the most memorable and incredible bosses of any game.
Despite its interconnected and vertical world map, despite the great bosses and level design, Dark Souls also harbors some of the lowest lows the series has to offer. For one, there are a lot of weird jank moments and, for some reason, a lot of platforming for a game with fall damage and no dedicated jump button. There are annoying enemies such as the Basilisks and the Wheel Skeletons, and occasionally the game can be bs. Crossbows are also laughably weak and bows are a niece tool rather than a viable weapon to use. There are also a few rings that are so good that it’d be stupid to not use them. Finally, some of the late-game content ranges from mediocre to dogshit. Later areas are very linear without any shortcuts or branching pathways unlike the amazing early game, because at that point the player would already have the Lordvessel. Some of these areas are still great, like the Tomb of the Giants and the Duke’s Archives, but others are just…. Meh. First off, the Crystal Caves. It’s fine. It's a linear walk with annoying invisible pathways. There are like 4 clams and 2 golems to fight and that’s it. Then there’s Chaos Ruins. Ugh. It’s a huge area that hurts to look at and is annoying to traverse due to the sheer amount of copy/pasted enemies, bad pacing, and 3 mediocre bosses, one of which is literally the third Asylum Demon. There are like 14 Taurus Demons and Capra Demons, 2 enemies that were early-game bosses, that are a chore to take out because you need to take them out one by one. The only other enemies are these ugly, fat fire demons and these really annoying worm things that break your weapons. (Also, weapon durability really isn’t a huge deal in the game and more of an annoyance unless you're using a crystal weapon.) Chaos ruins is definitely a low point in the game.
Then there’s Lost Izalith.
Hoo boy.
The entire place just screams “We ran out of money.” So, the moment you enter this place, you have to deal with this annoying mechanic where you have to use a ring to walk on lava, except there’s still a huge danger of dying despite “protection,” and the sound it makes when you walk on lava is really annoying. As you walk across this lava, there are about 2 dozen of these giant, ugly… things that are just chilling there that look incredibly out of place and just copy/pasted there. They’re like, the bottom half of a dragon, have insane amounts of health, and can one-shot you. Once you get to the temple, all there are are these weak, uninspired fat fire demons once again, and the Chaos Eaters… are actually pretty neat, but there’s not alot of them.
And what do you get for getting through this boring slogfest? Oh, only the worst fucking boss in the series. Seriously, Bed of Chaos is the jankiest, most unfair, uninspired boss I have ever had the displeasure of fighting, to the point where even FromSoftware realized it was bullshit and threw the player a homeward bone, so that the boss has “checkpoints” and you don’t have to slog through it longer than you need to. In all, Lost Izalith is just an ugly, boring experience, and represents the worst of the Souls franchise.
Souls is a special game, one with an extreme amount of jank and some really low lows, but the highs of this game are some astronomically high that no other games in the series has quite recaptured yet, and set a precedent that changed the face of gaming forever, with the help of it’s older brother Demon’s Souls. I for one am glad that I got to be a part of this community, with so many incredible content creators, animators, artists, and modders, and I hope that this convinced others to pick up this game and experience the magic for themselves, because I feel like I haven’t done this game justice with words alone.