What is there to be said about this absolute flawed gem, the most influential game of the past decade?
I played this game two, maybe three years away from DS2's release. It was still fairly unknown among gamer circles in my country. Browsing through the internet I would often see 'discussions' about it. And, of course, those two cursed words - 'git gud'. Being just a kid with self-esteem problems, I was no stranger to the need to impress anonymous people on the internet. So I bought it.
One day it arrived by mail and I started playing. I think my first impression was of the open-ended nature of the narration in the opening cinematic. I do recognize it's immense beauty today - but then it just striked me as bizarre, somewhat ankward. Naturally, this feeling of alienation would only deepen with the nature of the game.
'Why am I a wrinkled old poop? I thought I was a cute dude.'
'Why this guy just threw a corpse from the ceiling?'
'There was a key? Why didn't he just threw the key?!'
And so on.
Oh, the animations were clunky. The lightning and textures we're just fucking awful. 'Why is this game so popular?', I thought. Eventually, after a lot of spaghetti, I got to the Taurus Demon. Being a little baby raised by Skyrim and Devil Mary Cry on potato-easy mode, I got my ass handed back to me multiple times. It got so unbearable that one day I just shelved the game for, no joke, maybe 6 months. I would try again, fail, shelve it back again. And one day I did it, and it just clicked. It just fucking clicked. I started to understand the game's punishing yet fair language. I started to truly obsess over the game. It became all I wanted to consume for months and months. To this day, almost ten years later, I buy and obsess over every From Software game as soon as it releases.
Of course, it's not just the mechanical loop of dying, learning, dying, learning, [...] and eventually succeding. It's about the aesthetic too. From the encounters to the colors, from the item descriptions to the architecture, Dark Souls consistently oozes the same feeling: that this is a world that should have died a long time ago, it's nature tampered by the hubris of a god-man.
Of course, one needs to mention how these two factors, gameplay and aesthetic, converge beautifully: nothing in this game that makes it a game goes unexplained. Why do you keep spawing in a checkpoint after getting killed? There's an explanation for that, integral to the plot in fact. Why do you consume health potions and how are they possible? Same thing. The game simutaneously explains that which for long in games has never been explained and does not explain that which is not necessary, leaving you to fill those gaps.
And the level design! The first time I kicked down that ladder and saw that I was back into the Undead Burg, I came with my brain. It's a shame that in all othe games From Software went hard with the teleportation thing, which didn't made the tightness of Dark Souls 1's level design a necessity any longer, because I do miss it.
By far the dubious part of this game is the broken multiplayer. I had a lot of fun with it, but it's just bad in terms of balancing. But maybe balancing was never the point? I don't know, all I do know whas that this game was way too lenient on back-stabbing and INT/DEX builds.
In the end, Dark Souls is a beautiful meditation on the ambivalence of persistence. It is in one hand what keeps this crumbling world in agony. But it is also the hope that everything can be made anew and fresh again. Or is it all for nothing? Such as in life, you will never know.
I played this game two, maybe three years away from DS2's release. It was still fairly unknown among gamer circles in my country. Browsing through the internet I would often see 'discussions' about it. And, of course, those two cursed words - 'git gud'. Being just a kid with self-esteem problems, I was no stranger to the need to impress anonymous people on the internet. So I bought it.
One day it arrived by mail and I started playing. I think my first impression was of the open-ended nature of the narration in the opening cinematic. I do recognize it's immense beauty today - but then it just striked me as bizarre, somewhat ankward. Naturally, this feeling of alienation would only deepen with the nature of the game.
'Why am I a wrinkled old poop? I thought I was a cute dude.'
'Why this guy just threw a corpse from the ceiling?'
'There was a key? Why didn't he just threw the key?!'
And so on.
Oh, the animations were clunky. The lightning and textures we're just fucking awful. 'Why is this game so popular?', I thought. Eventually, after a lot of spaghetti, I got to the Taurus Demon. Being a little baby raised by Skyrim and Devil Mary Cry on potato-easy mode, I got my ass handed back to me multiple times. It got so unbearable that one day I just shelved the game for, no joke, maybe 6 months. I would try again, fail, shelve it back again. And one day I did it, and it just clicked. It just fucking clicked. I started to understand the game's punishing yet fair language. I started to truly obsess over the game. It became all I wanted to consume for months and months. To this day, almost ten years later, I buy and obsess over every From Software game as soon as it releases.
Of course, it's not just the mechanical loop of dying, learning, dying, learning, [...] and eventually succeding. It's about the aesthetic too. From the encounters to the colors, from the item descriptions to the architecture, Dark Souls consistently oozes the same feeling: that this is a world that should have died a long time ago, it's nature tampered by the hubris of a god-man.
Of course, one needs to mention how these two factors, gameplay and aesthetic, converge beautifully: nothing in this game that makes it a game goes unexplained. Why do you keep spawing in a checkpoint after getting killed? There's an explanation for that, integral to the plot in fact. Why do you consume health potions and how are they possible? Same thing. The game simutaneously explains that which for long in games has never been explained and does not explain that which is not necessary, leaving you to fill those gaps.
And the level design! The first time I kicked down that ladder and saw that I was back into the Undead Burg, I came with my brain. It's a shame that in all othe games From Software went hard with the teleportation thing, which didn't made the tightness of Dark Souls 1's level design a necessity any longer, because I do miss it.
By far the dubious part of this game is the broken multiplayer. I had a lot of fun with it, but it's just bad in terms of balancing. But maybe balancing was never the point? I don't know, all I do know whas that this game was way too lenient on back-stabbing and INT/DEX builds.
In the end, Dark Souls is a beautiful meditation on the ambivalence of persistence. It is in one hand what keeps this crumbling world in agony. But it is also the hope that everything can be made anew and fresh again. Or is it all for nothing? Such as in life, you will never know.