I spent the better part of half a decade in my teen years trashtalking this game. "It's artificially difficult just for tryhards and sweats to be able to lord over people who enjoying gaming as a casual hobby and say git gud" was my usual talking point when the game came up. My friend even bought me the game on Steam, which I tried beating the tutorial boss on Mouse+Keyboard before promptly quitting and whining about my lack of a controller.

Fast forward a few years; the technology has been developed to make Dark Souls PTDE accessible for even MKB players, even if only barely. A streamer I watch had swapped off of the game I found him through at the time and turned out to be a speedrunner of these games. I like speedruns, I thought, so why not. It actually even looked kind of fun! So I reinstalled the game, got DSfix and the MKB mod, and for the next forty hours I learned a valuable life lesson.

Turns out this game is peak.

This was the day I also discovered I love the sweet release of adrenaline and dopamine produced by triumphing over sometimes bullshit difficulty and repetitive tedium in pursuit of perfection.

There's a lot more I could say about this game. How it's a perfect analogy of depression, how its about triumphing over the self, and that it's okay to let go and to never lose sight of yourself. I think those topics have all been thoroughly covered before, so nah.

The moral of this story is teenagers are fucking stupid and never listen to them and especially not their opinions. They don't know what they're talking about ever. They just be making shit up.