Dark Souls is Dark Souls, and Dark Souls is the hardest and bestest game ever made.
Well, so I hear. You see, the thing about DS1 is it is far messier and more purely enjoyable than the online circlejerk may lead you to assume. It’s by no means easy, but I think the original Dark Souls is a fun and fair challenge that still feels legitimately revolutionary when placed in the context of its initial 2011 release, and not some bone-destroying grindfest where you’ll need every ounce of your being to succeed. It’s also not a perfect object. I’ll spend plenty of time on why its so great, but cracks begin to show all over the game, especially in its back leg. Ultimately, it’s the best kind of flawed game, one that pushes the boundaries of its style and budget to such extremes that the stretch marks are still visible in the final product.
Let’s start with the difficulty. Difficulty is such a, well, difficult thing to manage as a game designer, and to the credit of Miyazaki and his team, they do manage to strike a strong balance. Most of DS1’s bosses pose a decent challenge that’ll force a handful of attempts, but every attempt feels like an active learning experience towards your victory. Exploration is never free and maintains this incredible sense of tension in which every fight against even the most lowly of foes could lead to your end. I think this gives the ‘runbacks’ (as the kids call the between boss attempt traversals from a bonfire to a fog-gate) this excellent sense of mastery, as you gain total dominion over the environment to the point that you’ve turned it into a kind of obstacle course. Speaking of the environments, especially in the front half of the game, they are just a joy to traverse. Even (especially) Blightown. Trust me we’ll get to it.
But at the end of the day, despite the reputation, it's never unnecessarily tough. Even the most infamous of fights (especially the two separate times you fight a 2v1) aren't realistically going to take more than a half hour of your life. My theory on where this gets its ‘prepare to die’ name, is in its first few hours. Most people hit a hard brick wall early on (from my preliminary research this is most often Bell Gargoyles, though for me it was actually the Taurus Demon, rat bastard), where the skill floor of the game rapidly rises, and your ability is simply forced to match it. Of course, this is just a matter of this series’ trial-by-fire approach to preparing its players for later challenges, but I truly stand by the idea that DS1 spikes too high and too fast. Far too many players who absolutely would not find this game to be unmanageable will get turned off by the early difficulty spike and may never return. I’m only so sure of this because it happened to me multiple times! I’m stubborn and I wanted to like it, so I came back, but achievement data shows many do not. This is a damn shame only because once this thing properly gets into its extended second act, it sings.
One part of this is the much-praised interconnectivity. I’m well aware of how much I’m preaching to the choir when I say it but how can I brush past the fact that every moment the game loops back on itself both surprised and amazed me? Every conspicuous elevator ride into Firelink Shrine music beginning into “holy shit I’m back here again how the fuck” is one of the best moments you’ll ever get in a game. The level design is some of the best ever in immersing the player into a fantasy world because it allows it to feel so lived in.
You know what, I’ll even extend that to two of the most maligned sections of this game. Blightown and Sen’s Fortress are delightfully evil masterclasses of traversal, in which my favourite dickhead in the entire world Hidetaka Miyazaki forces the player to 3D platform in tight obstacle-heavy and projectile-ridden areas, with a character that can only jump insofar as they can perform a jump roll while sprinting. These sections are a total blast and have some expertly placed bonfires (though Sen’s is slightly hidden) to make the experience far more doable than it may immediately appear. I will concede that these sections were very close to too much (e.g. if the Poison Dart guys did notable knockback and/or respawned we might be having some issues [though the most twisted part of me kind of wished they did respawn]), but the needle is just barely thread. Allow yourself a little bit of patience, don’t get hit by the slowly moving and easily dodgeable axes more than a few times and you’ll find these sections far more fun than many do. To be honest, the only actively weak sections are all post-lordvessel, but we’ll get to that.
Even at its weakest, this game looks stunning. I played the remaster and while I did notice the overbearing bloom that many have discussed, I thoroughly enjoyed the almost smudgy look of the whole thing. The environments are gorgeous (especially the forests MY GOD) and you find yourself sinking even deeper into this world with how of a piece the art direction and enemy design is. I adore that you can essentially always travel to a place if you can see it. It never quite sunk into me before, but this is a seriously amazing aesthetic achievement.
And the bosses! Perhaps the most famous element of this series. Unsurprisingly, the first leg of bossfights is really fun. Once you get past your first proper roadblock, you’ll find yourself cutting these guys like butter. Surprisingly enough, the bosses in DS1 are rarely intensely tough but are always welcome challenges that fit to theme and cap off their areas superbly. There's also this incredible sensation that the game is stacking the deck in your favour with the boss arenas. So much of the geometry is useful! You can position them above you to sneak a heal or position them around a pillar to avoid attacks or plunge that fucking Capra demon to hell off a staircase or watch that dickhead Taurus Demon jump off the ledge like the idiot he is and so much more. It's incredible how effectively the game maintains the illusion of 'unfairness' despite this, and I love how you end up with these light-bulb moments where (e.g.) the O&S fight suddenly feels like a 2v7 when you notice how powerful your pillar friends are. It's a real magic trick. But when I said always welcome, I meant mostly, and even then I only meant the first half. There are some serious issues to put a pin in for later regarding some of these guys, and DS1 does have a surprising amount of actively weak fights, but on the whole it’s certainly a positive. How could I possibly pretend to dislike the boss fights in a game where you get to fight Ornstein and Smough? Come on.
Before I get to my quibbles, I’d like to quibble instead about Gamers. That’s right, you guys. Ornstein and Smough is an awesome fight, no doubt about it, and certainly one of the more challenging in the game, but by no means the backbreaking time waster I thought it would be based on the decade-plus of YouTube comments I’d seen. It was not the first boss I felt this way about. Same with the Bell Gargoyles, and same again with the Capra Demon (though I must clarify I'm not insinuating this fight isn't complete dogshit), and then I started to spot a pattern. Do other people stay locked on all the time? This is something that’s haunted me throughout my entire playthrough, and a legitimate issue with the way this game teaches its players. That’s right, this was a quibble the whole time, I got you! The lock-on feature is useful, undoubtedly. I found the most mileage out of it against airborne enemies (the bug thingies in Blightown, The Bell Gargoyles’ first phase) just because I couldn’t quite spin the camera around fast enough to keep up, but that was it for me. My problem with lock-on is that it massively disincentivises players from learning proper camera management and how to aim their swings consistently IF (and only if) you get into the habit of always using it. This is no big deal until you get to these bossfights with multiple targets that you simply have to deal with (unlike say Nito, whose skeletons will just get epically owned by him) but when you do, you will be at a massive disadvantage. Not because you can’t simply press the button to stop locking on, but because when you do, you’ll be ill-equipped to utilise the radically changed abilities of your character. For me, locking on basically never happens, and I much prefer to contort my right hand to be able to always move the camera and sprint in all directions. I found myself much more mobile (and my view of enemies much more dynamic) than I think many players do. So that’s my one piece of advice for you, lock-on sure, but do so sparingly, or you’ll set yourself up for failure with the multi-character bosses. To attempt to wrangle this rant into a point, I don’t think the game tries at all to teach players early on not to lock on all the time, and it allows the players to fall into bad habits with it too easily.
While I’m complaining, we simply must address the elephant in the code. Post O&S, this game properly nosedives, not to say it becomes unfun to play, or that it’s lazy or anything like that, but the bossfights become noticeably weaker, asset reuse becomes palpable and that delectable interconnectivity vanishes completely. Also, you have to play through Tomb of The Giants now. Not cool guys.
I think these problems are best demonstrated by the best of the Lord Soul fights, the Four Kings. These fellas reside in an area known simply as ‘The Abyss.’ Getting there requires exploration through a very cool and distinct area. The runback is an obstacle course in the truest sense, and the titular Abyss is seriously intelligent design. Its void leaves you entirely without depth perception, meaning you can’t ever quite nail down how large or far away the boss is until you're suddenly getting skewered by it. Very cool stuff. Additionally, this boss encourages a rush-down heavy playstyle that is very distinct from most of the duck-and-weave gameplay that I was used to (shields are for cowards after all, two-hand all day, dodge under everything etc.), and I enjoyed a challenge that forced me to push up against the generally slow pace of gameplay. What you may not notice, amidst so much awesome stuff, is that this boss is the same asset copy-pasted a bunch of times in a featureless void. It’s an incredibly creative example of it, but it’s still blatant scrambling from a development team fresh out of time and money. That’s not so bad, but when you get to the Crystal Caves or especially Lost Izalith, you noticeably feel the game suffer a little. These sections are pretty pathetic, feeling underrealized while containing a boss that just doesn’t stack up to the rest of the game. Seath is such a pushover it’s not even funny, and the Bed of Chaos is less a boss fight and more a low-tier Mario Maker troll level. It’ll kill you once or twice, but it certainly is not earned.
Then there’s Gwyn. A mad king in a desolate dying world. It seems only spiritually right that his fight would be both one of the harder ones and just that little bit too easy. Any sense of an epic conclusion is long gone by the time you enter the gate. Then the music starts. That melancholic piano is still ringing in your ears when the final cutscene plays, and it leaves the game on such a wonderfully bitter note that it reverberates back through the final few hours. It’s yet another artistic justification for lacking resources, but they pull it off in spades. I said it before, but even when stretched too thin, this game achieves so so much.
Dark Souls remains as weird, inconsistent and idiosyncratic as the day it was released, and I sincerely hope that people aren’t dismissing it out of hand for later projects. This is an excellent starting point for getting into the FromSoft canon, and my only real problem with it is that it tries quite hard to disguise that fact. Play it, love it, hate it, complain that it isn’t as fast-paced as Elden Ring, do whatever you like, but recognise that it has earned its place among the universally recognised best of the medium. Right behind Angry Birds Epic.
Well, so I hear. You see, the thing about DS1 is it is far messier and more purely enjoyable than the online circlejerk may lead you to assume. It’s by no means easy, but I think the original Dark Souls is a fun and fair challenge that still feels legitimately revolutionary when placed in the context of its initial 2011 release, and not some bone-destroying grindfest where you’ll need every ounce of your being to succeed. It’s also not a perfect object. I’ll spend plenty of time on why its so great, but cracks begin to show all over the game, especially in its back leg. Ultimately, it’s the best kind of flawed game, one that pushes the boundaries of its style and budget to such extremes that the stretch marks are still visible in the final product.
Let’s start with the difficulty. Difficulty is such a, well, difficult thing to manage as a game designer, and to the credit of Miyazaki and his team, they do manage to strike a strong balance. Most of DS1’s bosses pose a decent challenge that’ll force a handful of attempts, but every attempt feels like an active learning experience towards your victory. Exploration is never free and maintains this incredible sense of tension in which every fight against even the most lowly of foes could lead to your end. I think this gives the ‘runbacks’ (as the kids call the between boss attempt traversals from a bonfire to a fog-gate) this excellent sense of mastery, as you gain total dominion over the environment to the point that you’ve turned it into a kind of obstacle course. Speaking of the environments, especially in the front half of the game, they are just a joy to traverse. Even (especially) Blightown. Trust me we’ll get to it.
But at the end of the day, despite the reputation, it's never unnecessarily tough. Even the most infamous of fights (especially the two separate times you fight a 2v1) aren't realistically going to take more than a half hour of your life. My theory on where this gets its ‘prepare to die’ name, is in its first few hours. Most people hit a hard brick wall early on (from my preliminary research this is most often Bell Gargoyles, though for me it was actually the Taurus Demon, rat bastard), where the skill floor of the game rapidly rises, and your ability is simply forced to match it. Of course, this is just a matter of this series’ trial-by-fire approach to preparing its players for later challenges, but I truly stand by the idea that DS1 spikes too high and too fast. Far too many players who absolutely would not find this game to be unmanageable will get turned off by the early difficulty spike and may never return. I’m only so sure of this because it happened to me multiple times! I’m stubborn and I wanted to like it, so I came back, but achievement data shows many do not. This is a damn shame only because once this thing properly gets into its extended second act, it sings.
One part of this is the much-praised interconnectivity. I’m well aware of how much I’m preaching to the choir when I say it but how can I brush past the fact that every moment the game loops back on itself both surprised and amazed me? Every conspicuous elevator ride into Firelink Shrine music beginning into “holy shit I’m back here again how the fuck” is one of the best moments you’ll ever get in a game. The level design is some of the best ever in immersing the player into a fantasy world because it allows it to feel so lived in.
You know what, I’ll even extend that to two of the most maligned sections of this game. Blightown and Sen’s Fortress are delightfully evil masterclasses of traversal, in which my favourite dickhead in the entire world Hidetaka Miyazaki forces the player to 3D platform in tight obstacle-heavy and projectile-ridden areas, with a character that can only jump insofar as they can perform a jump roll while sprinting. These sections are a total blast and have some expertly placed bonfires (though Sen’s is slightly hidden) to make the experience far more doable than it may immediately appear. I will concede that these sections were very close to too much (e.g. if the Poison Dart guys did notable knockback and/or respawned we might be having some issues [though the most twisted part of me kind of wished they did respawn]), but the needle is just barely thread. Allow yourself a little bit of patience, don’t get hit by the slowly moving and easily dodgeable axes more than a few times and you’ll find these sections far more fun than many do. To be honest, the only actively weak sections are all post-lordvessel, but we’ll get to that.
Even at its weakest, this game looks stunning. I played the remaster and while I did notice the overbearing bloom that many have discussed, I thoroughly enjoyed the almost smudgy look of the whole thing. The environments are gorgeous (especially the forests MY GOD) and you find yourself sinking even deeper into this world with how of a piece the art direction and enemy design is. I adore that you can essentially always travel to a place if you can see it. It never quite sunk into me before, but this is a seriously amazing aesthetic achievement.
And the bosses! Perhaps the most famous element of this series. Unsurprisingly, the first leg of bossfights is really fun. Once you get past your first proper roadblock, you’ll find yourself cutting these guys like butter. Surprisingly enough, the bosses in DS1 are rarely intensely tough but are always welcome challenges that fit to theme and cap off their areas superbly. There's also this incredible sensation that the game is stacking the deck in your favour with the boss arenas. So much of the geometry is useful! You can position them above you to sneak a heal or position them around a pillar to avoid attacks or plunge that fucking Capra demon to hell off a staircase or watch that dickhead Taurus Demon jump off the ledge like the idiot he is and so much more. It's incredible how effectively the game maintains the illusion of 'unfairness' despite this, and I love how you end up with these light-bulb moments where (e.g.) the O&S fight suddenly feels like a 2v7 when you notice how powerful your pillar friends are. It's a real magic trick. But when I said always welcome, I meant mostly, and even then I only meant the first half. There are some serious issues to put a pin in for later regarding some of these guys, and DS1 does have a surprising amount of actively weak fights, but on the whole it’s certainly a positive. How could I possibly pretend to dislike the boss fights in a game where you get to fight Ornstein and Smough? Come on.
Before I get to my quibbles, I’d like to quibble instead about Gamers. That’s right, you guys. Ornstein and Smough is an awesome fight, no doubt about it, and certainly one of the more challenging in the game, but by no means the backbreaking time waster I thought it would be based on the decade-plus of YouTube comments I’d seen. It was not the first boss I felt this way about. Same with the Bell Gargoyles, and same again with the Capra Demon (though I must clarify I'm not insinuating this fight isn't complete dogshit), and then I started to spot a pattern. Do other people stay locked on all the time? This is something that’s haunted me throughout my entire playthrough, and a legitimate issue with the way this game teaches its players. That’s right, this was a quibble the whole time, I got you! The lock-on feature is useful, undoubtedly. I found the most mileage out of it against airborne enemies (the bug thingies in Blightown, The Bell Gargoyles’ first phase) just because I couldn’t quite spin the camera around fast enough to keep up, but that was it for me. My problem with lock-on is that it massively disincentivises players from learning proper camera management and how to aim their swings consistently IF (and only if) you get into the habit of always using it. This is no big deal until you get to these bossfights with multiple targets that you simply have to deal with (unlike say Nito, whose skeletons will just get epically owned by him) but when you do, you will be at a massive disadvantage. Not because you can’t simply press the button to stop locking on, but because when you do, you’ll be ill-equipped to utilise the radically changed abilities of your character. For me, locking on basically never happens, and I much prefer to contort my right hand to be able to always move the camera and sprint in all directions. I found myself much more mobile (and my view of enemies much more dynamic) than I think many players do. So that’s my one piece of advice for you, lock-on sure, but do so sparingly, or you’ll set yourself up for failure with the multi-character bosses. To attempt to wrangle this rant into a point, I don’t think the game tries at all to teach players early on not to lock on all the time, and it allows the players to fall into bad habits with it too easily.
While I’m complaining, we simply must address the elephant in the code. Post O&S, this game properly nosedives, not to say it becomes unfun to play, or that it’s lazy or anything like that, but the bossfights become noticeably weaker, asset reuse becomes palpable and that delectable interconnectivity vanishes completely. Also, you have to play through Tomb of The Giants now. Not cool guys.
I think these problems are best demonstrated by the best of the Lord Soul fights, the Four Kings. These fellas reside in an area known simply as ‘The Abyss.’ Getting there requires exploration through a very cool and distinct area. The runback is an obstacle course in the truest sense, and the titular Abyss is seriously intelligent design. Its void leaves you entirely without depth perception, meaning you can’t ever quite nail down how large or far away the boss is until you're suddenly getting skewered by it. Very cool stuff. Additionally, this boss encourages a rush-down heavy playstyle that is very distinct from most of the duck-and-weave gameplay that I was used to (shields are for cowards after all, two-hand all day, dodge under everything etc.), and I enjoyed a challenge that forced me to push up against the generally slow pace of gameplay. What you may not notice, amidst so much awesome stuff, is that this boss is the same asset copy-pasted a bunch of times in a featureless void. It’s an incredibly creative example of it, but it’s still blatant scrambling from a development team fresh out of time and money. That’s not so bad, but when you get to the Crystal Caves or especially Lost Izalith, you noticeably feel the game suffer a little. These sections are pretty pathetic, feeling underrealized while containing a boss that just doesn’t stack up to the rest of the game. Seath is such a pushover it’s not even funny, and the Bed of Chaos is less a boss fight and more a low-tier Mario Maker troll level. It’ll kill you once or twice, but it certainly is not earned.
Then there’s Gwyn. A mad king in a desolate dying world. It seems only spiritually right that his fight would be both one of the harder ones and just that little bit too easy. Any sense of an epic conclusion is long gone by the time you enter the gate. Then the music starts. That melancholic piano is still ringing in your ears when the final cutscene plays, and it leaves the game on such a wonderfully bitter note that it reverberates back through the final few hours. It’s yet another artistic justification for lacking resources, but they pull it off in spades. I said it before, but even when stretched too thin, this game achieves so so much.
Dark Souls remains as weird, inconsistent and idiosyncratic as the day it was released, and I sincerely hope that people aren’t dismissing it out of hand for later projects. This is an excellent starting point for getting into the FromSoft canon, and my only real problem with it is that it tries quite hard to disguise that fact. Play it, love it, hate it, complain that it isn’t as fast-paced as Elden Ring, do whatever you like, but recognise that it has earned its place among the universally recognised best of the medium. Right behind Angry Birds Epic.