Alright guys, cards on the table – Dark Souls represents so much of what I love and aspire to in videogames that not loving it felt like some kind of divine prank. In 2018, I finally got my hands on this Super Metroid/3D Zelda/Classicvania hybrid, complete with immaculate, intertwining level design, nuanced environmental storytelling, and a deep respect for the player's curiosity, persistence and attention span, and my impression was all the way down the middle of the road. Was it the jank? The stagnant, entropic world? The overblown expectations from myself and others developed over years of game design-y conversations with friends? Was it just too hard? Most of Dark Souls went by with a sigh instead of a smile, and I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to puzzle out exactly why. After beating Ornstein and Smough by waiting an eternity for their recovery animations to line up enough times, the game simply lost me, and not without some hard feelings.
Just so you know in advance, this review is going to be terrible. It’s going to be long and rambling and nitpicky, because I’ve struggled for years to figure out how to articulate my opinion on this game. However any of this may come across, I’m not trying to tell you you’re wrong, I’ve just gotta work this out for myself.
I think I was afraid of what it could mean for me to not resonate completely with this pillar of a medium I've devoted so much of myself to. If Dark Souls was not for me, was I in the wrong place? If I diverted from the lessons of this biblical text, could I make something of worth to anyone but myself? I had to pick it apart and ascertain some reason. Sounds ridiculous when I put it that way, but Dark Souls seemed to haunt me no matter where I went. The series' values turned up time and again in discussions with my professors and peers. Like the game's map, there seemed no topic that couldn't bend back around to Dark Souls, so it was inevitable that I'd be drawn back to Firelink Shrine myself. After all, it's a synthesis of so many textbook design concepts that it has become the textbook, but for me, this leads to some of the game's bigger problems.
Before we unpack any of that, though, let me first say that I found more to enjoy this time around than before, but a lot of that has to do with the amount of knowledge I had going in. People online like to make a big stink about how cryptic the first Zelda can be, but I struggle to imagine how I might've learned half of Dark Souls' mechanics just by playing the game. Noah Caldwell-Gervais' excellent video about the trilogy centers around how deceptively accessible it is, and perhaps I went in with the wrong mentality, but I didn't quite find this to be the case. From kindling bonfires and summoning spirits to unraveling the nature of the game's equipment and stat mechanics, Dark Souls either mires its details in maximalist menus, or leaves them to the birds. I want to emphasize that I don't have an issue seeking out external sources or making use of prior knowledge when it comes to delving into a game's deepest depths (I'm one of those weirdos who replays games an awful lot, often a great game only truly blossoms after the first experience), but without a foothold in the nature of the system or what it expected of me, it didn’t seem possible to make interesting decisions. Dark Souls’ solution is to bring the internet into the world, allowing players to offer each other tips and hints through messages left on the floor, but, as with most internet-related things, your mileage may vary. Having said that, I absolutely respect the confidence of this approach, and the intention to get people talking about its systems. The experience of discovery on a first playthrough sometimes equals and even outweighs the joy of making decisions with knowledge of a game’s intricacies on a replay, but in Dark Souls’ case, I don’t know if that applies for me. Maybe that’s an ego thing, I don’t want to have to ask someone what “kindling” is and what it does, I don’t need someone telling me how “poise” works, or what the magic system entails, or that kicking can be used to bypass enemy defenses, I’d like to be able to learn at least most of this stuff on the back of my own perseverance. Yes, one of my problems with Dark Souls is also one of my problems as a human being – I’m very bad at asking for help, and I’ll sooner resign myself to a challenge I don’t enjoy than swallow my pride and reach out to others (yes, I have seen Neon Genesis Evangelion). Dark Souls knows it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and I know that’s one of its strengths as a cultural artifact, but I think it’d be a little more considerate if it didn’t make me confront my personality flaws in the process. Jokes(?) aside, I’ve often heard the game compared to Super Metroid, but in this regard, I’d say they’re almost polar opposites. On a first Metroid playthrough, the process of learning where everything is through discovery results in constant upgrades and lessons which keep the player almost too powerful in an effort to teach them the lay of the land. With that knowledge, they can take the game’s challenge to beat it in faster, tougher, and more creative ways on subsequent attempts. This isn’t quite the arc that Dark Souls is after, but the resulting effect on returning playthroughs is similar.
Using the Master Key and some persistence, I skipped the Capra Demon and the Gaping Dragon and rang the Bells of Awakening in just a few hours. I charged up Sen's Fortress and slammed my head against Ornstein and Smough for a second time. Having accumulated some suspicions about Frampt's intentions (both intuitively and having gathered a few tidbits from outside sources), I avoided him and decided to seek out another way, and somehow managed to actually find it (though it’s a bit of a shame that the objectives themselves aren’t any different, only the sequence). However mixed my feelings might’ve been, I wouldn’t have been caught dead deriding Dark Souls’ level design even in 2018. It really is a triumph of digital architecture whose exploration is, for me, the game’s greatest joy. Watching it always manage to somehow loop back around to Firelink Shrine is almost a running gag, and navigating its ever-increasing network of shortcuts to tear from one side of the map to the other in search of leads to new discoveries is engrossing. I’ll take its tightly wound approach over Elden Ring just about any day for the rest of my life. Its sense of total seamlessness never fails to amaze me, as is its Symphony of the Night-like seeming endlessness. Each individual area plays more like a classic, straightforward Castlevania level in the moment, but fits into the larger world in a more intricate way. When Dark Souls is immersing the player in its creative variety, its shortcut-full pathways, its internally logical spider web of a world, it’s at its absolute best. I often viewed Dark Souls’ setting as a pastiche of dark fantasy tropes, but Lordran always manages to take ownership over whatever cultural touchstones it swipes, both in its lore, and the ways they’re implemented into the game design. The skeletons in the graveyard to the left of Firelink which pummel every unsuspecting player are the videogame skeletons, as is the dragon which makes its powerful entrance in the Undead Burg. Mario Odyssey’s dragon will forever be known as the “Dark Souls Dragon” (despite having as much in common with the one from Shrek), because Dark Souls owns videogame dragons now, that’s just the world we live in. Every archetype is presented with a sense of grandeur and scale, both visually and mechanically, which unites them under Dark Souls’ banner. That creative variety extends to so many of its scenarios and locations as well. Ceaseless Discharge, Sif, and Priscilla all go out of their way to provide memorable experiences beyond simple tests of skill, as do the trickery of Sen’s Fortress and the horror of The Abyss (and it seems obvious to me now that Ornstein and Smough are trying to get the player to bring their own buddy along to even out the odds). The Hydra is an incredibly clumsy encounter, but I’ll be darned if it won’t forever reverberate in my brain as the hydra for the rest of my days. As I became comfortable with the game’s systems and its medium-speed rhythm, and accumulated enough resources to expand my breadth of possible strategies, all of these things became far easier to appreciate. Prior knowledge of the map allowed me to make interesting decisions about which areas and objectives to tackle and in what order. It’s satisfying to develop plans and map out routes, develop my character and make progress on my own terms (which goes to show just how much Dragon Quest III is hiding in Dark Souls), but the satisfaction of actually overcoming the obstacles within this world varies wildly.
Dark Souls' combat generates a lot of praise for its sense of weight, the balance of its stamina system, and the satisfaction of overcoming its punishing enemy design, but it's a pretty passive affair. The level of punishment only further prolongs the process of waiting for the enemy to attack and retaliating yourself, and a good lot of the rogues gallery isn't receptive to the game's only two counter tactics, it's inconsistent. I can't say so with any kind of authority, but one on one systems like this most resonate with me when they're tugs of war between contenders for moments of dominance, but that sense of back and forth only vaguely applies against the most lowly of foes. The system is serviceable for most encounters (at its best, it's about provoking the enemy to leave an opening at the cost of making the environment itself more perilous to navigate (see: Quelaag)) but the dearth of depth is felt as the game grows long. There's little means of pressuring the opponent and they only occasionally react to taking damage, so encounters scarcely branch out of a neutral state. To be clear, I'm not defining this as some sort of hard and fast rule. After all, Hyper Light Drifter is also about dodging and attacking enemies who hardly flinch, but the perspective and player moveset allows any given moment to be far more active, enemies don't have to rotate to track the player's movement, and every opponent can be designed with the knowledge that they'll be responding to the same set of tools. It's particularly because this system relies so heavily on animations that it feels lacking in this way. Against most enemies, the best method of responding to an attack animation cycle is by rolling, and, with the exception of some environmental obstacles, that's about as dynamic as it ever gets. You roll at the right times and punish, but not so much that you'll run out of stamina and find yourself unable to roll away. No doubt this is a consequence of the level of build variety on offer. The game is more interested in delivering a swiss army knife than a singular, refined tool – you can cast spells and wear different kinds of armor and wield any combination of weapons in both hands – but as Dark Souls' most pronounced form of interaction, it doesn't have much going for it.
(As an aside – I’ve heard it compared to Punch-Out!!, but that game better rewards successful attacks by retaining the player’s stamina and causing hitstun, and mastery requires counter-punching and acting on even the slightest tells. Weighing whether a body-blow, face punch or star uppercut is the right move in any given situation is a more impactful decision than any light or heavy attack in Dark Souls, and the right move at the right time allows the player to press an advantage. Some attacks are best dealt with by blocking, countering, or ducking underneath them. Even a wayward punch at the wrong moment incurs a response from the opponent, rather than being ignored outright. Of course, this aspect of Dark Souls’ combat has the effect of evoking helplessness in the face of insurmountable odds, but it makes for a repetitive and tedious dynamic)
By and large, I'd say the game is well served by its degree of punishment. It lends a real sense of credibility to every obstacle the player comes across, but where difficulty often reveals the deepest nuances of a system, the one-dimensionality and tedium of the combat is only exacerbated by this decision. I'm only waxing on about it because Dark Souls leaves so much in the hands of this system, it wouldn't bother me to the same degree if it weren't such a significant focus. Thirteen years out from Demon's Souls, I'm sure this is old news for a lot of you, and yeah, I've come to agree that it's most charitably viewed as a vehicle for Dark Souls' method of delivering atmosphere and varied situations. If there's any benefit to be had from this prioritization of breadth over depth, that's it, and its best areas know this. The aforementioned Sen’s Fortress isn’t made of difficult combat encounters, but awkward walkways and hidden traps. Like so many of the game’s best setpieces, it doesn’t feel designed for the player’s convenience. The boss of the area is more like a climactic punctuation mark than a punishing fight meant to keep the player stuck for hours on end. The Iron Golem is one of the few who can be severely staggered, and given how easily the nearby bonfire can be missed, the tension comes more from the threat of having to navigate the entire tower again than the battle itself. The Painted World of Ariamis is peppered with damaging, but squishy groups of enemies who can be deftly dealt with if the player keeps a clear head and some distance. It’s one of the most architecturally varied and visually enthralling environments in the game, and it’s capped off by a boss who requests the player leave her in peace. When all of the pieces align in just the right ways, Dark Souls achieves an immersive quality that just sings and keeps me arrested in its setting. I could just as easily romanticize many of the game’s other moments using this kind of language (the Bell Gargoyles, the Four Kings, the Capra Demon, the Tomb of the Giants, etc.) because it isn’t hard to make the process of overcoming punishing challenges sound glamorous, but that would be disingenuous, because the moment to moment experience can feel clumsy and unrewarding. Dark Souls is often best served by foregoing the traditional methods of challenge scaling, because while it does contain moments that reveal the potential of the combat system, It only works so well as a straightforward action game; I was best able to appreciate it when I stopped viewing it through this lens.
Dark Souls is very much cut from the cloth of its RPG forebears (the likes of which I have far more experience with today than I did at the outset), which should’ve been obvious, but I felt it best when I hit a wall in the form of The Four Kings, and ventured across every corner of the setting in pursuit of treasures, routes, and resources that could strengthen my character. The game put me up against several of what I could only describe as Dungeons and Dragons parties, and the more of them I encountered, the more I began to feel like I’d been doing a solo run of Dragon Quest III the whole time. I’ve never exactly felt that action games benefit from these kinds of progression systems, and frankly, I’m still not entirely swayed, but if we view Dark Souls’ stamina system as some iteration on Chrono Trigger’s ATB mechanics (it’s better compared to Secret of Mana in this respect, but let’s make like Dark Souls and roll with this comparison), all about taking turns and exchanging numbers with the added benefit of being able to avoid damage through positioning, it clicks together a little more nicely in my mind. Still not an entirely favorable comparison, since the most interesting feature of any RPG combat system is the management and development of multiple characters who all balance out each other’s weaknesses, though the multiplayer features do make an effort to close that gap. Given the prominence of Humanity (the resource), the online features, and the game’s inclination to punish death with the removal of the player’s Humanity, I’ve gotta wonder if the intention was to incentivize players to make use of multiplayer as often as possible, using Dark Souls as a digital D&D campaign. There are multiple boss encounters which might support this, but, conspiracy theorizing aside, that’s simply not how I’ve played it (or how the community treats it), so I can’t provide much insight either way.
Whatever the case may be, Dark Souls’ most basic progression system remains divisive in my mind, and for a number of reasons. Legend has it that Yuji Horii’s theory in implementing the concept of grinding experience in Dragon Quest was that the player’s hard work would always be rewarded with some gains. The player levels up immediately upon reaching the experience threshold, and doesn’t lose those points after dying, so they’re always making some sort of progress. Dark Souls punishes the players who need those experience points most, and best rewards those who don’t. Souls have to be retrieved after death at the spot where the player died, and that spot can be locked behind a boss door, at which point the only way to keep them is by killing the boss. If a new player manages to reach a boss door with a whole lotta souls, their best option is simply to turn back and level up their attributes. Of course, they’re not going to do this. At its worst, this mechanic disincentives players from leaving an area for later and pursuing another which might be more manageable for their skill level, because they’ve already invested so much in their current run (I consider this an issue in Hollow Knight as well, because it undermines the game’s breadth of exploration with an incentive to stay in one place).
The risk/reward aspect can be compelling, but I’ve gotta question how effective it is when the game has to offset that system with collectible items which contain large quantities of souls. Of course, losing experience points forever is a staple feature of the series, and I don’t consider it a misguided concept for a game that prides itself on developing an oppressive atmosphere through challenge and punishment, but some of its quirks don’t seem to be implemented to the benefit of the game’s progression system, or the player’s engagement with it. Yes, that’s part of the intent, and those aforementioned soul items and boss drops might make up the difference, but at that point, the motivation to engage enemies begins to erode somewhat. Several areas have sharp enemy placement which deeply discourages players from ignoring threats, but just as often, it’s optimal to run directly past them and get to the boss, and the risk of gaining souls by fighting punishing enemies isn’t worth it when the player is endeavoring to learn the boss’ patterns across various attempts. It might’ve been possible to mitigate this problem by applying some sort of multiplier to the boss’ souls for every enemy killed along the way, maybe with a cap to prevent the optimal strategy from becoming too tedious. It’s not impossible to bank experience in the boss’ room by repeatedly retrieving one’s souls on arrival, but that’s not particularly better than grinding the area’s enemies at any point after the boss’ defeat, so you tell me.
It’s taken me a while to come around to the lore, mostly because of how often fan culture seems to fixate on trivial details and factoids rather than the broader meaning of a work, but the effect of distributing the game’s story throughout its item descriptions, environmental design, and occasional NPC dialogue is a potent one. Even if I only gathered a fraction of Dark Souls’ background on my own, the cohesion between the game’s rules and its themes is admirable, and even without explanation, the aura of rot is palpable. This isn’t the last time FromSoft would explore stagnation as a result of undeath, a rebellion against the natural order which prevents the world from moving on and highlights the importance of death in the cycle of existence. It might not even be the best exploration of that particular idea, but this method of storytelling, the process of archaeologically piecing together the history of Lordran, feels more appropriate here than in any of its successors. In the past, I’ve derided Dark Souls’ lore for ultimately amounting to little more than explanations for why bosses are sitting in rooms, just waiting for the player to kill them. For me, that quality undermined the verisimilitude of the setting, but that fails to account for the plots running underneath this basic structure. Solaire and Siegmeyer are on similar quests as the player, as are the various other travelers which can be confronted along the way. There are character motivations which drive subplots throughout Dark Souls, and that their quests parallel your own and similarly orbit around this stagnant setting serves to highlight that quality even further. The world is trapped in the Age of Fire, and the only people left with any kind of agency are those seeking an end to the curse of the undead (and more often than not, they succumb to the madness as well). It’s a no less convenient premise for a videogame, but it’s also uniquely suited to being conveyed through this medium. Its greatest disappointment is that either ending or prolonging the Age of Fire requires the same set of steps, simply shuffled around. These actions don’t reflect the differences in motivation behind them, and one might say that’s indicative of the fact that both goals are equally suspect, but that seems a little generous. Still, I’m willing to forgive that concession for the sake of providing an equally engaging experience regardless of the player’s decision. At the very least, it’s not an unreasonable solution.
Here’s the twist that, for some of you, might discredit that whole heap of words you’ve so generously combed through (thank you for that, by the way, you’re looking great). Right now, I’m sitting in the Tomb of the Giants, right in front of Nito’s fog door. I’ve been sitting here for the last two days, without progressing, just trying to unpack everything I’ve felt over the cumulative fifty nine hours I’ve spent with Dark Souls. Am I going Hollow? I used to play this game while listening to “Boy Oh Boy” from LISA: The Painful, because its dedication to silence bored me as much as its combat. I don’t do that anymore, I don’t even hate the fighting system now. Dark Souls is a whole lot of ancient, timeless game design principles swimming in a vat of acid. They rarely coalesce into something greater, but on the rare occasion that every ingredient is balanced just right, there’s a real magic that can’t be denied. Almost everything that Dark Souls attempts is done better in other places, but its level design and premise and its best moments are worth the experience, and, if nothing else, seeing those ideas come together in real time, through uninterrupted gameplay, is thoroughly novel. I’m not certain I’d have returned to Dark Souls at all, though, without the knowledge that every last one of my nitpicks and criticisms would be validated by a certain other FromSoft game. As far as I’m concerned, Sekiro was Hidetaka Miyazaki’s gesture to me, personally, that I wasn’t a moral failure for dropping his most famous game. Maybe we’ll talk about that one some other time, but for now, I stand before Nito, weighing my options as Anubis weighs hearts on a cheap kitchen scale. Do I care enough to see it through? Has this long and rambling inner monologue spilled out every last drop of Dark Souls-related emotion in the depths of my own soul? Is this Age of Fire destined to burn on interminably, never to confidently reach a decisive verdict, or will I put it to rest and allow the Age of Dark to begin?
Does it matter?
POST-SCRIPT
After some time, I did finally find it in me to dust off the ol' save file and see it through to the end. Within an afternoon, the gods were slain and I was left staring down the credits — from Seath, back to Nito, and through the Bed of Chaos (with a bit of a detour taken to see what all this "Artorias" business has been about), before, at last, putting Gwyn out of his misery. Seems I'm far from the first to recognize how...shoddy this last leg of the journey feels. I'd always considered its surrounding gameplay systems a mixed bag, but there's a confidence and unity to Lordran's layout and aesthetic which begins to slip away, and the deeper I went, the more flummoxed I became that this was the same "Dark Souls" so often whispered about in the tomes. I never stopped respecting its desire to maintain visual and mechanical variety (so many works would kill for this level of creativity) but, even as someone who doesn't particularly love this game, it was a bit sad to see it reduced to a parody of itself. Running back through long, boring zones to engage in half-baked boss fights again and again, I had to wonder if anything was cut from the final product. These areas aren't without their moments, but at this point, it seemed Dark Souls was struggling as hard as I was to stay awake.
This is, of course, with the exception of the game's DLC and final areas. In the Sanctuary Guardian and Artorias, it's already possible to glimpse Hidetaka Miyazaki gearing up for Bloodborne and Dark Souls III (heck, Bloodborne himself is hanging out close by), with timing specifically built around acrobatic light rolling, tight windows for retaliation, and little opportunity for recovery. I've still not been converted into an outright fan of this highly evasive style of 3D combat, with its unflinching bosses and more or less prescribed moments for offense and defense (which isn't to dismiss the game's build and weapon variety so much as it is to highlight the nature of the game's enemy design and stamina system), but I'd be lying if I said that the pace of these meat and potatoes heavy action setpieces weren't (quite literally) more my speed than almost anything else in the game (and it was especially cool to recognize that Sif had adopted many of her owner's techniques. That's Dark Souls for ya). Yeah, I do hold that the game is at its most engaging and interesting when it’s doing away with “traditional” methods of challenge scaling, but the Artorias gang makes a clean case. Their wind-ups and telegraphs were excellently done for the most part (and both have striking designs, even if one is just a straight-up Manticore), but I did note that both of these bosses had the ability to sometimes extend otherwise normal attacks into combos. This isn't anything insane on its own, but the severity of the game's stamina management and the inability to cancel actions once committed made this feature a little more questionable than it might've been otherwise. If the player can't reliably know when damage can be dealt and has to guess at whether the boss is finished attacking after every swing of the sword, attacks which can kill immediately and look identical to their single-hit variations, then every time the player waits for a combo that doesn't come, they've given up on some amount of progress through the fight, and every time they don't, they're putting themselves at risk. This isn’t the worst thing in the world, Artorias does always open up at the end of his combos, whenever they may arrive, but I found myself wishing those extended chains were given more distinct telegraphs to plan around and reward observant play. Gambling can be a welcome addition to a combat system, but I can't say I was thrilled to find it here, where I lacked a moveset dynamic enough to switch up my responses, and the stakes can involve immediate death and an inordinately long trek back to the arena. I don't consider this as big a problem against Artorias as, for example, the Margit boss fight in Elden Ring (where his combos will sometimes only come out if you decide to attack), but it was surprising to find this early in the FromSoft canon. I still had a good time against these bosses, but I thought I'd be thorough, since I spent so much time discussing my thoughts on the combat mechanics back in my last write-up. I'm aware there's more DLC stuff to be found beyond this point, but, for me, that may be better left to another life. It was time to leave.
The Kiln of the First Flame might just be one of the most striking pieces of visual storytelling in Dark Souls. Mounds upon mountains of grey ash surrounding a man too far gone to know just what he's wrought, or even what it is he's so bent on defending. Here, I wouldn't have needed the guidance of Darkstalker Kaathe to realize that Frampt and Gwynevere's cause was more than a little questionable, that linking the fire and continuing this age of stagnation and rot was nothing but a mad conservative dream. After finally managing to parry Gwyn's sword a whole fifteen times in a row (I didn't count), the future was left in my hands. In one last bit of gameplay/story integration, the act of linking the fire is identical to lighting a bonfire anywhere else in Lordran, only with a different text prompt. It tempts the player forward with a familiar sight, but I had no love for this place. I turned around and walked out of the chamber. Maybe this whole mess could've been prevented if I'd done so earlier. Then again, if the immediate start of New Game + is any indication after the credits, perhaps not.
And that was my Dark Souls. For all the time and attention I've given it in-game and in writing, I don't love this game. Some of the time, I don't even like it. More than anything, I'm fascinated by it as a work of world design, and as a cultural artifact. Fascinated enough to head down to Quelaag immediately after finishing the game and ring the second Bell of Awakening on New Game +, if for no other reason than some subconscious, poetic desire to leave this playthrough where it began. Still, I never did quite get to feel out and achieve a sense of oneness with the rhythm of Dark Souls' moment to moment gameplay, and only flickers of its emotional highs ever managed to truly land. To me, there's no question that From and Miyazaki would go on to make stronger, more consistent games which resonate more deeply with me (or at least one), but, as far as the rest of The World is concerned, they will always live in the shadow of this one. I'm glad I experienced it for myself from front to back, but I think it's high time I extinguished this weight from my mind and finally found it in me to walk away, even if I've gotta do it alone.
Just so you know in advance, this review is going to be terrible. It’s going to be long and rambling and nitpicky, because I’ve struggled for years to figure out how to articulate my opinion on this game. However any of this may come across, I’m not trying to tell you you’re wrong, I’ve just gotta work this out for myself.
I think I was afraid of what it could mean for me to not resonate completely with this pillar of a medium I've devoted so much of myself to. If Dark Souls was not for me, was I in the wrong place? If I diverted from the lessons of this biblical text, could I make something of worth to anyone but myself? I had to pick it apart and ascertain some reason. Sounds ridiculous when I put it that way, but Dark Souls seemed to haunt me no matter where I went. The series' values turned up time and again in discussions with my professors and peers. Like the game's map, there seemed no topic that couldn't bend back around to Dark Souls, so it was inevitable that I'd be drawn back to Firelink Shrine myself. After all, it's a synthesis of so many textbook design concepts that it has become the textbook, but for me, this leads to some of the game's bigger problems.
Before we unpack any of that, though, let me first say that I found more to enjoy this time around than before, but a lot of that has to do with the amount of knowledge I had going in. People online like to make a big stink about how cryptic the first Zelda can be, but I struggle to imagine how I might've learned half of Dark Souls' mechanics just by playing the game. Noah Caldwell-Gervais' excellent video about the trilogy centers around how deceptively accessible it is, and perhaps I went in with the wrong mentality, but I didn't quite find this to be the case. From kindling bonfires and summoning spirits to unraveling the nature of the game's equipment and stat mechanics, Dark Souls either mires its details in maximalist menus, or leaves them to the birds. I want to emphasize that I don't have an issue seeking out external sources or making use of prior knowledge when it comes to delving into a game's deepest depths (I'm one of those weirdos who replays games an awful lot, often a great game only truly blossoms after the first experience), but without a foothold in the nature of the system or what it expected of me, it didn’t seem possible to make interesting decisions. Dark Souls’ solution is to bring the internet into the world, allowing players to offer each other tips and hints through messages left on the floor, but, as with most internet-related things, your mileage may vary. Having said that, I absolutely respect the confidence of this approach, and the intention to get people talking about its systems. The experience of discovery on a first playthrough sometimes equals and even outweighs the joy of making decisions with knowledge of a game’s intricacies on a replay, but in Dark Souls’ case, I don’t know if that applies for me. Maybe that’s an ego thing, I don’t want to have to ask someone what “kindling” is and what it does, I don’t need someone telling me how “poise” works, or what the magic system entails, or that kicking can be used to bypass enemy defenses, I’d like to be able to learn at least most of this stuff on the back of my own perseverance. Yes, one of my problems with Dark Souls is also one of my problems as a human being – I’m very bad at asking for help, and I’ll sooner resign myself to a challenge I don’t enjoy than swallow my pride and reach out to others (yes, I have seen Neon Genesis Evangelion). Dark Souls knows it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and I know that’s one of its strengths as a cultural artifact, but I think it’d be a little more considerate if it didn’t make me confront my personality flaws in the process. Jokes(?) aside, I’ve often heard the game compared to Super Metroid, but in this regard, I’d say they’re almost polar opposites. On a first Metroid playthrough, the process of learning where everything is through discovery results in constant upgrades and lessons which keep the player almost too powerful in an effort to teach them the lay of the land. With that knowledge, they can take the game’s challenge to beat it in faster, tougher, and more creative ways on subsequent attempts. This isn’t quite the arc that Dark Souls is after, but the resulting effect on returning playthroughs is similar.
Using the Master Key and some persistence, I skipped the Capra Demon and the Gaping Dragon and rang the Bells of Awakening in just a few hours. I charged up Sen's Fortress and slammed my head against Ornstein and Smough for a second time. Having accumulated some suspicions about Frampt's intentions (both intuitively and having gathered a few tidbits from outside sources), I avoided him and decided to seek out another way, and somehow managed to actually find it (though it’s a bit of a shame that the objectives themselves aren’t any different, only the sequence). However mixed my feelings might’ve been, I wouldn’t have been caught dead deriding Dark Souls’ level design even in 2018. It really is a triumph of digital architecture whose exploration is, for me, the game’s greatest joy. Watching it always manage to somehow loop back around to Firelink Shrine is almost a running gag, and navigating its ever-increasing network of shortcuts to tear from one side of the map to the other in search of leads to new discoveries is engrossing. I’ll take its tightly wound approach over Elden Ring just about any day for the rest of my life. Its sense of total seamlessness never fails to amaze me, as is its Symphony of the Night-like seeming endlessness. Each individual area plays more like a classic, straightforward Castlevania level in the moment, but fits into the larger world in a more intricate way. When Dark Souls is immersing the player in its creative variety, its shortcut-full pathways, its internally logical spider web of a world, it’s at its absolute best. I often viewed Dark Souls’ setting as a pastiche of dark fantasy tropes, but Lordran always manages to take ownership over whatever cultural touchstones it swipes, both in its lore, and the ways they’re implemented into the game design. The skeletons in the graveyard to the left of Firelink which pummel every unsuspecting player are the videogame skeletons, as is the dragon which makes its powerful entrance in the Undead Burg. Mario Odyssey’s dragon will forever be known as the “Dark Souls Dragon” (despite having as much in common with the one from Shrek), because Dark Souls owns videogame dragons now, that’s just the world we live in. Every archetype is presented with a sense of grandeur and scale, both visually and mechanically, which unites them under Dark Souls’ banner. That creative variety extends to so many of its scenarios and locations as well. Ceaseless Discharge, Sif, and Priscilla all go out of their way to provide memorable experiences beyond simple tests of skill, as do the trickery of Sen’s Fortress and the horror of The Abyss (and it seems obvious to me now that Ornstein and Smough are trying to get the player to bring their own buddy along to even out the odds). The Hydra is an incredibly clumsy encounter, but I’ll be darned if it won’t forever reverberate in my brain as the hydra for the rest of my days. As I became comfortable with the game’s systems and its medium-speed rhythm, and accumulated enough resources to expand my breadth of possible strategies, all of these things became far easier to appreciate. Prior knowledge of the map allowed me to make interesting decisions about which areas and objectives to tackle and in what order. It’s satisfying to develop plans and map out routes, develop my character and make progress on my own terms (which goes to show just how much Dragon Quest III is hiding in Dark Souls), but the satisfaction of actually overcoming the obstacles within this world varies wildly.
Dark Souls' combat generates a lot of praise for its sense of weight, the balance of its stamina system, and the satisfaction of overcoming its punishing enemy design, but it's a pretty passive affair. The level of punishment only further prolongs the process of waiting for the enemy to attack and retaliating yourself, and a good lot of the rogues gallery isn't receptive to the game's only two counter tactics, it's inconsistent. I can't say so with any kind of authority, but one on one systems like this most resonate with me when they're tugs of war between contenders for moments of dominance, but that sense of back and forth only vaguely applies against the most lowly of foes. The system is serviceable for most encounters (at its best, it's about provoking the enemy to leave an opening at the cost of making the environment itself more perilous to navigate (see: Quelaag)) but the dearth of depth is felt as the game grows long. There's little means of pressuring the opponent and they only occasionally react to taking damage, so encounters scarcely branch out of a neutral state. To be clear, I'm not defining this as some sort of hard and fast rule. After all, Hyper Light Drifter is also about dodging and attacking enemies who hardly flinch, but the perspective and player moveset allows any given moment to be far more active, enemies don't have to rotate to track the player's movement, and every opponent can be designed with the knowledge that they'll be responding to the same set of tools. It's particularly because this system relies so heavily on animations that it feels lacking in this way. Against most enemies, the best method of responding to an attack animation cycle is by rolling, and, with the exception of some environmental obstacles, that's about as dynamic as it ever gets. You roll at the right times and punish, but not so much that you'll run out of stamina and find yourself unable to roll away. No doubt this is a consequence of the level of build variety on offer. The game is more interested in delivering a swiss army knife than a singular, refined tool – you can cast spells and wear different kinds of armor and wield any combination of weapons in both hands – but as Dark Souls' most pronounced form of interaction, it doesn't have much going for it.
(As an aside – I’ve heard it compared to Punch-Out!!, but that game better rewards successful attacks by retaining the player’s stamina and causing hitstun, and mastery requires counter-punching and acting on even the slightest tells. Weighing whether a body-blow, face punch or star uppercut is the right move in any given situation is a more impactful decision than any light or heavy attack in Dark Souls, and the right move at the right time allows the player to press an advantage. Some attacks are best dealt with by blocking, countering, or ducking underneath them. Even a wayward punch at the wrong moment incurs a response from the opponent, rather than being ignored outright. Of course, this aspect of Dark Souls’ combat has the effect of evoking helplessness in the face of insurmountable odds, but it makes for a repetitive and tedious dynamic)
By and large, I'd say the game is well served by its degree of punishment. It lends a real sense of credibility to every obstacle the player comes across, but where difficulty often reveals the deepest nuances of a system, the one-dimensionality and tedium of the combat is only exacerbated by this decision. I'm only waxing on about it because Dark Souls leaves so much in the hands of this system, it wouldn't bother me to the same degree if it weren't such a significant focus. Thirteen years out from Demon's Souls, I'm sure this is old news for a lot of you, and yeah, I've come to agree that it's most charitably viewed as a vehicle for Dark Souls' method of delivering atmosphere and varied situations. If there's any benefit to be had from this prioritization of breadth over depth, that's it, and its best areas know this. The aforementioned Sen’s Fortress isn’t made of difficult combat encounters, but awkward walkways and hidden traps. Like so many of the game’s best setpieces, it doesn’t feel designed for the player’s convenience. The boss of the area is more like a climactic punctuation mark than a punishing fight meant to keep the player stuck for hours on end. The Iron Golem is one of the few who can be severely staggered, and given how easily the nearby bonfire can be missed, the tension comes more from the threat of having to navigate the entire tower again than the battle itself. The Painted World of Ariamis is peppered with damaging, but squishy groups of enemies who can be deftly dealt with if the player keeps a clear head and some distance. It’s one of the most architecturally varied and visually enthralling environments in the game, and it’s capped off by a boss who requests the player leave her in peace. When all of the pieces align in just the right ways, Dark Souls achieves an immersive quality that just sings and keeps me arrested in its setting. I could just as easily romanticize many of the game’s other moments using this kind of language (the Bell Gargoyles, the Four Kings, the Capra Demon, the Tomb of the Giants, etc.) because it isn’t hard to make the process of overcoming punishing challenges sound glamorous, but that would be disingenuous, because the moment to moment experience can feel clumsy and unrewarding. Dark Souls is often best served by foregoing the traditional methods of challenge scaling, because while it does contain moments that reveal the potential of the combat system, It only works so well as a straightforward action game; I was best able to appreciate it when I stopped viewing it through this lens.
Dark Souls is very much cut from the cloth of its RPG forebears (the likes of which I have far more experience with today than I did at the outset), which should’ve been obvious, but I felt it best when I hit a wall in the form of The Four Kings, and ventured across every corner of the setting in pursuit of treasures, routes, and resources that could strengthen my character. The game put me up against several of what I could only describe as Dungeons and Dragons parties, and the more of them I encountered, the more I began to feel like I’d been doing a solo run of Dragon Quest III the whole time. I’ve never exactly felt that action games benefit from these kinds of progression systems, and frankly, I’m still not entirely swayed, but if we view Dark Souls’ stamina system as some iteration on Chrono Trigger’s ATB mechanics (it’s better compared to Secret of Mana in this respect, but let’s make like Dark Souls and roll with this comparison), all about taking turns and exchanging numbers with the added benefit of being able to avoid damage through positioning, it clicks together a little more nicely in my mind. Still not an entirely favorable comparison, since the most interesting feature of any RPG combat system is the management and development of multiple characters who all balance out each other’s weaknesses, though the multiplayer features do make an effort to close that gap. Given the prominence of Humanity (the resource), the online features, and the game’s inclination to punish death with the removal of the player’s Humanity, I’ve gotta wonder if the intention was to incentivize players to make use of multiplayer as often as possible, using Dark Souls as a digital D&D campaign. There are multiple boss encounters which might support this, but, conspiracy theorizing aside, that’s simply not how I’ve played it (or how the community treats it), so I can’t provide much insight either way.
Whatever the case may be, Dark Souls’ most basic progression system remains divisive in my mind, and for a number of reasons. Legend has it that Yuji Horii’s theory in implementing the concept of grinding experience in Dragon Quest was that the player’s hard work would always be rewarded with some gains. The player levels up immediately upon reaching the experience threshold, and doesn’t lose those points after dying, so they’re always making some sort of progress. Dark Souls punishes the players who need those experience points most, and best rewards those who don’t. Souls have to be retrieved after death at the spot where the player died, and that spot can be locked behind a boss door, at which point the only way to keep them is by killing the boss. If a new player manages to reach a boss door with a whole lotta souls, their best option is simply to turn back and level up their attributes. Of course, they’re not going to do this. At its worst, this mechanic disincentives players from leaving an area for later and pursuing another which might be more manageable for their skill level, because they’ve already invested so much in their current run (I consider this an issue in Hollow Knight as well, because it undermines the game’s breadth of exploration with an incentive to stay in one place).
The risk/reward aspect can be compelling, but I’ve gotta question how effective it is when the game has to offset that system with collectible items which contain large quantities of souls. Of course, losing experience points forever is a staple feature of the series, and I don’t consider it a misguided concept for a game that prides itself on developing an oppressive atmosphere through challenge and punishment, but some of its quirks don’t seem to be implemented to the benefit of the game’s progression system, or the player’s engagement with it. Yes, that’s part of the intent, and those aforementioned soul items and boss drops might make up the difference, but at that point, the motivation to engage enemies begins to erode somewhat. Several areas have sharp enemy placement which deeply discourages players from ignoring threats, but just as often, it’s optimal to run directly past them and get to the boss, and the risk of gaining souls by fighting punishing enemies isn’t worth it when the player is endeavoring to learn the boss’ patterns across various attempts. It might’ve been possible to mitigate this problem by applying some sort of multiplier to the boss’ souls for every enemy killed along the way, maybe with a cap to prevent the optimal strategy from becoming too tedious. It’s not impossible to bank experience in the boss’ room by repeatedly retrieving one’s souls on arrival, but that’s not particularly better than grinding the area’s enemies at any point after the boss’ defeat, so you tell me.
It’s taken me a while to come around to the lore, mostly because of how often fan culture seems to fixate on trivial details and factoids rather than the broader meaning of a work, but the effect of distributing the game’s story throughout its item descriptions, environmental design, and occasional NPC dialogue is a potent one. Even if I only gathered a fraction of Dark Souls’ background on my own, the cohesion between the game’s rules and its themes is admirable, and even without explanation, the aura of rot is palpable. This isn’t the last time FromSoft would explore stagnation as a result of undeath, a rebellion against the natural order which prevents the world from moving on and highlights the importance of death in the cycle of existence. It might not even be the best exploration of that particular idea, but this method of storytelling, the process of archaeologically piecing together the history of Lordran, feels more appropriate here than in any of its successors. In the past, I’ve derided Dark Souls’ lore for ultimately amounting to little more than explanations for why bosses are sitting in rooms, just waiting for the player to kill them. For me, that quality undermined the verisimilitude of the setting, but that fails to account for the plots running underneath this basic structure. Solaire and Siegmeyer are on similar quests as the player, as are the various other travelers which can be confronted along the way. There are character motivations which drive subplots throughout Dark Souls, and that their quests parallel your own and similarly orbit around this stagnant setting serves to highlight that quality even further. The world is trapped in the Age of Fire, and the only people left with any kind of agency are those seeking an end to the curse of the undead (and more often than not, they succumb to the madness as well). It’s a no less convenient premise for a videogame, but it’s also uniquely suited to being conveyed through this medium. Its greatest disappointment is that either ending or prolonging the Age of Fire requires the same set of steps, simply shuffled around. These actions don’t reflect the differences in motivation behind them, and one might say that’s indicative of the fact that both goals are equally suspect, but that seems a little generous. Still, I’m willing to forgive that concession for the sake of providing an equally engaging experience regardless of the player’s decision. At the very least, it’s not an unreasonable solution.
Here’s the twist that, for some of you, might discredit that whole heap of words you’ve so generously combed through (thank you for that, by the way, you’re looking great). Right now, I’m sitting in the Tomb of the Giants, right in front of Nito’s fog door. I’ve been sitting here for the last two days, without progressing, just trying to unpack everything I’ve felt over the cumulative fifty nine hours I’ve spent with Dark Souls. Am I going Hollow? I used to play this game while listening to “Boy Oh Boy” from LISA: The Painful, because its dedication to silence bored me as much as its combat. I don’t do that anymore, I don’t even hate the fighting system now. Dark Souls is a whole lot of ancient, timeless game design principles swimming in a vat of acid. They rarely coalesce into something greater, but on the rare occasion that every ingredient is balanced just right, there’s a real magic that can’t be denied. Almost everything that Dark Souls attempts is done better in other places, but its level design and premise and its best moments are worth the experience, and, if nothing else, seeing those ideas come together in real time, through uninterrupted gameplay, is thoroughly novel. I’m not certain I’d have returned to Dark Souls at all, though, without the knowledge that every last one of my nitpicks and criticisms would be validated by a certain other FromSoft game. As far as I’m concerned, Sekiro was Hidetaka Miyazaki’s gesture to me, personally, that I wasn’t a moral failure for dropping his most famous game. Maybe we’ll talk about that one some other time, but for now, I stand before Nito, weighing my options as Anubis weighs hearts on a cheap kitchen scale. Do I care enough to see it through? Has this long and rambling inner monologue spilled out every last drop of Dark Souls-related emotion in the depths of my own soul? Is this Age of Fire destined to burn on interminably, never to confidently reach a decisive verdict, or will I put it to rest and allow the Age of Dark to begin?
Does it matter?
POST-SCRIPT
After some time, I did finally find it in me to dust off the ol' save file and see it through to the end. Within an afternoon, the gods were slain and I was left staring down the credits — from Seath, back to Nito, and through the Bed of Chaos (with a bit of a detour taken to see what all this "Artorias" business has been about), before, at last, putting Gwyn out of his misery. Seems I'm far from the first to recognize how...shoddy this last leg of the journey feels. I'd always considered its surrounding gameplay systems a mixed bag, but there's a confidence and unity to Lordran's layout and aesthetic which begins to slip away, and the deeper I went, the more flummoxed I became that this was the same "Dark Souls" so often whispered about in the tomes. I never stopped respecting its desire to maintain visual and mechanical variety (so many works would kill for this level of creativity) but, even as someone who doesn't particularly love this game, it was a bit sad to see it reduced to a parody of itself. Running back through long, boring zones to engage in half-baked boss fights again and again, I had to wonder if anything was cut from the final product. These areas aren't without their moments, but at this point, it seemed Dark Souls was struggling as hard as I was to stay awake.
This is, of course, with the exception of the game's DLC and final areas. In the Sanctuary Guardian and Artorias, it's already possible to glimpse Hidetaka Miyazaki gearing up for Bloodborne and Dark Souls III (heck, Bloodborne himself is hanging out close by), with timing specifically built around acrobatic light rolling, tight windows for retaliation, and little opportunity for recovery. I've still not been converted into an outright fan of this highly evasive style of 3D combat, with its unflinching bosses and more or less prescribed moments for offense and defense (which isn't to dismiss the game's build and weapon variety so much as it is to highlight the nature of the game's enemy design and stamina system), but I'd be lying if I said that the pace of these meat and potatoes heavy action setpieces weren't (quite literally) more my speed than almost anything else in the game (and it was especially cool to recognize that Sif had adopted many of her owner's techniques. That's Dark Souls for ya). Yeah, I do hold that the game is at its most engaging and interesting when it’s doing away with “traditional” methods of challenge scaling, but the Artorias gang makes a clean case. Their wind-ups and telegraphs were excellently done for the most part (and both have striking designs, even if one is just a straight-up Manticore), but I did note that both of these bosses had the ability to sometimes extend otherwise normal attacks into combos. This isn't anything insane on its own, but the severity of the game's stamina management and the inability to cancel actions once committed made this feature a little more questionable than it might've been otherwise. If the player can't reliably know when damage can be dealt and has to guess at whether the boss is finished attacking after every swing of the sword, attacks which can kill immediately and look identical to their single-hit variations, then every time the player waits for a combo that doesn't come, they've given up on some amount of progress through the fight, and every time they don't, they're putting themselves at risk. This isn’t the worst thing in the world, Artorias does always open up at the end of his combos, whenever they may arrive, but I found myself wishing those extended chains were given more distinct telegraphs to plan around and reward observant play. Gambling can be a welcome addition to a combat system, but I can't say I was thrilled to find it here, where I lacked a moveset dynamic enough to switch up my responses, and the stakes can involve immediate death and an inordinately long trek back to the arena. I don't consider this as big a problem against Artorias as, for example, the Margit boss fight in Elden Ring (where his combos will sometimes only come out if you decide to attack), but it was surprising to find this early in the FromSoft canon. I still had a good time against these bosses, but I thought I'd be thorough, since I spent so much time discussing my thoughts on the combat mechanics back in my last write-up. I'm aware there's more DLC stuff to be found beyond this point, but, for me, that may be better left to another life. It was time to leave.
The Kiln of the First Flame might just be one of the most striking pieces of visual storytelling in Dark Souls. Mounds upon mountains of grey ash surrounding a man too far gone to know just what he's wrought, or even what it is he's so bent on defending. Here, I wouldn't have needed the guidance of Darkstalker Kaathe to realize that Frampt and Gwynevere's cause was more than a little questionable, that linking the fire and continuing this age of stagnation and rot was nothing but a mad conservative dream. After finally managing to parry Gwyn's sword a whole fifteen times in a row (I didn't count), the future was left in my hands. In one last bit of gameplay/story integration, the act of linking the fire is identical to lighting a bonfire anywhere else in Lordran, only with a different text prompt. It tempts the player forward with a familiar sight, but I had no love for this place. I turned around and walked out of the chamber. Maybe this whole mess could've been prevented if I'd done so earlier. Then again, if the immediate start of New Game + is any indication after the credits, perhaps not.
And that was my Dark Souls. For all the time and attention I've given it in-game and in writing, I don't love this game. Some of the time, I don't even like it. More than anything, I'm fascinated by it as a work of world design, and as a cultural artifact. Fascinated enough to head down to Quelaag immediately after finishing the game and ring the second Bell of Awakening on New Game +, if for no other reason than some subconscious, poetic desire to leave this playthrough where it began. Still, I never did quite get to feel out and achieve a sense of oneness with the rhythm of Dark Souls' moment to moment gameplay, and only flickers of its emotional highs ever managed to truly land. To me, there's no question that From and Miyazaki would go on to make stronger, more consistent games which resonate more deeply with me (or at least one), but, as far as the rest of The World is concerned, they will always live in the shadow of this one. I'm glad I experienced it for myself from front to back, but I think it's high time I extinguished this weight from my mind and finally found it in me to walk away, even if I've gotta do it alone.
KLAVIERGAVIN
2 years ago