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This review contains spoilers
Some may (and do) balk at the way this game carries itself with such unearned pomp, with such cringe swagger, but as a connoisseur of unhinged media I couldn't get enough of what this game was laying down and was marathoning it for days, barely tearing myself away to eat, which is not a reaction I've had in a while
70% of this game is made up of FromSoftware, much like how 70% of Hideo Kojima's body is made up of movies they both commit the necessary social transgression of creating transformative art, but let me tell you, the 30% of this game that doesn't come from From is so wonderfully and delightfully made stranger by incorporating it into the Souls framework
Characters overexplain and exposit in ways atypical of their work, they make their motivations clear, clearly tell you where to go to help them, largely make their quests unfuckupable, and to top it all off the menu design feels like a direct reply to internet brainwormed accessibility discourse that pops up every single time From releases a new game, doing things like pointedly marking when a destination has a character that needs helping
But lest this make you think they decided to go easy on you with this one, I love the way this game innovates on From's pantheon of spectacle bosses, with Leechmonger as a modern two-phase spectacle boss and Nier Automata carnival colliding with Raiden Metal Gear being some personal favorites, when parrying a massive string of freakishly moving attacks from the second phase known as Puppet-Devouring Green Monster, it dawned on me that with the way this creature is moving and lunging at you, this game would terrify children and you absolutely should not play it around them, and when it comes to design in this context it feels like an accomplishment
Level designs aesthetically cool as hell too aside from a couple that feel like padding, the Opera House scared the shit out of me, it almost feels like they developed the game in the order you progress through the areas because it feels like there's a consistent increase in quality as you go, alpha footage from 2021 being exclusively of early areas presented largely unaltered would seem to support this
They take a bold step of making the actual process of playing the game as frictionless as possible, the edges that Dark Souls III sanded off are further sanded down, shortcuts are way up, less side paths, key items are within a stone's throw of their locks, everything is in service of relieving the mental strain of navigation and decision-making in favor of reusing the now-freed tension headroom for ramming the boss patterns straight up your ass, parry like your life depends on it because it does
There's something immensely satisfying about the way From's games cast you in the role of archaeologist piecing together 10% of a forgotten history, but there's also something satisfying about the way this game gives you 100% of recent history, you get told everything you want to know
And perfect optimization too! 4K120 and not a hint of a frame drop throughout the entire game
Despite those accessibility changes (which I must stress I don't think are better so to speak, moreso that they make the game feel tonally different in a way that befits it), my instinct is to say this game is for sickos who played all the """Soulsborkiring""" games prior though, and if that's you and you weren't feeling this game I question if we were playing the same game, and maybe we were! You might've been burnt out, but also patch 1.3 apparently improved the game design pretty substantially with clearer windup animations among other changes
I can't overstate how incredibly funny it is to graft a cynical "I'm putting together a team" "The legendary Pinocchio will return" "Everything is going according to plan Mr. President" stinger ending onto a fucking Souls game, I rolled my eyes so far into my head they looped back around, if that doesn't make you crack a smile I don't know what to tell you
And the game ending on a Crash Bandicoot 1, Sen's Fortress channeling megacastle that conveys its scale to you visually by showing you every place you had been before, while showing you in real-time the entire journey up from the beach to the very peak, you can tell they really paid attention to complaints about From's game design by making sure to end the game on a strong note, and they wait until then throw Malenichiro at you, and then two more 2-phase bosses after that
This can feel like a soulless game at times, sure, but like Pinocchio himself, the game is ensouled by the uniqueness of its soullessness, the way it animates itself in imitation of life captivating if nothing else
The writing is actually very similar to the overly-verbose nonsense time travel version of Dark Souls II that we never got (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fQYr9xTdohZfnPvh27WZR_enJfggRmjmCOxSSN50mYk/), before Shadow Tower Abyss director and later Elden Ring co-director Yui Tanimura was dragged in to clean up his original co-director Tomohiro Shibuya's mess, and you could argue "they cut that approach because it didn't work", but it's nice to see for myself why it wouldn't have worked, you know?
It wouldn't work for Souls, too off-model, but it works for this game because despite all the Bloodborne memes this game is very much its own thing and synthesizes From's work into a cohesive whole where Sekiro's parrying mechanic and Bloodborne's rallying mechanic achieve a magnificent symbiosis alongside its weird, French-inspired, forgotten mid-80s OVA energy
This game is like an overproduced April Fool's joke made real and I wouldn't have it any other way, feels like a 4.25 basically