MICHAEL

DON'T LEAVE ME HERE

-cough-

MICHAEL

MICHAAAAAAAEL

-KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK-

HELP MEEEEEEEEEEEEE

has a lot of interesting ideas, particularly with how you choose both your upgrades and the enemy's upgrades, and it's got a very addicting gameplay loop

however, i really wish the folly shields worked on all "accidental suicide" moves. it's aggravating to lose a run by accidentally shooting a piece to death that was obscuring a rook or a queen when you are given grace for other moves such as stepping into a checkmate or shooting when you're in check. it's a minor point but it's the cause of at least a third (if not half) of my lost runs and that's quite frustrating when they normally give you warning about these things

still, its quite fun overall and that's really the only big annoyance i have with the game.

i havent reviewed it on this platform because it's been too long since ive played it to give coherent opinions on it, but the first dark souls game is also a 4-star game. what's interesting is that it's a 4-star game for completely different reasons than this game.

dark souls 3 is very well designed overall and has great gamefeel, with the more generous roll timing allowing them to create more elaborate bosses with quicker attacks. you can certainly see the influence bloodborne had on the game.

dark souls 3 also has the most consistent boss roster of any of the soulsbornekiroring games (that's what we're calling it now, right). it's still not perfect, obviously, and once you beat vordt you'll have a string of mediocre bosses to get through before reaching irithyll, but the roster is generally well made.

what makes dark souls 3 good, and what makes the original dark souls good are very interesting to compare. dark souls 3's biggest failing is in its generally lackluster level design compared to its predecessor. the game is quite linear, which certainly makes it more accessible than the others. it also means that the act of unraveling the world of dark souls 3 is generally not as interesting as it is for the original game.

it's hard to explain this properly, but the world of dark souls 1 felt like opening up a fantastic book that's difficult to parse but in the end, you feel like you've learned a lot about the society within the text, the bestiary of fantastic monsters, and all the intricacies of its politics.

the world of dark souls 3, perhaps somewhat intentionally, feels more like reading a collection of good, even great short stories whose only interconnecting theme is that the world should probably end already. it certainly has variety, and there's something enjoyable about these different stories, but lothric lacks the same perception of depth that lordran had. many areas feel like completely different worlds that you never get to properly explore.

this lack of cohesion, despite being undoubtedly the most cinematic of original trilogy, means that it is also less memorable overall compared to the original game. i should clarify that i'm not referring to the most cinematic fights in the game. slave knight gael isn't "less memorable than the taurus demon," thank you very much. but the areas and bosses of the original game manifest in my mind so much more easily than those of dark souls 3. i think this, too, has a lot to do with the level design, both on a mechanical and aesthetic level. even an area like darkroot garden sticks with me more than a place like farron keep.

that being said, dark souls 3 is undeniably the game i could easily pick up and play over the first game. the way it controls and the feel of the combat are so much better overall compared to the original game's general slowness that this game triumphs in the moment to moment gameplay.

so i guess, all in all, i'd rather play dark souls 3 if im bored and want to kill time but i'd rather play dark souls 1 if im in the mood to get immersed in a proper world.

what's that? dark souls 2? give me like... a couple years. maybe i'll actually beat that one if i have that much prep time.