i had to add this one for all the obvious reasons.

you ever play a game that changes your brain chemistry and how you think about and consume media for the rest of your life? lemme be clear, i played demons' souls first. i also MAD cheated in it with the item duplicating glitch. i also only played it because a friend guilt-tripped me into it. but dark souls is the one that changed the game (ahyuk).

i think about stories differently. i think about how a game feels to play, the intention behind it. i think about accessibility more. i think harder about whether the difficulty of anything is meaningful or not, and if it's really worth all the trouble of those first fifty-seven times that smough ends your bloodline with the sheer weight of his fucking ass.

there's not much else to say that you haven't already heard. i don't know if there are more video essays about anything than there are for dark souls, except video essays about majora's mask being a metaphor for the stages of grief. it's just a weird fucking game that changed the landscape of games forever, and i should like to grab lunch with miyazaki sometime right after i give him a bear hug and ask if he's good.