Beaten: Mar 09 2022
Time: 45 Hours
Platform: Switch
So beating Elden Ring a few days ago inspired be to give my Dark Souls playthrough a second chance. If you don’t know, I got about halfway through the game (up to Ornstein & Smough) before getting stuck and calling it quits. I was frustrated, particularly because I liked pretty much everything about the game except for some pretty steep difficulty spikes. Specifically, Sen’s Fortress’s snakes were much thicker than most of the enemies up til that point, and O&S just felt like an insurmountable brick wall in my way.
Anyways, upon picking back up, I decided to grind 15 levels out, which (along with my 65 hours in Elden Ring) gave me the edge I needed against O&S and finally let me see the second half of the game. This is where the game opens up, where you go back to some impassable doors and explore beyond them! The areas past these doors are wild and varied and a biiit annoying in places, but for the most part were just cool. They also all had interesting gimmicks, from Lost Izalith requiring you to walk across lava (cool) to New Londo Ruins being chock full of enemies you can’t hit without being cursed (less cool). Broadly though, I really liked the areas.
The bosses actually ended up being more my speed as well, with pretty much every boss post-O&S being a massive monster thing, which are the ones I gravitate towards. Big gross dudes in wild arenas with big slow attacks!! I think my fav of these was probably Sif (not sure if that’s a hot take). This all vs the first half of the game, which is semi-equally split between big dudes and nimble dudes in cramped spaces (uhhh not really my fav lmao). As a whole it just felt less frustrating, even with a few bosses giving me big issues.
I don’t know if I’ve got much real new insight here. I didn’t even switch weapons (Man-Serpent Gsword) when I got back in. I very much just came back in and finished up what I was doing. DS1 is much more unforgiving than Elden Ring, even though I think ER has more really tough bosses. There’s long stretches without bonfires, and you don’t get as many Estus flask upgrades. Are these flaws? Maybe, but I’d wager they’re also intentional as hell. Dark Souls was the hit that really got Player-Hostile design to seem like a valid idea in modern gamedev, and I respect it hugely for that, but at times it feels like it leans too hostile, too frustrating, and just a bit slapped together.
I love FromSoft’s whole weird programmery design practice + their incredibly lore-justified game systems, and it’s cool to go back and play the game that finally seemed to push them into the mainstream. I think I’ve said it before, but more games should have this level of jank, this mild lack of polish, because it really feels like the game was made by a group of people. People whose signatures are dotted all over the landscape, and whose voices get drowned out in the modern, massive, manpower behemoths that are the most popular games these days. Elden ring is a revelation for being a game that still manages to have a voice and feel like it was manually designed, but Dark Souls is practically a living legacy of design, with it’s designers souls trapped within. How fitting.
Time: 45 Hours
Platform: Switch
So beating Elden Ring a few days ago inspired be to give my Dark Souls playthrough a second chance. If you don’t know, I got about halfway through the game (up to Ornstein & Smough) before getting stuck and calling it quits. I was frustrated, particularly because I liked pretty much everything about the game except for some pretty steep difficulty spikes. Specifically, Sen’s Fortress’s snakes were much thicker than most of the enemies up til that point, and O&S just felt like an insurmountable brick wall in my way.
Anyways, upon picking back up, I decided to grind 15 levels out, which (along with my 65 hours in Elden Ring) gave me the edge I needed against O&S and finally let me see the second half of the game. This is where the game opens up, where you go back to some impassable doors and explore beyond them! The areas past these doors are wild and varied and a biiit annoying in places, but for the most part were just cool. They also all had interesting gimmicks, from Lost Izalith requiring you to walk across lava (cool) to New Londo Ruins being chock full of enemies you can’t hit without being cursed (less cool). Broadly though, I really liked the areas.
The bosses actually ended up being more my speed as well, with pretty much every boss post-O&S being a massive monster thing, which are the ones I gravitate towards. Big gross dudes in wild arenas with big slow attacks!! I think my fav of these was probably Sif (not sure if that’s a hot take). This all vs the first half of the game, which is semi-equally split between big dudes and nimble dudes in cramped spaces (uhhh not really my fav lmao). As a whole it just felt less frustrating, even with a few bosses giving me big issues.
I don’t know if I’ve got much real new insight here. I didn’t even switch weapons (Man-Serpent Gsword) when I got back in. I very much just came back in and finished up what I was doing. DS1 is much more unforgiving than Elden Ring, even though I think ER has more really tough bosses. There’s long stretches without bonfires, and you don’t get as many Estus flask upgrades. Are these flaws? Maybe, but I’d wager they’re also intentional as hell. Dark Souls was the hit that really got Player-Hostile design to seem like a valid idea in modern gamedev, and I respect it hugely for that, but at times it feels like it leans too hostile, too frustrating, and just a bit slapped together.
I love FromSoft’s whole weird programmery design practice + their incredibly lore-justified game systems, and it’s cool to go back and play the game that finally seemed to push them into the mainstream. I think I’ve said it before, but more games should have this level of jank, this mild lack of polish, because it really feels like the game was made by a group of people. People whose signatures are dotted all over the landscape, and whose voices get drowned out in the modern, massive, manpower behemoths that are the most popular games these days. Elden ring is a revelation for being a game that still manages to have a voice and feel like it was manually designed, but Dark Souls is practically a living legacy of design, with it’s designers souls trapped within. How fitting.