blows me away these guys made so many caves for their open world game and not a single one is a nutty putty nightmare like stonefang. not one is a boiling hot chest crushing True Ass Dungeon Crawl. not one has the geometry choke and bend in angular, ugly shapes or allows itself enough peace and quiet for proper low humming tension to build

you can make any number of enemies and bosses do any number of tony hawk 900s and eddy gordo bnb combos but you'll never get the same reaction out of me as trudging thru the million ton weight of 5-2's endless negative space

one of the things that stands out most here is how the lack of bonfires contextualizes everything within a given zone. everything's a tight circuit, everything has to facilitate reasonably efficient traversal from start to end, and the holistic one-shot delving focus keeps everything working in steady unison rather than presenting a series of discrete segments that're more vulnerable to escalation and ostentatious dramatics

bosses in particular are used as punctuation -- part of the flow and movement of each sequence. fool's idol and armoured spider don't need to be rigorous conclusions if they're just limbs on a greater body, and leechmonger and dirty colossus can be lightweight so long as they build toward the expectation of the grotesque and monstrous before astraea's melancholic anti-climax carves right thru it. everything's given ample space to breathe and standout among the the rest of the cast on their own mechanical and thematic terms, allowing even the most traditional showdowns a greater gravity. before penetrator and flamelurker were Every Fuckin Boss they were just two bosses. before storm king was contractually obliged to show up in every game it was just storm king

in general, there's a greater sense of unity and direction here. everything's so spirited and pertinent; its consonant use of mechanics as vehicle for tonal and thematic purposes far more thoughtful and accomplished than the number of titles that rehashed them under increasingly unconvincing disguises. the cohesion offered by an unborrowed shape pays off as the game reflects on the value of souls as objects of power, your role in accumulating that power, and the unflattering realities of your duty. there's no real need for a wealth of proper nouns, alliterative flourishes, or 23andme results for it to say what it intends to say -- it just says it, often using experimentation, passivity, or juxtaposition to hammer it home

invasions going from disruptive manifestations of doubt and hostility to disruptive manifestations of doubt and hostility if you feel like it shows how little care was taken in transplanting most of these bits over and how beholden to audience preferences and expectations later works have been in contrast. there was a reason most of the souls you acquired were from cannibalizing storied soldiers and renowned heroes rather than the hopeless denizens of defilement valley, and it wasn't just convenient itemization and exploration bait

I can't believe how much I miss the humid, sickly, woozy colour grading, the goofy bosses like adjudicator, and the spirit of limitless invention that was more concerned with banging out new ideas than vetting or refining them

world tendency was good, if you're gonna have a bad camera you might as well use it to make me feel like I can't breathe, and all these years later I might love this even more than I did in 2009

umbasa bitch