For me, video games are a social experience/lubricant first, and then an artistic medium with strengths not found in books/movies/etc, and then a source of comfort. There are games that I don't think are fantastic or that I don't actively play, but are games that I enjoy existing because I can connect with other people. We can have a chat and I can see what they value in media and we can connect from there, it's a nice time. The other day, I stayed like 30 min after my shift at work ended to talk to a coworker about Style Savvy. Dark Souls is a 0/5 game to me for how alienating of an experience it's been since this game blew up.
The presentation of the game doesn't do any favors. I don't like the visual direction of the game. I think the soundtrack is largely forgettable. I think the sound design in general is passable without leaving any notable impression. The enemy designs feel very bland, or what a teenager that just read the Golden Age arc of Berserk and didn't get it thinks is cool. It'd doubly frustrating because, even when they were less technically proficient, Fromsoft's audio and visual output in games like Lost Kingdoms or Armored Core resonated with me for years after I played through them.
The story of "you're a stranger in a dying world and any information you want has to be clawed out of the dead hands of its previous residents" is another aspect where, having played their previous backlog, it felt like EA version of a Fromsoft game. All of this atmospheric worldbuilding is in service to a stock dark fantasy setting and it's really hard not to compare those aspects to games that used similar approaches, but were alien enough to make the act of piecing everything together a unique experience, like Evergrace. So what you're left with is a largely empty world filled with NPCs that's hint of something more interesting.
Nothing about the gameplay works for me. The level design is one of those things where I'll hear people complain about basically every part of the game, or I'll watch them play the game and they'll just have this awful scowl on their face if it isn't a replaying of the game, but I get instant pushback if I point out that most of the "difficulty" either comes down to trial and error sections that lose all tension once you know the specific way the game's going to mess with you, or they're disasters like Blight town. I know they can have levels with decent flow, Bloodborne's level design largely (not always) avoided sections of the game that come to a screeching halt due to annoying enemy placement or stupid environmental gimmicks. The most praise I can give the level design is the interconnected nature of the game, but that's not a feature that Dark Souls does better than most games with similar structure, nor did I find it preferable to the menu system of Demon Souls.
The combat's way too limited to keep my attention. Weapons, outside of specific late game additions, have the same static moveset regardless of player or gear progression, and that moveset's too limited to warrant much outside of either "smack and run off to wait for stamina if you're unsure about the fight" or "aggressively position yourself to trivialize the encounter because all the tells are 90+ frames long". Player vs Player degrading into smacking your opponent into chugging potions is a telling sign. Magic might be the one saving grace of the game, I think access to these strong and possibly overpowered (they're not in Dark Souls) abilities in a RPG like this can change the way a playthrough is experienced and is cool, but still feels like a major step back from how it was implemented in Demon Souls, like they were worried about the player having too much fun and brought it into the same bland line as everything else.
The RPG mechanics in this game are just as dull. I do on some level appreciate how your progress isn't strictly tied to better gear, and if you find something that looks better than the most "optimal" piece of equipment, you can just keep wearing it with very little detriment to the overall experience. It does mean that every piece of gear I came across felt like either dull numerical increases or outright vendor trash, and the sense of progression that usually comes along with RPGs like this was totally lost. The souls system is in a similar boat. You're just increasing numbers with soul investment, you're not going to be able to spend your way out of a fight's gimmick. Death has less "meaning" when the thousands of souls you're supposed to be worried about dropping when banking up for an upgrade could be lost isn't actually that big of a deal. It deflates a lot of the progression or tension.
The community around the game is also a strong mark against the game. I have good friends of mine who really enjoy this game, even people who don't usually play a ton of video games. I don't mind those people enjoying Dark Souls, I like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, we can both enjoy some bad media. The diehard "my main interaction with this medium is Dark Souls and I have 2000+ hours in the series collectively" fans are some of the most universally repulsive and mean terminally online freaks I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with, and I played League of Legends for 8 years. Skeevy people with a laundry list of accusations if you're willing to hang around those circles for longer than a couple of hours.
If this game didn't become one of the most popular RPGs of the 2010's, it probably just gets a 2/5 and I forget the game exists. This game has influence. This game is the "Oh, I don't play hard games other than Dark Souls" option for a generation of people. It's influence on FromSoft outside of "it payed the bills" was a malignant one and we only recently just got out from under the shadow this game cast with AC6. There are games that wouldn't learn from this game's mistakes, but quadruple down on them, like the myriad of largely awful Souls clones that came out in the following years. It defined difficulty in video games going forward, not as a skill set that has to be developed and iterated upon like in fighting or rhythm games, not as a means to push yourself and compare your progress to your peers like shmups, but as trial and error, and if you don't get it then that's a personal failing on your end. I've ran into so many people in real life that play video games, and when I ask them what they've been playing lately, they say it's Dark Souls and I have to politely dance around the fact that I think this game isn't worth the disk it was printed on, or the bandwith required to download it off of steam.
My favorite thing about Dark Souls is that it probably kept a lot of people at FromSoft employed for years to come. Outside of the barest fact that "it existed and people didn't lose their jobs", I can't think of anything else I enjoy about this game.
The presentation of the game doesn't do any favors. I don't like the visual direction of the game. I think the soundtrack is largely forgettable. I think the sound design in general is passable without leaving any notable impression. The enemy designs feel very bland, or what a teenager that just read the Golden Age arc of Berserk and didn't get it thinks is cool. It'd doubly frustrating because, even when they were less technically proficient, Fromsoft's audio and visual output in games like Lost Kingdoms or Armored Core resonated with me for years after I played through them.
The story of "you're a stranger in a dying world and any information you want has to be clawed out of the dead hands of its previous residents" is another aspect where, having played their previous backlog, it felt like EA version of a Fromsoft game. All of this atmospheric worldbuilding is in service to a stock dark fantasy setting and it's really hard not to compare those aspects to games that used similar approaches, but were alien enough to make the act of piecing everything together a unique experience, like Evergrace. So what you're left with is a largely empty world filled with NPCs that's hint of something more interesting.
Nothing about the gameplay works for me. The level design is one of those things where I'll hear people complain about basically every part of the game, or I'll watch them play the game and they'll just have this awful scowl on their face if it isn't a replaying of the game, but I get instant pushback if I point out that most of the "difficulty" either comes down to trial and error sections that lose all tension once you know the specific way the game's going to mess with you, or they're disasters like Blight town. I know they can have levels with decent flow, Bloodborne's level design largely (not always) avoided sections of the game that come to a screeching halt due to annoying enemy placement or stupid environmental gimmicks. The most praise I can give the level design is the interconnected nature of the game, but that's not a feature that Dark Souls does better than most games with similar structure, nor did I find it preferable to the menu system of Demon Souls.
The combat's way too limited to keep my attention. Weapons, outside of specific late game additions, have the same static moveset regardless of player or gear progression, and that moveset's too limited to warrant much outside of either "smack and run off to wait for stamina if you're unsure about the fight" or "aggressively position yourself to trivialize the encounter because all the tells are 90+ frames long". Player vs Player degrading into smacking your opponent into chugging potions is a telling sign. Magic might be the one saving grace of the game, I think access to these strong and possibly overpowered (they're not in Dark Souls) abilities in a RPG like this can change the way a playthrough is experienced and is cool, but still feels like a major step back from how it was implemented in Demon Souls, like they were worried about the player having too much fun and brought it into the same bland line as everything else.
The RPG mechanics in this game are just as dull. I do on some level appreciate how your progress isn't strictly tied to better gear, and if you find something that looks better than the most "optimal" piece of equipment, you can just keep wearing it with very little detriment to the overall experience. It does mean that every piece of gear I came across felt like either dull numerical increases or outright vendor trash, and the sense of progression that usually comes along with RPGs like this was totally lost. The souls system is in a similar boat. You're just increasing numbers with soul investment, you're not going to be able to spend your way out of a fight's gimmick. Death has less "meaning" when the thousands of souls you're supposed to be worried about dropping when banking up for an upgrade could be lost isn't actually that big of a deal. It deflates a lot of the progression or tension.
The community around the game is also a strong mark against the game. I have good friends of mine who really enjoy this game, even people who don't usually play a ton of video games. I don't mind those people enjoying Dark Souls, I like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, we can both enjoy some bad media. The diehard "my main interaction with this medium is Dark Souls and I have 2000+ hours in the series collectively" fans are some of the most universally repulsive and mean terminally online freaks I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with, and I played League of Legends for 8 years. Skeevy people with a laundry list of accusations if you're willing to hang around those circles for longer than a couple of hours.
If this game didn't become one of the most popular RPGs of the 2010's, it probably just gets a 2/5 and I forget the game exists. This game has influence. This game is the "Oh, I don't play hard games other than Dark Souls" option for a generation of people. It's influence on FromSoft outside of "it payed the bills" was a malignant one and we only recently just got out from under the shadow this game cast with AC6. There are games that wouldn't learn from this game's mistakes, but quadruple down on them, like the myriad of largely awful Souls clones that came out in the following years. It defined difficulty in video games going forward, not as a skill set that has to be developed and iterated upon like in fighting or rhythm games, not as a means to push yourself and compare your progress to your peers like shmups, but as trial and error, and if you don't get it then that's a personal failing on your end. I've ran into so many people in real life that play video games, and when I ask them what they've been playing lately, they say it's Dark Souls and I have to politely dance around the fact that I think this game isn't worth the disk it was printed on, or the bandwith required to download it off of steam.
My favorite thing about Dark Souls is that it probably kept a lot of people at FromSoft employed for years to come. Outside of the barest fact that "it existed and people didn't lose their jobs", I can't think of anything else I enjoy about this game.
3 Comments
how you gonna criticize this as trial and error difficulty and then praise shmup game design
@SmtSucksAss not a dumb question, I get why you ask that
The surface level "learn how to dodge you can survive" element of shmups does have similarities, but once you understand the game and start playing for score, the insane depth of shmups start to come out. It becomes less about being able to pull off the ordeal itself, and more "do I feel confident doing this thing that'll boost my score, despite being harder" and it becomes a series of judging risk/reward based off of your progress as a player. In the Souls series, there's only one baseline difficulty, and if you want to change up how you approach a boss, it's more of a self imposed challenge that the game doesn't reward any differently (like using the broken sword to shiv down the Asylum Demon). I've been replaying the Fire Emblem games recently, and they also have fairly static (and low!) difficulties, but there's enough ways to mix up your gameplay with the core mechanics that things like a low turn count run or no growth playthrough interesting.
Also, just on a personal level, it's a lot less frustrating. Any new shmup is going to have training features (including some of the earliest examples of replay takeover, suck my dick GGXXAC+R), and older ones allow for save states. Also, most games in the genre take between 20-60 min total, and have a higher density of things going on at one time. There's an ebb and flow to DS's gameplay that results in a lot of downtime, and I'm a crackhead who needs shit happening on screen at all times, or I'd rather be playing a game to chill out with like Wattam. There's also just a development of skill in shmups that transfer well over to each other. Like, once you learn how to read a dense pattern and stream in one game, a lot of the games will reward that skillset, where as the Souls series doesn't really have that for me. A lot of the shit you can parry actually has a very generous window to hit, which both makes it feel like an obligation at times (the game expects you to sit there for a full second to not have your shit smacked the fuck up) and as a viewer, less hype because I know that most people who want to put in the effort to land that can. I'm not saying that the game would be improved if parries had a 2 frame window, but also I'm not sure if there's any change to the core gameplay of DS that would please me. I just don't fuck with the game at all.
The surface level "learn how to dodge you can survive" element of shmups does have similarities, but once you understand the game and start playing for score, the insane depth of shmups start to come out. It becomes less about being able to pull off the ordeal itself, and more "do I feel confident doing this thing that'll boost my score, despite being harder" and it becomes a series of judging risk/reward based off of your progress as a player. In the Souls series, there's only one baseline difficulty, and if you want to change up how you approach a boss, it's more of a self imposed challenge that the game doesn't reward any differently (like using the broken sword to shiv down the Asylum Demon). I've been replaying the Fire Emblem games recently, and they also have fairly static (and low!) difficulties, but there's enough ways to mix up your gameplay with the core mechanics that things like a low turn count run or no growth playthrough interesting.
Also, just on a personal level, it's a lot less frustrating. Any new shmup is going to have training features (including some of the earliest examples of replay takeover, suck my dick GGXXAC+R), and older ones allow for save states. Also, most games in the genre take between 20-60 min total, and have a higher density of things going on at one time. There's an ebb and flow to DS's gameplay that results in a lot of downtime, and I'm a crackhead who needs shit happening on screen at all times, or I'd rather be playing a game to chill out with like Wattam. There's also just a development of skill in shmups that transfer well over to each other. Like, once you learn how to read a dense pattern and stream in one game, a lot of the games will reward that skillset, where as the Souls series doesn't really have that for me. A lot of the shit you can parry actually has a very generous window to hit, which both makes it feel like an obligation at times (the game expects you to sit there for a full second to not have your shit smacked the fuck up) and as a viewer, less hype because I know that most people who want to put in the effort to land that can. I'm not saying that the game would be improved if parries had a 2 frame window, but also I'm not sure if there's any change to the core gameplay of DS that would please me. I just don't fuck with the game at all.
MiraMiraOTW
3 months ago
Japanese labor laws are really worker-friendly as far as terminations go, so this isn't even a mark in DkS1's favour. At worst Bandai would've had the yakuza knock on Miyazaki's door but that's it.