Sitting beneath the Shadow of the Erdtree, I once again find myself asking: why do I still like Dark Souls 3? I shouldn’t. I find its earlier areas lacking in environmental challenge, and it reveres its spectacular enemies and bosses which are heavily driven by i-frame timings as their centralising defensive option. Both of these are my highest criticisms for the ”genre” as a whole, but I find that Dark Souls 3’s execution is what keeps it interesting. While I enjoy the compelling later areas like Smouldering Lake and Irithyll Dungeon, they’re not in a position to ‘make up’ for my problems with the earlier ones; rather than the areas, it’s the surprisingly varied boss encounters that I find more fascinating. Even when beholden to the dodge-roll formula, bosses differentiate themselves through aggression and tempo among other traits, on top of any fight-specific flourishes. Their movesets tend to be simple enough to allow these core differences to make the bosses feel distinct. Dancer feels meaningfully different to Abyss Watchers or Dragonslayer Armour, for instance, and I generally enjoy fighting all of them. More surprisingly are the amount of bosses that bend or break the formula, most being disparaged as “gimmick bosses” or just as bad, but most of which I enjoyed. Proponents of “good game design” would brandish pitchforks on hearing that Oceiros was one of my favourite bosses in the game, but it’s true!

Dark Souls 3 cautions against stagnation and proclaims that systemic progress is necessary to avoid ruin. It waves the decrepit form of your Favourite Things from your Favourite Game in front of you and tells you that clinging onto as they are now is futile as to be laughable – everybody and everything you remember from the old world has rotten, died or carcinised. The wheel of change, however uncertain or uncomfortable, must turn. There’s almost an extra layer of humour, then, in how the perpetuator of the Painted World embodies the logical extreme of the combat system, and by extension the need to move on. Extended combos and annoyingly-delayed attacks are only a few of my problems – she expresses the difficulty of adding extreme challenge to this simple system and formula in an interesting way, and only results in making me feel exhausted. She isn’t just a boss with a moveset I don’t like, she warns what the future might look like if they wring this formula dry. Dark Souls 3 explores a surprising breadth of options within its rigid formula, it understands when it’s spent and knows when to quit. It understands that systemic progress is necessary for it to avoid stagnation and ruin.

..but did they listen?