Elden Ring (2022)

August 12, 2024 / stephensopinions / 1 Comment

Elden Ring is one of the most awe-inspiring adventures ever made. Its grandiose scope paired with wonderfully varied environments, naturally occurring vistas, and absurd array of characters and enemies is something that may never be surpassed. In many ways, Elden Ring is the natural evolution of FromSoftware’s Dark Souls franchise. It streamlines many of the more controversial aspects while doubling down on action and spectacle. And while I do love Elden Ring, I think something was lost in that evolution. Moreover, Elden Ring is often a victim of its scope. The game is gargantuan and undeniably runs out of steam towards the end.

What Elden Ring does best is the jaw-dropping moments of environmental reveals. The game has so many different classic fantasy areas such as magnificent castles, rolling plains, snow-capped mountains, desolate and rocky badlands, and dense forests. But it also has plenty of its own imaginative areas such as the rotting and malaised hellscape of Caelid. The sheer wonder I felt when I discovered the luminous skies in Siofra River is a high point that mirrored the first time I stepped foot in Anor Londo a decade ago when I first played Dark Souls.

It’s all the more impressive that Elden Ring manages to be full of these grandiose landscapes and creative environments when considering the scope of the game. The game is truly massive. In the first area of the game there’s a good chance you’ll be teleported to the other side of the map which serves as a shocking revelation that the big area that you’ve spent hours exploring is nothing but a miniscule slice of the world. Aside from the main dungeons and attractions in each area, there are plenty of enemy encampments, roaming bosses, side dungeons, and other secrets to uncover. While some may argue that the big world can feel a bit empty at times, I’d propose that blank space is vital. It makes the world feel genuine and real. The settlements and points of interest are spread out so you can spend a few minutes riding your horse and appreciating the landscapes.

To go along with its massive world, Elden Ring also boasts the most build variety of any of its predecessors. There’s a plethora of weapons, shields, spells, talismans, ashes of war, spirit ashes, and other items to find that can dramatically change the way you play. Aside from dealing high damage, heavy weapons deal a good amount of hitstun and also build up stagger which can allow you to land a critical strike every so often. Light weapons hit fast and let you hit the boss in the middle of their combos. Magic is better than ever for anyone who wants to play as a sorcerer. Status effects such as bleed and frost are also viable as they deal big chunks of a boss’s health bar. There’re tons of ways to modify your build to match your playstyle, which I think is fantastic.

Unfortunately, with so many options come quite a few issues as well. The sheer quantity of builds has three main flaws: exploration rewards, the upgrade system, and balance. In such a big world, you want to be rewarded for exploring every nook and cranny. Battling through a dungeon is a reward in and of itself, but most players want some sort of relevant trinket or item to help them along their journey. The problem in the case of Elden Ring is that the vast, vast majority of things that you find will be completely irrelevant to your build. If you want to play as a knight with a sword, pretty much every spell, weapon, and most talismans you find do absolutely nothing for you. To make matters worse, the game often rewards you with random material and cookbooks used in its crafting system, which most players don’t truly engage with. Sure, you get rewarded in the form of experience points just for defeating enemies. But the “fun” stuff such as new weapons and gear will be unusable for most players.

This problem is made much worse by the restrictive upgrading system. If players actually had the freedom to experiment with all of the new weapons and tools that they find then these would be sufficient rewards. But the reality is that because of how stingy the game is with upgrade materials (smithing stones), you won’t have enough material to test all the weapons you want to use. Moreover, it’s impossible to compare the effectiveness of a new weapon to your current one, as there is no way you will have enough material to fully upgrade the new weapon to the same tier as your current one. Most players are just going to stick with one or two weapons that they like and not experiment too much as it is cost prohibitive to do so.

There are plenty of open world games out there to play. The gorgeous and somber world is without a doubt one of its main appeals. But what truly makes the game stand out among its peers is its combat. Most big open world games have fairly rudimentary combat systems. While Elden Ring doesn’t quite have the complexity of Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, it still boasts challenging encounters that are begging to be mastered. FromSoftware has progressively made its Souls-style games more and more action-y, and Elden Ring is the natural progression of that trend. For better, and for worse.

Aside from the sheer variety that new weapons and magic affords, Elden Ring also boasts other tools to be used in combat. One major one is Ashes of War. All weapons have a default skill that can be used at the cost of some mana. These skills range from simple buffs, to whirling combos, to front-flipping slams with your sword. As you adventure and find Ashes of War which can be used to override your weapon’s skill with a new one. And if you are using a shield, you can perform a guard counter after blocking an attack for big damage. Having these skills at your disposal does open up combat a bit more from the standard light and heavy attacks that we’ve become familiar with.

Weapon skills and guard counters also highlight an important new mechanic: stance breaking. Like in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, you deal stance damage to enemies and bosses as you hit them. Light attacks do little stance damage, heavy attacks do big stance damage, and guard counters/skills can deal massive stance damage. If you deal enough stance damage in a short window of time the enemy will become stance broken allowing you to land a critical strike on their weak point. Not only does this do big damage, but it also gives you a moment of breathing room where you can heal, regenerate stamina, cast buffs, or attack a couple extra times for free.

I quite like the addition of this mechanic as it encourages players to remain aggressive and keep up dealing stance damage whenever possible. My one issue with this is that unlike in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the stance bar is invisible. I have no idea whether or not I’m close to a stance break which influences my decision making. If a boss was close to being stance broken, I may up my aggression, or the opposite case may be true if they regenerated all of their stance. I really don’t understand why this was kept hidden from the player when they had no problem displaying the stance bar in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

A major addition to the game is the jump button. While it may seem like it is mostly useful in short platforming sections, it turns out that jumping is absurdly powerful in combat. It may cost a chunk of stamina, but the jumping attack does a ton of damage both to health and stance. It also feels more reliable to execute than a normal heavy attack in many cases. Another huge benefit is that many attacks in the game are jumpable. I often found that I avoided attacks when going for a jumping attack of my own. While I do appreciate the inclusion of the jumping, I do think it has a few flaws.

First and foremost, the jump attack feels too powerful. This is especially true for builds with slow and heavy weapons as they rely on dealing stance damage. Moreover, the jump attack’s reliability makes it easier to execute than a charged heavy attack. It looks and feels a little silly to be jumping around constantly. My other issue with jumping is that it feels unreliable as a defensive option. While plenty of attacks are jumpable, the visual cues for these attacks feel inconsistent. Low sweeping attacks and ground slams may be obviously jumpable, but there are also many attacks that do not look like you can jump over them even though you can. Conversely, there are a handful of attacks that you cannot jump over even though you can’t such as ground eruptions. This led to frustration, trial and error, and ultimately, I stopped relying on jumps to dodge unless I knew for sure that something was jumpable.

Combat in Elden Ring is faster than most of its predecessors. While the series has been known for high-commitment actions with careful stamina management, Elden Ring gives the player much more stamina and quicker animations. You still have to be careful to not spam actions too much and run out of stamina, but generally it’s a far less present threat than in a game like Dark Souls. Of course, the reduction of these limitations on the player also means that the developers can afford to crank up the speed and relentlessness of the enemies as well.

All of these changes have undoubtedly increased the combat depth of Elden Ring. While it’s no Bayonetta, Elden Ring blows its open-world peers out of the water. In most open-world RPGs you just kind of have to accept that the combat is going to be underwhelming, but fighting enemies in Elden Ring is genuinely engaging. Even basic enemies can be threatening if you get swarmed. And stronger foes pose a real challenge. There’s a ton of creative visual design and a variety of enemies that will keep the player on their toes. But I have two major issues with the combat in Elden Ring: Spirit Ashes and boss fights.

The most impactful and controversial addition to Elden Ring is Spirit Ashes. These let you summon helpful allies to fight alongside you at the cost of some mana or health. I don’t hate the idea here. These summons help you deal with groups of enemies and provide some breathing room against bigger foes such as bosses. Summoning can make the game feel more dynamic as fights feel like real skirmishes. They also can be fun if you are roleplaying, summoning a horde of skeletons, knights, or wolves can make sense depending on your character.

My primary issue with Spirit Ashes is the enemy AI seems incapable of dealing with multiple foes. Most bosses can be trivialized by simply having a summoned buddy that draws the boss’s attention away from you. Encounters can be made stupidly easy because you get plenty of extra time to heal, regenerate stamina, cast spells, and get free hits in while the boss is attacking your summon. This is made worse by the fact that many Spirit Ashes are egregiously overpowered and are often capable of defeating bosses on their own without any intervention from the player.

You can make the argument that the player isn’t required to use Spirit Ashes if they don’t want to. But there’s a few problems with this. First and foremost, Spirit Ashes and their upgrade materials are a common reward for completing dungeons. They are undoubtedly a core component of the game, and it feels bad to just ignore them altogether. Moreover, FromSoftware is famous for never including an easy mode in their games. They have always been adamant that having a singularly designed and fine-tuned experience is how they want to make their games.

Part of the reasoning for lacking difficulty options is so that players can all discuss their experiences with the game on an equal level. Everyone can enter the discussion from the same place and understanding. That’s not the case with Elden Ring. Build diversity and Spirit Ashes dramatically change how you engage with the game. I found it immensely disheartening when I looked online after playing the game to see how other players fared against certain bosses and an exceedingly common response was “it’s easy if you use Spirit Ashes”. The game’s discourse has been entirely warped around them and if you used them or not which is frustrating when there is so much to talk about.

I think my biggest problem with Spirit Ashes is that there isn’t a middle ground. You either use them or you don’t. When using them many of the game’s encounters become trivially easy. When not using them, Elden Ring is the hardest FromSoftware title with relentlessly aggressive enemies. I don’t know what the intended experience is here. Neither option feels good. Bosses movesets feel like they are tuned for fighting multiple foes but their AI just can’t handle it. Bosses often cross the boundary into being more frustrating than fun.

FromSoftware has long been in an accelerating arms race with its player base. Their reputation for making difficult games combined with players’ skill naturally increasing means that every game has to be harder than the last. But there’s a problem there: difficulty can’t perpetually escalate. At some point, encounters become too challenging and take too long to learn, and I think that Elden Ring has surpassed that threshold in many places. Obviously, you can use Spirit Ashes to turn that tables and demolish these encounters but I find that unsatisfying as explained previously.

The bosses in Elden Ring feel like the designers are throwing the kitchen sink at the player. It feels like every boss is insanely aggressive, has multiple area of effect (AoE) attacks, high mobility, delayed attacks, long combos, branching combos, gap closers, ranged options to interrupt healing, multiple phases, and high damage. The extent of the new boss’s movesets makes them far more complex than the simpler bosses from days past. You have to memorize a bunch of different combos, attack timings, dodge directions, and punish windows. When it works, it’s great. Fights can be an adrenaline-filled dance where you play on a knife’s edge. When it doesn’t work, it feels genuinely awful. Bosses can feel like they don’t give you any opportunity for retaliation as they relentlessly spam dozens of attacks.

It’s common to treat FromSoftware’s bosses as puzzles. Players learn the ins and outs of every attack and how to respond to them. Experimenting with a variety of timings and positionings is necessary to maximize success. The end result is a mechanical mastery in which they have a reaction for every action that the boss takes. My issue with this approach in Elden Ring is that the bosses are so complex that it takes an absurd amount of time to master them. What would require a handful of attempts in previous games now can stretch into the dozens or hundreds. Personally, I don’t want to spend hours upon hours on a single boss, especially when there are so many of them in the game.

The way I fought most of the bosses in Elden Ring was not by mastering them, but by taking risks and accepting that I would be getting hit. On one hand, taking on the fights by using instinct can make for an adrenaline pumping experience. Scraping by with a sliver of health as you land the killing blow is exhilarating. But on the other hand, beating a fight without truly understanding it can be ungratifying. You never feel like you mastered the encounter. To make matters worse, bosses can feel unfair if you never fully master how to interact with them. The bosses in Elden Ring have a tendency to feel relentlessly aggressive with little breathing room to land attacks of your own. While many of these bosses have opportunities in the middle of their combos to retaliate, only players that truly master the fights can take advantage of those openings.

Many players will take advantage of the plethora of tools that Elden Ring introduces. The wide variety of weapons, ashes of war, spells, and summons that the game provides are all there to be used. There’s nothing wrong with this and I want to make it clear that gatekeeping players because they used an “easy” or “overpowered” build is obnoxious. Having said that, it is important to acknowledge that using certain tools does dramatically decrease the games difficulty, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Spirit Ashes are one example of this, but there are a handful of weapons and spells that can similarly trivialize even the game’s hardest bosses. I think there is plenty of validity to theorizing your own builds and coming up with a powerful strategy, but I don’t think that’s what a vast majority of players do. And for good reason.

For a game that focuses so heavily on exploration and progression, Elden Ring can be actively hostile towards players wanting to experiment with new equipment. A huge chunk (maybe even the majority) of the game’s weapons, spells, and ashes of war are garbage and not worth using. This wouldn’t be so bad except for the fact that the upgrade system is keeping players from testing out weapons on equal footing. You’ll never have enough materials to test and upgrade everything, so you just have to guess which weapons are good or look up a guide. It’s no surprise to me that if you watch a random stream or clip of a player playing the game that they are almost always using similar loadouts. It’s difficult to blindly commit to a weapon in a game with hundreds of choices, so players just look up the best options. I applaud players that use creativity and knowledge to craft specialized builds and strategies to take down difficult bosses, but I don’t want to just Google the best builds just so I can stand a chance against an endgame boss.

In some ways, these more complex bosses are good. There’s a reason people mention bosses like Nameless King, Orphan of Kos, and Sword Saint Isshin as their favorite bosses from previous titles. They are extreme tests of your skill and push the player to mastery. But when every boss is on that level of complexity the game gets exhausting. I crave more variety and originality. I’m certain that FromSoftware is aware of its player base’s reactions to certain fights. They know that players universally love the three bosses that I just mentioned, so they have been steadily making every boss fight into something resembling them. An intense one-on-one battle with high difficulty, multiple phases, punishing attacks, crazy spectacle, a wide-open arena, and a crescendoing orchestra. It may sound like it’s obvious to give the player more of what they want, but I think there’s more value in having contrast between the boss battles.

Players often bemoan “gimmick” bosses or any encounter that cause them to step out of their comfort zone, but I think it’s important to think of the game as a whole rather than a collection of individual bosses. When every encounter is similar, they blend together and become forgettable. But when every encounter is unique, they stand out in their own ways and enhance each other. Ice cream is great, but if you eat ice cream for every meal a hundred days in a row, you’ll get sick of it.

There’s no doubt that FromSoftware has mastered the spectacle of boss fights. But the emotional impact of the bosses is dampened by their repetitive nature. A boss with multiple phases used to be a genuine surprise. Now it’s an expectation. Musical scores used to be somber as you defeated the husks of dying gods as they’ve clung to fragments of life for thousands of years. Now every song is a bombastic orchestra. Plenty of bosses used to have unique arenas that you had to think about how to use to your advantage. Now every boss is in a wide-open room so that nothing gets in between you and the “duel”. There used to be plenty of anti-climactic boss fights that highlighted the nature of the dying world. Now every boss is an all-out action-packed climax.

I’m sad that the days of not knowing what was coming are gone. The unique experiences provided by Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls boss fights have been disregarded for a purer sense of action. Now when I step up to a boss fog door, I know almost exactly the type of fight I am in for. Sure, I don’t know the exact moveset or attack patterns that the boss employs, but I know that the developers are about to throw the kitchen sink at me while I roll a bunch until I memorize the attack patterns. There are whispers of FromSoftware’s old design here with bosses like Rennala, Starscourge Radahn, and Mimic Tear providing unique and memorable experiences. I just wish there was more of it rather than dozens upon dozens of spectacle fights that ultimately blend into one another.

This problem is made worse by the scope of Elden Ring. While boasting a massive map and setting moments of jaw-dropping reveal are a strength of Elden Ring, it also hampers so many aspects of the game. Many of the game’s bosses are frequently repeated. Side dungeons and caves become boring detours as you progress through the game. Enemy variety and balance plummets as you approach the final third of the game.

Elden Ring is a game that peaks early on, the first area of the game is the best holistic experience. You are thrust into a beautiful yet dangerous world without many resources. Exploration is genuinely difficult as you haven’t acquired any great equipment or gained a significant number of levels yet. Furthermore, you only have a handful of healing flasks to utilize per checkpoint. As a result, every enemy poses a threat to your success and you have to play carefully. Even a basic foot soldier can disrupt your travels. But you are encouraged to explore and engage with all the content because that is how you find new equipment and gain experience. Moreover, at this point in the game everything is fresh and new and surprising. Not to mention the fact that the beginning area’s capstone dungeon is one of the best that FromSoftware has ever made with intricate yet realistic level design.

As the game progresses every new area is less surprising. It’s easy to fall into a routine of riding from point of interest to point of interest to collect whatever rewards they have in store. Basic enemies lose their potency as healing flasks become plentiful. The game is still a fun time, it can even be downright cozy as you explore the somber world that FromSoftware has created. But there’s no questioning that the experience can be quite repetitive after dozens of hours. Legacy dungeons and other bits of unique content are great, but the act of exploring simple enemy encampments, ruins, and caves loses its luster quickly. Not to mention how the endgame is poorly balanced with bosses that can devastate the player with a single hit or two.

I do love Elden Ring. I wouldn’t have played this massive game twice if I didn’t. Exploring its world for the first time is a magical experience. The evolution of combat mechanics is a welcome change. Build variety and new tools allow even more players to experience the game and play however they want. The sheer scope never ceased to surprise me as I wandered into a new area. The grandiose spectacle of the game is something that may never be matched. But it did make concessions to achieve all of this. Balance went out the window to accommodate new builds and combat. Exploration can become rote after many, many hours. Scope and spectacle are great, but mechanically the game doesn’t surprise the player with interesting bosses or arenas. It is for these reasons that I give Elden Ring a 9/10. While I enjoyed my time with Elden Ring, I am feeling worn out on the standard Souls formula and am hoping that FromSoftware has something completely new in the works.

Demon’s Souls (2020)

November 9, 2023 / stephensopinions / Leave a comment

As a fan of FromSoftware’s catalog, Demon’s Souls has long been my white whale. Dark Souls is in contention for my favorite game of all time, yet I never got the opportunity to play its predecessor. Being the progenitor of one of the most successful and influential franchises of games makes Demon’s Souls an incredibly important title. Yet, the original game has only ever been released on the Playstation 3. Which is why I was so excited about the remake of Demon’s Souls, bringing it to the Playstation 5. I really did want to play the original game first before reviewing the remake to compare the differences, but unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance. From what I can tell, this is a faithful recreation of the game, including all the weird, archaic, and unforgiving ideas that were removed from subsequent Soulsborne games. And I love Demon’s Souls for that.

I think Demon’s Souls unfortunately has a bad reputation for being a bit unforgiving with its design. There’s a lot of mechanics and ideas present in Demon’s Souls that never carried over to its successors, and many claim that is for the better. But I feel like playing Demon’s Souls was refreshing. There are many aspects of Demon’s Souls that I wish would make a return in modern releases, especially after playing Dark Souls III and Elden Ring. In short, I felt as if Demon’s Souls was a far more cerebral game, opposed to later titles which rely more on fast-paced action. Demon’s Souls is unforgiving and punishing, leading the player to be cautious and think carefully about their next course of action. To compliment this, combat and bosses are generally far easier to mechanically execute, as long as you come up with a reasonable strategy. What really makes Demon’s Souls shine is how its unforgiving nature contributes to its impeccable atmosphere and worldbuilding.

The world of Demon’s Souls is surprisingly grounded. With many of FromSoftware’s games, I take in the world and its locations, but I’m not quite sure how it all fits together due to the obscured nature of the storytelling. Demon’s Souls only ever lets the player have a fragmented understanding of the world, but I found it enthralling. There are five main locations that the player can visit, and each one is supplemented by some short text passages on their entrance. These brief backgrounds, along with environmental storytelling, were enough to make sense of their respective locales.

Take the Valley of Defilement for example. It’s a narrow valley with poisonous sludge at its base. Its inhabitants have resorted to rickety shacks on the ledges and in the crevices of the walls. Narrow planks that overhang the darkness are the streets of the shoddily built shanty towns. The creatures who live here are all but forgotten, left to suffer in this vile mire. Yet, they make due. They defend their home, using its dark crevices as an advantage to sneak up on invaders. And they do so because the saintly Maiden Astraea lies at the heart of the swamp, and she has resolved to free the valley’s souls of suffering. They worship her, and she protects them. Through almost purely environmental storytelling, Demon’s Souls paints a vivid image of its world and how Valley of Defilement came to be what it is. It’s not just a dirty swamp of vile monsters for the player to slay, it’s a fully realized location that makes sense.

Demon’s Souls is often maligned for being unforgiving, but I don’t think this is an entirely fair perspective. I think the unrelenting challenge and inconveniences are crucial to building tension. The lack of checkpoints is often seen as inconvenient and tedious, but I think that having long gaps between safety is critical in a grim game such as Demon’s Souls. Each level only has a single checkpoint at the start, and many levels open up a shortcut or two as the player progresses. But even the shortcuts never lead directly to the boss. There’s always obstacles and danger blocking your path. I think this is fantastic because it ups the anxiety and tension of exploration and combat. A single misstep means you have to repeat large chunks of the level. This also encourages the player to not only to defeat enemies, but to master besting them in combat so that you can repeatedly bypass them. The added pressure of death works wonderfully with the boss battles in Demon’s Souls.

I frequently read that Demon’s Souls has the worst bosses in the series because they are easy and often gimmicky. But I disagree. The bosses are easier to execute then later games because they have fewer attack patterns and generally attack in a slower, more telegraphed manner. But many of the bosses have a trick to them that the player has to figure out. They have unique arenas, weak spots that must be focused, or potent attacks that you have to figure out how to counter. While it’s true that the bosses may be on the easier side, I think each one provides a unique experience that is distinct and memorable. Moreover, easier bosses make sense when the player has to overcome a gauntlet of challenging enemies just to give the boss another shot. It would be enormously frustrating to have to replay the whole level dozens of times because the boss is monstrously difficult.

I think over the years Soulsborne has focused on making bosses more and more difficult. While games like Elden Ring nail the spectacle of boss fights, I do think they often go too far with the bosses moveset. Demon’s Souls bosses are relatively simple in comparison, but I find them to be more memorable because they are all so different. Not just visually different, but mechanically different. While there are some straight up one-on-one duels, there is often more to contend with than just the basic combos that the boss can throw out. The bosses having a “gimmick” is what makes them interesting and memorable.

Not every fight should follow the routine of learning how to dodge every attack the boss has, finding safe times to attack, then getting a hit or two in. Variety is what keeps the game fresh and interesting. While fast-paced duels are often the pinnacle of boss fights, they are even more impactful and memorable if they are kept as an occasional treat. Having some more “gimmicky” fights interspersed throughout the game is a breath of fresh air. And Demon’s Souls bosses are memorable because they behave so differently than many other bosses in the series.

While I do love Demon’s Souls eccentricities, there are some aspects of the game that do feel archaic. The most obvious example is the healing system. In Demon’s Souls, the player collects a variety of consumable moon grasses which restore health. These are collected through exploration, combat, or you can straight up purchase them from certain merchants. While I do think it’s a good idea to limit how much the player can heal, it’s too easy to abuse this system. I often carried dozens of moon grass items, so as long as I didn’t make an egregious mistake I could always heal up to max health with little threat. Conversely, worse players may often run out of moon grass and have to farm enemies to replenish their stock, which is obnoxious. Dark Souls immensely improved on this by only providing a few chugs of their healing flask per checkpoint. That way, players would never have too much or too little.

Demon’s Souls has a unique mechanic which changes the world depending on your actions, called tendency. I think this is actually kind of a nice idea, but its implementation is esoteric. Good actions will make your tendency “white”, while performing bad actions skews it towards “black”. Certain secrets open up depending on your tendency, enemies may get stronger but provide better rewards, and there may even be additional enemies. My issue is how poorly explained this all is. It’s very easy to unknowingly perform an action which makes you move towards black tendency, which ultimately makes the game more difficult. I suppose the learning process can be seen as fun and interesting, but mending your tendency after it plummets is unreliable.

There are a few other archaic systems in Demon’s Souls such as the upgrade system and inventory encumbrance that I don’t want to delve too deep into. But an area that I do think is important to discuss is what FromSoftware is famous for: world and level design. The levels of Demon’s Souls are actually quite condensed, which I think is a positive. It’s tempting to fully explore each area because of this. Mechanically, I also think that the levels are quite good. There’s a variety of scenarios and encounters that the player has to not only use their skills to overcome, but to use their brain as well. There’s a lot of traps and obstacles that encourage caution and thoughtful exploration.

I do think that Demon’s Souls shows its age a bit in some of its levels. There is an abundance of narrow corridors, ledges, and groups of enemies that show the weaknesses of the game. Combat is stunted in cramped spaces like corridors and ledges because your weapon often hits the wall instead of enemies. I get the realism factor here, but enemies don’t seem to follow this rule and inherently have an advantage in these spaces. Furthermore, groups of enemies are famously difficult to deal with in Soulsborne games, and Demon’s Souls has a ton of these groups. The slower pace of combat doesn’t work well when you have to contend with many foes and it’s easy to get stunlocked into death.

As for the world design of Demon’s Souls, I quite enjoy the areas individually but I wish they were not completely disconnected from each other. There are five major areas in the game, each with a handful of levels. But these major areas are not connected with each other, the only way you can access them is through the hub area. I think this is unfortunate in a game that otherwise is impressively immersive. Constantly sitting in load screens and fast traveling around is just not nearly as captivating as having a singular, connected world.

As previously mentioned, I haven’t had the opportunity to play the original game so my perspective on Demon’s Souls as a remake is limited. From my research, it seems as though the gameplay is extremely faithful. Visually, the remake is stunning. However, when compared to the original game’s environments, the remake is showier. The simple Eastern European style simple castles are more ornate. Moreover, the sun beams and impressive lighting do impose a sense of grandeur that wasn’t present in the original game. Gone is the dirty and eerie faint glow of lighting. I don’t think the visual differences are a huge deal as the atmosphere retains its somber mood. I think the bigger change is the music.

After listening to both soundtracks, I think it’s a shame that the spirit of the original was lost in the transition. Particularly in the boss fights. As previously mentioned, the boss fights in Demon’s Souls aren’t always epic one on one duels, many are somber, depressing, or disturbing. The original soundtrack captures these differences quite well. The Fool’s Idol piece is a stark example of how drastically the music was changed. Don’t get me wrong, the music is beautiful. But not like every boss fight needs to be a grand duel, not every song needs to have a dramatic choir with full orchestral backing.

Playing Demon’s Souls put the whole series in perspective for me. It makes me long for a time where Soulsborne games emphasized memorable experiences rather than just difficult ones. Conversely, Demon’s Souls also made me realize how far the series has come. There are many archaic and esoteric aspects to Demon’s Souls, and I am glad that the remake let me experience it all faithfully. It is for these reasons I give Demon’s Souls an 8/10. I encourage everyone to give Demon’s Souls a fair shot. It was a risky title when it was originally released, and not every idea was a hit, but there’s a sense of magic and authenticity that arise from the game’s bold choices.

Dark Souls III (2016)

February 19, 2018February 19, 2018 / stephensopinions / Leave a comment

It is no surprise that while Dark Souls is heralded as one of the greatest games of all time, its successor, Dark Souls II, was a let down in numerous regards. Less focused combat, incoherent world building, and less interesting bosses were my biggest gripes with Dark Souls II. So, the big question when starting up Dark Souls III was if it would return to the series former glory, or follow in the footsteps of the disappointing sequel. Personally, I think that Dark Souls III does mostly return to the successful style of the original game, but there a few key differences between the games.

Dark Souls III is more a direct sequel to the original than Dark Souls II was for a multitude of reasons. The first reason is that Dark Souls III is set in the same world as the original, granted that it is very far into the future. This highlights the cyclical nature of the Dark Souls lore, and watching how the world evolved and noticing the references to the past was something that I really enjoyed. That being said, I feel like there was almost too much reference to the past titles. A well placed and constructed reference is incredibly appreciated, but the game constantly saying “Hey remember this?” in essence can grow grating. In any case, Dark Souls III is the end of the series, and I felt like it did a phenomenal job ending this historic series. The final boss in the base game ties the games together brilliantly, and truly helped me understand the cycles of the Dark Souls universe. The DLC of Dark Souls III really finishes off the series by revealing what the “Dark Soul” even is and why it is important. Both of the final bosses (the base game and the DLC), are incredibly somber and profoundly sad, and are extraordinary ways to end this storied series.

One of the most important aspects of Dark Souls was its atmosphere and world building. Dark Souls III also continues in this trend, by creating a quintessential dark fantasy world. Despite the fact that many of the areas of Dark Souls III are just future versions of areas from the original game, they are changed enough that you cannot entirely recognize them. Furthermore, there a plethora of completely new and visually interesting areas. However, there are a few complaints that I did have with the world of Dark Souls III. One minor complaint I have is that some of the areas were just kind of forgettable and uninteresting. The swamps and forests in particular are just kind of dull and we’ve seen enough of them in the series. This isn’t a huge deal because the majority of the game is made up of far more interesting areas. The major complaint I have is that the world just is not interconnected enough. The individual level design is great, as it bases itself off of the design of the original game. But there is not a sense of connection between these areas. There is no sense of verticality or a tight-woven world like the original game. Every area is just fine in and of itself, but there needs to be more connection between these areas. This may be due to the fact that teleportation between bonfires is available from the very start of the game. Similar to Dark Souls and Dark Souls II, once teleportation is available, the interconnectedness of the world is sacrificed. There is no need to carefully craft a world when a player can just teleport where ever they want.

The final aspect of Dark Souls III is of course its gameplay. Combat Dark Souls III is decidedly faster than the original Dark Souls. It does not fall into the same traps of Dark Souls II (too many enemies and boring bosses), but it is very different than the original game. There are 3 reasons for this additional speed in combat: low poise, high stamina, and faster animations. Poise is the stat that controls when the player/enemy is hit, if they get briefly stunned. High poise means that you can eat an attack from an enemy and not have it stop you dead in your tracks. Both the enemies and the player in Dark Souls III have very low poise. When you hit an enemy, you can easily chain together hits until they are dead with no chance from recourse from the enemy because they are stunned. Of course, this means that the enemies can do the same to you, if you get hit once there is a good chance you are going to take a lot of damage. High stamina means that the player can spam rolls and attacks with little thought. In previous titles, if you rolled too much you wouldn’t have enough stamina to attack and vice versa. This is not something that the player has to worry too much about in Dark Souls III, which is a bit of shame considering that careful stamina usage was such a vital part of the combat in Dark Souls. This in essence reduces the risk and reward system that Dark Souls combat is centered around. Finally, the animations of all actions are reduced in Dark Souls III. The windups for attacks and rolls are shorter, and the delay at the end of these actions is also shorter. You are no longer locked into long animations, but on the flip side the enemies also move a lot faster.

As a whole, these three factors combine to make combat a lot faster than its predecessors. This is not inherently a bad thing, it is just a different playstyle. However, in the context of the series I would argue that this is a downgrade in combat. Combat in the original game was more deliberate and stylistically made more sense. Dark Souls III feels more reaction time based, while the original Dark Souls required more careful decision making in combat. I will say that this faster combat does allow for some very memorable and creative boss fights. The vast majority of the bosses of Dark Souls III are incredibly engaging. The combination of the wild combat and creative visuals make for some remarkable bosses.

Another factor of note is the change in how the healing item, the Estus Flask, works. As I mentioned in my piece on Dark Souls, the Estus Flask may be the single most important factor in why Dark Souls works so well. It keeps combat and exploration forgiving enough to give you room for some errors, but at the same time rewards the player for mastering a boss fight or entire area. The Estus Flask in Dark Souls III functions very similarly, but with two key differences. The first being that you can discover Estus Shards and Undead Bone Shards across the world through exploration. These items will increase the total amount of Estus Flask charges and how much those charges heal respectively. I like this as it rewards exploration and adds an extra layer of character power and progression. The only issue is that I feel like you almost get too many Estus Shards, so by the end of the game you can have around 10-15 charges of Estus, compared to the base 5 from the original game. This is almost too forgiving, I wish these Estus Shards were harder to come by. The second change is adding a second Estus Flask for focus points, which is essentially your “magic” bar. You must delegate your total Estus Flask charges between the original health based Estus Flask and the new magic Ashen Estus Flask. This may be why there are so many Estus Shards, so that players who want to use magic can have enough for both healing and magic usage. But players who don’t use magic will have an overabundance of healing Estus. Again, I liked exploring and upgrading my character, but I wish they toned it down a bit.

Is Dark Souls III as magical as Dark Souls? I don’t think so. However, Dark Souls III is far more consistent in its execution than the original. Less careful world design and less deliberate combat are the biggest issues I have with Dark Souls III, but it is still an excellent game. It was a perfect way to finish off the series with its gloomy themes and atmosphere. Intense and memorable boss fights combined with visually stunning areas make Dark Souls III a game worth playing. For these reasons I give Dark Souls III 9/10. Dark Souls III is an essential title for any fan of the Soulsborne series, or just fans of role-playing-games and fantasy worlds alike.

Dark Souls II (2014)

November 26, 2017November 26, 2017 / stephensopinions / Leave a comment

Following the unexpected timeless classic that was Dark Souls, FromSoftware had high expectations upon the release of Dark Souls II. Strangely, the mastermind behind Dark Souls, Hidetaka Miyazaki, was assigned to develop another title instead of being in charge of Dark Souls II. I did not know that Miyazaki was not at the helm of this project until I sensed that something was very off about Dark Souls II, so I was inclined to look deeper into its development and saw that the inspiration behind the original game was gone. This is not to say Dark Souls II was a disaster, as many aspects of the game are still fantastic, but it felt like the spirit of Dark Souls was gone. It was almost like the developers of Dark Souls II did not understand what made Dark Souls so good. Or they misunderstood the point of Dark Souls and focused on the wrong aspects all together. As such, I am going to reference and analyze the original Dark Souls frequently in this piece to highlight these crucial differences.

As a quick aside, after writing this piece I realize that this is almost more like a full analysis rather than a review. But I feel it was necessary as I have very strong opinions on Dark Souls II and I felt like I needed to justify why certain aspects bugged me. I didn’t think it was fair to say “X, Y, and Z are bad” without really digging down to explain why X, Y, and Z don’t work in the context of the series. Also, I reference the original Dark Souls a lot. Again, I feel like this was necessary to explain how Dark Souls II missed the mark in a few areas by comparing the systems implemented to the original game. Lastly, I played the Scholar of the First Sin edition of the game, which is slightly different than the first release of Dark Souls II. I think these two versions are similar enough that the overall factors that I will underline are the same.

The most obvious and critical misunderstanding was over the difficulty of Dark Souls. Miyazaki always emphasizes that the point of Dark Souls was not to be hard, but rather the difficulty is used as a tool to make the played feel different emotions. I was immediately worried during the starting cutscene of Dark Souls II in which the game explicitly tells you “You are going to die, over and over again” almost mocking the player, essentially focusing in on the difficulty. My fears were affirmed by the hub location in Dark Souls II, Majula. In Majula there is a pillar with a sign on it that lists global player deaths, almost as if the developers were bragging about how many times players had died playing their game. This focus on difficult is apparent throughout the game in most scenarios and encounters.

For the sake of brevity in my Dark Souls piece, I did not delve too deep into the idea of encounter design. Encounter design is essentially looking at every single scenario and encounter with enemies or bosses in the game and breaking it down. For example: enemy placements, types of enemies, the number of enemies, the environment, etc. are all crucial elements to making a successful encounter. In the case of Dark Souls the mechanics of the game lends itself towards one on one scenarios, and this is reflected in the encounter design. Most of the time you would fight one enemy at a time, sometimes there would be a few enemies, but you could split them apart with some easy maneuvering. Very rarely would you have to fight a horde of enemies, and when you did, they were so weak that you could plow through them with ease. This is not so in Dark Souls II, and there seems to be a much higher focus on fighting larger groups of enemies.

The biggest issue with fighting large groups of enemies in the Soulsborne (Demon Souls, the Dark Souls trilogy, and Bloodborne) series is the player’s reliance on lock-on. Since The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, action-adventure games have relied on locking on to single enemies as a way of simulating a duel. This is not nearly as functional once you introduce more enemies. Your camera is locked on to one enemy, so if there is more than one you can easily be blindsided. You constantly need to change your lock-on target to the enemy nearest to you. Lock-on is just not conducive to fighting multiple enemies at once, and Dark Souls II is notorious for spamming enemies at the player. You essentially have to teach yourself how to not rely on lock-on so much, but the thing is that lock-on was invented for a reason. Combat in a third-person action game is fairly unintuitive as the controls and camera are just not well suited for it. Lock-on was created out of necessity, and now players must unlearn this mechanic to effectively play Dark Souls II. Unfortunately, lock-on is not the only issue with fighting groups of enemies.

There are a couple issues specific to Dark Souls II that make fighting hordes of enemies a pain other than just lock-on. First and foremost is stun-locking, which is when an enemy hits and staggers you, and then you get chained into more hits and you cannot escape the chain as each hit staggers you. This frequently leads to scenarios in which you drop from full health to zero health because you made a single mistake and got stun-locked to death. The next issue is overlapping attacks. In Dark Souls II, enemies can attack through each other to hit the player. Now this was also present in the first Dark Souls, but it was encountered far less frequently due to reduced enemy count. This is a necessary feature in my opinion, because if enemies’ attacks did not go through one another, then the game could easily be broken by keeping enemies in a straight line, bashing their attacks into each other. While it is necessary, it does not make it any less frustrating when an enemy you can barely see swings their weapon, passes through the enemy in front of you, and damages you. This also leads to a problem in which enemy’s attacks overlap in a certain way so that the player does not have a window to counterattack. Combat is straight forward, you wait for an enemy to swing at you, and then you dodge/avoid/block/counter the attack and then you have a window to counterattack. When the developers throw more into enemies into the mix that window becomes smaller, occasionally it becomes non-existent. The final issue with having so many enemies to fight is that damage is just unavoidable sometimes.

One of the defining features of the original Dark Souls was that every hit that the player took was avoidable in some way, and therefore was a mistake. This is not so in Dark Souls II, and the developers realized this and had to change the games mechanics as a result. I consider the Estus Flask, the healing item from Dark Souls, to be one of the most ingenious and important aspects of Dark Souls. While I could write an essay on the nuances of the Estus Flask, I’ll keep it short for this piece. Essentially, the Estus Flask is an item that stores 5 charges that heal the player, and these charges refill when you rest at a bonfire. The Estus Flask limited the player’s mistakes, if you made too many you would have to return to the last bonfire to refill it. As you got better at an area, you could avoid more damage, save more Estus Flask charges, and make it to the next bonfire or boss. This was a remarkable method of limiting the player’s exploration and progress. Essentially your ability to adventure was gated by your skill, and as you got better, you could press on further. This does not work in Dark Souls II because sometimes the player just cannot avoid getting hit, so the developers decided to supplement the Estus Flask with a new healing item called Lifegems. These Lifegems slowly restore health over time, as compared to the quick restoration provided by the Estus Flask. The issue with Lifegems is that they are essentially infinite, as the player can easily purchase them from a vendor at a very low price. This completely destroys the point of limiting the players healing in the first place, because even if you screw up and take some damage, you can easily heal it off with some Lifegems. There is no feeling of learning and mastering an area if you abuse Lifegems. On the flipside, the game is balanced around Lifegems, there is going to be plenty of instances where damage is near unavoidable, but Lifegems are meant to make up for this. So, if you entirely ignore Lifegems, you are in for a frustrating experience unless you are experienced with the game beforehand. So essentially the forces the player to set a Lifegem limit for themselves as to avoid infinitely abusing Lifegems to trivialize the game. If players have to impart their own rules to make the game fun, then maybe the game was poorly designed.

Furthermore, some majorly disappointing aspects of Dark Souls II were the boss fights. Maybe I remember the first Dark Souls bosses better because it was my first Soulsborne game, but I genuinely think many of the bosses of Dark Souls II are entirely forgettable. Both visually and mechanically, many of the bosses of Dark Souls II are wholly uninteresting. Most bosses can be described as “dudes in armor” and have similar and predictable move sets. They lack that same sense of grandeur and wonder that the original Dark Souls would invoke. In Dark Souls it felt like you were fighting immortal and unconquerable beings, in Dark Souls II it feels like your fighting some random guy in a suit of armor. Most bosses also have similar and repetitive move-sets, resulting in some same-y and forgettable boss fights. Some bosses make me wonder what they did to even earn the title of being a boss. The Royal Rat Vanguard and the Prowling Magus and Congregation are just basic enemies with a boss health-bar slapped on them for whatever reason. On top of that, very few bosses are even remotely difficult when compared to the challenge of the normal areas in the game. The lackluster bosses are particularly egregious because the Soulsborne series places a heavy emphasis on bosses, yet in Dark Souls II there is only a handful of interesting and memorable bosses.

The world design of Dark Souls II is not as masterfully crafted as the original Dark Souls. In Dark Souls the world was a carefully intertwined web that looped in on itself. In Dark Souls II, it instead is a system of roots that sprawls outward in many different directions. While this is obviously easier to design and less immersive and intriguing as the original design philosophy, it is not without its benefits. It allows the designers to take more liberties and make areas however they want without worrying about how they were going to connect them back into the fold. Fast travel is available to the player from the very beginning of the game as a result of this, so you very infrequently revisit and traverse areas multiple times. This is a shame because Dark Souls II has some phenomenal atmospheric and visually impressive areas. The dizzying heights of the Dragon Aerie, the calm flow of the Shrine of Amana, and the peaceful aura of Heide’s Tower of Flame are fantastic and are some of my favorite areas atmospherically. Unfortunately, you never get to really familiarize yourself with these areas enough as to burn them into your memory as a result of the branching world design. Also, the world of Dark Souls II is at times completely nonsensical. I would think that the freedom that comes with the branching world design that the designers could make for a believable world, but that is not the case. The most egregious example is how you climb a tower into the sky, reach the top of it, take an elevator upward, and then end up in a volcano. You can see the tip of this tower from the ground, and there is no elevator or hint of anything above this castle, let alone an entire keep inside of a lake of lava. It is incredibly jarring and detached me from the world as it did not even make an attempt to make any logical sense.

The level design in Dark Souls II mirrors its world design in a sense. There is a lack of interconnectivity in individual levels. In Dark Souls, each level had numerous shortcuts to unlock as you progressed further into each level. In Dark Souls II, many levels opt to just put in more bonfires rather than looping the player back to a previous bonfire and having them use it again. It frankly just feels lazy, especially since there are an absolute load of locations where it would have been easy to just put in a ladder, or push down a tree to unlock a shortcut, but the developers opted to just add another bonfire instead. Also, like I mentioned earlier in the review, it feels like the developers also leaned heavily on just adding more enemies whenever they wanted to up the difficulty factor. There are some levels that take this concept to the point of absolute absurdity. The Iron Keep is probably my least favorite area in the game because of this. Another strange addition to this game was how roll speed is tied to the adaptability stat. Previously, roll speed was determined solely by your weight/carry ratio, but now adaptability plays a huge role in the effectiveness of your rolls. Before you get many points into adaptability rolls feel very off and clunky, so you either need to pump some points into adaptability early on or just deal with useless rolls. This isn’t a huge deal past the first few hours, but it definitely just feels wrong and I could see it turning off players who are used to fast rolls at the start of the game.

After all that ranting about Dark Souls II, there are plenty of redeeming qualities that I probably should highlight, as I don’t think Dark Souls II is a horrible game, I just think it missed the mark. First and foremost, the user interface is a massive improvement from the original game. It is much more clean and intuitive to use. Another notable improvement is the online play. It flat out just works better from a technical stand-point, and on top of that it is far better balanced for player-vs-player combat. Like I mentioned earlier, Dark Souls II is remains phenomenal atmospherically and visually. Most importantly, while Dark Souls II may have been a little off in many regards, and I harped on it a lot, it still keeps the basic structure of the Soulsborne series, which is just flat out enjoyable. A brutal and inhospitable fantasy world in which you battle against the odds against lumbering creatures and undead beings for the sake of humanity. There is just something wondrous about the concept. The combat and gameplay are not inherently bad, I just think the developers went a little bit overboard with how many enemies they added. Nothing proves this more than the DLC (downloadable content) of Dark Souls II.

I rarely talk about DLC as it usually just more of the same of the base game, but there is a strange dichotomy of the Dark Souls II DLC. It contains both the absolute best of the game, but it also brings out the utter worst in the game. There are 3 DLC packs, and each contains a new main area, a few bosses, and an optional side area. As far as I’m concerned, the main areas of the DLCs are the best parts of DLC beyond a shadow of a doubt. The areas are excellent visually, and they return to the looping level design of the original Dark Souls. You really get to know each area because there are far less bonfires, you have to master each area just progress. Each area also unique attributes that make them far more memorable rather than just “slaughter a couple dozen enemies and then take on a boss”. Speaking of bosses, the bosses in the DLC blow the bosses of the base game out of the water. Incredibly challenging, unique, and unforgettable. The Fume Knight in particular ranks up there with Knight Artorias as one of my favorite boss fights ever. All that being said, the optional side areas of the game feel like the developers just took every bad aspect from Dark Souls II and smooshed it together to make these awful areas. The Cave of the Dead, the Iron Passage, and the Frigid Outskirts are so terrible that I refused to believe that they were not intentionally designed to be dreadful. The contrast between the excellent main areas and the appalling side areas is so off-putting that its hard to believe that they were designed by the same people. Massive amounts of enemies, cheap tactics to kill the player, and copy-pasted bosses are just some of the frustrations that you will encounter here. As it turns out, these areas are meant to be played co-operatively, in other words you are not supposed to play them by yourself. This is pretty strange considering this is the only place in the series where the game explicitly encourages co-op. Luckily, these areas are optional and I really don’t recommend setting foot in them unless you are a masochist, a completionist, or you have someone else to play with.

As a whole, its difficult for me to judge Dark Souls II. It misses a lot of what took the original Dark Souls from “good” to “legendary”, but that still leaves Dark Souls II firmly in the “good” category. The masterful level and world design is wholly absent, but the strong basics of Dark Souls are mostly intact. The bosses could have been better, the healing system lacks a punch, and the developers are overly reliant on spamming enemies. But for the most part, Dark Souls II is still a solid game. I don’t think it is even remotely close to the original in terms of quality, but that does not intrinsically make it a bad game, especially considering Dark Souls is a generational title that has had an enormous influence on the industry. For these reasons, I give Dark Souls II a 6/10. Outside of the main DLC, Dark Souls II just kind of misses the point of what made the original so iconic, but its still a decent game.

Dark Souls (2011)

October 25, 2017 / stephensopinions / Leave a comment

In a time in which numerous video games hold the players hand and are generally easy, one game challenged the idea that difficult games were too frustrating and that mainstream games should stray away from challenging the player. That game was Dark Souls. This action-RPG was an industry-changing title, other developers realized that there was a market for games that did not coddle the player. The difficulty is far from the only factor that makes Dark Souls what it is, although its reputation of being hard is what everyone knows about Dark Souls, even if they have never played it. Dark Souls is also a bastion of success in level design, atmosphere, and world building, and I have yet to come across a game as impressive as Dark Souls in those departments. I consider Dark Souls to be one of the greatest and most important games of all time, rivaling titles like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Metal Gear Solid, and Super Mario 64. It has had a profound effect on the industry and will shape video games for years to come. That being said, I consider Dark Souls to be a flawed masterpiece. It is no secret that the second half of the game was rushed to reach a deadline. It also dangerously teeters on the line of “difficult but fair” and “frustrating”. While I consider the game to be “difficult but fair” a majority of the time, there are still a few moments that cross the line and enter “frustrating” territory. Despite these shortcomings, Dark Souls has quickly become one of my favorite games and its importance cannot be denied.

What makes the difficulty of Dark Souls so compelling? Part of its success is that Dark Souls is tough, but it rarely ever feels cheap or gives you an unwarranted death. Every time you die, it’s your fault. Every time I died, I learned something valuable and I could avoid dying the same way in the future. It is evident that nothing is too difficult to execute because on my second play-through I died extremely infrequently due to my prior knowledge on how to defeat all the enemies. There is a certain beauty to the challenge of Dark Souls. Many challenges seem insurmountable at first, but you keep trying and trying until eventually you figure it out. When you do finally overcome a tough area or boss, there is an overwhelming feeling of elation and pride at what you have just accomplished. There is something to be said in that Dark Souls mimics life in this regard. Dark Souls is not difficult for the sake of being difficult, rather it uses difficulty as a tool to make the player feel different emotions. The sense of accomplishment when you defeat a boss, the anxiety of not knowing what is on the other side of a fog door, the fear and tension of fighting a tough enemy, or the immense relief when you discover a new bonfire; these emotions are possible only because of the challenge provided by Dark Souls. Furthermore, I really appreciate when games are actually challenging, it is far more engaging and addicting. That feeling of wanting to conquer a genuine challenge makes me want to keep playing, and when I did finally defeat whatever was in my way I really felt like I had made significant progress.

While the difficulty is probably the most well-known feature of Dark Souls, there are many other categories which make Dark Souls master class. The most impressive feature to me was the brilliant level design. Each area in Dark Souls often loops in on itself and reveals a shortcut from the nearest checkpoint. This is genius for a couple of reasons. First, it lets areas evolve in a sense, and as you progress through the game an area is going to have more paths and shortcuts available to access. Since many paths are closed to the player initially, it allows the player to become familiarized with the level’s layout before further complicating it. This sort of circular level design also surprises the player, and makes you stop and think how you ended up back where you started. From a player progression standpoint, the looping level design is massively important. As you return to areas you have been previously, you can test how strong you have become. As gear, level, and player skill increase you feel much more powerful visiting areas that you were in just a short time ago. Lastly, this type of design also reduces tedium by a massive amount. The player will only have to get through a particular chunk once and can skip that chunk once a shortcut has been opened. So, there is very little tedium when running from a checkpoint to where you died.

The atmosphere, setting, and world of Dark Souls is also hauntingly beautiful. Every area is completely unique and memorable. Often, I just stopped adventuring and had to take in my surroundings. The world of Dark Souls mirrors the level design in the sense that it utilizes vertical layers to have areas loop in on themselves to create a compact and believable world. There are many instances of Déjà vu as you open a door or descend an elevator as you realize that you have been here before. Atmospherically, Dark Souls is in a tier of its own. The world is littered with viewing points from high places where you can gaze upon the areas that you have just conquered, or even look ahead to see your next trial. I often felt insignificant when gazing upon the wondrous land or Lordran, and fighting enemies that were magnitudes larger than me reinforced that feeling. Despite this, as I traversed the world and surmounted these creatures, I felt powerful. The world of Dark Souls is vast but compact, it is interconnected, and it is breathtaking.

Another aspect of world-building is the lore and the story. While the story of Dark Souls is fairly simple, it becomes incredible as you learn the backstory to the world. I don’t want to delve too deep into the lore, as I feel like people should attempt to discover it on their own. There is a real feeling of living in a dying world, and you are putting this worlds creators and gods to rest in order to preserve life for a little while longer. Fighting many of the bosses of Dark Souls becomes far more emotional once you learn their backstory, and often times it is profoundly sad as you put these old gods to rest. Speaking to all of the characters in the game gives you a sense that they are on their own journeys through this world, and don’t solely exist for the benefit of the player. The other interesting thing about the lore is that it is never explicitly laid out for the player. You must discover it for yourself through contextual clues, item descriptions, and character dialogue. This gave me the feeling of piecing together a puzzle, and even if some of the pieces were missing, I could still make out the overall picture. I really felt like an adventurer in a fantasy setting, discovering the world for myself.

One of the most important features of an action-RPG is obviously the combat. At first glance, the combat of Dark Souls seems pretty rudimentary and slow, but looking deeper into the game one can see that this is not the case. Every action that the player takes has a significant wind-up at the beginning and some down-time at the end, this is to encourage the player to only make an action when it is safe to do so, otherwise you will get hit. Enemies hit hard in Dark Souls, even the weaker enemies in most areas can kill the player in a few hits, so you better be sure that you have a big enough window to attack, or you will pay heavily for it. The combat is actually surprisingly deep in a sense, as the player learns the ins and outs of all the combat systems. Learning how to use stamina, poise, staggering, shields, rolling, light attacks, heavy attacks, shield breaks, back stabs, parries, and efficient use of the estus flask are all essential as you get further into the game. The combat is heavily focused around risk and reward, for example: you can shield an incoming attack to guarantee your safety, but you’ll lose stamina, or you can parry the attack and riposte for massive damage, but if you mess it up you will get hit hard. That is just one example, and the player is encouraged to test out all of the combat options available to them. The other interesting thing is that all the enemies abide by the same rules that the player follows. Enemies also have stamina, poise, wind-up animations, and down-time after their attacks, and they also die from a few swings of your weapons. You can always expect the enemies to behave in a similar way to the player, which is immensely important. If enemies did not have to follow these rules, they would feel cheap and unfair. There is a feeling of weight and permanence in the combat of Dark Souls, every decision must be carefully calculated because the stakes of getting hit are so high.

Do you remember being a kid and huddling around the playground with you friends and telling each other about all the cool secrets you found in a game? Most of what was said in these discussions ended up being wrong, but it was still neat to imagine all of the hidden features in a game. Dark Souls does a great job of recreating this feeling. Players can leave messages for each other, telling of illusory walls or how a great item is waiting for you if you jump off this cliff! This harkens back to the playground discussions, as these messages are mostly jokes. But occasionally you will find a tip about a hidden item, or a how a trap is waiting for you up ahead. These messages can also be likened to adventurers swapping tips and stories around a bonfire. There are also bloodstains scattered across the world and you can view exactly how other players died in that spot, which can be pretty humorous. Not only can you communicate with other players, but you can also summon players to play alongside you and engage in jolly cooperation. Be careful though, some of the crueler players can invade your world and fight you one on one. I don’t consider the multiplayer aspect of Dark Souls to be one of the main features of the game, but I definitely did get a few chuckles out of the goofy messages and bloodstains.

It is clear that I adore Dark Souls, so why did I call it a “flawed masterpiece”, what is wrong with the game? One of the issues is that there are definitely some moments that are more frustrating than they are difficult. Luckily, these moments are not too common, but they still sour the experience a little. This was a risk the developers took when creating a challenging game, every encounter must be extensively tested to make sure that it is tough, but not so hard that it makes you want to smash your controller. While it is a shame that some of these types of moments made it into the full game, I think it is remarkable that these frustrating moments are so few and far between and it shows how much care what put into this game. Also, the game can often be a little too cryptic for its own good. While the DLC areas and bosses are some of the best in the game, accessing the DLC is so confusing that I doubt most people figured it out without looking it up. Unfortunately, these are not the sole issues of Dark Souls, the most important issue is that the game is just not finished. In order to meet a deadline, the final areas in the game were rushed and are nowhere near the quality previously demonstrated. The level design falls apart as it no longer loops in on itself, and the same can be said for the world design. There are a few separate paths that lead to dead ends, there are no grand revelations of “I know exactly where I am”. Furthermore, many of the enemies, bosses, and the areas themselves are clearly rushed. I think the other big issues with the final 4 areas in the game is that the developers attempted to let the player tackle them in any order they wanted.

While some fans claim that one of the biggest strengths of Dark Souls it its open format, I have to disagree. Sure, you can go to a variety of different areas at the start of the game, but you are clearly pushed into one path. To me, that is the beauty of the pseudo-open world of Dark Souls. The developers trust that the player is intelligent enough to avoid tougher areas early on and instead come back when they are better prepared. At the end of the game, there are 4 paths all laid out for the player to go in any order they want. The issue with this is that as the player progresses through these paths, they will become more powerful, so it is immensely difficult to balance these 4 paths. They all must be about roughly equal in difficulty so that the player can choose to go to whichever one they want first. What ends up happening is that the first area you go to is going to be the hardest, and then each area you visit gets progressively easier as you level up and get better equipment. I think the developers realized this issue, and since difficulty is such an important factor in the game they attempted to combat the problem that subsequent areas get easier and easier. In order to fix this, the developers made each area difficult by adding a gimmick. These gimmicks remain relevant regardless of the players level. The pitch blackness of the Tomb of the Giants, the lava of Lost Izalith, the invisible platforms of the Crystal Caves, and the ghost enemies in New Londo are all gimmicks. They are cheap tricks meant to make the game more difficult and I feel like they damage what could otherwise be decent areas. These gimmicks could actually be pretty interesting twists to these levels if they were implemented better, but as they stand now they are just annoying to deal with. Despite this, I still think that most of these areas are decent, they just don’t adhere to the brilliance that was the first half of Dark Souls.

Even though it is undeniable that Dark Souls is flawed, it is still an immensely important game. It has redefined level design, world building, and atmosphere in games. I have struggled for a while to write this piece. It is not easy for me to put into words my opinion about Dark Souls, and as such I believe that it is a game that everyone needs to at least try. Do not be intimidated by others boasting about how hard the game is, as I think it is entirely accessible to anybody decently experienced at video games. Dark Souls is a truly wonderous and unforgettable experience, and while it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, I highly recommend that everyone should at least give it a chance.