#I feel like fromsoft is the best and worst example of this

[doedipus]

generic fantasy concepts are kind of like instant ramen in that if you just kind of drag and drop the most boilerplate version of something into your story it's going to be boring as shit and devoid of nutritional value. and this goes doubly so for big setpiece monsters like dragons.

you gotta like, either come up with a unique thing or make enough additions and substitutions to the stock thing that it meaningfully has its own identity or it's going to suck

[rosecorcoranwrites]

Video Games as Interactive Storytelling

As I previously established, video games are a worthwhile form of storytelling, combining the best aspects of books, movies, and comics. They are unique among mediums, however, for being a truly interactive form of media. They are games, after all, and thus incorporate aspects play and choice.

Environment

Because you, the player, control the character, you experience the world as if you were in it, much more than in any other medium. You explore the environment. You fight the boss, and experience the struggle of battle. You help various NPCs, or non-player characters, with tasks. You make friends and allies, and fight alongside them. Although I never like my favorite characters getting hurt in any medium, when people attack my allies in video games, it's personal.

And that's what video games do: offer an incredibly personal experience. Unlike books, movies and comics, where you have to read from start to finish, video games let you meander and spend time in the setting. In games like Zelda, Okami, or Dark Souls, you can discover secrets that aren't necessarily part of the main plot. These can include hidden areas or side quests. Sometimes these add to your understanding of the story or make the main plot more emotionally impactful. For instance, I actually did all those side quests for people in Okami, so the cutscene during the final boss fight was personal to me. I helped those people; they were lending their strength to me.

You can also gawk at the extra details of the world. One of my favorite examples of this is in Skyrim, where you can read books of short stories or admire intricately carved Nordic architecture, neither of which are important to the story or gameplay, but which make the experience more complete and immersive. I like to wonder at the fact that some person was paid to write those stories and design those carvings; they’re neat little details that someone at the studio thought were important enough to put into the game.

Even a game as linear and straightforward as the Ace Attorney series allows for a sort of exploration. Though you can only "move" through a series of set-like locations during the investigation stages, you can click on almost every object in order to hear banter between you and your assistant. While this doesn't generally offer much in the way of world or story building (unless the object turns out to be a crucial piece of evidence) it does let us experience more chemistry between the characters, endearing them to us even more.

Choice

Games in which the player’s choices effect the story obviously offer an interesting experience. Certain games have binary choices—send this character to the safety of the cathedral, or to be experimented on in a laboratory!—while others have branching trees and dozens or hundreds of possible endings. Many games incorporate a morality system, where the more bad choices one makes make for a darker ending, with the best result being the “Good ending” and the worst result, the “Bad ending”; many games opt for multiple bittersweet conclusions.

While some such games have fairly blank-slate, player-insert characters as protagonists (that is, they don’t have too much personality, because the player can fill that in), others have very specific motivations, while still offering choice. My sister was describing her initial frustration, in Red Dead Redemption 2, that she could only make not-so-good choices in some of the side quests. This makes sense, given that you are playing as an outlaw in a gang, but was still annoying in a game that claimed to give one choices. She was later delighted, though, after something important happens to the character (spoiler: they find out they have tuberculosis, which not only makes them sympathize with one of their former victims of the same condition, but also forces them to come to terms with their decisions, as time is running out), and good options start opening up. The way the game presented choices made sense for that individual character while still giving the player the freedom to reject certain choices if they want. Masterful!

Happenstance

I will say, however, that player choice is not totally unique to games, as Choose Your Own Adventure books were and occasionally still are a thing. Programmers can program in more possible choices than can be contained in a physical book, but the storytelling principal is the same. More interesting, I think, is video games’ ability to create random happenstance. What do I mean? Depending on what the player does when, they might stumble onto a part of a game in a different way than other players.

For example, in Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, musical themes for each location play during the day, while nighttime has only sound effects. As anyone who has played Ocarina can tell you, the Gerudo Valley theme is some of the coolest, most adventurous music in the franchise, and it starts playing in the canyon, before you arrive at the desert. In order to get to the desert the first time, you jump your horse over a broken bridge, which feels pretty awesome to a first time player. But for me, it was more. I arrived on horseback at the canyon at dawn, rode to the edge as the castanets of the Gerudo Valley theme started playing. Just as I jumped, the sun came over the horizon and the guitar began! I could have sworn there was even a lens flare, but that might have been my imagination reacting to the epicness of what was happening. It was a totally random, unrepeatable event, and I’ll never forget it.

In Okami, I never knew that going through some torii gates led into mystical areas while going around them led to ordinary shrines, because I always went a certain way. Thus, my mind was blown when I discovered, after following a little sparrow girl through a gate, that what had once been a solid wall was actually a pathway. It wasn't until my second play through that I went around the gate of the first shrine, which led to a glowing portal to a celestial world, and discovered nothing but an ordinary statue in a moss-covered cave. I never knew!

In another Zelda example, every player had a different experience of their first Blood Moon in Breath of the Wild. Blood Moons are events that serve to replenish the enemies in the area, but in-game are meant to be the malice of the main enemy infecting the environment and causing monsters to resurrect. They happen at random, and are preceded by the music changing, the light dimming, black wisps issuing out of the ground, and, of course, the full moon turning red. My brother first experienced it while looking at some goats in a pasture outside an inn, while my sister experienced it after climbing up a tower to reach a treasure chest. Never having heard that Blood Moons were a thing, their thoughts, respectively, were, “What the HECK is wrong with these goats!?” and “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry! I’ll put it back!” I’m sure others have their own fun stories of their initial horror at what was happening.

Social Interaction

Cast your mind back to when this whole diatribe of mine began (many weeks ago), when I mentioned a coworker of mine saying that video games don’t inspire social interaction. Just the opposite is true, and it always has been.

One of the first, if not the first video games was the two-player game, pong. Though not actually a story game, this led the way for more two player, and then multiplayer games. Kids used to go to each other's houses and play Mario Brothers or Bubble Bobble; now, they interact with friends and strangers across the country in online, multiplayer games. There are even games that have “emotes”, special moves you can do to communicate with other players without voice chat. Others let you vote for another player as the MVP of each round to show your appreciation. Lest you think it’s all online, Nintendo is keeping in-person multiplay alive and well with games like Mario Kart, Mario Party, and Smash Brothers.

Single player games, too, invite interaction. Pre-internet, people would spread hints and strategy and cheat codes by word of mouth. “How did we know how to do that move without reading the manual?” my sister asked, recalling some odd special move in an older game. “I think a friend must have told me, and they probably heard it from one of their friends.” Nowadays, internet forums and Let’s Play videos serve the same purpose: a community of gamers helping each other out and spreading information about games.

I myself have talked repeatedly about what my brothers and sister experienced in their playthroughs. Some of this is because some games are too hard for me (like, every game FromSoft will ever make), but a lot of it is just because there was one TV and not enough time for me to start my own game. I’ve never actually played Sekiro or Bloodborne or Last Guardian, but I’ve watched people play all of them from start to finish, so I still have that experience. My brother and I both gasped when we first encountered a Mist Noble and its enchantment in Sekiro (and my advice, “Kill it with fire!” worked like a charm). My sister and I squeed over the griffin-dog-thing’s cute antics in Last Guardian. Unlike books, comics, and movies, which are best enjoyed in silence, video games invite conversation during play.

Online streams offer a similar experience. Even here, choice rears its head. Some streamers play it straight, from start-to-finish, with little editorializing. Others derp around doing a lot of nonsense, or add hilarious commentary, often adding their own layer of storytelling to the mix. Viewers of said streams can type comments in real-time, so that the streamer interacts not only with the game but with his viewers, and the entire experience is like one big conversation. Who said video games don’t inspire social interaction?

Community

Right about now is when I connect this new form of storytelling to something ancient. Books are the new songs and poems, movies are the new plays, and comics are the new tapestries and hieroglyphics. What, then, are video games? As I said before, they take elements from all of these other mediums: video games are the new bard adding their own lyric to a song, or the actor playing a well-known role a different way, perhaps due to choice or happenstance.

But mostly, video games are the new play, that most primal and primordial of all human storytelling. We play as soon as we can think, and play act as soon as we can walk. Children assign themselves roles and act them out together. Humans are communal creatures, after all, who process narratives by interacting with other humans.

To some extent, all storytelling is like this, as it is one human telling something to another rather than keeping it in their head. Video games, though, bring back the communal aspect of storytelling. Wanting to take part in stories—whether as a child going on adventures with friends, or an adult participating in a narrative ceremony, or anyone telling a story around a fire to a group of rapt and responding listeners—is part of being human.

At some point, however, that part of life got chopped off and shunted to the corner, as if adults shouldn’t desire narrative play unless they are writers. Thus, video games are put down as childish, or geeky, or not as valid as books. Oddly, they are stereotyped as being something beloved by loners, which ignores the vibrant and vocal gaming community.

I’m not sure where the animus towards gaming comes from. Why is immersing oneself in an imaginary world while staring at a book is considered high-brow, but doing the same while staring at a screen considered low? I don’t know, nor do I want to. What I do know is that some of the most unique, innovative, and emotional, stories I’ve ever seen have been those in video games, and I hope that in the future, more people give them a chance.

And those, dear readers, gamers, viewers, and story lovers of all stripes, are my thoughts on video games.

[fume-knight-of-shovelry]

Thoughts on Dark Souls 3

(Note: I made this right after I finished the base game back in April. I just wanted to clean this up and get it published while going through my drafts. This only applies to the base game.)

All right, first off, I’m going to clarify that I love Dark Souls 3 and have not played Dark Souls 1 (was too young when it came out to play an M-rated game).

That being said, Dark Souls 3 has some serious issues. I know Fromsoft will never see this, and in all honesty most companies should ignore everything on tumblr (otherwise BioWare’s future games would be awful, awful, awful and Overwatch would be doomed). I still wanted to verbalize this, though.

1: The Bosses

I cannot be the only person who thinks that, ironically, Dark Souls 3 has more “Armored Knight” bosses than Dark Souls 2.

I mean, if we compare the bosses, there are 32 in Dark Souls 2.

The following could count as “Dudes in Armor”:

The Pursuer

The Looking Glass Knight

The Ruin Sentinels

The Old Dragonslayer

Velstadt, the Royal Aegis (who is awesome)

Vendrick (who’s naked, so maybe it doesn’t count?)

The Dragonriders/The Twin Dragonriders (counting these as two bosses)

Throne Watcher and Throne Defender

The Gank Squad (okay, only two of them are in armor, but we’ll just count these guys/girls/whatever)

Sir Alonne (who is awesome)

Fume Knight (who is super awesome)

Burnt Ivory King 

So that’s...thirteen bosses out of 32, twelve if we exclude Vendrick. Of the 23 bosses in the vanilla game, 10 of them are dudes in armor (9 if you exclude Vendrick).

Let’s compare that to Dark Souls 3. Of the 19 bosses, the following could be counted as “Dudes in Armor”:

Iudex Gundyr (or, at least, his first phase)

Vordt of the Boreal Valley (he’s got the behavior of an animal, but still counts)

The Abyss Watchers

Pontiff Sulyvahn (who is a great boss)

Dancer of the Boreal Valley

Champion Gundyr

Lorian, Elder Prince, and Lothric, Younger Prince (okay, only one of them is in armor and the boss is badass, but c’mon, they count)

Nameless King (phase 2)

Soul of Cinder

So, that’s 9 out of 19.

So 47% of the Dark Souls 3 bosses are armored knights, while 37% of the Dark Souls 2 bosses are (counting the DLC and excluding Vendrick: it’s 40% if we count the base game without Vendrick). So, percentage wise, I’m mostly splitting hairs since the difference doesn’t seem substantial (although 10% is nothing to ignore, so we’ll have to wait and see how the DS3 DLC shapes up).

While the overall quality of the non-knight bosses in Dark Souls 3 is better compared to those in Dark Souls 2 (Prowling Magus, Blue Smelter, and Royal Rat Vanguard, I’m looking at you), I still feel a bit disappointed in the buildup to the bosses in DS3. Plus, there aren’t all that many optional bosses, and, except the entirety of the Archdragon Peak area, most of these optional bosses aren’t well-hidden.

Remember exploring the now-unlocked areas in the Lost Bastille and coming across the Gargoyles and the Bellkeeper covenant, or finding the Darklurker at the end of the Pilgrim questline? There aren’t too any bosses like that in DS3. The DLC might fix this, though.

The Lords of Cinder are quite good, but two exceptions stand out; Yhorm and Aldrich. While Yhorm’s fight is a love letter to a Demon’s Souls boss, it still feels like it embodies a critical flaw in the game; sacrificing interesting or innovative ideas on the altar of nostalgia. Aldrich is appropriately horrifying and a gut-punch to DS1 players, but after the initial shock, goes down without too much trouble. On the other hand, the Soul of Cinder is an epic love letter to Dark Souls 1 and 2, and many of the other bosses are excellent additions to the Souls boss repertoire, there are still plenty of disappointments (Deacons of the Deep, Crystal Sage, Ancient Wyvern, and the Greatwood [arguably]).

So, in conclusion, while the bosses are excellent, I hope the DLCs do a bit more to hide the optional ones, increase the number of optional ones, and diversify the boss lineup.

2: The PVP

I’ll be careful about blanket statements, but the PVP seems to have overall been received much more poorly in Dark Souls 3 compared to Dark Souls 2. Part of this is flaws in the covenant design, but a lot of it is the core design choices of this game and how they differ from before.

Let’s start with the positives. The absence of Soul Memory is an obvious plus, making it much easier to find appropriately-leveled and geared friends and enemies. The online connectivity is the best it’s ever been, with fewer instances of game-based lag, and generally smooth hitboxes even for notoriously problematic weapon classes. Covenants once again offer a place for players to carve themselves out in the world, and the differences between some of them lead to far more creative gameplay then we’ve ever seen before. Increasing the number of possible players in a world leads to even more chaotic brawls.

Unfortunately, there are a slew of negatives to go along with this.

For one, you can no longer be invaded in areas where you have cleared a boss; while I can understand the desire to make an area permanently “safer”, this means that end-game players are left in the lurch for areas to PVP in.

[NOTE: As of the original time of writing this, the arenas were not yet announced. With the presence of arenas, this issue has been largely addressed.]

All weapons in a weapon class have identical movesets. This makes it more fair when it comes to predicting possible attacks and helps unify weapon balance, but robs the ability of some weapons to stand out based on their specific moveset (Santier’s Spear, anyone?), meaning that good weapons are determined by stats alone and there are far fewer viable options.

On that note, Whips, Scythes, and Lances are essentially nonexistent or so poor as to be unviable choices (with the lone exception of Friede’s Great Scythe). Gone are the days when dual bleed whips were a viable strategies and the Grand Lance’s running attack was the terror of tight corridors.

And now, we come to poise. Whoo boy, poise. “Working as intended” memes aside, poise is a difficult issue to pin down. Making it too strong leads to the death of fast weapon builds and the overabundance of tanks. Unfortunately, the opposite occurred, and for a long time after launch, fast straight swords (Estoc and Dark Sword spam) ruled the meta, and running heavy armor was essentially worthless. The situation hasn’t been fixed, but people have adapted a bit.

Lastly, we need to address the covenants, which are the worst they’ve ever been. Never mind that some of the rewards are worthless or poorly placed (Mound-Makers get Warmth? Really?). For weeks after launch, auto-summon covenants (Blue Sentinels/Blades of the Darkmoon and the Watchdogs of Farron) weren’t working at all, making levelling up in these covenants a near impossibility. The Blue Sentinels/Blades of the Darkmoon were hit particularly hard by this, given that there are no rewards for joining the Way of the Blue and thus people didn’t have much incentive to equip it, further killing the chances for “Bluebros” to get summoned.

Perhaps in anticipation of this, much like how covenant spells were available in NG++ from Chancellor Wellager in Dark Souls 2, some enemies drop covenant items. While they shouldn’t drop regularly enough to disincentivize online play, the drop rate for some items is inexcusable. I never want to see another Silver Knight again; far too many hours were wasted hunting for Proofs of a Concord Kept, and it’s only marginally better for Wolf’s Blood Swordgrass and Pale Tongues.

That being said, the positive from above are worth noting, and being able to swap covenants instantly and keep progress is a welcome and overdue boon.

3: The Levels

I’ll preface this by pointing out that the levels in Dark Souls 3, mostly, are vast, interconnected webs with shortcuts, interesting navigational tricks, and clear connections to other areas. From the tower in Farron Keep, for example, you can see the Undead Settlement, the High Wall of Lothric and Lothric Castle, the Cathedral of the Deep, and (maybe) Irithyll of the Boreal Valley. The areas make good use of verticality and looping-back to feed into a growing sense of comfort with the ins and outs of a place of exploration.This is all fantastic.

However, in terms of the sheer variety, Dark Souls 3 feels like it drops the ball. A few too many areas have the ambiance of a cathedral (sections that stand out in particular include parts of the High Wall of Lothric and the entirety of the Cathedral of the Deep, excluding the graveyard portion), to the extent that once you get to areas like Lothric Castle, I was a little sick of grand arches and choir chambers. Plus, almost every area you visit has already been colonized, inhabited, or otherwise has some continuous sentient presence. The primary reason areas like the Untended Graves stood out, aside from the genuine creepiness of the whole place, was the sensation of isolation that wasn’t really present when tearing through the Undead Settlement or Irithyll of the Boreal Valley.

In addition, some areas are of baffling length given their placement. The Road of Sacrifices feels poorly paced; besides the section with Corvians at the beginning, one can essentially bolt in a straight line from Anri and Horace to either of the two connecting areas. Though the Consumed King’s Garden and Smouldering Lake are optional, these areas have the distinct sensation of halting at awkward times. The Garden has a few wandering abyss-snake dudes and some confusingly-placed Cathedral Knights, but ends after a single shortcut. The Smouldering Lake is a confusing mess of tunnels that can be skipped by…running in a straight line from the entrance, if one is ballsy enough. Sure, deactivating the ballista is an interesting operation, as is finding all the goodies, but the Lake does feel like a strange tribute to DS1’s most hated area. Anor Londo made a little bit of sense as a beloved an important area from DS1, but Lost Izalith?

Unfortnately, the Profaned Capital does not have “it’s optional” as an excuse. After the confusing but rewarding hell of the Irithyll Dungeon, an area with the tagline “Profaned Capital” brings to mind something more like Lothric Castle, but instead is a very fast L-shaped pathway towards a boss that sacrifices interesting mechanics for nostalgia, with an optional hellswamp.

On that note, the amount of poison in Dark Souls 3 feels a little overbearing. Farron Keep on its own is worse than any previous poison zone, and even if they’re short, the Consumed King’s Garden and the swamp section of the Profaned Capital feel like an extra kick in the nuts.

The larger problem I have with the level design is actually less the level design, and more the world design with respect to player choice. Dark Souls 3 is pretty much a linear shot the whole way through, with only two notable diverging points; whether you kill the Deacons of the Deep before clearing the Catacombs of Carthus, and whether you kill Aldrich or Yhorm first. Technically, one can also get to Lothric Castle early by fighting the Dancer of the Boreal Valley before Vordt, but you can’t ­­a­ actually get to the Lorian and Lothric, or even the Grand Archives, early. In comparison to Dark Souls 2, where you could not only choose which area to go to first (within a limited framework), but also which boss you could fight first, the restriction feels more than a little unwelcome.

That being said, most of the game’s areas are very well-designed. As mentioned, Irithyll Dungeon is a confusing, claustrophobic, terrifying and unforgiving environment, and the Cathedral of the Deep offers plenty of shortcuts (developer-made or otherwise) to make navigating the well-designed building easier. Archdragon Peak is of just the right size for an area so off the beaten path, and the Grand Archives are a fantastic final wall to throw up in front of players before the end of the game, involving heavy vertical as opposed to horizontal travel. And especially in comparison to Dark Souls 2, as mentioned above, even if the player has less choice in where to travel, the ways those areas link up is much more fluid and interesting.

On an unrelated note that I couldn’t think of any other place to put, the lack of differences between NG and NG+ and beyond are noticeable. In Dark Souls 2, new enemies and items were very common and the difficulty jump was noticeable. In Dark Souls 3, there are new rings, and that’s pretty much it. It’s a small issue, but combined with the lack of build variety, really hurts the game’s replayability.

4: The Story

The story is the part that hurts the most for me personally. While the characters and plotlines introduced in this game can be genuinely interesting, there’s no way to beat around the bush. Far too much of the story feels like it’s directly repeating Dark Souls 1.

While some of my complaints are to do with the dropping of interesting threads and characters from Dark Souls 2 (in the base game, there are a handful of items and areas referencing it, and the only enemies that carry over are the fucking poison bugs; even Yhorm turns out to not be a Dark Souls 2 Giant, although he’s implicitly related to the Giant Lord), I’m actually mostly frustrated because it means that the genuinely interesting threads from Dark Souls 3 get dropped. The entirety of material relating to “The Deep” ends up a dead end, Lothric itself feels like it’s repeating Lordran and Drangleic in uninteresting ways (even if that’s a theme of the series), and some of the most interesting original areas (Irithyll of the Boreal Valley, the Grand Archives) turn out to be connected at the hip to key elements of Dark Souls 1 that take over the new plotlines. Several new characters are essentially repeating roles from previous games, either in new coating (Lautrec for Leonhard), or even with the same appearance (Siegmeyer and Siegward [while I love both of them, the latter feels a little too much like silly fanservice at first]), and some of the new characters don’t…really go anywhere. Greirat finds an old woman’s bone and…dies after a while? Cornyx and Karla don’t go anywhere, although Karla has enough interesting questions to excuse her case.

And even for a Souls game, some of the material feels like such a tiny amount of substance is given to it that attempting to make connections is more frustrating than interesting. How on earth did VaatiVidya get enough material to make videos on the Angels of Lothric and Londor when very few items make any substantial connections? Again, what on earth is going on with Sulyvahn, the Church of the Deep, Carthus and more?

That being said, there are some excellent storylines and questions that pop up, and many of the previous callbacks enhance the story of the original Dark Souls. Again, the Untended Graves pops out as a positive, adding a great deal not only to the game’s story, but extending the importance of a seemingly silly character (Ludleth), and several storylines pan out in interesting ways. In general, the purely original elements of the story and characters stand out as great; some of the previous tie-backs fall comparatively flat.

Conclusions

Vocal people were spending the last 2 years whining about Dark Souls 2 and the developers tried so hard to recapture Dark Souls 1 that it kind of feels like DS3 fell flat in both respects. Genuinely good aspects from the second game were discarded for reasons that really aren’t clear, although they deserve props for learning from DS1′s mistakes and what DS2 didn’t do well.

I feel like Dark Souls 3...doesn’t really have its own identity. It blends elements from the previous entries very, very well but I genuinely think the story is too hung up on DS1, even with the excellent references to DS2 (Shield of Want and theories regarding Eleum Loyce being the Profaned Capital/Irithyll, anyone?).

Dark Souls 3 is an excellent game. At the same time, it feels like it’s trapped in an identity crisis between the first Dark Souls, and, occasionally BloodBorne.

[iamanartisttype]

Fromsoft did difficulty right, with Dark Souls.

Role playing games are the grind-fest of the gaming world. The player sits back and grinds their way until the mobs are now easily disposed of. Then they move onto the next area full of confidence, only to get trounced by whatever high level thing that is. The cycle continues until they become a demigod and then they start the process all over again. This is the idea of how an RPG should be through a leveling system. The only way to win is to level up. Then came the action RPG’s. Now developers have to balance the fun action oriented combat with the leveling up mechanic. This can be challenging since there are so many different kinds of action formats and they need to be blended into the leveling format. Dark Souls is one such game that managed to find that right balance. Even with the outcry of “artificial difficulty” it still has a superior system to the likes of Skyrim, the rest of the Souls series (Including Bloodborne) and the Witcher series.

 Dark Souls leveling system is akin to a classic leveling system with an alteration. Instead of experience points the player gains souls that they can use to level up their characters stats, thereby increasing their overall level. The leveling system is open. Whatever stat the player feels is in need of a level up is open.  Souls are also used as a form of currency and some of them can create some powerful weapons. Classical RPG’s used gold along with experience points to improve characters. Dark Souls variation is more challenging since there’s a scarcity of souls early on. The player will have to decide what is most important to them as they progress.

 Dark Souls isn’t forcibly hard when it comes to leveling choices. Like any RPG it comes down to how the player manages their character. Personally, my first builds through Dark Souls were pitiful. Thankfully, the game is rewarding if the player sticks around. Any horrible build can be fixed with just a little creativity and patients. There are also ways to grind levels quickly and grind items that could offset leveling mistakes.

 The gameplay aspect of Dark Souls is what's called artificially difficult. Players complain that it’s too forcibly hard with a steep learning curve and that it’s brimming with trial and error difficulty. These are mostly all true for the previous game and the games that came after. The only one I have to roll my eyes at is the trial and error comment. All games are trial and error. The player messes up and dies. Thankfully, the player doesn’t get locked out from playing and can try again. For the rest of the comments i’ll look towards Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 2, Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3. They all have two major things in common, spamming enemies with infinite stamina and tracking that allows the A.I. to move like it’s on a record. These are what should be known as artificial difficulty. The A.I. can attack as many times as it pleases and only need to pause for a brief moment and if the player tries to get behind them for a flurry of attacks It’ll just follow all the way.

 Dark Souls 2’s basic enemies spin like a top. Go on youtube and look up Dark Souls 2 tracking, you’ll find a video of just how bad it can be. I’ll leave one of a fire lizard spinning like a top. There’s also spamming enemies are all over the place in any of those games. Whats even more interesting is the decisive end to the players flurry’s. While attacking a spamming enemy it will just decide the player is done and then start attacking back. The player will get stunlocked and die. Dark Souls has some of everything I’ve said, but it was in it’s less cheesy stages.

 Some will argue this adds challenge to the games. They add artificial challenge to the game. A real challenge would be to make enemy that isn’t beaten within easy means like stunlocking it to death or constantly backstabbing. This will add real challenge and force the player to figure out the enemies weaknesses. Some call this trial and error gameplay and that’s kind of the point. It’s setting the player up to pay attention to what their fighting and to learn to counter it quickly. This is so important to learn to defeat bosses without dying. There’s multiple ways to beat anything in the game with any build they just have to be found.

 This brings me to explaining how Dark Souls itself had things done differently. There was far less spamming enemies and tracking throughout the game. Some enemies were blatantly easy and others were frustratingly hard, but they’re never so hard that it’s impossible to win. They’re challenging enough to make the player need to pay more attention. One of my most challenging bosses to fight was the four kings. They were so infuriatingly unfair, or so I thought. They have a glaring weakness that the game allows the player to exploit, but it has to be found. I went on to beat them with several builds ranging from glass cannon damage dealers to tanks. I use myself as an example because I was one of those people that hated the game at first, but the more I went on the more I found out how to kill everything with whatever build I was using.

 There are some unfair things I have to mention. There’s a couple of spamming enemies, one of which is before a giant plague releasing bag of bones, that will attack the player to no end until their stamina has hit zero and they die. Everyone hates these enemies and for good reason. They’re unfair. The previous variants were challenging, but fair. The player had to work hard on killing them. These things feel like they belong in the second installment. There’s also a few cheesy, but optional bosses that are very unfair to specific players. Luckily, these aren’t main bosses. They can be bypassed. There are some unfair main bosses that everyone agrees were poorly designed, but luckily they’re beatable. Unless everyone is like me and smashes their controllers every single time it’s almost beat, but it knocks you off and makes you fall to your death.

 This was particularly vague since I don’t want anything to be spoiled. The game is glorious and allows for the player to learn and grow much like any other RPG. Does it have it’s moments where it’s unfair? Yes, but these aren’t as frequent as later games and luckily Dark Souls allows for allies to help both from the A.I. and other players. If there is something that is giving anyone trouble then grab a sign. Just beware of the red/black phantoms. I say red/black since they look red, but are referred to as black. Anyway, please consider picking the game up again and playing. It is one of the few action RPG’s that truly hit the nail nearly perfectly when it comes to difficulty. All play styles are welcome and it can be forgiving if the player just has enough patients.

 I feel as though I should get into the other games I mentioned to compare. These will be brief comparisons. Skyrim’s leveling system is the worst of the Elder Scrolls series and it pales in comparison to Dark Souls. I’ve talked about it before so i’ll just say it allows for too much freedom without much of a penalty and it’s so restrictive in that if the player does create a fair build it’ll be held back for not having the sufficient points. No points means no bonuses to that high skill level.

 Skyrims difficulty is blatantly artificial. The enemies attack goes up and the players attack goes down. RPG’s are far more fun when the player is on even terms with the enemy. The best way to play through Skyrim on legendary is to grind until every single important skill is in the high legendary’s, exploit the horrible A.I. or grab an ally and let them tank. Not as fun as being the one in the action of an evenly matched battle.

 The Witcher series follows how Dark Souls makes things more difficult. It makes the enemies stronger, but it doesn’t touch the player. I love the Witcher for this. The only thing I dislike is the streamlined RPG format. It’s the player levels up, gets a point and, it’s basically Skyrim, but with random stat improves. It’s a little better, but it’s not a classic RPG in the sense that Dark Souls is.

 Thank you very much for reading! I now want to play through Dark Souls again!

 Writer's Note: My harshness towards Skyrim, Witcher and the rest of the Souls series shouldn’t be taken as these games are terrible. They’re all good in their own right. This was just a comparison on what I prefer in an RPG.

 Link to the tracking video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRiHNNj_G64

 A bonus one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOTjz9nESsM