My Experience With Dark Souls

 Introduction

    Dark Souls is a franchise known for being hard, after playing them myself I personally disagree and think that it is simply challenging and misunderstood by people who have not played it (except bed of chaos, that shit just plain sucks.) Playing through these games has made them easily land among some of my favourite games of all time, and they’ve been some of the most fun I’ve had with games for a long while (even if it may not seem like it from what I write). I thought after shitting on the franchise for so long, I at least owe it some positive words on the internet now that I have actually played them all myself. For full disclosure, some of this will be repeated later on, but I did not play the DLC of 2 or 3, when pyromancy builds in 1 and 3, and swordmaster into hexxer in DS2 so by all means take my opinions with a grain of salt, this is about my experience playing the games, and not an absolute universal truth about them, they are all great games in their own right, and all should be played, in my opinion, to the end.

My First Experience

    I was around 20 days from turning 12 when the first dark souls game was released, and about 3 years away from owning a platform that could competently run it, but a lot of my friends owned consoles that could play it, and their parents being irresponsible and not seeing the massive red 18 on the box bought a few of my friends the game, and I saw quite a few complaints here and there about how hard it was, that was the first thing that made me think “I never want to touch that game franchise with a 10 foot pole.” Some time went on, more games getting released, hearing my friends talk about how hard they were but beating them, in a way made me feel incompetent, I wanted to stick to games like pokemon, and kingdom hearts, but here my friends were, beating these games that they were making out to be impossible, I was still getting used to playing FPS games on a PC that could barely run Minecraft. Eventually, I just developed this mentality of “why would I play a game that is near impossible, that will just make me mad, clearly a bad game, games are meant to be fun.” I wasn’t far off with that last part; games are meant to be fun what I failed to see, is that fun is subjective, some people like a challenge, eventually I would come to like that challenge too, just not for several years, which I would spend insisting they punish you for even daring to turn the game on.

 

My First Time(s) Playing

    It was 2021, I had recently started watching Hbomberguy on youtube, and came across a video explaining the brilliance of Dark Souls 2, that video alone made me want to fight my pre-existing bias and play them, due to my living situation at the time, I couldn’t set up my PC to play with a proper controller, all I had was my switch I had to pay in handheld mode, not the most fun way to play, that was in fact one of the most off-putting things to me, it felt like someone had handed me the bias confirmation I craved for years without needing to put the effort in, but thanks to some wonderful friends who call me out on my bullshit when I really need it (they will be mentioned in the special thanks section at the end) they insisted I was wrong, so a few months later, my pc all set up, I see dark souls on sale, in fact they all were, it was the steam summer sale, so I bought the remaster of 1, scholar of the first sin, and 3 with all it’s DLC, hoping it would be a better experience, it was about the same, because I went about it the same way, the wrong way. I then proceeded to call my friends wrong for even enjoying the games because, for those of you who know me, I can be a bit of a pissbaby when it comes to games, and believe my opinion is objective fact, when it is not, and not only that, is oftentimes incredibly malleable. Little did I know, that second time had left a little brain parasite growing in me, every now and then I would go back and rewatch the Hbomberguy video, and eventually he made one about speedrunning where he spoke about dark souls speedruns which made it grow, and surrounded by much better friends, who just had a raw passion for the games made it fester, and finally, in 2022, it arrived, Elden ring, seeing my friends play that, and have fun, and talk about it, it had taken over my brain and wanted out, I wanted to play dark souls and I wanted to enjoy it.

Feeding the parasite

    I explained the situation to my friends, and realised, Dark Souls is an intense RPG, and I had learned quite a bit about dungeons and dragons, which depending on your DM, can also be an intense RPG, but I only learned as much as I did, because of friends, so I realised, if I wanted to finally play these games that stared me down every time I opened steam, right at the top of my “Play Next” queue, I would need friends to hold my hand and swing me down the street like a toddler… metaphorically speaking… so I recruited them, that is why they are getting a special thanks, they could have responded with just “get good” but instead, as they usually are, they responded with “yeah sure, but don’t force yourself if you don’t like them, it’s totally fine” so we got to work, I had heard pyromancer was an easy build for DS1 and its mainly what I went for in these games (except in DS2) so they sat down, looked at what I had, told me the do’s and do not’s, if information I had was wrong, or at least not advised for first timers, and away I went, playing dark souls 1, it took me 4 hours to beat the first boss, but eventually I did it, many deaths, lots of frustration, but I did it, I did that, I had moral support but the servers were down so no summoning friends to help, (they were down for all 3 games for maintenance whilst I played them) and the accomplishment I felt was enough to keep me trucking on.

Dark Souls 1 (Praise the sun)

    After beating the first boss, I kept going, got stuck for a while on the gargoyles, but every time I got stuck, my friends were there offering advice, and what I learned was the game wasn’t unforgiving, it was intentional. Every action you made had to be intended, you had to think and plan, but this leads to a very trial and error style of gameplay. It also meant that when you were going the wrong way, they game didn’t pop up with an invisible wall, or sign saying wrong way, if you wanted to try going that way, and had the skill to, you could, but if not, you would die, repeatedly, till you took the hint. It was a refreshing game to only be limited by skill and in some rare cases plot progression, D&D being by far my favourite RPG due to its openness, it was hard to capture that in video games, Disco Elysium I felt captured the RP elements of it immaculately, and I believe that in terms of gameplay, Dark souls is amazing and captured the openness of thoughtful combat I had experienced and enjoyed so much in D&D. My main struggle was the first 2 bosses but after that the game opened up, it felt like I knew where to go most of the time and what to do, with the occasional discord message to friends asking what I needed to do next and what I should go for next, and very swiftly, like a switch had been flipped, my opinions changed. Dark souls is certainly challenging, and a lot of things it doesn’t outright tell you, but that shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing, it creates a more convincing world, and yes its frustrating to die tens even hundreds of times to the same boss, or enemy, or weird unclear level design because the servers were offline so there weren’t messages telling you to walk up a weird part of the level and through a window. Figuring that out, is part of the fun, it makes you feel like this character walking through an apocalyptic civilisation trying to save it with just a sword, and that is where the appeal comes from.

Dark Souls 2

    This one was my second favourite, It had a lot of interesting ideas, some of which I liked but they did get incredibly tiring after a while, and also I did spend about 6 hours on one run I ended up restarting because I had ruined the build that badly it was a borderline softlock. Where dark souls 1 had felt like it started to ease up after the first boss or so, and really open up, dark souls 2 really kept the pressure on me the whole way through, it was nice, but I was very inconsistent with parrying the whole way throughout, and some areas were very unclear as to where I had to go. After around halfway I was really starting to get burnt out enemies did start to feel very samey, areas started to feel bland, and although difficulty wise it remained consistent, another way to put it was stagnant, and I just started to feel like I wanted it to be over, and I started to sprint to the finish line, I still at the time of writing this haven’t finished the DLC, I don’t know when or If I will go back, I do wish that they had more time to flesh out those cool new ideas and expand upon them in a sequel, instead a lot of fans of the previous game weren’t fond of them, so 3 would end up being closer to 1 in terms of gameplay than 2. All in all, this was my second favourite in terms of overall experience, but the fact it tried something, was willing to experiment, and leaned into a lot of what made the first one great, I doubt we will see something like that again within the franchise, if we ever get another dark souls that is.

Sekiro – Shadows Die Twice

    This isn’t a dark souls game so is excluded from my ranking, I did play it immediately after 2, came nowhere close to finishing it, not a fan personally aside from the movement mechanics, ultimately it was too challenging for me, I just felt it was worth mentioning that it is still a well made game, just not for me, so if you like the more skill based aspects of dark souls, highly recommend picking this one up if you haven’t yet.

Dark Souls 3

    Of the souls games, this was by far, my least favourite. I’m told it is considered “the easy one” but that did not make me like it more, there were a few irritating bosses but a large amount of them just melted, it felt like the challenge was more in not getting hit by the gauntlet of enemies between the last bonfire and the boss than the boss itself, and a lot of the areas just felt bland and repetitive, more so than in two. Part of my feelings on this were most likely due to burnout from playing all these games in a 2-3 week period. Full disclosure I didn’t pay attention to any of the lore in any of the games, aside from things my friends told me, but this one felt like a rehash of the first game, going to firelink, anor londo, a few recurring characters and concepts, heck the final boss is even just a guy with a fire sword, I did enjoy bits here and there, but ultimately, I doubt I’ll be playing it again, or returning for the DLC of this one. It was by no means a bad game, but it was far from my favourite, especially in the souls franchise.

Conclusion

    I learned a lot, that my opinions don’t matter, but also, at times neither do other peoples, you can be arguing something is hard or easy, bad or good, something that is seemingly a binary, yet ultimately, you can both be wrong. Dark souls is, a challenging, yet fun and rewarding franchise, and I urge anybody who thinks they are unfair or punishing to give them a try, and the whole “get good” mentality although is partially true, I feel is largely untrue, I’m an idiot and still think I suck at them, yet I managed to beat them, and although I wasn’t the biggest fan of all of them, I am now a fan of the franchise and they are among my favourite games of all time, and I cant wait to play the other 3 games made in this style by fromsoftware.

 

Special Thanks

    I’d like to thank my friends Phil and Travis AKA "Scholar of the Javelin" for helping me with this, without them I wouldn’t be sitting here writing something for the first time in 2 years, wouldn’t have played these games to completion and found some new favourites, and there is so much more to thank them for that isn’t dark souls related because they are honestly just amazing friends, so thank you guys.

The Last of Us 2: A Review

           So, To preface this entire review, I will mention, any opinions in this review are my own, and at the end of the day, they are just my opinions, if you enjoyed it, that’s great, I am Kind of disappointed by this, I know naughty dog can do better, and have seen them do better, so its just kind of sad that they couldn’t live up to the hype of the first game, also there will be spoilers in this review, so with that out of the way, let’s get into it.

The Good

           Despite me absolutely despising every minute spent in this game all the way to the end, I will admit, everything in here has the capacity to actually be an amazing game, they used all the right ingredients, yet somehow made the wrong thing altogether, I don’t know how. What I’m mainly talking about is the story, chronologically, it actually isn’t an awful story, but you see the problem is, you start out as Ellie, and you kill all the people who killed Joel, then you play as Abby, and get to know these people, but the problem with that, is its like “oh they like dogs, too bad they killed one of my favourite characters from the original game, still a piece of shit” and then you play as Abby, for the second half, witnessing the carnage that Ellie has wrought upon your loved ones, this was their mistake, there are flashbacks in this as well, some starting as early as during the same time frame as the original game. What would have made these deaths more impactful and therefore got more of a reaction from the player, would have been keeping Joel and Ellie out of promotional material, presented it as a sequel that just takes place in universe, you start out with Abby’s flashbacks, then instead of starting at the point where Abby and her friends kill Joel, It’s Abby’s Seattle Day 1, you play through all of that, with the brief mentions of what happened in Jackson, but nobody goes into specifics, then, when Abby hit’s the hotel, shoots Tommy and kills Jesse, says the line “we let you live and you messed it up” you flashback to Abby and her friends on their way to kill Joel, then after Joel’s death, its Ellie’s story, going through Seattle, Angry at whoever those people were, so you’ve grown to care about these characters, and come across them dead, meanwhile all you can do is think this was done by scars, then you have to be the one to kill them, as Ellie. That would have improved the story, and absolutely nothing is added in terms of story like “my OC John Billybong, the kooky but lovable steel drummer” its literally just rearranging it. So, in hindsight, the story isn’t awful, but nothing is designed for it to be enjoyed after the fact, because if it weren’t for the fact that I wanted to write this review, I would’ve just stopped playing once the search for Abby began on Ellie’s Day 1.

               One of the things that did kind of make the experience a little bit enjoyable, was it was clear everyone who worked on it cared about it, it wasn’t enough for me to call this a good game on a whole, but in several areas, the love put into it shone through, its why in my opinion, I believe it just suffered from poor creative direction, the voice actors were amazing, I only really experienced a few bugs and annoyances, and some of the areas did look nice too.

              The Final thing that I will absolutely praise this game for is the accessibility, there are so many options one of which I did abuse quite a bit when I couldn’t really be bothered to hunt round a dark room for what might only be 1 rag or something and that was the high contrast mode, but actually going through all of them, it baffles me that hardly any other games have them, and I don’t think there is one that has them to this level, not all games need ultra-super-duper accessibility to the point it ruins the experience, but it would help if your game is story driven and you want that story to reach as many people as possible, and there are so many other factors to accessibility for instance there is a fighting game player who goes by the name SightlessKombat and he has managed to get to an amazing level of playing Killer instinct, solely based on sound design, Accessibility is one of the reasons that you should never ever neglect a single aspect of game design, every single aspect is important.

The Bad

              So, I feel I’ve already aired out most of my grievances with the story, and that’s just that its in the wrong order. However there are so many things wrong with it too, such as the Lazy sort of parallels within the story, for instance, Dina reveals to Ellie that she is pregnant, so to try and make you feel bad for killing Mel, Ellie realises she is pregnant only after the fact, Then you also have Joel playing the guitar and teaching her at the beginning, and then at moments to try and make the player feel sad, it has Ellie play the guitar as if to say “hey remember Joel, the guy who used to play guitar, he is dead, remember” and another example is Ellie keeps her diary in a box, and in that diary mentions how she wont talk about her feelings, kind of like she is keeping them locked away in a box and pretending they don’t exist. It just feels like bad writing, and just piles onto how the game tries to force you to feel something, rather than actually putting in the effort to build up the emotion and then really drive it home. It also does this thing where as Ellie you kill a dog, then in Abby’s story find out it was a very happy dog that lived a nice life, I feel like this is one of the only games that guilt trips you despite the fact your only choice as the player was play the game, or don’t play the game. This led to me being very unimpressed, and even a bit angry, If I as the player had a choice to not kill, I’m pretty sure 99% of the time I wouldn’t have, but the game forces you into it, and if I actually cared about the made up lives of these people, I probably would’ve stopped playing the game. Probably the final point of the whole guilt tripping thing is the fact that all NPCs have names, so if you kill someone, another of the enemy’s will call out something like “Jeremy” and I feel like that was supposed to make me feel bad, but when 7-12 people with guns are all trying to kill me, the last person I am feeling bad for is Jeremy the NPC.

               Now onto parts of the gameplay. There are many padding mechanics, some of which combine with the very low effort jump scares in the game, such as holding triangle for 15 seconds to open a door, or lift a door, or move rubble, or lift rubble, and unfortunately, I must have spent at least an hour just holding triangle. The jump scares that appear in the game also are incredibly low effort, where you have a sound mechanic, so you hold R1 to focus on sounds and what direction they’re coming from, if there is a jump scare, yet you can hear the clicker making noise, it blatantly doesn’t show you where it is when you use the sound mechanic, and that’s just bad, but to be fair, jump scares are bad in general so I don’t really know what I was expecting. The rest of the horror elements in this game are just sort of over the top gore, its not personally my thing but if you like ripping a mans jaw off with a sickle and then punching what’s left of his jaw clean off, then you will probably like the combat in this. I’ve somewhat touched a couple of the mechanics, some of which that were present in the original are missing in this one, and that was the locked doors you open with shivs, shivs are still in the game, but exclusively in Abby’s story, and only for self-defence, I will admit, that is a bit nitpicky, but now locked doors just mean there is either a vent to climb through or a window to smash, which just feels a lot easier and doesn’t cause the player to gamble on the trade-off of “do I use my last shiv for potentially more ammo, or supplements, or weapon parts, or do I save it for later when I might need it to save me from a clicker”. Some of the newer mechanics also don’t feel nice to use either, such as jumping, which is actually shocking considering its naughty dog, the guys who made crash bandicoot, jak and daxter, and uncharted, yet they kind of botched the slight parkour elements in this game? The jumping doesn’t feel fluid at all, it feels incredibly clunky, and honestly I feel like I would rather toss a coin to see if I make the jump or not, because it feels like the jump distance shifted every time I went to jump, and I’m pretty sure most of my deaths can be attributed to missing jumps, or ropes just deciding they didn’t want to be ropes for a couple seconds, and I just missed them entirely. So, despite being a newer game, in terms of mechanics it feels worse to play than the original. I also wasn’t too impressed with the stealth, while I expected the AI to improve, instead of actually improved AI, it just notices you easier, which meant I just had to stay hidden longer, which at one point I was hidden behind a crate for so long I actually fell asleep, and woke up, and hadn’t actually been spotted at all, admittedly it was only about 30 minutes of sleep, but still, kind of a let-down. My final mechanic gripe is the horse riding, you do quite a lot of it at the beginning of Ellie’s story, then you don’t do it again till near the end of Abby’s so by the time it actually came to a long horse riding segment, I had pretty much forgotten most of the mechanics for the horses, and to then attempt to shoot stuff while riding the horse it just didn’t feel fun at all, there should have been a few more horse riding segments other than a couple hours at the beginning of a 25-30 hour game (bearing in mind the final 2-5 hours will be spent on epilogue crap).

          Now, one of the things I really really really hated, was the RE4 Cottage style sequence, in case you are wondering what that is, in Resident Evil 4, you (Leon Kennedy) and Luis Sera are trapped in a very cramped cottage with lots and lots of zombies coming at you, they will come at you endlessly for a set amount of time, the problem is, this was so fun, that every single other zombie game you can think of has a sequence like this. I’m not joking, Evil within 2, State of Decay 2, RE2R kind of has one, but its more avoid Mr X, RE3R however does have one, and its been done to death, much like zombies as a genre, in fact, The last of us 2 has a better sequence in it already at the beginning, when you play as Abby for a brief period, you run from a massive horde of zombies, that was amazing compared to the later part where all different zombie types just sort of flood a small room for a set amount of time, it’s boring.

Just Plain Wrong

The problem with this game being linear, is a lot of the environments are too open, this is nice for people who appreciate the art of the game etc. but when the environments are massive yet filled with no actual content, or items/resources, why are they so big, because if more effort was spent on extra areas, to be explored, and extra content, it may have been received better, but instead we get to go into a large field and say “wow, look at this large field with nothing in it” some areas towards the end of Abby’s story suffer from this to such a level that they just feel unfinished, because you come across a small set of huts, none of them can be entered, there are no enemies, it feels more like a test area than something that would have been left in the final game. It’s nice they’ve expanded the sizes of sections compared to TLOU but the problem is they still have the same number of things within them as they would have had if it were the first one, same number of enemies, items, etc. and it just ends up feeling empty.

What I will leave this section with, is the fact that it is just plain wrong, that this game got review bombed a bit on Metacritic on release (and is still kind of ongoing) because “SJW” and “PC” and “keep politics out of my games” because I feel I can almost guarantee that those same people saying those things will go on and recommend games like the witcher 3 and the original bioshock games to their friends as some of the greatest games of all time, just because they are doesn’t mean they aren’t political, they are some of the most political games of all time, you just don’t like this game because it appears to have politics you don’t agree with inside it, and for that you don’t deserve anybody to take your word seriously as any kind of critic. So many reviews like these just prove the people made a judgement based on the leaks, rather than playing it themselves, I wasn’t too impressed with the leaks which is why I bought the game myself, to find out myself, and although I dreaded playing it, some areas did leave me pleasantly surprised.

Final Score

So Overall, its nothing special, there are a million other much better games on every platform at the moment in my opinion, I believe this game is a 4.5/10 its certainly nothing special, but if you aren’t bothered by much of what was stated in this review then odds are, you will enjoy it, but if this stuff made it seem like its not really your thing, then depending on whether you still want to play it then I would either wait till its on sale, or just not bother picking it up.

Citations:

Killer Instinct Player:

-          https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-03-29-meet-the-blind-gamer-with-a-killer-instinct

-          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THbVXGulDUE&feature=emb_err_woyt

Metacritic Reviews:
https://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/the-last-of-us-part-ii/user-reviews?sort-by=date&num_items=100