Dark Souls: 7 Years Later

Dark Souls. It’s always been a controversial title wherever video games are concerned. Some people just can’t stand the “fad” of those who genuinely long for a game of struggle in an era where people look to run from hardship.

I, on the other hand, find Dark Souls to not only be one of the most influential titles of the last decade of games, but also one of the most brilliantly designed masterpieces of its time (and even to this day, for that matter). One of the biggest reasons for this is the meticulously detailed and brilliantly entangled level design that makes the whole world feel connected, something that was lost in translation in its sequels. That’s not to say the second and third games were not as good, as they improved in more ways than one on the proven Souls formula. It’s just that there’s a certain “magic,” for lack of a better term, that has managed to retain itself after all these years without losing its charm in the slightest.

An Unrelenting Show of Force

From the beginning, Dark Souls conditions you to expect the worst. Whereas most game introductions will have you play out scripted scenes in a very hand-holdy manner to give you a run-down of the controls and basic overview of how to play, Dark Souls instead opts to throw you right into the heart of a prison whose sole exit is guarded by a Demon several times your size.

The Asylum Demon, gatekeeper of hollows.

To make matters worse, this tutorial fight is near-impossible to win on your first try; it’s actually to your benefit to run away initially, gathering arms and armor first before heading back into the arena. Keen observers and those who are patient will also find other ways to make the fight easier, such as a vantage point from above that lets you plunge down with weapon in hand to dish out a massive amount of initial damage before the fight even starts, and by way of your only healing item, the Estus Flask, that has a limited number of uses for every visited bonfire, checkpoints that you can rest at to replenish your health, repair equipment, and level up.

It’s a whole lot of stuff to take in for someone who hasn’t played anything similar, and people who didn’t play Demon’s Souls in 2009 (that is to say, most people including myself) had no way of bracing for the shitstorm that was the Undead Asylum. Despite all this, however, the first fight is actually indisputably a fair one at that; the boss choreographs his attacks, and if you pay attention, it’s not difficult at all to avoid his massively slow-swinging club, butt-stomps, and drop-attacks, as people who return to the original quickly discover when they finish the game. It just feels like the odds are not in your favor because your are not initially prepared, mentally, to take something like this on from the get-go.

It’s All Connected

Part of the reason Dark Souls will be (is already?) a cult classic is due to the fantastic level design and way in which the story is told. Apart from the opening cinematic cutscene, the game does not explicitly tell you what is going on (and the cutscene doesn’t do much in the way of explaining, at least not the first time you watch it). As the player, you piece together the story and world lore by reading the descriptions of EVERY ITEM you come across. A sword you pick up might tell you something about its previous owner, an old side-street something about the people who once lived there and the events that brought it to ruin. You can literally go through the whole game without knowing what’s happening if you don’t pay any attention to the world around you, or you can become entrenched in the deep and mysterious world that is Lordran, should you decide to decipher your environment. There is no real reward for understanding, other than the understanding, itself.

Something the future Dark Souls games got wrong in my eyes (as convenient as it is) was granting the player a form of “fast-travel” (instant teleport from bonfire to bonfire) from the start of the game. By forgoing this luxury, the makers of Dark Souls 1 were forced to create a world that interconnects to itself in more ways than one. When you’re forced to travel everywhere on foot, you take extra consideration before pressing onward, unlike when you can be anywhere at any time.

Here’s an easy way to explain this: if you can fast-travel in any game, it allows you to think only about exploration of new areas without concern for places you’ve already been to. If you find a blacksmith, you can decide whether you want to upgrade all your stuff as soon as you meet him, or you can say “I’ll see him later” and keep on going, knowing that you can warp right back to that spot and upgrade your stuff when you need to, as is the case in Dark Souls 2 and 3. In Dark Souls 1, you HAVE to decide right then and there, because if you don’t upgrade your shit and you keep moving forward, you might wish you had done so when your clinging to a ladder in the deep dark pit that is Blighttown (but I won’t spoil the details about THAT place; that’s for you to find out on your own).

Great Wolf Sif, loyal follower of Knight Artorias.

The other factor the designers are forced to consider when there’s no teleports is that every location must connect to each other naturally so that the world can be traversed on-foot in one coherent run. This not only has the side effect of making the game more immersive, but it also means the designers have to think about how every building, hill, and dungeon fits together in the world, and this leads to them making shortcuts to get from place to place. Things like abandoned lifts and locked sewers that are seemingly worthless, gated areas are soon discovered to be paths back to central locations that make you satisfyingly think “so THAT’s where that path led to!” Pretty soon, you start to learn that the lone tower in an early location with a strong enemy and locked door at the bottom is actually a gateway to a dense forest (that you can actually access from behind, if you go all the way around the world!), and a pit of tree branches in an already deep (and I mean REALLY deep) cave system leads to an open, sun-stricken beach, complete with an ocean and sea monsters (and only one way out; climbing back up from whence you came). It’s something unique that I haven’t seen captured in a game since, including the sequels; interconnected world design is miles better than a bunch of separate areas packaged together by teleports.

Immersive Interaction

One of Dark Souls defining features is managing your hollowing, a disease that causes you to lose your humanity. This mechanic will both aid and hinder you, making the already challenging game more difficult than it has to be, especially for newcomers to the franchise. Hostile players can enter your once-thought single-player experience by way of an “invader” mechanic by using cracked red-eye orbs to show up in your game at random, should you choose to reverse your hollowing. But by allowing yourself to return to a more human state, you not only open the door to invaders, but to fellow “good-guy” summons, phantom players dubbed “Sun-Bro’s” by the game’s community, who’ll help you fight back against hostile players and other enemies in PvP and PvE, alike.

Multiplayer as a whole is handled in a manner not attempted by other online RPG’s. So long as you have an active internet connection, you are always online, which means you’re bound to have interactions with other people, and what other people do in the world. You don’t have to play online, though. Offline mode means you won’t be invaded by other players, but other players cannot help you fight others either, so it’s definitely a trade-off. In addition, you can rack up a whole lot of souls (a currency that doubles as experience points and money) if you decide to help or kill other players; if you play offline, you’re semi-handicapping yourself (but if you are familiar with the game, not really) by cutting off a few possible revenue streams for upgrades.

Gargoyles of the Undead Parish, Guardians of the Bell Tower

There are also a few contextual events unique to the original Dark Souls that are not present in the later sequels that I miss, such as “kindling,” an action that permanently boosts a bonfire to grant the player two to four times as much healing from the estus flask. If another player kindles a bonfire in their game, and you just happen to be at the same bonfire in your game, you’ll receive one extra use for your estus flask (until you use it or get killed). Another event that affects other people’s games is the ringing of a bell (there are two big ones that must be rung in the first half of the game); when anybody rings either bell, you’ll be able to hear it being rung in your game! It’s the little things like this that add to making the player feel like they are part of the world.

GENRE-DEFINING COMBAT

The meat of Dark Souls lies in the fighting; if you can’t figure out how to defend yourself, you’ll never get anywhere in this game, and if you don’t like the way it works after giving it ample time, you should probably find another game. Dark Souls is not easy; there’s a reason everybody these days compares any game remotely difficult to Dark Souls, itself.

The controls and combos are nothing fancy or hard to learn. You can roll, block, light attack, heavy attack, and parry. Everything you do in combat stems from those five basic moves. Pressing the roll button without moving your character makes them backstep. Backstep then light attack for a quick counter jab. Chain together light and heavy attacks to stagger your foes and deal extra damage. Sneak up behind them and stab them in the back when they aren’t looking. Deflect their own attacks with a well-timed parry and use their over-aggressiveness against themselves. Kick their shields when they act too defensively. Shoot them with arrows when they start to run. Throw explosives or poisoned daggers when they’re too hard to tackle head-on. With so many possible ways to fight and controls that are easy to pick up after a few hours, the combat in Dark Souls is one of the most satisfying of all games to date.

Yes, there will be times when you feel cheated out of a win because something crazy happens. Remember that one dude you decided to run past instead of kill? Well now that you’re in an intense battle going strong, three against one, that guy just might decide to jump off the rampart and land his sword into your skull. Is that the game’s fault? No, you had your chance, and you blew it because of your own laziness. Ambushed in a dark room from all directions? Why on Earth did you expect that glinting treasure in the center to be unguarded? Opening every chest you see? Maybe one day it’ll be a mimic, and you won’t be so lucky.

At the end of the day, Dark Souls is a game of patience that rewards thorough, conservative play. If you clear your corners, avoid letting greed consume you, and always keep your guard up, you’ll almost always come out on top. Dark Souls is so renowned for its gameplay that in its wake, there have been dozens of games claiming to be Souls-Like/Souls-Lite. You know you’re doing something right when your masterwork becomes a genre.

Making Memories

So few games have moments that you can actually remember distinctly without second-guessing yourself. I mean sure, you can remember what you did at what points and what the story might be and how it went along, but game moments that create emotional attachments in your mind are hard to come by. The games that create the most moments like these are ones without a true goal, open-ended sandbox titles like Rust and Minecraft.

“Hey Joe, remember when we made that HUGE fortress, and the next day we had to man the walls with primitive firearms while 50 guys stood spears and stolen explosives in hand at our front door?”

“Hey Dan, remember when we conquered that plot of land, made an elven city in the forest, and found out we were on top of the largest underground ravine system we’ve ever seen?”

It’s the player-created moments like these that are most memorable, at least to me. Of course, that’s not to say scripted moments in game stories are not memorable, either. Take Metal Gear Solid, for example; the story was so crazy throughout them all, you remember all the twists and turns and grand finales. Pulling the trigger on The Boss was hard to do: I know I stood there a good 5 minutes with my finger on the trigger before I realized that it was time to set her free. Finally finding Ciri after following her trail for most of The Witcher 3 was also an extremely satisfying moment, as was completing the first Dishonored without killing a soul to see how different the world was compared to my first playthrough, where I murdered half of Dunwall and faced the consequences of two dead queens, a plague uncured, and a city in chaos.

Executioner Smough (Left) and Dragonslayer Ornstein (Right)

Dark Souls has the best of both worlds. The story is so sparse and cutscenes so few, every little drip of lore becomes that much more important and impactful. Couple that with extreme difficulties and struggles to be overcome by the player (along with many, many failures), and you have many moments to be remembered. I will never forget how long it took me to finally vanquish Dragonslayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough, arguably the toughest fight in Dark Souls. The feeling of satisfaction was immense after the many one-shot deaths I faced during the few days it took me to finally win. You build up all this anger and hatred of the game inside as you lose and slip further into rage, but at the end of the day, you know it’s all you, and you find some way to use it to your advantage. When that moment of clarity comes, you experience a huge mental and emotional release as you come off the adrenaline you created, and boy does it feel good.

A GEM NOT WITHOUT FLAWS

Nothing in life is perfect. Dark Souls is not perfect. Performance of the 7 year old game is very sub-optimal, even after the remaster. No matter what I do, I always seem to experience major slow-downs and stutters at random depending on how long I play. Cheaters are also pretty rampant in the multiplayer portions of the game; some people always seem to slip through the anti-cheat with characters that have end-game gear from the beginning of the game. They will invade your game, find you, and kill you, unless you find some way to end them with gravity, the equalizer (if you fall off the map a la Mario, not even hackers can survive).

There are bugs. Some enemies will have their weapons clip through walls and somehow kill you. Sometimes you’ll get stuck in a corner, and sometimes you’ll fall through solid Earth. It happens, but not often enough for me to dwell on it. All games have problems one way or another, but in the case of Dark Souls, I never found such errors to be so bad that they overshadowed the experience as a whole. Many people have beat the game multiple times without even taking damage, so trust me when I say you don’t have to worry too much about random, crazy glitches. They’re there, though, and it’s worth mentioning.

User Interface design in Dark Souls isn’t clear to someone looking at it for the first time without explanation, but that’s okay; it fits with the mystery and lack of clarity in all other facets of the game. Graphics are good, but not great when compared to things coming out 7 years after the fact, but that’s okay, too, because they’re stylized in such a manner that they won’t be rendered horribly obsolete any time soon.

Some weapons are just straight up better than others with no downsides, and some are so bad, you wonder why they’re even there. Some enemies have some moves so wierd, you’re bound to die a few times just to figure out what they can’t do. My least favorite thing about Dark Souls 1 is that you cannot re-spec. your character; that is, you can’t change your stats after you commit a level up to them, unlike in other souls games, so if you don’t know what you’re doing (as was the case my first time around), you’re going to end up with a high level character that has crappy, useless stats, and you’ll be pitted against higher level enemies with no real way to effectively deal with them. It happens, but it’s not the end of the world. It’s not very convenient, though.

Verdict

Story / Lore: [90 / 100] - The story itself is one of good vs evil, a tale we’ve all grown accustomed to, except the way in which it’s told is unique, with details being sparse and everything mysterious.

Lore goes deep, and everything you hear must not be taken for granted. By the end, you will question whether the good is truly good, and evil truly evil.

Gameplay: [95 / 100] - The combat system and overarching mechanics present literally created a new sub-genre of RPG that has never been truly replicated. It’s as unique and fair as it is challenging, and offers plenty of replay value in character build variety, alone, that I’ve replayed it through many times, and will one day most likely do it again.

Presentation: [84 / 100] - Everything has its place in the world of Lordran. From the UI, to the voice acting, audio work, and level design, all the pieces of this title come together to create a unique experience that you won’t soon forget.

The visuals are stylized in such a way that they are not distracting despite not being the most detailed thing you’ll come across, but after 7 years, the game is definitely showing signs of age in the graphics department.

In addition, though nothing game-breaking was present as far as I’ve personally experienced, there were still quite a few glitches left unpatched, and more were introduced in the remastered edition, oddly enough.

Score: 90 / 100

Dark souls is not for the faint of heart. It is brutal, unforgiving, and will test the limits of your sanity. This game will make nice guys not so nice. It will make people on the edge go ballistic. And that’s completely okay, because despite all this, it’s designed fairly, the world is crafted ever so delicately, and the combat is so crisp, deliberate, and simple you’ll wonder why nothing like it came earlier. I wish more developers would follow suit, but that’s a lot to ask for; Dark Souls is a masterpiece of this generation, and to skip out on it would be a great loss to those considering a try.

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