By now everyone in the video game community knows about the infamous difficulty of the Souls series, reaching its summit of popularity with the 2011 game Dark Souls. While playing the first hours of the game I completely agreed with this opinion as I was slaughtered time and time again by enemies’ equivalent to goombas and shy guys. But as I progressed and kept learning the game’s system it dawned upon me that the real word that described this game wasn’t hard, but challenging. Dark Souls is never unfair to the player with its difficulty just to make him mad or try to stop him from progressing, using methods that are borderline cheating. Dark Souls offers you a challenge, a real challenge that is rare in today’s video game market, and if you do choose to take up that challenge you’ll be treated with one of the most interesting stories that I’ve seen in a long time.
Like the majority of Japanese games, Software studios start us off with a tutorial showing us the controls and combat mechanics that you must slowly master for any chance of progression in the game. As soon as that’s done you are thrown in the middle of a shrine, told to ring two bells in different sides of the map, and you’re off. From that point on you are alone in this creepy and desolate place with no help whatsoever and this is the coolest thing about Dark Souls. It doesn’t treat you like a complete moron that needs to be told every single thing that has to be done to get to the next part; you have to figure it out by yourself by learning from your previous mistakes. If you don’t then you’ll simply die a lot, and here is where I think this whole thing of the game being insanely hard comes from. People have been accustomed to being helped as soon as they die like two times in modern games. When they go and play Dark Souls and realize that help is never going to come they just get frustrated and give up. Dark Souls is a game where you have to adjust you’re fighting style quickly with each new enemy and adapt to every situation. This style of combat is not very common and needs a little more effort on the player’s part, meaning that it’s more challenging than other combat styles we see. Again: challenging, not difficult.
The combat as previously mentioned is more complex than the average combat in video games. The attacks are slower and there is a big emphasis in defense. Dodging incoming attacks is the key to the combat and a skill that takes time to master. In the beginning you’ll rely more on your shield but as time goes on you’ll start to see the patterns of enemy’s attacks and be able to dodge them. Those enemy patterns are the other half of the combat system; with each new enemy that presents itself you’ll have to recognize its types of attacks, how much does he use them, what effects they have on your character and the weakness each one has. Every enemy has a weakness and finding that weakness is the fun of the game, especially with the incredibly cool bosses. But even though they have weaknesses, they are by no means push overs; if you get cocky and start slashing like crazy they will annihilate you instantly.
Accompanying this combat system is a very deep, complex weapon and armor upgrade system that I had to look up in the internet because it’s stupidly difficult to comprehend. Each weapon and piece of armor can be upgraded several times and if you choose to they can go on upgrading in different types of branches. Fire weapons, Chaos weapons, Magic, Crystal, Divine, the list goes on. This is a very important part of the Dark Souls gameplay because as you progress through the game you realize that enemy weaknesses start to broaden. One enemy might be impervious to your fire weapon but weak to divine, meaning you’ll have to upgrade a divine weapon to keep progressing. This is where the developers should have made an exception to the “let the player find out” mindset and at least let an npc explain better this whole system. It’s so confusing and complicated that it makes the creation of cool weapons downright tedious and boring. This makes it very easy to just skip this part of the game and overall degrade the experience as a whole.
Dark Souls also has some very cool systems implemented that will make the player obligated to do difficult choices along the game. The best one is definitely the bonfire mechanic; the bonfires are the checkpoints in Dark Souls where you rest your character. Here he can replenish his health and you’re Estus Flasks (health potions) but there’s a catch: every time you go rest at the bonfire all enemies respawn. Now the player has to choose whether to go back and replenish his health and kill all the enemies again or go on with what health he has left. Thus the game creates a constant problem that the player will have to keep in mind; something that makes the experience this game brings a whole lot better.
The multiplayer component in the game also brings an awesome way to communicate with players through the single player campaign; each player can write messages and put them in the floor where they were standing. Other players can then see these messages in their game as markings in the floor; they open it and can then be warned of difficult bosses, near resting places or incoming traps ahead. Even though you don’t directly communicate with other players you can still share your experience in the game to them by a message that maybe later will come in handy to others. This makes people more altruistic than in other games, everyone helping each other out in an anonymous way.
Now to my favorite part: the story. Before starting the game you will be treated with a cut scene explaining the formation of the land called Lordran, where the game takes place and the destination of your character. You are the chosen undead that has been given the task of reigniting the flame of a once beautiful land now corrupt, decayed and evil. To accomplish this you must travel through the remains of once powerful and majestic cities that are now full of enemies, the citizens of this land before they all turned hollow. That’s it; that is the majority of the story that the game itself will tell you. Following its style of letting the player figure it out, if you want to know more of the lore of this land you’ll have to talk with NPC’s, read the descriptions of items you find and piece together the story with the clues the world gives you.
I suggest you do this because the Dark Souls lore is one of the best of the last console generation. This lore is just plain sad; characters, areas that you explore, enemies, bosses, allies, they all have a backstory and not a single one is happy. They are all really depressing, there are no happy endings in this game; happiness basically doesn’t exist in this place. You can see it clearly in the areas you explore; they are all crumbling, dark and old. The gothic elements in the architecture and the music combine to create a somber and dreadful mood through the whole game, making the world even more depressing. Seriously; I cannot stress enough how depressing this game is, but it’s so amazingly done that you just want to keep learning about this sad place. You want to know how it turned into this dark land when it was once beautiful and why, and the best part is that you can find out if you look enough. The amount of detail put into this lore is incredible to the point of giving backstories to characters to minor characters. This construction of a world is so well done that even though it’s more depressing than Schindler’s List; you still want to spend more time in it.
But even though the creation of the environment you play in was masterfully done, Dark Souls failed miserably in the graphics department. Compared to other hit titles that also launched in 2011 like Skyrim and Portal 2, the graphics in this game are just plain awful. Textures look blurry and most of the buildings up close have to texture at all. And then there are the human NPC’s, don’t get me started on these shitty NPC’s. Just go google the faces that you can choose for your character and you will see the spawn of Satan himself. I took the first helmet I could find and put it on just so I didn’t have to see my characters face, it’s really fucking bad. The only redeeming thing about this is the enemy designs; there are some incredibly cool enemies that are without a doubt the best I’ve seen in a video game, especially the bosses, those are insane.
All in all, Dark Souls does succeed in popularizing the challenging game style that its predecessor Demon Souls first brought and adding a few systems that make the experience even better. It creates an amazing sad world that teases you into exploring its vast history and exotic places. That said, Dark Souls is a game for the hardcore RPG fan that likes to be tested, wants to master the combat and will learn about the upgrade system. This game is definitely not for everyone, if you can’t deal with being less powerful than your enemies most of the time, Dark Souls is not your thing. If you feel like you haven’t been seriously challenged from a video game in a long time, go play this game right now.
PS: If you’re suffering from depression please don’t play this game; it’ll just make it worse.
The Geek Scholar 