Fair warning, this is a bit of a long post.
Prior to play
I’ve heard many many times that Dark Souls trilogy was worth playing. The first game was called the ‘Ultimate Game of All Time’ by a magazine, it’s certainly eye-catching but is it thatgood? It did spawn its own genre of imitators and copycats, and even went to influence other unrelated games, making them copy some aspects of it. I remember some modifications for Skyrimthat tried to make the game more like Dark Souls because the combat itself was much better.
I really didn’t know what to make of it, but once Elden Ring was announced, I decided to take the plunge and buy the trilogy on Steam. I own Bloodborneon PS4 so I’m playing that separately, but I wanted to get at least some idea on what I was gonna get into if I was to play it. By that time, I had played Code Vein as well, a game from Shift Studios, known for their God Eater franchise, so I was somewhat prepared so what was to come, but I needed to get down to the real deal.
General Overview and Review
After playing all of these, I can conclude that Dark Souls is just Dance Dance Revolution but deadly. It’s not so much as a game with battles but more like dance like something DDR or, I dare to say, Friday Night Funkin’. You need to know how each character dances like and act accordingly, doing the correct inputs. It’s not as swift or masterful as the Batman Arkham games or Spider-manby Insomniac, it’s more like a heavy metal version. The only difference is that failing to dance the tune gets you killed.
Death being part of the experience is something very amusing because pretty much all games consider death the final stop of the experience. Mass Effect tells you to reload a save if you die, and so many other RPGs. But Dark Souls embraces that and it makes death as part of the experience. And it makes sense in-universe too! The main character just refuses to go hollow and lose sight of what they want, whatever it might be.
Another bit to talk about is that you’re incredibly vulnerable. The first enemy you face can kill you, which brings back the whole dancing thing. But the key takeaway here is that it’s not treated as a regular power fantasy, you have to fight things, get stronger and overcome difficulties (just like in real life!). Eventually you’ll be powerful enough but it’s more akin you being a tougher glass cannon than being Superman, which I can appreciate.
The lore of these games is confusing and often not told directly, and I’m fine with that. The way we can interpret things can be done in multiple ways, but we usually start with facts so then we speculate. A big part of the games is to try to connect the bits we know and the bits we don’t and see if they connect, and how they can connect. There’s some really wild theories out there that I personally don’t disagree, and that’s actually fine. All part of the game.
Patience is a virtue and this game will teach you patience. If you are active and have a clear goal in mind, you’ll eventually do it. Can’t pass the boss? Grind a bit more, do a cheese strat, both are equally accepted options (which can maybe teach you the wrong thing but if the game accepts it, it works, right?), but you’ll get there with patience and all.
Dark Souls 1 (played Remastered)
The Age of Ancients was ruled everlasting dragons, a gray and foggy world. Then the fire came and with it, disparity. From the light of the fire, it came the dark and from the dark, the Four Lords. Together they defeated the dragons and created the Age of Fire. But the flames started to fade and a curse befell humanity called the Darksign, causing humans to become undead. These undead go mad as their humanity is lost in the process. They are thrown inside a prison in the north as they will ‘live’ forever until the end of the world. The Chosen Undead however decided to do the impossible, ring the Bells of Awakening, get the souls inside the Lordvessel and link (or abandon) the fire for a new era. The post-dead world of Lordran contains traps, people that don’t know any better and lots of implications.
Dark Souls 1 is the most and least realized game for me because as the entry of the franchise, it had to present itself as something unique and also concepts, like the world being dead, so much so that we’re in a post-apocalyptic medieval world, which is impressive on itself, and that everything is much stronger than us.
The lore has lots of implications on what happened, the locations all feel unique enough, the combat can be cheesed, the world represents something new and fresh. I love it.
Another great aspect of it that this is the best Castlevaniagame never made. Almost all parts of the map are connected in a Metroidvaniastyle, everything kills you quickly, and even better, you can get a whip like Simon Belmont in the NES/SNES games. Fun stuff.
But as a game, Dark Souls 1 is lacking so many quality of life features from later games and imitators. Tying the fast travel to an in-game item can be fine, but losing the ability because the game takes that away when you start a new game is not. Died to a boss? Go back to the last bonfire and travel all the way back to the boss arena. The lack of convenience makes the experience worse because you want to fight it as long as it takes but you can’t, you have to go all the way back to it. I know you have to be patient, but this is the sort of thing that really tests your patience, and not in a good way.
The remastered edition ran fine in my PC, no complaints there. Solid 60FPS experience so polished port.
Dark Souls 1 isn’t the ultimate game of all time for me, but a really good entry that if they decided to remake it, they could and should fix the minor grievances and add some quality of life features, as well changing the map layout to be a bit more spread out.
Dark Souls 2 (played Scholar Of the First Sin)
Long ago, in a land in the north, a great king created a great kingdom called Drangleic. A place that could be mend the ones cursed by the Darksign, that eventually turned humans into creatures that fed on souls only, the Hollow. The Bearer of the Curse decided to tackle a hard journey. After traveling to Drangleic, they found that the kingdom itself had fallen long ago and if anyone could fix it is was the king. With a task in mind, they decided to seek powerful Souls and be granted an audience with the King to fix them. But of course, the journey to get these powerful Souls leads the Bearer of the Curse through the entire kingdom and not everything is as it seems…
I love Dark Souls 2‘s lore, more so than DS1. Majula is so good, it gives light to a place that got so dark. But it’s clear that whatever the original vision for the game was, it’s a shadow of its former self. It’s quite amusing to play the retail Dark Souls 2 and then look at old content, some of it buried inside the game files and imagine what it could have been, if that vision stood out. Still, I love it. However, because of this, it’s another case of being not quite a realized game.
Drangleic is legit great to go through (some wonkiness aside). A great kingdom that has fallen to the many problems of the curse of the Undead, affecting even the king. Crazy stuff, but it makes sense. In the lore, he was distressed to find a way to stop it, to cure himself from this, and went hollow when he found that things weren’t as good as he hoped. Better yet, his brother decided to study a way out, so they were parallels in their search.
And the final dungeon being the castle makes a big splash, a beautiful and large castle that is most definitely the final area of the game, absolutely wonderful. Almost the entirety of DS2 is appealing to me on how much it contrasts the previous game. New protagonist, new setting, new enemies (most of them), new lore, a new and fresh experience, while having the old lore in the middle, like the undead, hollowing, dragons, souls, etc. I love it.
My real problems with DS2 is how the actual game really is. The inconvenience found in DS2 is a little more offputting, you always get the feel the combat is wrong, that the mechanics are not as quite as good as DS1, and I only managed to figure out when I compared both together. DS2 has stronger enemies and less ways to cheese for upgrades unless you go out of your way to do so. So many changes that make the game go through a ‘death through 1000 cuts’ deal, but if you are a bit conservative on how you play, DS2 will work just fine as a game, which is what makes this so strange. It’s almost like DS1, but it’s not. It’s its own thing, but it’s actually lesser for doing so.
I played Scholar of the First Sin, with all the DLC. I liked how it went even further on the time travel aspect and eventually gave you a new ending, which also makes sense.
Dark Souls 2 feels not completely finished, but it is finished enough. If From Software ever wanted to go back to this, remake it, please make the combat like in DS1. Or Elden Ring. That’s truly the only issue I have with DS2, besides some weirdly placed locations. But overall, I enjoyed my time with it.
Dark Souls 3
For eons untold, gods, kings, heroes and the like offered themselves to the First Flame, to keep it alight but only embers remain. Without nothing else to burn, the world started to collapse, with the lands converging, after the Age of Fire being prolonged past its relevancy. The only hope to keep the fire burning is to revive the lords of the past and burn their cinders, but none of them would take on this act. An Unkindled, a nameless undead made of bits from heroes past, decided to take on this task, getting the Souls of these Lords of Cinder and burn them… Or snuff it out and finally lay rest to this undead world. The place of choice is Lothric, a land affected by time and space, where everything became separated and erratic, but also deadly.
Dark Souls 3 is the least and most interesting game in the franchise to me for a few reasons. Most because the new lore created for the game is actually pretty cool. But least because most of its own lore just piggybacks directly from DS1. Now a reference here and there is fine, and sure, the Undead as a concept is okay, but DS3 goes way too heavy-handed with its DS1 callbacks, for almost no apparent reason.
It has Anor Londo from the first game (but heavily butchered because of course) in this game, for the solo reason to make sure that “hey, remember this area? here it is again”. DS2 was not well likely (by a vocal minority) for having too many changes in its direction and people dismissed it. So when the director of DS1 came back to make DS3, he and his team decided to do lots of callbacks.
And it annoys me because they are limited to those very same things. The biggest example for me is the ‘Abyss Watchers’. Allegedly a group of people that decided to watch for the Abyss, close to what Artorias from the legend in DS1 was gonna do. And in the end, they were corrupted by the Abyss like the man himself. But their entire shtick is that they all wanted to be Artorias, instead of being a nebulous group that was looking to enforce themselves, have the power or authority to do it and once they actually did it, they were consumed by the Abyss. Instead, at the end, the Abyss Watchers feel like a bunch of Artorias fanboys. It… It sucks.
And that permeates through the entirety of DS3. Every time it gets interesting lore wise, it has to do a massive piggyback to DS1, for some reason. And it feels like it’s trying to please the crowd that didn’t like DS2. And even though it’s the highest selling Dark Souls 3 game, and great to actually play it, the lore gets shafted on every time, trying to do callbacks for no apparent reason. It’s a complete misstep to be like this and it makes me not want to play it.
There are two DLCs for Dark Souls 3 but I wanted to get this post out before I concluded them, mostly because DS3 has burned me out for its crappy lore shenanigans. One day I’ll finish them.
Conclusion
Dark Souls as a concept is quite good, as a game is less so. It’s easy to mistake it for being a game that is too hard for anyone to play or even finish but I managed it. And reminder that this is a JRPG, so you get quest lines and the like, which will most of the time end in disaster.
The lore is pretty cool, because it’s not told in specific or directly, only implied, meaning that we can infer things and eventually conclude things, but no interpretation is the correct one, and even new theories can be created from things not fully connecting to other things.
If I was gonna give ratings or grades to any of them, I’d have to separate them a bit, like this:
- Dark Souls 1: average gameplay in comparison to the others, but still decent enough. Crazy amount of lore implications and cool idea for the map.
- Dark Souls 2: weakest gameplay, insane lore, weirdest placed map.
- Dark Souls 3: strongest gameplay, weakest lore, alright map.
In the end, I think playing all three is something that people should do, because they are completely different experiences from each other. But make no mistake, Dark Souls never truly peaked, it was always missing something.
Until Elden Ring came along, I suppose (which I loved by the way).