Demon's Souls Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 9/29/2024)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Demon's Souls

Developer: FromSoftware

Publisher: SCEI

Genre(s): Action RPG, Soulslike

Platforms: PS3

Release Date: February 5, 2009

Every bit of praise I’ve bestowed on Dark Souls has been a lie. Okay, maybe the whole truth behind the misappropriated adulation is that they are half-truths. The first Dark Souls did in fact popularize the idiosyncratic combat, rich lore, and world-building that hundreds of future titles would emulate. However, I’ve been attributing it as a visionary pioneer of its attributes and gameplay mechanics, and that’s not entirely an honest statement. The true innovator, the Nikola Tesla to Dark Souls’ Thomas Edison, is Demon’s Souls, FromSoft’s 2009 title that debuted all of the Dark Souls ingredients that captivated gamers everywhere. Demon’s Souls was critically acclaimed and it gave gamers of the era a stark alternative to the cinematically-inclined titles that ran amok on the PS3. So why is it that Demon’s Souls is relegated to partial obscurity while Dark Souls is the one reaping the spoils of its legacy? The way I see things, Demon's Souls' placement in the Souls family is comparable to how Vladamir Lenin fits in the Soviet Union's timeline. The Russian revolutionary was the governing debutant of the communist empire but was cut down in his prime just as the movement was in its infancy. The immediate successor to the throne (Stalin) reigned the ideals of Lenin’s new world order for decades onward, so it's no wonder that that figure has a clearer association with that particular dogma and political period. In a non-analogous fashion, Demon’s Souls is positioned as a “proto-Souls” game instead of the series’ glorious emergence because its licensing confines it not only to Sony’s grasp but to the now-defunct PS3 system. In order to play it myself, I had to make an extraneous purchase for a used PS3 console. This was an endeavor I never would’ve been forced to do for any future Souls title due to their widespread accessibility as far as their availability is concerned. Given that I’m a staunch veteran who has played through its successors countless times (except for Dark Souls II), I figured that I’d face less adversity in Demon’s Souls. The reality behind my assumption was that the progenitor of Dark Souls threw me around just as violently specifically due to its primitive elements.

To my surprise, Demon’s Souls doesn’t hide narrative context from the player. Every subsequent Souls game makes a deliberate effort to implore the player to seek out the lore and obscured rationale for embarking on this quest through character interactions and organic clues implied by the world’s conditions and general atmosphere. Demon’s Souls blinds the player at first when they are catapulted into the “tutorial” area and a portly beast with a seemingly impenetrable health bar trounces the player with a single swipe of his hulking battle ax. After conquering the feasibly vanquishable first boss, an eyeless woman wearing a black cloak carrying a staff decides that the player has earned the privilege of being informed on what they are experiencing. The kingdom of Boletaria has been poisoned with a noxious fog that carries the presence of soul-sucking demons who have made quick work devouring the inner essences of the kingdom’s denizens. The fog in question is not a thick, blinding wall of aerosol like in Silent Hill, rather, it's a metaphorical malaise that refers to the overwhelming danger that exists throughout. The player’s primary target is Boletaria’s ruler King Allant, who resurrected “The Old One” and his legion of demons to render his world barren out of contempt for it. Naturally, the road up to knocking this tyrant off his prodigious pedestal is filled with gobs of formidable monsters, so this adventure will be an extensive one, to say the least. The mission of quelling the immediate threat that plagues Boletaria positions the player’s warrior avatar into a heroic role, and acting as the kingdom’s savior recalls a more heightened, traditional hero’s journey arc than the mopping up of Lordran the player embarks on in Dark Souls.

At the center of Boletaria from both a gameplay and geographical (in a manner of speaking) sense in The Nexus. The player, on the high likelihood that the “Vanguard” demon pulverized them, would’ve shed their mortal coil at the start if this detached nether realm wasn’t present as a safety net of sorts. The player will only be teleported to The Nexus once upon dying, but they will always be invited to return on their volition because it's the hub of Demons Souls. At the base of the towering temple lies various NPCs that cater to many of the player’s necessities. The aforementioned eyeless figure known as the “Maiden in Black” serves the player in upgrading their stats if their soul count is equal to or more than the amount that she requests. Blacksmith Boldwin will upgrade the player’s weapons and armor given the appropriate smithing materials, and Stockpile Thomas sitting next to him will keep an eye on your overflow of items like a bank. Encumbering the player when they pile on too much bulky equipment persists onward to subsequent Souls games, but Demon’s Souls putting a finite limit on their entire inventory is the first mark of primitiveness the game bestows. The player will “collect” many other NPCs, mostly magicians and sages, after encountering them in the “fog.” The last initial person held up here is the “Crestfallen Warrior,” who does nothing but bitch and complain about how he doesn’t know the whereabouts of his body. Should I inform him that it’s one kingdom over in Lordran, or is my future insight considered a paradox? I not only appreciate the one-stop-shop convenience of The Nexus after the first Dark Souls scattered all of Lordran’s blacksmiths and sages across the map, but it's possibly my favorite hub that FromSoft has ever devised because it's downright sublime. The otherworldly etherealness of this monumental area exudes something of a pleasant dream, making it seem like any harm that might come to the player is ultimately inconsequential. Considering a hub’s utility is to emulate a sanctuary, The Nexus does its job perfectly.

But like all proactive people, they must leave the comfort of their homes and expose themselves to the drudgery of the outside world to work and earn a living. For the player, leaving The Nexus especially exposes them to a world most foul and hostile. I’ve been known to marvel at Dark Souls’ 3D interpretation of a quasi-Metroidvania game displayed as the interconnected world of Lordran. Considering that Demon’s Souls is the primitive predecessor to Dark Souls, one can already assume that its kingdom isn’t designed with the same rich and ambitious world template. Boletaria is divided into five different areas, all accessed through teleporting via the archstones located alongside the arched staircase at the base of The Nexus. Traversing through each area is a linear trek, and each boss conquered is a stamp that marks a significant progression milestone. This is why sections between bosses across all of the areas of Demon’s Souls are conventionally referred to by decimal integers (I.e. the area outside of the castle door in Boletarian Palace is “1-1” and anywhere past the Phalanx boss arena is “1-2”). While the linearity displayed in Demon’s Souls level design doesn’t floor me like Dark Souls’ impeccable world cohesion, I’d equate each area in the game to a rope with tons of knots that interrupt the straightforward pathway. Arriving at the domain of another demon admiral will still involve navigating through several twisted, labyrinthian roadblocks, which still constitutes a deeply engaging design philosophy in my book. Unfortunately, shortcuts and other forms of moderate respite are not prominent tenets of Demon’s Souls’ philosophy. In Dark Souls, surviving past a certain point in an area will often reward the player with a bonfire as another spawn point, or at least they’ll find themselves circling around to an unlocked door or transportation contraption as a more organic form of shortcut. Demon’s Souls, on the other hand, evidently does not subscribe to the belief that the tedium of backtracking upon dying should be mitigated as a reward for incremental progress or astute discovery. If the player is slain in Demon’s Souls, returning to the point of demise, much less the nearest boss arena, usually involves an exhaustive retread. Organic shortcuts are seldom provided at certain extents of progress, but they are definitely exceptions to the general rule and tend to be rather oblique. The pulley intended to transport coal and other materials down to Blacksmith Ed’s workshop in Stonefang Tunnel feels so makeshift that it's as if the developers implemented it as a shortcut unintentionally. For the most part, Demon’s Souls forces the player to hike all over creation without stopping to rest their feet, and conquering a boss to earn that intermission after tiring themselves arriving there is an insult to injury. The “runbacks” to boss arenas are an infamous consistency across all of FromSoft’s output. Still, the lack of any kind of intervals to breathe marks this cumbrous idiosyncrasy at its most austere and unforgiving.

The extent of what Demon’s Souls expects the player to endure for such a lengthy swathe of progress stunned me with incredulity as soon as the “second” level. The area past the armored slug Phalanx and his identical bodyguard underlings in Boletarian Palace is set on top of a narrow stone bridge that directly connects to the next boss arena. Sounds (literally) straightforward, right? Well, confidently stepping into the sunlight after leaving the field archstone will likely incinerate the player to a smoldering crisp. An orange dragon will belch an inferno of flames that engulfs the entire section of the bridge the player is standing on every five seconds, and it’ll switch its flight path to the following portion if the player survives the first fiery onslaught as if it harbors a vindictive grudge against their wellbeing. An underground passage is available to elude the scaly beast, but the ground-level enemies in this musty, dark tunnel will likely eviscerate the player due to their pack-like attack strategy. Once the player reemerges and manages to dodge yet another fire blast from the dragon, an army of soulless soldiers of differing ranks will stand guard to hack the player to bits with a vengeance. Miraculously withstanding all of this strife just to be immediately smote by the gargantuan blade of the stainless-steel sentinel Tower Knight will leave the player quite disillusioned. Before I raised my white flag and wrote Demon’s Souls off as too stringent to even humor, a moment of clarity struck me like a falling apple. I didn’t have to be trapped in this vicious cycle of defeat attempting to conquer Tower Knight, for the other archstones in The Nexus were open and I was free to travel elsewhere. While the individual areas of Demon’s Souls are relatively ironed out to a point of compression, the optional method of tackling them in whichever order the player chooses is the juicy component of nonlinearity that I initially thought hadn’t crossed the developers’ mind yet. It smacks of Mega Man instead of Metroid, but even a less sophisticated depiction of freeform world design is still stimulating nonetheless.

While it's relieving to vacate from Tower Knight’s domain if the player feels like the obstacles are too overwhelming to overcome, I must issue a warning that the player’s ticket out of torture isn’t as golden as one might think. Assuming that the difficulty curve of Demon’s Souls still abides by the order of the numerical integers, shifting from Boletarian Palace to another area presents an entirely different slew of challenges. The leathery, lizard-esque miners in Stonefang Tunnel will be upset if the player interrupts their perpetual labor, and the exoskeletons of both the native rock worms and bearbugs are as impenetrable as a laminated windshield. The eerie Tower of Latria sees illithid guards patrolling the dank prison halls, and they’ll paralyze anyone in their sight to suck their gray matter dry far before the player encounters the mechanized tower that spits rows of arrows. As a melee player, all I could do was evade the torrent of javelin icicles constantly spurting out of the flying stingrays that soar in the skies over the Shrine of Storms. God help you if the Old Hero strikes you down, for the trek back to him with the rolling skeletons and reaper ghouls alongside the swarm of aerial projectiles is possibly the most strenuous journey back to a boss fight across the entire Souls series. If you couldn’t tell, choosing an alternative to Tower Knight is a “pick your poison” scenario and the route is determined by which of these areas presents the path of least resistance. All of these districts of Boletaria are equally arduous in their unique ways but for the love of all that is holy, do not pick the literal poison that is the Valley of Defilement. Take the name of this area as a cautionary warning, for the fifth area that proves Miyazaki had no latency period for his favorite level trope will defile the player at every corner of the sludgy and dismal bog. Still, I think I’d rather invest in a timeshare here rather than excavate through Blighttown again.

The bouts of endurance that the player is forced to undergo to succeed in Demon’s Souls don’t entirely connote that the game is bereft of any accommodations. For instance, the unhinged healing system in this game will stave off any fatal occurrences for a long while. Instead of using the sparkling, possibly tangerine-flavored Estus Flasks, the restorative grass is an item meshed in with the rest of the player’s inventory. Boletaria has a thumb as green as the state of Colorado, for grass is commonly dropped from enemies upon defeat for the player’s taking. The different strands of grass are differentiated by the phases of the moon, ranging from the sliver of crescent grass to the curvaceousness of the full moon grass which signifies the effectiveness of its restoration. Once the player can afford to spend their surplus of souls on other services besides leveling up, grasses are available to be bought in bulk like a Costco member before a hurricane hits. I can definitely see why this method of healing was scrapped in favor of the Estus System with a fixed and reasonably finite amount of uses. The unabated mass of grass I accumulated after a certain point in the game became relied on like a crutch, replenishing any fraction of damage received provided I found an opportunity to distance myself from enemies. My mistakes during combat that resulted in a grave depletion of my health bar became trivialized by the limitlessness at which I could remedy them. In the defense of the grass, perhaps I wouldn’t be desperately chowing down on the plant like livestock if the game didn’t fracture my health bar in half per death. It’s an absurdly uncharitable penalty for failure and I’d chalk it up as another example of the game’s primitive mold if one Dark Souls game didn’t adopt it (it was equally bullshit in that game too). Only conquering a boss or imbibing a Stone of Ephemeral Eyes will mend this unfair affliction, and that particular item isn’t nearly as plentiful as the grass (surprise, surprise). While I was initially appalled by the game’s demerit of death, I eventually discovered that there were benefits to playing with a crappy hand. Another feature totally unique to Demon’s Souls is “world tendency,” which affects certain aspects of the gameplay. If the player is in “soul mode” with half of their total health, the enemies do not brutalize the player quite as relentlessly. On the other hand, having full health comes with the perk of looting rarer items and obtaining more souls per kill with the caveat of tougher foes and frequent black phantom invasions. It’s nice to know that the developers can express kernels of sympathy for the player, but I find the world tendency mechanic to be somewhat condescending. FromSoft can fuck off if they’re insinuating that one death is enough evidence of the player’s skill, or lack thereof, to lower the difficulty.

The bosses will not be affected by the player’s status, even if a good handful of them will have the player questioning if the stipulations of their “soul form” are still seeping into the experience. Surprisingly, the mightiest foes of Demon’s Souls with screen-spanning health bars are the easiest crop of bosses across all of FromSoft’s titles. Instead of seeking out a chance to stab at a boss at a moment most opportune that will ideally leave the player unscathed like the Souls duels we’re accustomed to, several of the bosses in Demon’s Souls are dispatched via methods so unorthodox that they can be interpreted as gimmicks. For example, fighting Tower Knight organically will result in shaving unsatisfactory chips off his health bar. Targeting his ankles and nipping at them like a mangy chihuahua will cause him to lose his balance and fall on his back, giving the player free rein to strike at his exposed head for potent damage. The grotesquely obese cleaver-wielder called The Adjudicator will absorb any and all harm that touches the impenetrable rolls of fat on his body. That is until his bloody fissures are prodded enough times that he’ll similarly fall over and expose the weak spot of the bird piloting this abomination. This puzzle-oriented pattern of boss fights is incredibly prevalent for the so-called “archdemons,” the penultimate boss of an area that concludes the overarching level. The foreboding Dragon God will crumble into the pool of lava below him after impaling him with two giant arrow contraptions found in the arena, shooting the Storm King out of the sky requires unsheathing a special sword with forceful wind properties. The fight against Maiden Astraea is actually with her bodyguard, as she’ll oblige her own demise once the player defeats her means of protection. The aggressive major adversaries that mirror the typical Souls bosses like Flamelurker and Penetrator are few and far between here, and their predictability still makes them pale in comparison. The Old Hero would fit in this category if his blindness wasn’t burdening him, a quirk that situates this boss with the rest of the unconventional pack. At times, it seems like finally arriving at a boss is a relief from the hellish expedition that preceded it, which is yet another amusing instance of Demon’s Souls dipping its toes in the quaint characteristics of retro gaming.

After defeating every demon boss whether they be breezy or a grueling test of one’s Souls prowess, a complete checklist will eventually circle around to continue ascending Boletarian Palace and quashing the king who doomed the kingdom with his hubris: King Allant. The pathway up to Boletaria’s decorated ruler is appropriately one of the most excruciating, with roided-up knights and agile ninjas bombarding the player at all angles and another dragon’s fire to swiftly evade with great precision. Once the player faces Allant, no gimmicks will save the player any strain. King Allant verges heavily towards the belligerent side of the boss spectrum, and his array of sword tactics along with his AOE magic explosion will have the player devouring so much grass that they’d make for a healthy cut of hamburger meat. As epic as this duel is, the formidable King Allant is not the final battle. In fact, this is but a mirage of the king’s glory days. The true King Allant is located in a realm under the base of The Nexus, and he’s pathetically been reduced to what is best described as a sentient turd. Refusing to commit regicide will result in the player taking his position as the ultimate demon lord that will reign in a new era of prosperity for the scourge. On the other hand, returning to The Nexus and letting the Maiden in Black close the portal to the demon world will put Boletaria at peace. It should be pretty clear which decision to make in these final moments considering one ending is concretely labeled as “bad” and the other as “good,” I much appreciate the ambiguous conundrum of ethics that the player is presented with at the end of Dark Souls. Besides, the miserable state of King Allant is an effective forewarning of what is to come if the player takes control, and it’s an existence I can’t imagine anyone would idealize for themselves.

A lesser Dark Souls, Demon’s Souls certainly isn’t. Sure, it’s comparatively rudimentary in plenty of aspects as to be expected from a first crack at an unprecedented type of action-adventure video game. I prefer the seamless world, the frequency of bonfires, the obscured narrative, and the boss fights that require pure skill to defeat rather than the prevalence of puzzle-oriented headscratchers that all became idiosyncrasies of every game in the Dark Souls trilogy. Yet, this is all based on personal preference. None of Demon’s Souls' more “video gamey” attributes inherently make it obsolete, even if working with them made the game infuriating at times. At the end of the day, Demon’s Souls resonated with me on the same scale as any of its spiritual successors because triumphing over all of its challenges gave me the same invigorating sense of personal satisfaction that no other series exudes.

Bloodborne Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 6/13/2021)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Bloodborne

Developer: FromSoftware

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Genre(s): Action RPG, Soulslike

Platforms: PS4

Release Date: March 24, 2015

Adapting and interpreting the works of H.P. Lovecraft is very hard to do. The sub-genre of cosmic horror has been present in art and entertainment for well over a century now, but it doesn’t seem like too many people have a grasp on what it is. Cosmic horror is commonly defined as the “fear of the unknown”, incomprehensible terrors coming to light for mere, mortal beings like us humans. The form of horror frames man’s pitiful, insignificant existence by juxtaposing it with the grand scope of the horrific cosmic forces. It’s more in-depth than just presenting monsters as obstacles for the human protagonists to tackle. Perhaps adapting cosmic horror into other mediums is difficult because it’s difficult to convey in more visual mediums. The existential dread highlighted in the passages Lovecraft forces the reader to visualize the horror for themselves, causing the reader to experience feelings of insignificance by proxy. In a visual medium, the terrors are presented as scary, alien monsters with no context of what they are supposed to represent. Lovecraftian horror is more about presentation and direction rather than visuals. There have to be layers of substantial inquietude underneath the eldritch beasts on the surface. The medium of film has always had trouble conveying this because films are shorter than novels and have to present themselves more concisely. They can’t take the same time to develop the grand scale that Lovecraftian horror has. Video games, on the other hand, are a more visual medium that doesn’t have the same problem. Video games can take the time to establish the Lovecraftian tone and offer a richer experience that more thoroughly reflects the themes in Lovecraft’s works. Lovecraftian horror also tends to be more esoteric and ambiguous by nature, so what better developer to adapt a Lovecraftian video game than FromSoft, the creators of the esoteric and challenging Souls series?

Bloodborne is the fourth game developed by FromSoft since they started branding their own style of action RPGs starting with Demon’s Souls in 2009. Though it is not part of the Souls series, Bloodborne is so heavily intertwined with the Souls games that the franchise is now referred to as “Soulsborne” to include Bloodborne in the canon of Souls games. Bloodborne is essentially Dark Souls in a different setting with slightly different gameplay mechanics. There is something about Bloodborne that elevates its status from the other FromSoft games besides its aesthetic and technical differences. Bloodborne holds a special place in the hearts of many gamers, myself included. It’s a grand achievement in many aspects. It is arguably the best Souls game there is, it magnificently captures the essence of a Lovecraftian work in a visual medium, and it was the game that restored my hope for the video game industry.

I’ll start the last point with a little bit of context: for a hefty chunk of my life, I was a tad averse to modern triple-A titles. The new industry trends during the seventh generation of gaming, like the casual gamer market, the centralized focus of multiplayer, online experience, and microtransactions, left me disenfranchised with modern gaming. When the eighth-generation consoles came out, I was a bit apathetic. I was only interested in games from my childhood, experiencing older games that I missed out on, and modern indie games that either emulated elements from older titles or offered a less streamlined experience. I only bought a Wii U out of the obligation to get the newest Super Smash Bros. In 2016, I got a PS4 for cheap and laid in my room as a dormant paperweight for about a year and a half. In 2017, I started attending a university and got my own apartment with a roommate who also had a PS4 with about a dozen games. I brought mine up there to sample his titles, and one of them was Bloodborne. I knew the Souls games' reputation and was eager to try one. My roommate warned me about Bloodborne and its infamously high level of difficulty in a condescending fashion as if all I had played up to that point was Nintendogs or some shit. I confidently ignored his fair warning and ran head-first into my first Souls experience.

It’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly made me fall in love with Bloodborne to renew my faith in gaming. I remember my first experience with the game involved a fair bit of struggling, but not to the extent of what my roommate thought I was going to experience. The combat wasn’t the initial point of strain as I quickly became comfortable with my weapon and plowed through the corrupted denizens of Yharnam. The control in Bloodborne felt so organic that I acclimated to it very quickly, making it easy to kill the mobs of enemies. I never felt like the combat was extremely inaccessible to the player, nor did I get the impression that this game had a steep learning curve. Saying that the combat in this game was “tough but fair” is a cliche, but I can’t think of a better way to describe it. The combat demands a fair amount of skill and acuity from the player, but not to the point of using difficulty as an unfair novelty to see what the player will endure. Whether the Yharnamites were meeting their end with my blade or tearing me to pieces, I never felt like the game relished in sadistically brutalizing the player. On the other end of the spectrum, Bloodborne never held my hand across Yharnam like a fretting parent. It felt refreshing to experience a modern game with so much organic control that didn’t condescend towards the player’s innate abilities.

It wasn’t until I came across a bridge with two lycanthropes that the combat difficulty started to affect me. These two beasts were too menacing to deal with in that proximity, and I died numerous times attempting to get past them with a fight. It didn’t help that I expected to see another lantern in this level after a long trek through Central Yharnam because I didn’t understand how the layout of a Souls game worked yet. I kept enduring the lengthy path to get here just to die at the monstrous claws of the lycanthropes again and again. After being frustrated with the game, I decided there must be another way around this obstacle. In doing this, I discovered many brilliant things about Bloodborne’s level design. I found another passageway at the other end of the bridge obscured by breakable backdrop objects like coffins and wooden barrels. This took me to another area of Central Yharnam, seemingly removed from the path I was taking that led me to the bridge. It wasn’t a dead-end but a different route that took me to the first main boss of the game. I also found an elevator around the bend that took me back to the first lantern at the beginning, a heavy relief after attempting to trek all the way through the level without any respite. In discovering this, I was in awe of the layered design of Central Yharnam. It encourages players to meticulously explore the world and find solutions in places that don’t seem as obvious as the beaten path. The long, arduous expedition of Central Yharnam was rewarded by giving me a shortcut to the spawn point, feeling as if I unraveled the level. It felt much more satisfying than bolting through the level like a race to the finish. The game also presents the player with more than one route when an obstacle becomes too daunting to tackle. All of this is very reminiscent of a Metroidvania-like design philosophy which is one of my favorite methods of game design. It was nice to see that the developers took more from Castlevania than just an aesthetic influence. I was also incredibly impressed that they could execute this concisely in a 3D space, something seldom seen in gaming.

The enemies and bosses in Bloodborne were the icings on a cake that solidified my adoration for this game. In most of the modern triple-A games I was familiar with at the time, the enemies were carbon copies of one another, and bosses were either entirely absent or glaringly obvious to defeat. Nothing in Bloodborne is obvious, including the enemies and the bosses, another aspect that made the game so invigorating. While the game has some standard enemies like the gangly, pitchfork, and machete-wielding villagers, each area introduces new ones to keep the players on their toes. These enemies can range in size, power, numbers, etc., and in Dark Souls fashion, the unassuming foes can be as dangerous as the gigantic ones. The bosses in this game are a real treat. The inspiration of HP Lovecraft naturally gives the developers leeway to design some pretty intimidating, eldritch beasts. Some of these bosses proved to be quite challenging, but dying to them did not vex me because each of them was magnificent. I’d sometimes speed through a level just to get at the chance to conquer the next boss.

Since being impressed and enthralled by my initial Bloodborne experience, I have played through every other Soulsborne game (except for Demon’s Souls for a lack of a PS3). I now have the insight to compare Bloodborne to the other FromSoft games. Even though the first Dark Souls is my favorite due to its world design and game progression, Bloodborne is still a very close second favorite for me. I’d still argue that Bloodborne is objectively the best Soulsborne game due to its superior mechanics. It took the principles of Dark Souls and sanded out the rough edges without compromising on the substantial qualities of the series. Bloodborne is, in essence, a translation of the Souls series. It has the same properties as Dark Souls, but all of these have been shifted to fit the gothic foreground of Bloodborne. The change in setting is an obvious shift from the middle-ages-inspired Dark Souls, but plenty of other aspects have been shifted to make Bloodborne discernible from Dark Souls. Many of these aspects elevate Bloodborne from the rest of the FromSoft games.

Bloodborne is a much more visceral experience than Dark Souls. No longer are we hacking up languished hollows and dragons. The ravenous villagers and arcane beings in Bloodborne are much more aggressive. You have to match their aggression to survive the onslaught of eldritch terrors. Your character can’t just wait to strike and block attacks with a shield. The game even gives you a wooden shield that shatters after using it once to lull you into a false sense of Dark Souls familiarity. It reminds veteran Souls players that this isn’t Dark Souls and Bloodborne has something new to offer that will take some time to get accustomed to. Your character in Bloodborne is much more agile, opting for a dash move instead of a roll to fit the swift combat. A new feature allows the player to restore lost health by striking enemies, which gives the player incentive to be more aggressive. The backstab move involves using a charged strike to put the enemy in a vulnerable kneeled position which is then followed up by what is referred to as a “visceral attack”. Your character plunges their hand into the enemy and then blows them back upon exiting, resulting in a pulpy, coagulated mess of blood. Another way to initiate this visceral attack is reposting Bloodborne's version of parrying. Using a shield is out of the question, so Bloodborne proposes that the player blowback the scourges of Yharnam with a gun. From a distance, you can use the gun in your left hand to time a shot when an enemy is about to attack, rendering him vulnerable in the familiar kneeled stance. Reposting is by far the superior method of blocking the enemy’s attacks. It’s much easier to do than parrying with a shield, but it still requires the same precision. I avoid parrying in Dark Souls like the plague, but reposting is second nature. Reposting also compliments the faster-paced gameplay Bloodborne offers.

If the enemies in Bloodborne don’t force you to be aggressive, the bosses certainly will. Dark Souls bosses will make you consider the best tactics to defeat them, but the bosses in Bloodborne will mop the floor with you if you don’t act quickly. I can’t imagine bosses like the frantic Darkbeast Paarl or the feral Blood-Starved Beast in a slower-paced game like Dark Souls. Their movement is so erratic that there wouldn’t even be a window to block their attacks with a shield. Bloodborne bosses also have second waves after downing a certain amount of their health. These are meant to throw you for a loop even after you pin down their unpredictable windows of opportunity. Every boss fight is a chaotic, heart-thumping duel that will have you exhausted by the end of it. While these bosses require more vigor to overcome than the calculated methods of victory in Dark Souls, Bloodborne offers the most consistent array of foes out of every FromSoft game. Each boss is totally unique, and they come in a variety of sizes and forms. These bosses were more varied than the tired, sword-wielding bosses in Dark Souls and better considered than the reskinned bosses littered in the Souls games.

I’d have a difficult time trying to determine which magnificent, eldritch beast I enjoyed vanquishing the most. Rom’s fight occurs entirely while walking on the water of a remote, gorgeous lake illuminated by the moon. The One Reborn is a grotesque pile of corpses that is quite literally shat out by the moon. Amygdala and Ebrietas’s designs are more reminiscent of the arcane monsters from the Lovecraft lore. My favorite fight is the Shadows of Yharnam, a gank boss between three ringwraiths at the end of the Forbidden Woods. This fight is as well-balanced as Ornstein and Smough from Dark Souls 1, with each ringwraith having different moves complementing one another. Their foggy entrance into the arena is also effectively ominous. The main criticism I have with the bosses of Bloodborne is that the difficulty curve of these fights is the most inconsistent out of every FromSoft game. Father Gascoigne is the first main boss of this game and his hectic swipes with an axe and relentless second form make him one of the hardest fights in the game. On the other hand, Mergo’s Wet Nurse can potentially be the last boss in the game, but she’s slow and predictable. The range of difficulty is dispersed so unevenly.

Bloodborne’s inspiration doesn’t stop at the Lovecraftian themes. The kingdom of Yharnam takes inspiration from a bevy of gothic influences. The city's architecture is towering and brooding with stained glass windows, pointed arches, and ornate decorations. The moon has a heavy presence at every point of the game, and its color even signifies the worsening condition of Yharnam. Cemeteries, cathedrals, and dark forests are common areas. The game is so gothic that the statues along the architecture are weeping, which I think is a little much. The game also retains a very Anglo influence like Dark Souls, but the influence stemmed from Mary Shelley and John Keats rather than Chaucer and Beowulf. Bloodborne isn’t directly set during Victorian England, but the gothic nature matched with the clothes and technology sort of leads people to assume that it is. The urban environments of Yharnam look like the foggy streets of London that Jack the Ripper used to prowl. Yharnam is utterly sublime and always has a foreboding, bewitching atmosphere. Yharnam may not have the same seamless world that won me over in Dark Souls 1, but there are still plenty of consistent paths that cross over each other. I was pretty impressed that a hidden route in the Forbidden Woods took me all the way back to Iosefka’s clinic. The strength of Bloodborne’s world is in the quality of each individual level. They are all intricate in their design and are discernable from one another. None of the levels suffer from seeming unfinished, nor do they piss me off like some individual levels in Dark Souls 1. The closest exception is the Upper Cathedral Ward, a calamitously dim area with incredibly narrow hallways littered with some of the worst enemies in the game. Invest in a torch. The stand-out level for me is Cainhurst, the be-all, end-all of gothic castles. The level is so grandiose that you need an invitation to go there, like attending a gallant ball in a Jane Austen novel.

Many of the names of familiar properties from Dark Souls have been shifted to fit the “blood” moniker of Bloodborne. Souls are now referred to as “blood echoes”, titanite shards are “bloodstones”, estus flasks are “blood vials,” etc. Homogenizing these properties with a singular word is probably used to distance the Dark Souls roots from Bloodborne. Still, it could also indicate simplifying some convoluted aspects of Dark Souls. The many builds and play styles one can use in Dark Souls are streamlined in Bloodborne as a singular hunter class, but this doesn’t mean the combat is limited. There are many weapons, including swords, axes, greatswords, and even whips (calling back a possible Castlevania influence). Instead of finding a smattering of different materials for these weapons, they all level up with bloodstones, increasing in size as the weapon gets stronger. The Victorian garb still has protective attributes, but I wouldn’t consider any of these clothing items to be like the armor in Dark Souls. You can’t upgrade the clothing, and none of it will weigh you down. The rare weapons can also be bought at the vendor in Hunter’s Dream instead of having to scrounge around for them. Some might argue that this more streamlined approach to character and weapon building is for cheap accessibility, but I choose to think of it more optimistically. Bloodborne translated these build aspects and filtered out the convoluted tedium.

Not all of these translations are exceptional. While Bloodborne excels in delivering a finer-tuned Souls experience, it also adds plenty of tedium that wasn’t present in Dark Souls. In Bloodborne, the bonfires have been shifted into eerily lit lanterns. The issue is that these lanterns do not function the same way the bonfires do. Interacting with these lanterns will automatically take you to an area called The Hunter’s Dream, an isolated realm covered with white lilies and crocuses with gravestones erected symmetrically along a paved path with a quaint, Victorian manor on the top of a hill. The Hunter’s Dream is similar to the Firelink Shrine from the Souls games in that it acts as a sort of comfortable refuge from the unrelenting world around you. Due to the sublime design and ethereal atmosphere, I’d say the Hunter’s Dream is the best respite area across all of the FromSoft games, next to the Firelink Shrine from Dark Souls 1. I would be confident with this claim if I wasn’t forced to visit The Hunter’s Dream so often during the game. The ability to travel between the lanterns is available right at the start, accessed through the gravestones on the right of the path that goes up to the manor. The problem is that The Hunter’s Dream is the sole passage between each lantern. You can’t rest at a lantern but only teleport between them through the gravestones in The Hunter’s Dream. I’d be more critical of this method of traveling if The Hunter’s Dream wasn’t the hub for everything in this game, giving the place a great deal of utility. Similar to Dark Souls II, a cloaked female character upgrades your stats after speaking with her. In Bloodborne, this figure is a pale doll that sits on a stoop at the bottom of the manor. The manor also has a workbench to repair one’s equipment and upgrade weapons. It fills its role as a hub splendidly, but I much prefer being able to teleport between checkpoints without going to a hub. It doesn’t help that the loading screens in Bloodborne are abysmally long, so traveling between the hub and another lantern can sometimes be grueling.

The health system has been changed to healing items called blood vials. These will restore about 40% of your maximum health, and you can hold up to 20 of them at a time. Unlike the estus system in Dark Souls, blood vials are treated as items the player has to accumulate by either pillaging them from enemies or buying them in the Hunter’s Dream. If you die or reawaken in another place, the number of blood vials will return to the maximum. This is only if you have a number over the limit as insurance. Blood vials are not a rare item as enemies like the giant executioners, villagers, and giant pigs will drop a number of them. Exhausting your blood vial count happens often, and rebuilding your blood vial inventory requires killing multiple enemies that drop them or farming for blood echoes. Either tactic requires a hefty amount of grinding, which I’m not particularly a fan of. One would think the blood vials wouldn’t be an item like the antidotes or pebbles because they are relegated to their own button, but they are just as finite. The healing power of the blood vials can’t be upgraded like the estus flasks, so you use quite a few at once. This usually results in having you grind every so often to restock on blood vials which is something I never enjoyed doing.

In The Hunter’s Dream, there is another array of gravestones located on the opposite side of the teleporting ones. These gravestones will transport you to the chalice dungeons, the most grind-intensive aspect of Bloodborne. In the chalice dungeons, Bloodborne adopts a dungeon-crawler approach as you’ll navigate maze-like, gossamer-filled hallways with a boss at the end. Some bosses are completely new, and some are harder versions of bosses from the base game. I’m told that these new bosses are some of the hardest in the game, but I can’t share their frustration because I decided to tackle the chalice dungeons on NG+2, and the difficulty of NG+ doesn’t stack in the chalice dungeons. I strongly recommend doing these on an NG+ run, by the way. Even in doing this, the chalice dungeons are a long slog. The sublime, sprawling landscapes of Yharnam are reduced to claustrophobic mazes which are tedious to the senses. Even more tedious are the rituals needed to conduct the means to enter these dungeons. The specific materials needed come with a long checklist. Some of these items are common, but the scarce ones will have you flipping over every nook and cranny in Yharnam like a madman. The relieving thing about these chalice dungeons is that they are completely optional. At the end of the last one, the Pthumerian Queen, who you might recognize from the base game, is a secret boss, and defeating her wins you a gold PSN trophy. Unless you are a completionist, don’t bother with the chalice dungeons.

The chalice dungeons are a great source of the game’s lore, but you wouldn’t know that just by playing through them. Bloodborne adopts the same subtle, esoteric method of telling its narrative just like Dark Souls. In fact, the narrative in Bloodborne is presented in an even more oblique manner than in Dark Souls. Bloodborne is not a melancholy journey marked by despair but a living nightmare marked by madness. The thin veil between dream and reality is never clear and becomes even more distorted as you progress through it. This veil is illustrated in the first cutscene as the player is greeted by a man in a top hat to sign a contract and begin a “transfusion” in a hazy stupor. This cutscene turns into a sleep paralysis terror as you are approached by a bloody lycanthrope and a group of small, boney creatures with shark teeth. Once you get to the Hunter’s Dream for the first time, the man from the first cutscene sits in the manor on the hill in a wheelchair. This is Gehrman, the creator of the Hunter’s Dream. He explains that you have been assigned to the duty of a hunter, a person responsible for ridding Yharnam of the scourge that plagues it like he once was long ago. You fulfill your duties on the streets of Central Yharnam, slicing up the corrupted villagers.

After venturing through the Forbidden Woods, you come across a remote college set along a tranquil lake. This is Byrgenwerth, a prestigious place of learning and the establishment where the madness started. Master Willem, the founder of Byrgenwerth, discovered traces of blood from god-like beings known as the “great ones” in the Pthumerian caverns below. He founded Byrgernwerth to further the research on the findings and gain insight into them. Another scholar named Laurence has different plans for the great one's blood. He felt that Willem was underutilizing the blood and that it could be used to not only cure diseases but transcend one’s being into a potential god. Laurence founded the College of Mensis to combat Willem’s ideals and founded the Healing Church to test his hypothesis about blood. Thousands of people came to seek the blood for ailments, and while it cured their diseases, it turned them into horrifying abominations. Once this got out of hand, hunters started gathering to purge Yharnam of the mistakes that Laurence made. You encounter Willem at the edge of Byrgenwerth, now a decrepit old man who doesn’t even have the strength to lift his scepter or utter a single word. His state of elderly decay makes an interesting point for transcending the human form. At least the beasts are mobile.

After defeating Rom under the lake in Byrgenwerth, the moon changes into an ominous, splotchy orange color to signify that the nightmare is only furthering. Once you arrive in Yhar’ghul, you get a taste of it. Beasts that look like Chtutulu are scaling the gothic walls, and the villagers are even less tied to their humanity than before. This is the true extent of the madness uncovered by defeating Rom. You then come across the School of Mensis, the rivaling college established by members of the Healing Church. This place grants access to two different places, the Nightmare Frontier and the Nightmare of Mensis. Both of these places are even further removed from the world of Yharnam and signify a further descent into the nightmare. The Nightmare Frontier is a poison lake on a cliff where you fight Amygdala, one of the aptly named creatures that appear after the moon becomes blood-red, signifying the more substantial fear of furthering the nightmare. The Nightmare of Mensis is the most harrowing place in Bloodborne. It’s a gothic castle along a cliffside that looks more sinister than the blood-red moon, and it’s filled to the brim with Winter Lanterns, enemies that strike terror in the hearts of every Bloodborne player. In this gothic loft lies Micolash, a follower of Laurence and the host of the nightmare, allegedly. His unconventional boss fight is supposed to signify his state of madness from tampering with the great one’s blood, but it turns out to be the most aggravating fight in the game.

Once Micolash is slain, you must make it to the peak of the loft to fight Mergo’s Wet Nurse. Mergos is allegedly the child of the Pthumerian Queen and one of the great ones, making him a vessel between god and man. The nightmare has been slain, and you are transported back to The Hunter’s Dream. Three different endings can occur here. The first and easiest one is for Gherman to kill you, ending the nightmare for yourself. If you refuse his offer to kill you, Gherman is the final boss (and a much better one than Mergo’s Wet Nurse). After you defeat him, the Moon Presence descends upon you and gives you Gherman’s role as the Old Hunter, a cyclical ending that mirrors rekindling the flame in Dark Souls. The third, true ending is the more complicated one. After defeating Rom, the blood moon impregnates Iosefka and Arianna, a prostitute taking refuge in the Cathedral Ward. These immaculate conceptions are apparently surrogacies for the great ones. You have to kill Iosefka, kill Arianna’s Eraserhead baby, and kill Mergo’s Wet Nurse to receive three umbilical cords, remnants from the unborn children of the great ones. To get the true ending, you must consume all three of these before fighting Gherman, something I did not know in my first playthrough. Doing this will trigger a fight between you and the Moon Presence. After defeating him, you turn into what is allegedly a great one, a cosmic reward for defeating what was likely the paleblood alluded to in the beginning. It looks like a fucking squid.

The story of Bloodborne is essentially madness. It’s much more convoluted and has way more branches than the story in Dark Souls. There are so many ties to the lore, and discussing them in great detail would become a word-vomit, clusterfuck. The lore of this game is so rich and multifaceted that FromSoft should issue something like the Silmarillion to make sense of every facet of the game. The base of the lore that explains the blood-fueled plague is a cautionary tale about playing with forces beyond our comprehension. Laurence played god, and everyone suffered because of it. It probably also alludes to a class division in Yharnam, with the educated, aristocratic types in Byrgenwerth callously experimenting on the lower class. The pandemonium catching up with them is like karmic retribution, telling how catastrophic the plague has become.

Bloodborne is not an adaptation of an HP Lovecraft story, nor is it a Lovecraft pastiche. There are plenty of references to Lovecraft’s stories, such as the surrogacies from The Dunwich Horror, but none of these are directly tied back to the mythos of Lovecraft. The paper-thin narrative in Bloodborne aids the subtle nature of a Lovecraftian tale. Still, I think there is something else even more subtle in Bloodborne that gives it more clemency as a Lovecraftian horror work. There is a minor mechanic in Bloodborne called insight. In the game, it functions similarly to humanity from Dark Souls in that you can use it to summon partners to aid you with boss fights, and it can be used as currency. Insight can be gained through a consumable item called a madman’s knowledge and by progressing through the game. As you gain more insight, you can find more esoteric items and the madness of Yharnam becomes clearer. Once you defeat Rom and the blood moon is revealed, your insight rockets to at least 40 more than you previously had. In Yarghul, there are tons of Cthulu-Esque monsters all over the place. If you lose the insight gained for whatever reason, many of these monsters are gone, alluding to the fact that they can no longer be perceived by you. Once you defeat Mergo’s Wet Nurse, you gain a colossal amount of insight and find the manor in the Hunter’s Dream is in a perpetual state of immolation. Once you maximize your insight, the madness encompassing Yharnam is readily transparent. It’s the fear of the unknown that Lovecraft tells of coming to life for the player in the most subtle and personal way possible. It illustrates that the forces at work are all-encompassing and impossible to overcome, which is a horrifying realization once we become privy to them.

Bloodborne achieves so much with its presentation, lore, and gameplay that I’d be hard-pressed to call it a masterpiece. It took the foundations of Dark Souls-like its gameplay and subtle narrative. It made something not only with its own concrete identity but something that arguably surpassed the already magnificent Dark Souls in many ways. The more aggressive gameplay was more invigorating, the more organized method of character and weapon building was less of a hassle, and its story managed to be even more complex and esoteric. It even accomplished presenting something in the vein of Lovecraftian horror in a visual medium, something that had rarely been executed properly. The upstanding quality of this game also rejuvenated my interest in the modern video game industry. It showed me that video games were now being treated more like art instead of as a means of commerce. Bloodborne is also arguably the most influential FromSoft game. After the success of Bloodborne, many imitators attempted to translate aspects of Dark Souls into different settings like science-fiction (The Surge), feudal Japan (Nioh), and even in the universe of Star Wars (Jedi Fallen Order). Many of these games borrowing elements from Dark Souls give credence to the “souls-like” genre it spawned due to its popularity. In terms of providing a quality translation of the Souls series, none of these games match up to when FromSoft managed to outdo themselves with Bloodborne.

(Originally published to Glitchwave on 6/14/2021)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Bloodborne: The Old Hunters

Category: DLC

Release Date: November 24, 2015

I don’t think anyone would argue that Bloodborne isn’t a challenging game. However, The Old Hunter’s expansion makes facing the challenges in the base game look like a walk in the park. Even after you conquer everything the base game has to offer, you still might not be prepared for the horrors present in the DLC. Every single aspect of the DLC is a test of might and patience that is unparalleled by anything from the base game. The difficulty of the Old Hunters DLC might even be unparalleled by anything from the Soulsborne series. It’s a brutal affair. With all of this in mind, is it still worth the struggle? Absolutely. The Old Hunters rivals Artorias of the Abyss as the supreme FromSoft DLC output, and Artorias of the Abyss is an exemplary piece of DLC content. Like Artorias of the Abyss, The Old Hunters adds new levels, enemies, bosses, and weapons, and fleshes out aspects of the lore that weren’t present in the base game. While Artorias of the Abyss is difficult, it is not nearly as demanding as The Old Hunters. Every stretch of this expansion demands the player’s maximum level of Bloodborne prowess.

A misleading mistake some players make when trying to tackle the DLC is based on how early you can access it in the base game. The DLC can be accessed as early as defeating Vicar Amelia in the first half of the game. When I purchased the DLC, I was eager to experience more from this game and was relieved that I didn’t have to play through most of it to access the DLC. Little did I know, I’d have to level up enough in the base game not to get annihilated at every point in the DLC. Prepare for the DLC like you would prepare for a final boss. Immediately, the bizarro Cathedral Ward area known as The Hunter’s Nightmare proves to be a substantial endeavor. The place is crawling with saif hunters, hunters in the DLC that look like Gehrman and fight like him too. These enemies are similar to the hunters if they were built like club bouncers and had their tenacity. You will encounter one at every step of the way in The Hunter’s Nightmare, making getting past each one the biggest obstacle in this first level. Reposting is practically mandatory for these enemies. The Hunter’s Nightmare is also home to some of the most ruthless standard hunters in the game and the area as you trek through this without encountering a new lantern for quite a while. I stuck my proverbial toe in the water that is the Old Hunters DLC and got stung by a proverbial jellyfish. I learned that the DLC content was not to be treated as a lark and prepared immensely afterward. I didn’t get to the next lantern in The Hunter’s Nightmare until beating The One Reborn in the base game.

Once you overcome the odds and discover the Nightmare Church for relief, you are in good standing to fight the first boss, Ludwig. Along with Gehrman, Ludwig was one of the first hunters. He’s obviously seen better days as he’s transformed into an abominable horse creature the size of a house. To give you a scale of what the Old Hunters have to offer, Ludwig is not the hardest boss in the DLC. He is, however, harder than any of the bosses in the base game. His movement is incredibly erratic, and he is the hardest boss to find a window to attack. He caught on to my backstab strategy implemented on most giant bosses in Soulsborne games and launched me across the room with his hooves. His landing move is difficult to time because he plummets so quickly, and he’ll even emulate a train to run you down and deplete most if not all of your health bar if you get caught in it. The saving grace of this fight is it’s much easier if you summon an NPC hunter to help you given that Ludwig will be distracted half of the time. His second phase is triggered by a cutscene in which Ludwig gets on his hind legs and brandishes a lurid green greatsword. This phase is much easier because Ludwig’s backside is finally vulnerable, but his sword slam attack will kill you even at full health if you get caught in it. If you thought Ludwig was a hectic fight that tested your full abilities, he’s merely a sampler for what is to come.

After scouring a long, dark prison hall and riding the heaviest elevator known to man, you will arrive in the Research Hall. It’s an architecturally interesting area with a winding spiral staircase towering in the center of the building. There are about three or four levels in this place with many rooms on opposite sides of the staircase. The Research Hall is the living quarters of Iosefka’s patients, forlorn abominations created due to failure. They look like humans in hospital gowns but with a gigantic, hideous growth like a blotchy scrotum protruding from their heads. Some of them are even reduced to being sentient blobs. They constantly throw tantrums like toddlers to defend themselves because they have little control over their senses and faculties. You’ll find many of them in the side rooms of the Research Hall crying out in anguish, resting on sodden beds in total darkness. Some are even restrained in chairs. It’s a genuinely disturbing site. What’s even more disturbing is that they cry out for help from Iosefka, the person who put them here in the first place. The large door in the hall's center takes you to the Lumenwood Garden, where you’ll fight the Living Failures, more cases of Iosefka’s medical catastrophes. Their fight is like a bulkier version of the Celestial Emissary, except that the Living Failures have a collective health bar and magic attacks.

The next boss is at the center of a clock tower right next to the garden. You approach a woman sitting in a chair in the center of the room when she grabs you unexpectedly. This is Lady Maria, another hunter in the league with Ludwig and Gherman. The doll in The Hunter’s Dream is also modeled in her image. She fights in the same fashion as the other hunters, swiftly dodging your attacks and waiting for a chance to strike while dual-wielding cutlasses. After a certain point, she adds blood and fire as collateral to her sword swipes. Lady Maria is my favorite fight in the DLC, and it’s not because she’s much easier than the other bosses (except for maybe the Living Failures). The ease in this fight is a testament to your proficiency with reposting. If you don’t repost or you suck at it, Lady Maria is a formidable foe. If you have practiced the art of reposting up until this point, Lady Maria will be at your mercy. I experienced a fair amount of difficulty when I couldn’t repost but was proud of myself during my last playthrough when I eviscerated Lady Maria with countless visceral attacks.

The next boss in The Old Hunter’s is the bane of my existence. I do not lose hope and give up easily on a boss in any video game, including Dark Souls. However, the countless failures at the hands of this boss matched with the cyclical monotony of running back and forth between the lantern and this boss time after every defeat was starting to drive me insane. The numerous failures made me fall to my knees, and I felt like I couldn’t beat him. He was relinquishing my confidence as a gamer. He is my Achilles heel, my kryptonite, my dark star. To this day, I still feel a sense of dread and intimidation with this boss, like confronting an abusive stepfather.
...No, I’m not talking about the Orphan of Kos. I beat that ugly shrimp on my third attempt (although I was not so lucky with him upon subsequent playthroughs). I am referring to none other than Laurence, the first Vicar, the only optional boss in the DLC.

Laurence is obviously an incredibly important figure in Bloodborne’s lore, essentially the creator of the scourge that plagues Yharnam. His importance makes it imperative that he’s actually present in the game, and his boss fight certainly reflects his role. After scrounging up a few key items, you’ll return to the mirrored version of the cathedral where you fought Vicar Amelia in Hunter’s Nightmare. You’ll see Laurence resting upon his throne, a wild beast after imbibing the blood of the great ones and a reflection of his folly. If you’re a determined completionist like I am or batshit crazy, you’ll wake him up. You may notice that Laurence looks like a flaming version of the Cleric Beast, the first boss in the game. If you think that this fight is going to be a cakewalk because the Cleric Beast was an easy foe, your naivety will be your downfall. Laurence is incredibly unpredictable. The frames to attack him are wider than Ludwigs, but failing to properly time them will punish you more severely. Laurence has about fifteen different ways to strike at you with his hulking stature. All these are aided by his fire AOE damage that will stagger you if they hit. Keep in mind this also if don’t kill you in one hit, even at full health. Laurence also likes to combo his moves, so if the first one doesn’t kill you, the immediate second or third swipe will. He’s also a giant damage sponge. The middling damage I do to him matched with the rare opportunities I have to hit him without being punished for it severely grated on my patience. Once you think you’ve finally got a hold of him, his second phase throws you for another violent loop. Laurence loses the lower half of his body and crawls around the arena with his giant arms. His backside is no longer a vulnerable spot because it’s constantly gushing molten lava at every waking moment, so the windows to hit him are even more narrow during this phase. The lava that falls out of his backside becomes a stage hazard, and it will always be present during this phase, so you’ll have to work around it instead of directly avoiding it. Laurence will also vomit lava at some points as if the constant expulsion of lava from his ass wasn’t enough. His arms are as long as redwood trees, and will use them to chase you down the entire perimeter of the arena. If that fails, he’ll slam his arm down on you that, you guessed it, it's hard to avoid and will kill you at full health. Like Ludwig, you can summon an NPC hunter to help you, but it won’t do any good. The first phase is slightly easier, but the NPC is guaranteed to die soon after the second phase starts because he doesn’t have the sense to avoid the lava. This leaves you by yourself with a more durable Laurence for about half of the fight, giving you a total disadvantage to fighting him on your own. After failing against Laurence several times, I went back and grinded to level up in the base game. I felt like Rocky in Rocky IV, training for his rematch with Ivan Drago. Eventually, once I beat Laurence, I still did it by the skin of my teeth. Bloodborne is all about nightmares, right? Well, Laurence, the First Vicar is my fucking nightmare.

Upon defeating Maria, a new location is revealed behind the opened clock tower arms. This rainy, dilapidated place is the Fishing Hamlet, a location inspired by the H.P. Lovecraft story, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”. Mutated fish creatures of all sizes make up this fishing hamlet, and just like the ones from Lovecraft’s story, they worship a deity that lies at the shore of this area. This is the notorious Orphan of Kos who is the dark secret kept in the Fishing Hamlet. Apparently, the hunter’s killed the Orphan’s mother, who then cursed them, marked by the dark moon that lights every corner of the DLC. I’d feel more sorry for the Orphan if he wasn’t such a bitch. This boss is said to be not only the hardest boss in Bloodborne but the hardest boss across the entire Soulsborne franchise. He’s another unpredictable boss with a large array of moves, but as I mentioned previously, I beat him on my third attempt when I first played this DLC. Once I played this DLC again, he kept kicking my ass. I’m unsure how to explain this, but becoming better at Bloodborne made me worse at this boss. Playing passively worked wonders when fighting Orphan of Kos on my first playthrough when it didn’t work so well with other bosses. The Orphan of Kos punished me for being more aggressive, and that aggression made other bosses more manageable. Fortunately, the Orphan gives you plenty of opportunities to attack, and he can be easily staggered. He also gives you plenty of opportunities to repost. His second phase is a lot more chaotic, but I managed to find clear windows to attack him. Once you beat him, the DLC is complete, and you have a gorgeous shore view to look upon as you marvel at your achievement.

The Old Hunters DLC follows the same direction of descending deeper into the nightmare just like in the base game. This time, your journey uncovers the horrifying truths kept secret by the essential figures of Bloodborne as you venture onward. It’s a bit of a linear excursion, but I didn’t mind in this case because the progression is excellent. I felt as if I was diving deeper into the rabbit hole, resulting in a satisfying dead end at the shore. Everything in this DLC made me feel like I was being pummeled by four mack trucks coming at me from all sides, but I appreciate it for presenting such a stark challenge (except for Laurence. Fuck that boss). For some reason, I think The Old Hunters DLC is the most substantial part of the whole Bloodborne experience. While the levels and bosses in the base game are consistently enjoyable, there’s something special about what’s presented in The Old Hunters. I don’t know if it’s the level design, progression, or bosses that make this so, but it’s something that is definitely felt after overcoming the excruciating odds. Artorias of the Abyss feels removed from the base game of Dark Souls and supplementary to the whole experience, while The Old Hunters feels like getting to the core of Bloodborne. Experiencing The Old Hunters DLC feels mandatory. When the DLC almost eclipses the base game, you know it’s worth every cent.

Dark Souls III Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 3/27/2021)

[Image from igdb.com]

Dark Souls III

Developer: FromSoftware

Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment

Genre(s): Action RPG, Soulslike

Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbox One

Release Date: March 24, 2016

Judging from the status of the Dark Souls franchise by 2016, FromSoft was ready to move on. Bloodborne garnered mass acclaim for taking the Dark Souls formula to another setting, so one could assume that FromSoft would do the same for a few new IPs. Dark Souls seemed like it pioneered a new genre of video game instead of becoming a long-lasting series. Several new IPs have taken the essence of Dark Souls and have rebranded it under a different moniker. Dark Souls became a template instead of a long-lasting franchise. Not to mention that the Dark Souls name was butchered in its sequel, which was made by a totally different group of people. New paths were paved, and the old route was sealed off, or at least suffered from massive fault damage. I’m glad Miyazaki glanced back at the Dark Souls property and decided to give the first game a proper sequel. It would have been a shame to have left the Dark Souls franchise on the sour note that was Dark Souls II. Dark Souls III was a return to form for the franchise. It took everything from the first Dark Souls and revamped it the way a sequel should. For some people, Dark Souls III is the pinnacle of the franchise, taking everything that made the first game great and creasing the hinges for a finer-tuned experience. My opinion of Dark Souls III slightly differs from this. It improves on many aspects from the first game, but I’m only using the word improvement lightly. Dark Souls III takes the base of the first game and buffs the scratches, but it doesn’t really form its own identity in the process.

With the influx of “soulslike” games, it seems like the elements of Dark Souls that made it unique are pretty easy to spot. There’s the level design, lore achieved by world-building, using a consistent marker as checkpoints scattered parsimoniously, and creating a special build by leveling up like an RPG. There are several other elements, but these seem to be the most integral aspects. When it comes to making another iteration of Dark Souls itself, FromSoft tends to unabashedly repeat every single aspect of the first game. The doomed kingdom in Dark Souls III is Lothric, and can you guess what is plaguing this land? The first flame is dying out yet again, and you are the chosen undead who will either prolong the flame or relinquish it. I thought that reusing the plot and lore of the first Dark Souls was emblematic of the lack of inspiration that plagued Dark Souls II, but now I can see that this same loose plot is just the premise of Dark Souls. It’s not the middle ages inspired background mixed with the combat; it’s the damn first flame going out again. This premise carried such a heavy weight throughout the first game, but now it seems trivial because it has just become a common trope of the series.

As previously mentioned, Lothric’s flame is dying out. It can be saved if the five lord souls of Lothric are sacrificed to prolong the flame. However, all of these lord souls are in hiding, and it’s your job as the chosen undead to seek them out like an undead bounty hunter. Essentially, it’s a remix of the second half of the first Dark Souls. Now that I think about it, Dark Souls III is a remix of the first Dark Souls. There are so many moments in this game that scream familiarity. Of course, a sequel is supposed to be somewhat familiar by nature, but Dark Souls III is this to a fault. Lothric is its own sprawling kingdom totally discernable from Lordran in terms of areas and level design, but there are quite a few aspects stripped directly from the first game. For one, Andre the Blacksmith is your main source for modifying and enhancing weapons in the hub world. Andre was probably my favorite NPC in the first game, but why is he here? Did FromSoft really have a hard time thinking of another shredded old man to hammer away all day? This is without mentioning that he resides in a place called the Firelink Shrine, the hub world of Dark Souls III and another obvious call-back to the first game. On another note, the Firelink Shrine in this game is my least favorite hub world across every Souls game. It’s just kind of pale and drab and hard to navigate. It doesn’t have the cozy feeling of the Firelink Shrine from the first game. In fact, it seems a lot more like a “firelink sanctuary” because of how closed off and claustrophobic it comes off as. I’d want to rest at the Firelink Shrine from the first game, but I wouldn’t want to rest at the one here unless I was seeking some kind of refuge. In the Undead Settlement, you come across a man in sturdy onion armor and shriek with giddiness when you think it’s Siegmeyer from Dark Souls 1. You’d be wrong, however, when you discover it’s Siegward, a totally different character with the same armor and name like you’ve just stumbled into some Kafkaesque Dark Souls 1 realm.

Seeing all of these familiar characters in the context of Dark Souls 1 led me to believe that rekindling the fire was the canon ending of the first game. It led me to believe that what the chosen undead of the first game did was birth a new beginning for this land. Perhaps Lothric is the successor to Lordran, and enough time has passed where it’s in the same place as Lordran once was; a once prosperous kingdom showing its age. Perhaps the denizens of Lordran started anew here, which might explain the familiar characters. This theory went out the window once I went past Irythyll of the Boreal Valley into Anor Londo. That’s right, Anor fucking Londo. It’s not the sprawling, picturesque land in perpetual sunset but rather a frosty, nocturnal section of the already cold and dark Boreal Valley. It’s not even there as a lark as one of the main bosses in the game resides in the same arena you fought Ornstein and Smough. You can’t even make out the rest of Anor Londo from the first game because it isn’t there, so where is the rest of Anor Londo, and when was Irythyll of the Boreal Valley built in its place? Did Aldrich devour the rest of Anor Londo along with Gwynevere and Gwyndolin? What the hell is going on here? What is with the inconsistencies?

Trying to make sense of the world in Dark Souls III is very confusing. It seems like Lothric is a revitalized version of Lordran several years into the future after the first game, but including Anor Londo as a part of Lothric doesn’t make sense. It’s not an area of Anor Londo districted off to the kingdom of Lothric because anyone who has played the first game will recognize the building where you fight Ornstein and Smough and the giant blacksmith’s body lies. Did the lords of Lothric revamp Lordran into their own creation after the first flame was rekindled? That might explain why Anor Londo is gone except for the Ornstein and Smough building covered in Aldrich’s sludge. I think the real reason these familiarities are inconsistent lies in a problem outside of the game, and that is Dark Souls III relies too much on the impact of the first game. Dark Souls 1 was an experiment, but Dark Souls III doesn’t take any risks. It’s nice to see Anor Londo again, and it’s nice that Andre the Blacksmith is back, but did we need either of them in this game? We didn’t need to be reminded that this is a sequel to Dark Souls, FromSoft. In fact, all of the callbacks to the first game are total detriments to this one as they project a lack of inspiration and insecurities about this entry into the franchise. Either that or FromSoft ran out of ideas even with Miyazaki back at the helm.

This isn’t to say that Dark Souls III is a bad game. I quite like Dark Souls III and consider it to be a solid entry in the franchise and a great way to cap off the trilogy.
Objectively, it might even be a better game than the first one from a technical standpoint. It may not have the same impact as the first Dark Souls in artistic achievement, but it makes up for it by being the most fine-tuned Dark Souls game. Dark Souls III is the culmination of every previous Souls game, and it also takes elements from Bloodborne. Dark Souls III is a testament to the evolution of the Dark Souls formula. It’s not just a proper sequel to the first Dark Souls, but to every previous game in the franchise.

I mentioned in my Dark Souls II review that all of the changes the game made inadvertently caused it to feel more “video gamey.” These changes cheapened the impact that the first game had because they were so shoddily implemented. In the case of Dark Souls III, the “video gamey” changes from Dark Souls II are improved upon because the impetus of Dark Souls III was to shave off the esoteric aspects of the first game. FromSoft wanted to make a more accessible Dark Souls experience, which they achieved by toning up every aspect of the series. Just to be clear, accessibility is not necessarily a bad thing. All of the “video gamey” changes to Dark Souls II were made to be as inaccessible as possible. Dark Souls III fixed these up and made them palatable.

One of these was the estus system from Dark Souls II. Again, I’m not sure what was wrong with the estus system from the first game, but at least the system in Dark Souls III makes sense. You start with five estus flasks, a reasonable number instead of the rationed one estus flask from Dark Souls II (and no, there aren’t any weird healing crystals that slowly heal you that the developers make you rely on. Miyazaki wouldn’t fuck you over like that). You can explore to find more estus shards to increase the total number of flasks giving you a naturally occurring leveling system for the estus flasks as the game gets harder. There are 15 instead of 20, but I rarely ran dry on estus anyways. There is also an option to divide your estus flasks into blue ashen estus flasks to refill your magic meter. I suppose this is good news for magic users, but I never bothered with them because I am a brutish melee player. The human effigies that replace humanity in Dark Souls II have been changed to embers in Dark Souls III. Instead of restoring your maximum health due to death penalties, embers give you a 30% maximum health boost. They are in finite supply like human effigies, but they occur automatically once you defeat a boss. Once you die, the effect is no longer there. It’s refreshing to be rewarded for victory instead of being punished for failure. One of the negative aspects of “video gamey” accessibility is the placement of the bonfires. I mentioned in my Dark Souls 1 review that bonfires acted as checkpoints but were not dispersed in typical video game fashion like getting to a new area or defeating a boss. In the spirit of accessibility, Dark Souls III gives you a bonfire every time you get to a new area or defeat a boss. Because of this, the intense nature of leveraging your estus and trying to find a bonfire is seldom present. They really implemented this to fault as some bonfires are merely a couple of yards away from one another. Thanks for looking out for me, FromSoft. I’ll be careful not to get massacred walking twenty feet.

The elements Dark Souls III borrows from Bloodborne are even more readily apparent. It seems that FromSoft decided that the more aggressive, faster-paced gameplay in Bloodborne was the optimal approach to combat. In the scope of Dark Souls, it’s a little mixed. The enemies in this game are so relentless that you question whether or not you need a shield since you need to attack them with the same high energy. It works, but it feels a little TOO much like Bloodborne. Following suit with Bloodborne’s unpredictable aggression are the bosses. Not only do they never let up, but each boss has one or two more phases to throw you off. This starts as early as the first boss, Iudex Gundyr, who seems like a simple weapon-wielding humanoid boss to teach new players how to dodge attacks or parry. That is until he sprouts a tar-black, reptilian-looking demon out of his orifices at half health, and you start pelting firebombs at him out of shock and terror. Get used to this because almost every boss will present a new obstacle for you to work around. Personally, I think boss phases are a great way to keep the player on edge and offer a challenge that fits organically with the boss battles of the series.
The world design of Lothric also reminds me of the world from Bloodborne. The level progression is mostly a linear path of several levels with a little deviation from the main path. It’s underwhelming compared to the world of the first Dark Souls and even Bloodborne, but each level is still designed superbly.

I’ve already gone into fine detail about what Dark Souls III emulates from the first game. I’m not impressed by Dark Souls III’s tendency to use the first game as a crutch regarding its lore and settings. With all this in mind, I think some individual aspects of Dark Souls III are comparatively better than in the first game. The world isn’t as impressively designed as in the first game The closest Dark Souls III comes to capturing the grand juxtaposition between areas are the areas between Irythyll of the Boreal Valley. It feels great unearthing oneself from the catacombs to uncover the frigid wonderland that is Irythyll of the Boreal Valley, like resurfacing from the water to breathe fresh air. The Irythyll Dungeon acts like the Painted World of Ariamis in that it shows the seedy underbelly of the seemingly magnificent Irythyll, except the underlings are far more unsettling, and it feels far more claustrophobic. This is as close as the world of Dark Souls III gets to provide the same impact as the first game through level progression. However, the individual levels are consistently better in Dark Souls III. There are some levels in the first game that I still dread visiting, like Tomb of the Giants, New Londo Ruins, and the Catacombs. Still, I forgive them individually because they are essential in crafting the entirety of the world of Lordran. Because Dark Souls III takes a different approach to world design, the areas don’t exactly fit a cohesive whole, but they don’t have to. Each area feels different from the last one, and I don’t have any gripes about them. Areas that drew ire from me initially have grown on me, and I now appreciate them like the poison pool, Blighttown-esque Farron Keep to the aforementioned Irythyll Dungeon. The stand-out area in this game is definitely Irythyll of the Boreal Valley. It’s the gigantic, mid-game capital in the same vein as Anor Londo, so the grand scale of it automatically elevates the area above everywhere else.

The bosses in Dark Souls III are also consistently better than the ones in the first Dark Souls. Most of them aren’t as memorable as, say, Ornstein and Smough or Quelaag, but none of the bosses in Dark Souls III piss me off like the Four Kings or the Bed of Chaos. Many bosses in this game boil down to the mechanics of a humanoid sword wielder. They come in a wide variety in design, but there are so many sword-wielding bosses that parry enthusiasts will speed through this game. It’s a little tiring. The bosses in the first game were far more memorable, but some of the gimmicks didn’t work. When the bosses in Dark Souls III have gimmicks that make them unique, the gimmicks make their fights much more interesting instead of grating. One of my favorite bosses in the game is the two princes. Once you defeat Lorian, Prince Lothric resurrects him and jumps on his back with his own health bar while Lorian’s health is halved. You have to cripple Lorian some more to get to Lothric, but you only have to defeat Lothric to win the fight. It’s not a gank boss, but this fight between two bosses is much better executed than several other gank bosses across the series. The gimmick with the Ancient Wyvern is fantastic. Many people feel cheated by a boss that dies in one hit, but plunging my sword into his brain and watching his health bar drop like the 1929 stock market crash is hilarious. The one boss in this game that stands out above the rest is the Nameless King, who is arguably the perfect Dark Souls boss. He’s a strapping, formidable foe who rides a dragon and has the power of wind and lightning on his side. He even seems more god-like than Gwyn. The first phase of his fight with the Dragon is easy, but his second phase is easily the hardest fight in the game. Even though he is learnable if you play it safe, his fight is still tough as nails. Taking him down feels like taking down Zeus.

Once you retrieve the four lord souls, the final battle in Dark Souls III takes place in the “Kiln of the First Flame.” This place merely shares the same name as the final area of the first game as it is structured differently. It could be the same place, but that would unearth my confusion about Lothric in the place of Lordran again. The final boss is the Soul of Cinder, another humanoid boss with a multi-faceted moveset with two different phases with their own hulking health bars. Getting to this fight doesn’t have the same weight as getting to Gwyn, but the Soul of Cinder is an estus drainer that will have you holding on by a thread at the end of it. Is the Soul of Cinder supposed to be your character from the first game? Who knows, but I wish my character from Dark Souls 1 could combo and whip magic out of his ass like the Soul of Cinder. Once the fight is over, you either sacrifice yourself to prolong the suffering or extinguish the land and have darkness sweep it away. However, there is another ending option that is a little more ambiguous. You can “usurp” the fire, which has more complex implications. It’s arguably the best ending because it’s different, and it forces you to get more involved with the lore of this game but unlocking it is incredibly particular and circuitous. I don’t recommend attempting to get this ending on your first playthrough.

Whether you decide to kindle the first flame or douse it, the light that was the Dark Souls series was stamped out by FromSoft. Considering how much they borrowed from the first game, it was indicative of how quickly FromSoft ran out of ideas for the franchise. Fortunately, the swan song of Dark Souls managed to implement everything great from the previous games, fixing every loose screw. Does its lack of unique identity ultimately put it in the shadow of Dark Souls 1? Unfortunately, yes. I hate to give Dark Souls II any credit, but at least it was different from the first game. Games like Bloodborne and other soulslike games seem to be stronger successors to the legacy of Dark Souls, but this doesn’t mean that Dark Souls III is useless. If Dark Souls 1 is the sun, Dark Souls is a lightbulb. It doesn’t have the same scope as the sun, but it serves its purpose with essentially the same function and even has its own unique utility. And if you're wondering what Dark Souls II is in this analogy, it's like a shitty model of the sun made by a seventh grader for their science class.

(Originally published to Glitchwave on 3/29/2021)

[Image from igdb.com]

Dark Souls III: Ashes of Ariandel

Category: DLC

Release Date: October 24, 2016

Snow = Painted. Huh.

Apparently, the Japanese word for cold, snowy, or something along those lines was mistranslated in the FromSoft offices as "painted". It made sense in the first Dark Souls because you travel to a snowy world through a giant painting. In this case, the Painted World of Ariandel is another snowy place in Dark Souls, so the painted aspect doesn't make any sense. Was the original title for Cainhurst Castle the "Painted World of Gothic Castle?"

All jokes aside, the setting of the first Dark Souls III DLC extension is a snowy world called the Painted World of Ariandel. It's one big area covered in snow with tons of alarmingly grotesque creatures that seem like they are praying for death. The land is filled with dilapidated architecture and is subject to many avalanches. At the end of this area, you unlock the DLC's boss fight near the beginning of the area. There is only one area in this DLC and there is only one boss. It's a fairly large area with quite a grand boss, but they've got some nerve charging full price for DLC with only one area and only one boss. I'm convinced that they were concerned that they couldn't charge what they wanted for this DLC pack with this minimal amount of content, so they decided to pad everything.

This is especially the case for the boss, Friede. She's a hard enough foe as it is, but her fight has three phases with three separate health bars, four if you count the gank boss second phase with Ariandel. It is the ultimate Dark Souls endurance boss and it is one of the most exhausting parts in the franchise. Unfortunately, it isn't the gratifying type of exhaustion. It makes me think that FromSoft implemented this challenge at the end of the DLC so people wouldn't complain about it being too short.

Overall, this DLC pack is fine because it's more content from a game that I already like. The cynic in me is the one who feels cheated by the length of it and the boss is inexcusably long.

Dark Souls II Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 2/28/2021)

[Image from igdb.com]

Dark Souls II

Developer: FromSoftware

Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment

Genre(s): Action RPG, Soulslike

Platforms: PS3, Xbox 360

Release Date: March 11, 2014

The sophomore slump is a common thing across all entertainment mediums. Movie sequels are always embraced with hesitance, and albums never seem to match their debuts. Where there is a Marquee Moon or a Stone Roses, there are also the Adventures and Second Comings. Burnout is a hell of a thing. This phenomenon isn't as common with video games. This is probably due to the first game being an experimental charade. After all, you don't know what to work off of if you haven't already established the fundamentals of what you are presenting. Video games always carry a little more leeway for improvement. The second game in a franchise always feels like the developers took the foundation of the first game and took the time to improve on every little aspect. Of course, there are always exceptions like Zelda II, Super Mario Bros. 2, and Castlevania 2, games that deviated from the formula of their successful predecessors and faltered. Dark Souls II is a more modern example of a sophomore slump in gaming that did exactly what these classic sequels did.

As soon as Dark Souls 1 caught wind and won everyone's hearts, the series went through a peculiar marketing campaign focused on the tough difficulty. The remastered PC version of the first game is called the "Prepare to Die edition," overtly spelling out what they are trying to highlight. However, the first Dark Souls isn't just a torturous endeavor only for the type of gamer that unironically blends a cocktail of Mountain Dew and Doritos. It's a captivating experience filled to the brim with atmosphere, spectacle, and unique organic gameplay that greatly rewards the player once they overcome it. Miyazaki's vision for Dark Souls was uncompromising, but it was much more gratifying. During the development of Dark Souls II, Miyazaki was busy working on Bloodborne. The only involvement he had was overseeing it. Dark Souls II was made by a FromSoft B team or a FromSoft F team considering the quality of the game (F as in failing grade if that wasn't clear).

Dark Souls II was the last of the trilogy that I played, so I figured I'd play it to round out the whole trilogy. I already knew that this game had a "black sheep" type of reputation, but I assumed that I wouldn't mind considering that it was still a game in a franchise I adored. I just lowered my expectations for this game. As it turns out, I do not like Dark Souls II. I do not even remotely like Dark Souls II. I thought my experience with the first game tested my limits, but this was on a whole other level. At least my experience with the first Dark Souls turned out to be something that strongly resonated with me. Dark Souls II beat me to a pulp and hung me out to dry. It's a game that feels, in essence, like the first Dark Souls but doesn't have ANY of the aspects that I love about Dark Souls.

I'm going to support my point of this with the most pretentious thing ever written on this website: Dark Souls 1 is a work of art while Dark Souls II is just a video game. I may have struggled with the first Dark Souls, but it immediately became one of my favorite games because it offered so much more than just a challenge. The world Miyazaki created blew me away with its design, and the overall journey was weighted with a bevy of emotions. The spectacle was like nothing I had experienced in a video game. Dark Souls II, on the other hand, is just a difficult video game. In fact, being a difficult video game is all that Dark Souls II sets out to be. It doesn't have the atmosphere, the spectacle, the density, or the meticulous world-building of the first game. This game was made by people who totally missed the point of Dark Souls, and it totally shows in what they created. It's Dark Souls, but through an absolutely underwhelming, shallow, and tedious presentation.

Drangleic is the tragic kingdom setting in Dark Souls II. Like Lordran, the flame keeping everything peachy is dwindling and everything in Drangleic is suffering as a result. You, the "chosen undead" have to journey through the world of Drangleic collecting the souls of four main figures to gain access to the big cheese at the end of it. I think it's both funny and ironic that the heavily criticized second half of the first Dark Souls is, in essence, the entire base of the second game. You venture too far off corners of the map going through about three or four different levels before encountering the boss and hit a dead end. This method of progression seemed underwhelming in the first game, but that was only comparable to the first half. What was deemed as being lazily rushed is now the basis of the entire sequel. How interesting. You also can't choose which order you tackle the Lordsouls in like in the first game. I used to wonder why that is considering each direction isn't necessarily more difficult than the next, but I soon figured that it was because it would take clever world design to make the game seem open-world like the first one. This obviously wasn't the case for this game.

Majula is not as cozy as the Firelink Shrine, but I actually quite like it. It is off of a cliff-side near an ocean and it always looks like the sun is setting. The cloaked figure of the Emerald Herald perched on the cliff always looking off at the large body of water is quite beautiful that it could be the basis of a painting. It definitely helps that the score for this particular place is beautiful as well. It's too bad that every area that stems off from it is utter horseshit. Heide's Tower of Flame looks like a graphically upscaled beta area from the 1993 game Myst. The Gutter is essentially an uninspired Blighttown. Even an area as seemingly vast as the Iron Keep is a linear endurance test to get to the boss. The clever individual design of something like Sen's Fortress or labyrinthine like The Depths is never present in Dark Souls II.

Drangelic is also so geographically inconsistent they might as well have implemented a level select feature. Each level stems from a passageway from the hub world until you defeat one of the main lord bosses. Once you beat one, you go back to the hub world and uncover another path. It's hard to say if each passageway has a theme or not. The first one takes you to a forest that isn't even close to Things Betwixt, the dark forest tutorial area. This leads you to a series of ancient-looking architectural buildings that stand in water. This leads to a pitch-black wharf and an array of castles built near the wharf. Overall, it's a tad askew in terms of consistency, but it gets much worse. Every direction you go seems to lead you to another forest area. Huntsman's Copse is a rocky area with a waterfall and Shaded Woods is dehydrated and filled with spirits, attempting to make the level seem moody and ominous. I don't buy that the hub world of Majula is surrounded by different wooded areas because each of these areas is accessed in totally different directions. Are wooded areas considered more domestic and less hostile to ease the player for something like Iron Keep or The Black Gulch? I suppose that's what the developers were thinking because that is how the progression is for every section of this game. The progression never feels gratifying because the geography of the level never makes any sense. In the first game, the descent from Lower Undead Burg to the Demon Ruins is so earned because it feels like you are descending into hell. As you descend further, the environment gets darker, danker, and more hostile. Dark Souls II never captures this spectacle even when the game has you descend a well in Majula taking you to the darker territory as you progress.

The problem is that each area is too short. None of the areas can amount to something like Anor Londo because each level is just a passageway to get to the next one. None of the areas take any time to breathe because they all amount to a race to get to the next one. Each of them may have a single gimmick to them and that is about it. It is emblematic of the overall predicament with Dark Souls II and that is the developers went for quantity over quality. There are about 40 different individual areas in the game and just as many bosses. Quantity over quality was apparently their imperative when they were designing the range of difficulty as well. Dark Souls II was the hardest Souls game for me, but it wasn't because of something like clever like unconventional design. The philosophy that the FromSoft "F team" had was to overwhelm the player with ridiculous amounts of enemies at every corner. There were moments in the first game that did this, but enemy hoards were always made up of weak enemies that could be defeated easily as individuals. Everything balanced itself out. The "F team" of Dark Souls II probably has an onset carpal tunnel from mashing the copy and paste keys for every level. If there is a bigger enemy in a level, just know that there will be an army of him around the corner if not huddled up beside him like a football team ready to make a play. In this context, the play is to run at you with everything they have. Because of this, you cannot run away from anything in this game. I'm going to lose the respect of some Dark Souls players when I say this, but running away from enemies is a legitimate method of getting through some of the levels in these games. It's arguably as challenging as fighting them because the enemies in these games tend to be relentless, but Dark Souls II takes this to another level. You cannot get away from the hoards of enemies in most of the levels. If you try this in No-Man's Wharf, Iron Keep, Drangleic Castle, etc. over 25 different enemies will be on your tail like an angry mob. You might argue that this keeps the player from chickening out, but fighting them head-on is always overwhelming because all of the enemies come in packs no matter how individually strong or weak they are. You can't enter the fog door to get to a boss without being trounced by hoards of enemies. In every other Souls game, encountering a fog door meant you were invulnerable, but Dark souls II decides to fuck the player. This makes the runs to get to a boss from a bonfire one of the most frustrating and tedious parts of this game.

This philosophy of overwhelming the player with absurd quantities was also implemented with the bosses in this game. There are a whopping 35+ bosses in this game, but that's not what I mean by absurd numbers. To artificially pad the difficulty, half of the bosses in this game are gank bosses. I don't mind gank bosses, in fact, Ornstein and Smough are my favorite boss from Dark Souls 1 because both of them balance each other out wonderfully. There is no balance with the gank bosses in Dark Souls II. Every gank boss in this game feels like Gravelord Nito or the Four Kings, but if each skeleton had its own stake in the total health bar and if every king appeared at once. The latter example comes with bosses like the Ruin Sentinels, the Belfry Gargoyles (which is exactly like the Bell Gargoyles from the first game except cheap and obviously derivative), and the Throne Watcher/Throne Defender. The former example comes with bosses like Freja, Looking Glass Knight, and the Twin Dragonriders (this boss is even a cloned gank boss from a solo fight earlier in the game. Is it even remotely surprising that the "F Team" would rehash bosses to pad the game?). I can't even say if I have a favorite boss in this game. I guess an honorable mention goes to the Covetous Demon because he's laughably pathetic (and I always wanted to take a whack at Jabba the Hutt). However, I can easily tell you what my least favorite boss in this game is and it's the Royal Rat Authority. It's another gank boss that takes "inspiration" from both the Capra Demon and Sif fights from the first game. The main focus of the fight is a giant dog that fights almost exactly like Sif sans the giant sword. The point of frustration is that four small rats will ambush you AND poison you before the dog even shows up. Why did they do this? Because fuck you, that's why. The specific reason as to why this is my least favorite boss is because, for the first time in any Souls game, it forced me to use magic. I am strictly a melee fighter and I've gotten through the other games just fine without using any magic. With the Royal Rat Authority, I saw no other option. It really compromised the accessibility of using a specific build that works for you which was an aspect I loved about the original Dark Souls. Come to think of it, comparing this fight to Sif really puts things in perspective. Sif is a gorgeous, mighty grey wolf that makes you feel terrible for having to kill it. The Royal Rat Authority is an ugly, gangly dog that you want to put down immediately and then taxidermy his mangy ass out of spite. It's almost like a comparative synecdoche between the quality of both of these games. Bosses like these made me do something I didn't do for the other games: skip optional bosses. I just didn't have the drive to care.

What does the game do to aid you in combating their poorly implemented difficulty tactics? Nothing. In fact, if you can't acclimate yourself to it, the game punishes you. Every time you die in this game, your maximum health decreases incrementally until it gets to 50% of your overall health. Are you fucking kidding me, FromSoft? Sorry, I know that this is still the "F team" here, but who in their right mind would think that this was a good idea? The game is already hard enough without giving you penalties for dying. I don't expect the game to aid you for failure, but this is like failing to run a mile in a minute and cutting off a piece of your leg as punishment. It's a whole other level of unfairness. You can alleviate this affliction by consuming a human effigy, but there are only so many of them per area. It certainly doesn't help that the game only starts you off with one estus flask. Why not just make me fight with my bare hands while you're at it? There are these weird life gems that replenish your health very slowly but again, these items are finite. What was wrong with the estus system in the first game? Was it too fair to have the flasks come in multiples of five? If it isn't broken, then don't fix it. Then again, every single aspect of this game is broken, so I guess the estus system had to follow suit.

You could attest to the negativity of this review on the basis that I just suck at Dark Souls. You could be on to something, but I'd still have to disagree. The unfair difficulty isn't the only detractor and I don't think hard difficulty should be one unless it's cheaply implemented and there is no other payoff. Dark Souls is guilty of this in spades, but you wanna know something? There is an easy way to get around this game that I'm not sure if the developers intentionally implemented or this is just a result of their overall carelessness. Magic-users can dominate this game. In the first game, your magic was finite and you had to use it sparingly. In Dark Souls II, all cards are off the table and you can spam almost any spell you want to your heart's content. This is the ideal way to play Dark Souls II as any enemy swarm can be dealt with from a distance. As a result, it makes the difficulty of this game almost trivial. The difference between my melee play-style and magic users is like night and day in Dark Souls II. I shouldn't have to switch my playstyle to breeze through this game. It's so balanced in the other games, so what happened here? Bullshit. Bullshit happened here.

I walked away from the first Dark Souls feeling accomplished and in awe of what I experienced. I walked away from its sequel feeling like I got gang-banged. It just shows me that Dark Souls needs the Miyazaki vision to successfully make a game that is both challenging and substantial. Otherwise, a shallow, boring, and frustrating game is made. This is the Family Guy to Dark Souls 1's Simpsons. Some elements are reminiscent of a quality product, but it fails to understand what makes the other one so meaningful. This game was like the equivalent of performing a pledge for a fraternity where you have to walk ten blocks across town with a pineapple shoved up your ass and you have to do it naked in broad daylight without falling over. Just as you've almost made it, a frat bro kicks you in the balls and you fall over, as a result, making you do the whole thing again, but with a pineapple shoved in your mouth as well. It's just enough to make you drop out of school and become a plumber or something. Dark Souls II is by far my least favorite Souls game and was one of the most unpleasant gaming experiences I've ever had.

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And if you think I'm playing the DLC, you've got another thing coming.