Dark Souls

Available on: Xbox 360, PS3, and PC
Played it on: Xbox 360 and PC
Played it for: 150 hours

RATING: 8/10 on console, 6/10 on PC

Ah, Dark Souls. The famously obscure, infamously hard, not-to-be-trifled-with lovechild of Hidetaka Miyazaki and Kentaro Miura. The series has gained plenty of attention over the years, but let's go back to where it all began. Well, not counting Demon's Souls, of course. Or King's Field, for that matter...

Dark Souls isn't a direct sequel to Demon's Souls. Atlus published the latter, and there's been plenty of discussion since about IP ownership, so FromSoftware instead made a game with the same mechanics that's set in a different universe, this time published by Bandai Namco. The universal currency of the game is "souls" that are collected from fallen enemies, which can be used as both experience points and as gold. Business as usual, then. But the premise of Dark Souls is much more fleshed out than the previous game. In Demon's Souls, the protagonist, the "Slayer of Demons," was a pioneer adventurer who wanted to kill some demons. That was that. But Dark Souls paints a deep story for the protagonist. Cursed with the fate of the undead and branded with the feared Darksign, the protagonist is locked in a remote asylum to await the end of days. But unlike other undead, the protagonist still retains their human will, and sets forth on a date with destiny to become the Chosen Undead that would alter the course of history forever. Sweet!

The game still plays in a similar way to Demon's Souls, but overall it has a lot more polish than its older sibling. The first Dark Souls is the slowest of the Souls-borne games, but this goes miles in terms of building a tension that is inherent to the world of Lordran. Every weapon swing feels purposeful, like a commitment. This makes combat much more challenging, as poorly-timed swings could quite easily end up being fatal. Smaller weapons swing much faster, but don't deal the poise damage required to stagger most enemies like the massive zweihander would. But both are viable, as are all the other weapon classes.

Casting, too, has been revamped to allow viability from the start, instead of asking the player to invest 60 intelligence or 60 faith and just hope for a payoff that would still often require a melee fallback when one runs out of MP. MP has been removed in Dark Souls, and spells are instead limited to a certain number of uses that cost stamina to cast. You'll still see the most damage out of a spell when you max out its appropriate stat, but it's perfectly viable to be a split physical and mental character this time around, pushing 40 Strength and 50 faith to get the most damage out of your lightning spears while still hitting like a truck with your blessed longsword. The possibility is massive in this game.

The rolling system has been re-tuned to a tiered metric. Increasing your endurance increases your equip load, which affects how your roll. Demon's Souls simply revolved around the 50% equip load mark, but Dark Souls adds a "mid roll" between 30% and 70% load. The addition of the mid roll is huge, as it's not too good and not too bad. It's significantly more difficult to get your character to the ridiculous hyper-speed Brushwood Set meta from Demon's Souls, although it is still possible with the right commitment. It is instead much more plausible to simply mid roll in the heavier sets, and this still requires a focus in Edurance. This means players need a much more careful balance of damage stats, Vitality, and Endurance, and is much better for gameplay overall.

Now, onto the story and such. The focus of Dark Souls was on an interconnected world design instead of the "hub-and-spoke" design of Demon's Souls. The game drops the Chosen Undead into Lordran with the basic objective of ringing the two Bells of Awakening in order to progress to the mysterious Kingdom of Anor Londo. Accomplishing that goal is left to the player, and while there is a standard order of bosses, there are many ways to unlock doors and potentially cut corners. As the player works through their quest, they'll meet quite a few NPC's that are all attempting to complete their own quests, most of whom the player can help as the game progresses.

The game slowly unveils the story as the player moves forward, and builds a genuinely complex history through environmental clues and item descriptions. It's a fascinating passtime to really piece everything together and come to the ultimately sad conclusions about the world of Lordran. And it feels absolutely fantastic to triumph where so many others failed. It builds a wonderful and coherent world that feels satisfying to play. It's a solid experience.

The game, of course isn't without flaws. The PvP experience is... less than stellar, with faulty netcode that often means completely off-model hitboxes. Backstab scamming is an important tactic, even in high-level PvP, and the weapon and armor balances were meant almost exclusively for PvE. They become far too easy to exploit in the PvP scene. Parrying is incredibly easy as well, and again becomes an important and easily exploitable mechanic when fighting other players. So while PvP is an ingrained and important part of the universe, it's a pretty terrible experience overall.

The PC port is also... well, it's atrocious. The mouse and keyboard controls are horrendous, the mouse isn't even hidden on-screen, the netcode works even less reliably than it does on console, the framerate is grossly underwhelming, and if you click to summon somebody whose name is too long, the game outright crashes. It takes no less than three heavy mods to get the game working right, and even then it doesn't fix the mouse or control issues, and it's far better to just plug in a controller. The game itself is good, but the disgusting port seriously docks points.

Overall, it's a great experience. Even on PC, if you can get all the mods to work right. It makes seriously beneficial improvements from Demon's Souls, builds a fantastic, breathing world, and feels great to play. Starting with this game is a must if you're a Souls-borne fan, or even if you're just interested in trying it out. Demon's Souls is optional. But not this one.