Yes, after playing several of its imitators, I finally got around to the original, only 10 years late!
After all the hype, I found it… underwhelming. My biggest takeaway is that the Soulslike imitators vastly improved upon and streamlined the formula, which isn’t terribly surprising. Dark Souls itself feels like it has a lot of design principles pulling in opposite directions, as well as a lot of tedious cruft that its imitators wisely trim.
Update: I returned 3 years later to try the sequels too. They are not much better.
I think the most noticeable misstep the game makes is including RPG elements. This is the first thing you see when you start the game:
Oh dear. That’s a lot of text and numbers. But okay, I’m an RPG player, I’m fine with fussing over numbers, and the game does at least tell you what all the stats do.
The problem is that none of them matter.
Here’s what my armor inventory looks like:
The first four numbers on each line are defense stats for various types of damage. As far as I can tell, they’re a straight subtraction from enemy attack power. What’s enemy attack power, you ask? Even weak enemies do hundreds of points of damage per hit, and frequently use combos that hit multiple times. Your total HP caps out at around 1350. These fiddly 1-point differences between your different types of armor will never, ever matter. The best defense is to not get hit. And since there’s a mechanic that slows you down if you’re wearing too much equipment, it’s actually better to strip naked so you can dodge more attacks. This entire mechanic that fills a whole tab of your inventory is worse than useless.
Weapons are slightly better, but there are still far too many of them, and I found that most of the weaker ones did next to nothing against most enemies. I just stuck with my slow but powerful greatsword and called it a day, because the best defense is also a good offense. (Literally, because dealing large amounts of damage will cause enemies to stagger and miss their attacks.) The RPG elements actually hinder weapons, too, because the point-build system means there are tons of weapons you’ll just never use. Magic weapons that scale off of Intelligence are a really cool mechanic for keeping mages viable, but since I’m playing a fighter who put all his points into Strength all they do is clutter up my inventory.
The game just isn’t designed for a crunchy RPG experience. The factor that determines success or failure is player skill: How well you can read enemy attack patterns and how quickly you can react. Your class of weapon can be a factor in that, but using one greatsword over another isn’t going to matter nine times out of ten. The game should be clear that that’s the case instead of leaving players wondering if they’re just using the wrong build or equipment.
I’ve heard a lot of people praise this game as having the feel of a Metroidvania where finding equipment helps you in other areas, but I’m genuinely confused what players could be referring to when they say this. My only reaction to new equipment (except for the rings, which still provide only minor benefits) was “Cool, another thing I’ll never use.”
Hollow Knight did well to ditch all of this and focus on what makes the game actually good, which is the combat and exploration. Even Unworthy, which still kept stats and levels, ditched armor and made all the weapons unique and distinct. By making upgrades qualitative rather than quantitative, I had a much better idea of what they could do and what I was capable of.
For an RPG the game is also needlessly obtuse about just about everything. It does let you press a button to get tooltips on what all the stats mean, but that’s about where it ends. The amount of times I had to Google for basic gameplay information, like how to jump, was absurd. I think perhaps the co-op mechanic was meant to deal with this, but I turned that off immediately the first time I started up the game and got flooded by confusing nonsense (which ironically just ended up making me miss the few inbuilt tutorial messages, so I didn’t even know how to lock on for the first few hours). Making the revisited Undead Asylum an absurdly hard-to-reach bonus area is fine, keeping multiple items effectively necessary for progression hidden there is not. (Interestingly, I learned there are inbuilt hints that tell you exactly how to get there if you use the “Seek Guidance” miracle, but the spell’s description does not make it clear it reveals developer messages and not just more internet junk.) If you include a way to make the Blighttown swamp actually navigable, you should let players know it exists before throwing them into it and making them think they have no option but to trudge through at a crawl, like I did.
The lore is also obfuscated to a frustrating extent. You are given a general idea of your quest and what direction to go in next, but context for what any of it means? Nope. You are neither told nor shown what your ending choice actually means, nor are you even told you do have a choice. I accidentally got the Dark Lord ending just because I tried poking the edges of the final boss arena, not realizing that was supposed to be a meaningful choice. For a game praised for its lore this was, again, incredibly disappointing.
I also must say, 3D does not do action games any favors. Far too many of my deaths happened because the camera bugged out and I couldn’t see where I was in relation to the enemy. There also doesn’t seem to be any good way of fighting multiple enemies simultaneously, because locking on to one enemy will often just prevent you from seeing where the others are. I again appreciate the 2D Soulslikes for allowing me to see everything at all times; when I screw up there, I know it’s my own fault, and not that the camera was blinding me to an attack from out of nowhere.
Another thing they should not have included is instant death pits. I didn’t realize Hollow Knight was actually being generous by only taking off 1 hit point with its area hazards; here, if you make a single misstep, it’s back to the bonfire with you. It might not be so bad if they relegated such drops to the edges of areas, but they are everywhere. There is even a boss who requires you to make a difficult jump to reach its weak spot, and if you’re slightly off even once you have to make the whole trek from the bonfire all over again.
…Which brings us to the other big problem: Checkpoint starvation. I know the game is 10 years old but modern games still don’t seem to get this, so it bears repeating: Forcing players to go through the same challenges they’ve already done 15 times to get to the part they actually need to practice is not difficulty, it’s just tedium. It doesn’t help that areas are just so huge that even when you don’t have to fight through trash mobs, walking from place to place takes way longer than it needs to. There is no reason not to let us restart right outside a boss room, nor is there any good reason to withhold fast travel until the endgame, nor do I understand why you can’t warp to every bonfire when you finally do get fast travel. I’m sure at least half my playtime must have been spent solely on walking paths I’d already traveled.
When the game manages to get out of its own way the combat does tend to be pretty good, but even that was hit-or-miss for me. 99% of fights are won with the exact same strategy: Roll through their legs and stab them in the butt. Against humanoid enemies there is a dedicated backstab maneuver that is ridiculously overpowered and easy to pull off, and monsters are so slow that they just can’t turn around fast enough to hit you. It’s pretty much the only strategy that works against bosses, too, because they’re so huge you can’t see anything but their legs anyway, which makes it nigh-impossible to read their tells. Again: 3D was not a good choice here.
It doesn’t help that, as previously mentioned, you will be fighting the exact same string of enemies a dozen times to get between the checkpoint and the boss, which just grinds down every ounce of fun the combat could have had. You can’t even experiment to try to shake things up, because the game is so punishing of failure: Every time you die, you drop all your money (which also doubles as your experience points!) and if you die again before getting to the same spot and picking it up, you lose it all! Under those conditions, it’s madness to do anything but advance at a crawl — which is fine if you’re going through an area once, but not if you’re forced to do the exact same challenge a dozen times. If anything the game seems to be banking on this; most of the times I screwed up were because I got frustrated and wanted to just make it go faster.
To be honest, I didn’t mind the use-it-or-lose-it mechanic too much; it encourages you to spend instead of hoard, which is always good, and you accumulate souls so quickly it’s not much of a loss if you do lose a cache. It helps that you do get to keep any items you found, including items that are essentially banked souls. The lost time frustrated me far, far more.
So… eh. All this game really did was make me think of how Hollow Knight and Unworthy did the same things better. I think it does at least try to be fair, but there are too many bits that simply aren’t, which just pushes it from challenging into frustrating.
Dark Souls 2
I return 3 years later to say I foolishly chose to return to the franchise, because I hadn’t suffered enough. I saw some chittering on the internet saying that Dark Souls 2 was controversial and disliked by a lot of Dark Souls 1 fans, and hey, enemy of my enemy is my friend — if I didn’t like Dark Souls 1, maybe this would be interesting.
It is massively better by stint of giving you fast travel from the start, and I liked that most of the bosses were humanoid and small enough to fit on the screen, but the hollowing mechanic is just more unnecessarily punishing death spiral nonsense. Otherwise, it’s more of the same: Instant death pits still suck (and if anything are even more ubiquitous); checkpoint starvation still sucks (I dread to contemplate how much of my life I wasted just doing the same runs over and over); platforming still sucks; mob fights make everything 10x harder because the engine was blatantly not designed for it; the camera still hates me; and the RPG mechanics still accomplish nothing but rendering 90% of treasure (you know, the stuff that’s supposed to be your reward for exploring) worthless.
Also, why did they design so many cool boss weapons only to render them unusable by making them all weigh a metric ton? How on Earth did they think forcing players to choose between wearing armor and dodging if they wanted to use these special weapons (which are, if anything, weaker than regular weapons) was remotely appealing? Especially given the weapon upgrade mechanic making it even harder to get them up to par! Like, really — you can find titanite anywhere, but you don’t get a renewable source of petrified dragon bones until the endgame (and even then they’re a rare drop), yet despite that regular +10s and boss +5s are about equivalent in power (despite, again, boss weapons weighing three to four times as much!). What is game balance??? I never bothered with the boss weapons, they are so profoundly not worth it.
Also also, I don’t remember if this was as much a problem in Dark Souls, but the enemy attack animations felt really uncanny. They look like they’re moving underwater for their ridiculously, painfully long windups, and then suddenly they whip out these impossibly lightning-fast attacks. It made it extremely difficult to guess when to dodge because their movements just don’t match up with real weight and momentum.
Overall, I was left feeling like the people fighting over this game are whack. This is just Dark Souls again. Even if a few details are different, the core gameplay is unchanged. It plays exactly the same.
Bloodborne
I still hadn’t learned my lesson and also tried Bloodborne, because I heard its combat system was different from Dark Souls’ in ways I found intriguing. And it actually is; it genuinely plays differently from Dark Souls. As for if it plays well… I’m sure it was revolutionary at the time, but having played it after Sekiro all I see is an awkward middle child. The parts that were Sekiro (fast-paced combat, parrying, more humanoid enemies) were good, the parts that were Dark Souls (everything else) were terrible. The game feels like it can’t decide what it wants to be — humanoid enemies and monster enemies are fought so differently they feel like different games. I very nearly quit the game after how clunky and unfun the Cleric Beast was (didn’t help that the recommended strategy was “use your extremely finite consumables, unless you already used them in a failed attempt, in which case go screw yourself”), and only stuck with it because I learned the Cleric Beast was optional. Fortunately Father Gascoigne and the rest of the game were good enough to maintain my interest, but dear god I am so sick of checkpoint starvation and boss runbacks.
The rally system was cool and I liked it. Especially given that visceral attacks were a full restore, it synergized really well with the parry system — I was always annoyed how I’d often eat a hit even if I successfully parried because the timing window was so tight, but when you can instantly recover the lost HP that’s no longer a concern. The blood vial system worked really well for the levels (where you get a steady trickle from defeated enemies, so you can usually push through without having to double back to a checkpoint) but terribly for boss fights, as all consumable items do in these games. I don’t know why they thought it was a good idea to make players lose consumables spent on failed attempts in a game designed around players constantly failing.
Camera issues were probably at their worst here. The Cleric Beast was by far the worst offender, with the camera spinning like a top if you try to lock onto his upper body and constantly getting stuck behind the railings on the bridge, but every large boss was as frustrating as in Dark Souls 1, possibly even worse because of the faster pace of combat and smaller dodge windows forcing you to react faster. I barely understood anything that was happening throughout the Amelia fight, since her hair and bandages flying everywhere and being the same color as her skin made it nigh-impossible to read her movements.
And the game still won’t show you which attacks are parryable or not, even when the game places so much emphasis on the parry system, which combined with parrying being difficult was very frustrating — I could never tell if an attack was unparryable or if I just couldn’t get the timing right. (How did they not figure out something this basic until 2 games later?)
Oh, and the story was somehow even more bleak and miserable than the other games’. So many characters just die no matter what you do. It’s just so cruel and sadistic, so mean.
I’m left feeling that, for all the praise FromSoft gets, they’re actually really bad game designers. They had one good idea, the combat system, but everything they added on top of that — their attempts at connective tissue to make it into a full game — are absolute garbage that do nothing but detract from that core. When you can cut out everything except that core and end up with a better game, like Titan Souls and Cuphead do, it means you took a very wrong turn somewhere. All that AAA money accomplished nothing but worthless bloat that actively dragged the game down; indie titles that imitated the formula but stripped that fat out of necessity actually ended up better.
Dark Souls really is a billion years old. I’m not surprised to hear that it hasn’t aged super well, particularly since it spawned a million imitators; even the small fraction that really learned from DS’s mistakes became superior.
People revere the original Dark Souls, but I’m more a fan of Dark Souls 3, the most recent iteration. That’s the one where I’d say the design and gameplay are just about perfected, and the quality-of-life has taken such leaps as “go from any bonfire to another at any time” i.e. basic fast travel. I don’t really want to go in-depth about it, though, because judging by your specific criticisms, there’s another From Soft game I should be hyping: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
I could almost go down the specific checklist of your complaints and how well they’re addressed in Sekiro.
– 3D environments with pitfalls not good? Sekiro is built for that kind of verticality because you’re a ninja who magically takes almost no fall damage.and can grappling hook around. Even bottomless pits only remove about half your life
– Checkpoint Fast Travel in addition to the trademark “door that opens to where you’ve been before” fix the awful need to run around to get everywhere
– Sekiro gets rid of all RPG stats except for HP and Attack Power, both of which are gained from pickups and beating bosses. Experience goes to skill trees
– Sekiro’s combat is just straight-up sword-fighting (with some bonus ninja tools). No backstabs outside of genuine stealth, and parrying with your sword is far better than dodging because it actually helps you kill enemies faster
– Speaking of stealth, that plus Sekiro’s general speed and maneuverability make it easy to run past enemies to get to where you died before (in most cases)
– The story is simple but pretty well-done and features characters with names and… character. It’s also expressed mostly through dialogue rather than item drops
Finally, while this isn’t in response a specific criticism of DS, Sekiro has a resurrect feature that lets you pop right back up the first time something kills you, which is really nice for maintaining the flow of a game like this even if you do decide to go back to the checkpoint to top the resurrection back off. In conclusion, Sekiro is everything an action game could hope to be, though I’ll have to see if Elden Ring unseats it.
Huh, interesting. A game design channel I follow preferred DS1 to its sequels, but they liked a lot of the same things I hated. Maybe I’ll give DS3 a try someday. What about Bloodborne, how does that compare?
I’ve heard of Sekiro, but never looked into it. Does it have a similar open-world structure? I’m not as interested in a straight linear action game.
Sekiro is no sandbox, but it doesn’t lead you by the hand, either. I’d say it’s about as linear as DS was, if not less.
I never played Bloodborne to the end because lolSonyexclusive. Heard good things. I know that it’s somewhere between DS3 and Sekiro in terms of how fast-paced the combat is, with Sekiro being the fastest.
Bloodborne’s storytelling is even more opaque than Dark Souls III (the only Dark Souls game I’ve played), the plot and much of the information about the setting is hidden in item descriptions, but it makes sense considering the genre. It’s a lovecraftian horror story pretending to be a gothic horror story, full of ancient cults, raving madmen and such, everyone who understand wat’s going on is dead or insane or a squid. In a way, trying to figure out the story *is* the story.
Gameplay-wise: fighting is more agressive than DS. Your character has only six relatively straightforward attributes. There are less weapons (and spell) than in DS but they tend to be much more unique.
Sekiro’s combat is so good it actually makes the other soulsborne games’ kind of silly retroactively. The devs finally figured out that parrying and blocking are basically the same thing, so attempting a parry is no longer this gambling move which makes or breaks a fight. They reduced the i-frames on the dodges so you actually have to dodge away from blows instead of into them. The result of this plus the perillous attack system makes fighting much more interesting because it’s no longer a timing based mini-game where you win by dodging at the right time.
Well, Sekiro benefits from being a wholly single-player experience. They didn’t have to balance the combat system around PvP or netcode. It makes sense that they were able to hone the combat system as far as they did without the extra baggage. It still does kind of boil down to a timing based minigame where you win by parrying all the time. That said, Sekiro has some incredibly organic swordfighting because bosses actually respect your attacks nearly as much as you have to respect theirs; you can even get fighting game-style situations where you and the boss will psyche each other out and cancel your attacks to block. You are encouraged to use your offense to blunt the enemies’ onslaught.
I really liked Dark Souls III PvP; you could feel the variety in playstyle and equipment the game was tailored to support. I very much hope Elden Ring continues in that vein.
There’s a lot of attack where you can’t parry or you can’t dodge, or you can neither and must use a specific counter, or you can parry but it’s better to dodge-attack to bleed out your opponent before doing poise damage (the Lady Butterfly fight basically exists to teach you this), whereas in DS3 and Bloodborne the i-frames were so extensive that I feel like 95% of the time you were fine if you dodged at the right time, not even in a specific direction, so finding the right tempo to dodge and light attack was sufficient for most of the fights. It’s not like it was bad or anything but Sekiro is so much better on that front.
I am not really sympathetic to concessions on gameplay made for the purpose of PvP, because I only do single-player, the way God intended.
Yeah, I mean it’s less one-note than Dark Souls with the perilous attacks, but the vast majority of fights will still come down to parrying combos while looking for the opportunity to light attack. What truly sets Sekiro apart is the pace: throwing away the stamina bar and replacing dodge rolls with the parry system gives the combat a more high-tempo and consistent flow. Speaking of stamina, I do actually like the Dark Souls stamina system and the fact that it’s governed by an actual stat, like equipment load. Sekiro is a better action game than Dark Souls, for sure, but after going back to DS3 I found I still had a great appreciation for the slower game.
Lady Butterfly was an interesting boss because at first I did chip away at her health, but as I got better and came back on an NG+ she was the first boss that I beat with relentless aggression. When you manage to stay in close quarters and force her into parry rallies, her rotation becomes a lot more limited and manageable. This works with a lot of bosses, with exceptions like the terrifying Father (Owl) and Sword Saint Isshin fights. Those two are better at creating distance and putting you on the back foot, enough that I still occasionally beat them through health.
Elden Rings is pretty good, It has the Dark Souls combat but feels smoother and less janky overall. Also has a very expansive open world with plenty to explore.
Elden Ring is really fucking awesome. That said, I do have a few criticisms. My biggest complaint so far is that you’re railroaded more by upgrade materials than by the story; early smithing stones essentially disappear from the game outside the first two regions, so you’re forced to go back or look up the location of the item that allows you to purchase them from a vendor. Then I found that I actually *skipped* whatever slice of the game has higher mid-tier materials, and went straight to the high-tier, so I can’t bridge them unless I find the earlier ones.
The team has mostly done very well translating their formula to open world; I really have very few complaints about the game overall. It’s very noticeable when a crucial element breaks the flow of gameplay like this, in a way that facing difficult enemies wouldn’t. I hope for a patch to change it, but barring that I’ll have to just look up the vendors that sell upgrade material and beeline to them in future files.
To be fair, the item that lets you buy them is in a cave right next to where you start the game. Also, there’s a vendor that sells them, too, without needing the item.
I heard Dark Souls 2 was controversial, so I tried it to judge for myself. It is massively better by stint of giving you fast travel from the start, and I liked that most of the bosses were humanoid and small enough to fit on the screen, but the hollowing mechanic is just more unnecessarily punishing death spiral nonsense. Otherwise, it’s more of the same: Instant death pits still suck (and if anything are even more ubiquitous); checkpoint starvation still sucks (I dread to contemplate how much of my life I wasted just doing the same runs over and over); platforming still sucks; mob fights make everything 10x harder because the engine was blatantly not designed for it; the camera still hates me; and the RPG mechanics still accomplish nothing but rendering 90% of treasure (you know, the stuff that’s supposed to be your reward for exploring) worthless.
Also, why did they design so many cool boss weapons only to render them unusable by making them all weigh a metric ton? How on Earth did they think forcing players to choose between wearing armor and dodging if they wanted to use these special weapons (which are, if anything, weaker than regular weapons) was remotely appealing? Especially given the weapon upgrade mechanic making it even harder to get them up to par! Like, really — you can find titanite anywhere, but you don’t get a renewable source of petrified dragon bones until the endgame (and even then they’re a rare drop), yet despite that regular +10s and boss +5s are about equivalent in power (despite, again, boss weapons weighing three to four times as much!). What is game balance??? I never bothered with the boss weapons, they are so profoundly not worth it.
Also also, I don’t remember if this was as much a problem in Dark Souls, but the enemy attack animations felt really uncanny. They look like they’re moving underwater for their ridiculously, painfully long windups, and then suddenly they whip out these impossibly lightning-fast attacks. It made it extremely difficult to guess when to dodge because their movements just don’t match up with real weight and momentum.
Dark Souls 2 has its adherents and it did do one or two cool things (powerstancing in particular hasn’t been seen again), but I found it utterly forgettable and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. I think Dark Souls 3 is the best of the mainline Souls games, though it’s still less popular than the trailblazing DS1. They were somehow still figuring out how to design appropriate challenges for their system; in many ways I think the level layout and enemy placement were a few steps behind DS1. If I remember right, DS2 was done by their B-team while the A-team worked on something else. Bloodborne, maybe?
Leaving aside the weight, I rather liked the fact that normal weapons and boss weapons scaled on the same attributes and weren’t fundamentally ‘better’. The resources to upgrade, on the other hand, sucked in DS1, 2, 3, and onward into Elden Ring. I hate their upgrade system and I’m losing patience with the artificial scarcity and material progression timesinks in all RPGs (every time I see a copper->iron->silver progression, I cringe).
At the moment my favorite From Soft games are Sekiro, Armored Core 6, and Dark Souls 3, pretty much in that order, though it changes some days.
I heard this mentioned a few times but I still don’t know what it is. Yet another hidden mechanic they don’t bother explaining, I guess.
In principle I agree, and it seems like that’s what they were going for, with boss weapons often having special effects. But the problem wasn’t just that they weren’t better, it’s that they were worse due to their ridiculous weight and how difficult they were to upgrade.
The weapon upgrade system honestly just seems objectively bad for a game that throws so many items at you, because it makes it impossible to judge how new equipment compares to your current setup. Does this new weapon underperform because it inherently sucks, or just because I’m comparing it to something I’ve upgraded to max? And you can’t tell without investing tons of resources (or looking it up online, of course).
From what I remember, powerstancing is basically a dual wield moveset you could activate with certain weapon combinations by holding triangle or something. It is indeed an esoteric mechanic with no tutorial. Dark Souls 3 fixes this by having outright dual weapons like double daggers or double curved weapons, and Elden Ring makes it so wielding any two of the same weapon type gives you a dual wield moveset with them. So it’s a classic example of a mechanical relic that some people really loved.
Dark Souls 3 was a little better than Dark Souls 2 about upgrade materials; you could eventually just buy the majority of them from the primary vendor when you found all of the upgrades to her inventory. Elden Ring did the same but worse because it’s a giant open world and you’d never find them all without a guide. It’s weird because Elden Ring took the open world nature into account for a lot of things but not the weapon upgrade materials, though the scarcity isn’t as bad as the previous titles.
To clarify, to powerstance you simply need the stats to ‘two-hand’ any weapon you have two of and hit the ‘two-hand’ button with them both wielded. It doesn’t ever tell you about it directly but it’s something you can figure out if you ever try to two-hand while dual-wielding since they shift to a different stance and much more obviously dual-wield.
Elden Ring also has dual-weapons that you properly powerstance by ‘two-handing’.
I decided I hadn’t suffered enough and also played Bloodborne, because I heard its combat system was different from Dark Souls’ in ways I found intriguing. I’m sure it was revolutionary at the time, but having played it after Sekiro all I see is an awkward middle child. The parts that were Sekiro (fast-paced combat, parrying, more humanoid enemies) were good, the parts that were Dark Souls (everything else) were terrible. The game feels like it can’t decide what it wants to be — humanoid enemies and monster enemies are fought so differently they feel like different games. I very nearly quit the game after how clunky and unfun the Cleric Beast was (didn’t help that the recommended strategy was “use your extremely finite consumables, unless you already used them in a failed attempt, in which case go screw yourself”), and only stuck with it because I learned the Cleric Beast was optional. Fortunately Father Gascoigne and the rest of the game were good enough to maintain my interest, but dear god I am so sick of checkpoint starvation and boss runbacks.
The rally system was cool and I liked it. Especially given that visceral attacks were a full restore, it synergized really well with the parry system — I was always annoyed how I’d often eat a hit even if I successfully parried because the timing window was so tight, but when you can instantly recover the lost HP that’s no longer a concern. The blood vial system worked really well for the levels (where you get a steady trickle from defeated enemies, so you can usually push through without having to double back to a checkpoint) but terribly for boss fights, as all consumable items do in these games. I don’t know why they thought it was a good idea to make players lose consumables spent on failed attempts in a game designed around players constantly failing.
Camera issues were probably at their worst here. The Cleric Beast was by far the worst offender, with the camera spinning like crazy if you try to lock onto his upper body and constantly getting stuck behind the railings on the bridge, but every large boss was as frustrating as in Dark Souls 1, possibly even worse because of the faster pace of combat and smaller dodge windows forcing you to react faster. I barely understood anything that was happening throughout the Amelia fight, since her hair and bandages flying everywhere and being the same color as her skin made it nigh-impossible to read her movements.
And the game still won’t show you which attacks are parryable or not, even when the game places so much emphasis on the parry system, which combined with parrying being difficult was very frustrating — I could never tell if an attack was unparryable or if I just couldn’t get the timing right. (How did they not figure out something this basic until 2 games later?)
Oh, and the story was somehow even more bleak and miserable than the other games’. So many characters just die no matter what you do. It’s just so cruel and sadistic, so mean.
I’m left feeling that, for all the praise FromSoft gets, they’re actually really bad game designers. They had one good idea, the combat system, but everything they added on top of that — their attempts at connective tissue to make it into a full game — are absolute garbage that do nothing but detract from that core. When you can cut out everything except that core and end up with a better game, like Titan Souls and Cuphead do, it means you took a very wrong turn somewhere. All that AAA money accomplished nothing but worthless bloat that actively dragged the game down; indie titles that imitated the formula but stripped that fat out of necessity actually ended up better.
I read the Bloodbourne wiki and my impression has always been that this was a superior experience to actually playing it. Then again, I’m not a soulslike person in general.
I personally think FromSoft is a good developer that has a tendency to get in their own way. Like, I consider Sekiro a masterpiece. When your action game has minibosses that are cooler fights than most other games’ final bosses, you know you’ve made something special. Same with the Armored Core series, which actually predates the Souls series and is fantastic mecha action. Armored Core 6 is the best thing FromSoft has made since Sekiro.
Elden Ring of course is their most popular title ever now, but it’s also I hope the terminus of the Souls-style of game. You could tell From was at the end of their rope in the Elden Ring DLC; they just can’t push this system further without wholly reworking the player abilities.
See, that’s the thing. Sekiro is their best game because it’s the only one where they got out of their own way. Minimal RPG elements, just pure action. When they focus on the one thing they’re good at, they make a good game. (Even then, I’d think it’d be a better game if it had fewer RPG elements — it still has the consumable attrition problem, which was annoying.)
Yeah I mean, I didn’t share your negative opinion of some of their other games. Like, I think Dark Souls 3 is really good. I think that’s the one where their basic souls formula was at its peak, pound-for-pound better than Elden Ring. It also had very good PvP. Dark Souls 1 I feel hasn’t aged very well; it’s more historically important at this point imo.
And like I said, Armored Core 6 is just very cool. A lot of their older fans were so happy they finally did a non-Souls game.