In my quest for control over something difficult in my life, I've paradoxically landed on playing through the modern Soulsborne catalogue. Thanks to my incredibly-late arrival to the genre, I've been able to pick up almost all of the games for super cheap--with the exception of Sekiro, I think--and that includes my latest victory, Dark Souls II.
I have to admit, I entered into the world of Drangleic with a hefty host of reservation. Within the Soulsborne community, Dark Souls II has an at-best-mixed reputation. There are lots of reasons for that, including creator-worship (since the creator of the series, Hidetaka Miyazaki, was not in the driver's seat for this entry), disliked changes to the formula, and a fair amount of hate for the hit boxes of the game. In fact, I watched a couple of YouTube videos under the search terms "Should I play Dark Souls 2?" because I wasn't sure if I wanted to spend time in a game that wasn't scratching the itch that FromSoftware games (alone, perhaps) seem to make in me. Still, at sub-twenty dollars, it didn't seem like a huge financial investment. If I didn't like the game after twenty hours or so of playing, no big deal, right? Well, I ended up dropping fifty hours into the game before beating it last night, and I have to say…I definitely see why people like it the least of the Soulsborne games. That does not equal hating it (I wouldn't have beaten it if I hated it). It means that, in the pantheon of Soulsborne games, my current ranking is as follows: 5. Dark Souls II 4. Dark Souls 3. Demon's Souls 2. Sekiro 1. Bloodborne (We'll have to see, in a few weeks, where I feel Dark Souls III lands. And, in a few months/years (?) where Elden Ring fits in.) I feel like the greatest controversy in this is where Dark Souls goes, as it's the originator in the series and has a special, nostalgic place in the hearts of a lot of gamers. Many have been involved with Souls games since its inception during the early PS3 generation, so there's a lot that factors into one's feelings about these games. For me, that nostalgic devotion is centered on Bloodborne (though it seems that most of the community agrees with me that it is the best of all, regardless). Nevertheless, I put Dark Souls where I did in part because while its formula is better implemented than in Demon's Souls, I played the Demon's Souls PS5 remake, which has so many nice features to it--up to and including the superior haptic feedback of the PS5 controllers--that it just barely edges out Dark Souls from the top three. It bears emphasizing that these are all good games. If I have to put them into a hierarchy, then that's how it currently shakes out. And why do I put Dark Souls II on the bottom of the list? Well, just like how I put Demon's Souls higher because of a collection of small-but-adds-up-to-a-lot features, Dark Souls II has the same-but-opposite effect: The tiny changes diminished my preference for the game. The Cons
The Pros
In sum, the game is good. It's great, in fact, though it fails to live up to the high standards of the others in its pedigree…which is basically what the community told me when I did my original due-diligence. Okay. Next up…Dark Souls III. Christmas of 2020 was…rough. Not only were we self-imposed pariahs, separated from almost all family and friends as the (seemingly) only ones still taking the pandemic seriously, but the looming treatment of Gayle's breast cancer cast a pall over a very subdued holiday. One thing, however, that has come from that time was I've picked up a new hobby, thanks to the gift Gayle gave her boys of mini-fig paints. I've been playing D&D off and on for about three years now. My boys have all created characters that they use in our adventures, and thanks to a generous neighbor and my school's 3-D printer, we've even created 3-D prints of them to use when the mood hits us right. As good as these prints are (which, considering the constraints of the technology, are pretty good, I think), they're still monochromatic versions. Despite that, I thought it might be a good father/son bonding experience for us to learn how to paint those same miniatures. I was this close to buying a starter painting set at the last FanX convention we went to, but distance and crowds prevented me from following up. Ever observant, my wife decided to pick up some paints for us as a Christmas gift, thus allowing us to paint together as a family. We kind of have. My younger two boys have sat down with me on a couple of occasions as we've taken some molded miniatures that Gayle gave us and tried our hands at painting them. (My oldest is not really interested in artistic endeavors of any sort, so he has yet to sit down and participate with us.) I watched some YouTube videos, listened to my wife's artistic advice, and then set to work. We primed the models (using a spray-paint primer, in order to prime a lot of them all at once) and painted them in the stock colors that came with the original set. The first one I did was of an elven archer. I was surprised at how well it turned out, considering my inexperience. It was also fun to sit with my boys and quietly work on something together. My middle son has shown the greatest interest, having painted a couple of dragons, a skeleton, and a couple of others. (Ironically, despite the fact that we started this hobby in order to paint the miniatures of our characters, we've yet to try to paint the 3-D printed minis.)
Where I really became interested was when I got the Bloodborne Board Game, a hefty investment of Christmas cash that arrived back in February or March. I learned about the game after its Kickstarter campaign had ended, so I was forced to buy through an alternative website that incorporated the main game and three additional add-on packs of different types. It was a lot of money (more than I spent on the video game, that's for sure), and I didn't want it to go to waste. Fortunately, the game is really enjoyable--I've played it for dozens of hours so far--and I want to keep my interest in it as high as possible. To that end, I've continued my painting hobby. See, having all of these new miniatures (probably over 100 of them, if I were to sit down and actually count them) means that I have plenty to keep me busy for the next couple of years or so. Each monster of the game comes with two or four miniatures, meaning that I can experiment with different color sets, motifs, and techniques. If I do one that feels incorrect, it's okay: I don't have to reset on that one as I can just paint another one in a better way. It's also helpful in keeping me from secluding myself in my office when the rest of the family is downstairs playing video games, sewing, or otherwise interacting. I sit in the corner of the kitchen table next to a stack of drawers filled with paints, brushes, pallets, and figurines, quietly painting my models. I use an old orange juice bottle with a bit of 3M double-sided adhesive to keep the models attached. A Tupperware container provides the perfect place to put a wet paper towel and a square of parchment paper in order to make a wet-pallet that keeps the mixed paints from drying out before I can use them all. Because Gayle is an artist, she has a huge collection of acrylic paints that I'm now learning how to use. Her generosity is always impressive, if you ask me. There are a couple of downsides: I'm not sure if it's because they're cheap or what, but I think I'm wearing out the brushes. I make small mistakes sometimes because the brush-heads act in ways I'm not expecting, or fail to keep a strong point when I need them to. I also sometimes get irritated by having to paint the same thing four times (eight, if I prime them by hand). I know, I know--I just said that it's good that I have so many options. And that is true, for reasons I mentioned above. It's also true that it can be tedious to go over the same details again and again. This doesn't happen all of the time--I have so many figurines to paint that I really can just bounce from one to another whenever I want--but as far as the game is concerned, I want to play with the pieces that I've painted. When I've only painted one or two, then I feel the urge to paint the remaining ones, but struggle against the aforementioned irritation of being involved with the same one again and again. It isn't a massive con, or anything, just one of the quirks of the situation. Paint choices are also limited, in a sense. I mean, I can paint them whatever I want--obviously--but the game's source material is rather grim, bleak, and dark. There are lots of blacks, browns, and blood-red, yes. However, bright colors that really pop, or provide interesting contrasts don't really fit into the game's design. (I cheated a bit when it came to painting the item chests, as it gave me a chance to make some that were gold or silver and much more eye-catching.) So, I've had to settle with going in slightly different directions as far as the coloring goes. Despite these slight difficulties, I am really enjoying this new hobby. It has taken away from my writing and reading (though I just finished listening to The Fellowship of the Ring while painting in my corner, so it's good for audiobooks), but it's also immensely cathartic. I mean, there's a lot in my life that requires a lot of my emotional energy. Writing is one of the most demanding things that I do outside of my job. Sometimes--most times--I'm drained when I get home from work. The last thing I want to do is spend time slapping a keyboard. Add to that a continuing doubt about ever writing something worth being published, the (perhaps) connection to increasing my medication dosage to deal with my depression, and the overall stress of the continuing cancer treatments while in a pandemic from which my oldest is still at risk, and it makes sense that I want to do something that doesn't have any higher stakes than "Can I make this look cool?" Anyway, I'm pretty proud of what I've done. There's a whole thread on Twitter that you can look through everything I've painted so far, as well as a few more here below. I've been talking a lot about FromSoftware games lately. This is because I've been playing a lot of FromSoftware games lately. (If you missed it, I talked about Dark Souls--and my interest in this style of game more broadly--and Sekiro, with some preliminary thoughts on Bloodborne from a few years ago.) So it is surprising to no one to learn that when I got my PlayStation 5, I purchased it in a bundle with both Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Demon's Souls.
This means that I've been playing FromSoftware games very much out of order. The original version of Demon's Souls came out <<checks internet>> in 2009. I definitely missed the boat on that one, and who knows? I may not have had the drive to learn the punishing mechanics back then. Anyway, after FromSoftware released Demon's Souls, they created a spiritual successor that would've felt like a carbon copy had it come from a different studio: Dark Souls, which came out in 2011. The two sequels to Dark Souls were released in the subsequent years. The apotheosis of the form came in 2015 with the PlayStation 4 exclusive of Bloodborne. Four years later, Sekiro dropped. At the time of this writing, the "Soulsborne" community is eagerly awaiting Elden Ring, about which I have purposefully remained almost completely ignorant. That timeline is interesting to me, because it creates an evolutionary map, with components from different games manifesting in other areas--sometimes multiple games apart. For instance, one of the few flaws in Bloodborne is the healing method: blood vials are a limited resource that must be "farmed" off of fallen enemies, discovered in the world, or purchased from the creepy Messengers. This process of finding healing items in-world was abandoned in the three Dark Souls games, yet is a component of Demon's Souls, the first of its kind. In Demon's Souls, you find different types of grasses that heal different amounts, with the rarer, more powerful healing items being (unsurprisingly) much more difficult to find. In Dark Souls, you are given an "Estus flask", a small bottle in which the Fire from bonfires is contained. Your character has a limited number of uses--starting at 5, though a crafty player can get that cranked up to 20 by the end of the game--but the flask refills upon every interaction with the bonfires. Bloodborne streamlines the healing process by only having one major healing item--the blood vial--that is quantity-capped at 20, yet must be found or purchased…a mixture between Dark Souls efficiency and Demon's Souls resource management. It's interesting to see how some components of these games remains the same: Difficulty, of course, as well as environmental- and minimalistic storytelling. There is always a grim tone, endings that range between "well, that was depressing" to "well, that was super depressing", and brilliant game mechanics. Yet there are also inventive lateral steps, aspects of one game that are abandoned, refined, or reskinned in subsequent games. Which is what makes the PS5 remake of Demon's Souls so interesting. I know that it is a very faithful adaptation of the original. Unlike the recent Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII remakes, this isn't a retelling or reimagining--it's an updating. Yet it kept some of the components of the original game (which, again, I haven't played) that aren't very good. And I think that they're not very good because we don't see them repeated in any of the future games. (I say that with a very large caveat that, though I'm playing through Dark Souls II right now, I can't speak about what's in Dark Souls III, since I've never even loaded up the game.) So here are three gripes about Demon's Souls. #1) The Archstones. The layout of this game world is significantly less linear than any of the other FromSoftware titles. In Demon's Souls, the player is dropped into the Nexus, a central hub that allows the character to teleport to any of the five sections of the world where the adventure takes place. After the introductory components of the game are done, the player can choose any pathway through any of the levels. I approached it in a rotating form, getting further in the first map (Archstone of the Small King) before moving over to, say, the fifth map (Archstone of the Chieftain), and so on. If a player wished to only push through one Archstone entirely before moving on to another, that would be a possibility. That isn't my beef with the system. I like it well enough, though it feels significantly less connected than all of the other games. The world feels cohesive enough, thanks to the tone and art style. But you can't run from Boletarian Place to the Ritual Path, for example, as they're in different Archstones. That in and of itself isn't a huge deal; its effect is minimal, and it really does help make the game be more organized. No, what bothers me is the limited number of archstones (as opposed to Archstones) within each map. The only way to get these crucial checkpoints is by defeating a boss. And while the level designs are sharp enough that, once you've explored the area well enough, you'll be able to activate a shortcut of some sort between where you're respawning and where you need to be, the amount of time spent running between archstone checkpoint and boss fight gets really tedious. Now, all FromSoftware games have this to an extent. There's the gauntlet of Black Knights you have to slalom through to get through the Kiln of the First Flame in Dark Souls, for example. But when you consider how far you have to run from your respawn point to the last fight in Bloodborne or Sekiro, you can see that long sprints aren't really necessary to maintaining the vision of the game. And it got tedious on some of these runs. The last major one, going through the remnants of the Boletarian castle to challenge Old King Allant again and again was the main reason I decided to cheese* him rather than try to defeat him in combat. (That and because he had robbed me of over 10 soul levels with his stupid soul-sucker move and I was done having to regain those levels.) I died more often on the way to the boss than from the boss himself. And that ends up being a really frustrating component of the game. Again, that isn't to say that these later titles don't suffer from the same problem, but all of the subsequent games have checkpoints in places besides just where you've defeated a boss. As Bluepoint (the company that remade this game) was remaking it, why not tweak this super annoying aspect? #2) Soul Form In Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Dark Souls (the three FromSoftware games I'd beaten before taking down Demon's Souls), dying meant some sort of punishment, usually in the form of losing experience points. But that was it. That was the punishment. In Demon's Souls, the character's mortal body is lost upon death. Defeating one of the bosses gives you your body back--or you can use a consumable item for the same effect--but here's the rub: If you die with your human body in a level, you actually make the game harder. This is a broader criticism of the game, but there are some pretty important behind-the-scenes mechanics that are at play which definitely change the way a player chooses to go about playing the game. In Demon's Souls, dying with your body in any part of the world (except the Nexus) will cause the world to have a darker "tendency". Defeating a boss will create a lighter "tendency". Certain areas of the maps will become accessible, NPCs will appear, and other consequences stem from what kind of tendency you've created in each of the worlds. That is an interesting idea, but it is not clear at all that that's what's happening. And, since a dark tendency actually increases the difficulty of the enemies, it means that dying in human form is a great way to make the game harder, which will lead to a greater chance of dying in human form again, which only makes the game harder. But my biggest gripe on this front is the fact that a soul form body has only half the total HP. It's more of a psychological thing, really, but seeing half of the HP bar permanently empty feels dispiriting. Why even have it available? Being human means that you have more HP, yes, but the game is designed to make you die. A lot. So that means that particularly trying areas--you know, the places where you need extra hit points--you're disincentivized to do the thing that would give you the greatest advantage: Be in human form. Because if you do, then you're running the risk of dying in that area and making it even harder. To mitigate this a little, you can equip a "Cling Ring" that increases the amount of total HP in soul form. I definitely appreciated that--I probably wouldn't have been able to beat the game without it--but it also meant that, for all intents and purposes, I only had one ring that I could equip. There wasn't any way to have the extra health and multiple buffs or perks from two different rings, which severely limited my ability to explore different combinations of rings and weapons. I can see some pointing out that the purpose of the game is to be difficult. It's supposed to be hard. And I get that. But the difficulty level is pleasurable only in proportion to how fair the game is. It would make the game much harder if your character randomly exploded, but that wouldn't make it better, because you can't control random moments. Skill and commitment are what takes you through the game, but you are going to die. Unless you're a speedrunner or someone who never takes damage--meaning that the mechanic doesn't matter to you either way--this specific design choice is merely a source of irritation at best and downright frustration at worst. #3) Inventory Management One thing that all FromSoftware games seem to struggle with is how to navigate the inventory. It makes sense why it's difficult: Much of the storytelling and worldbuilding is located inside the items and their descriptions. And these games have a lot of items in them, so there's a lot to keep track of. What Demon's Souls does that really rather baffles me is that it makes your inventory limited. All of the other games avoid this, letting the magical logic of video game inventory screens contain thousands of different items, weapons, knickknacks, and armor types without explaining how the character really accesses them. Now, I'm down for greater realism in video games. I like it when a character's hand gun is replaced in the hip holster while the rifle is slung across the back. I also like it when you press a button and a sword bigger than your body suddenly appears in your hand. That isn't the problem. Since Demon's Souls isn't interested in any sort of realistic fealty on that front, it's so strange when I'm harvesting items from fallen foes only to have the game let me know that I don't have enough space to collect the item. "However," the game tells me, "you may send this item directly to storage if you press the Menu button." Um. Okay. One, why not make it be the X button? You know, the one that I use to clear almost every other piece of on-screen information? And two, why bother? Just let me carry all of the things. I know, I know: They want to have an encumbrance mechanic going on. And you know what? The one that actually matters to how the game is played is a great one. How much you have equipped to the character as a type of encumbrance is a wonderful way of having the player carefully choose what they think will be most useful in the next run. It's a good way of creating consequences for what you place on your avatar. So, since that's where material weight matters, where encumbrance comes into play, I don't see the need to place a limit on how many items the player can carry. It doesn't help that, despite their best efforts and years of iteration on this idea, the storage system is still clunky. Being unable to unequip while in the storage box means that you have to strip your character before interacting with Stockpile Thomas (who chats with you every time and has precious little to say), and though the individual types (consumables, keys, crafting items, armor types, and more) are easily flipped through, there are different buttons used in different situations. This is a pet peeve of mine that has been growing over the past few years, and that's when the same button does different things in different situations. For the most part, this game doesn't fall into this trap. When I press X, it's to interact with the world and that's about all. (This is one of the benefits of mapping the attack buttons onto the shoulders: Circle can always be dodge/run, X can always be interact, etc.) It isn't the same button that I normally use for jumping or what have you. In the case of the menu, however, there's this one thing that FromSoftware (and, in this case, Bluepoint) tends to do that I forget about constantly: Square doesn't always bring up the item description. When you're in the equipping screen, pressing Square will unequip the item. But when you're in any other screen, Square will pull up the item description--a necessary component of the game if you're going to learn anything about the lore of the world (especially in the PS5 version, where loading screens average less than 5 seconds). I can't tell you how often I pressed Square so that I could look at the details of my item, only to realize that I had unequipped it instead. And, without a quick scroll option (other games use Left or Right on the D-Pad; in Dark and Demon's Souls, that's how you swap through the menu tabs), there's a lot of scrolling up and down while looking for a necessary item. It just seems clunky to me. Sekiro does a marginally better job in this case, but that's mostly because it at least allowed for quick scrolling. I don't know if there is a better way to deal with this--and its close cousin, not knowing how an item compares to your current stats when you're looking at it in the storage box--but I feel like there must be. It's just so…inelegant. The Good Stuff The thing about all of the stuff I just said, is that it's all pretty minor. Annoying? Yes. Worth ignoring for the overall excellence of the game? Absolutely. I don't know how faithfully Demon's Souls on the PlayStation 5 recreates its predecessor from a couple of console generations ago, but I don't really care: This game is amazing. It will probably go without saying from now on that the graphics of the game are simply stunning. Dazzling lighting effects, incredibly detailed environments, intricacies in areas that are likely overlooked--it's all a visual feast. I played the entire thing in "Cinematic" mode (rather than the "Performance" mode, which reallocates computing resources to increase the smoothness of gameplay) and I was in awe almost the entire time. Though my surround sound system isn't particularly impressive, the sound design was excellent. The echoing of certain effects coming from the controller's speaker was immersive and appreciated. I loved the way a spell felt like a massive blast of power, even if it only did middling damage, thanks to the way the sound design augmented the play. The PS5's advanced haptic feedback means that there are all sorts of tactile telltales, subtle physical communications that pull you into the game more fully. For example, one of my favorite late-game spells is Warding, which ups your defense without cutting down on your agility. When you cast it, there is a very soft pulsing of the controller as long as the spell is active. Once the spell ends, the pulsation stops. If you're in the middle of a fight, you're not likely to notice when the spell ends--too many other things to keep track of--but it's a cool way of informing the player of important stuff that's only there for those who are looking for it. Additionally, the loading speeds are such a nice change. As much as I love Bloodborne, I'm not looking forward to the interminable load times. Yes, they give a chance to read the item descriptions, but since you can't scroll through them, you end up rereading stuff that you've already seen dozens--if not hundreds--of times. And in the case of Sekiro, I think that I sometimes had more than half a minute waiting for the game to load after a death. The feedback loop of "death leads to learning to avoid dying the same way" is shortened when the load screen incorporates fog billowing about for a few seconds and then the game beginning again. It helps immensely in feeling like you're still playing the game, even though you died and have to start that section over again. Plus, this is a FromSoftware game, carefully and lovingly recreated for current-gen systems. That means that it's automatically a worthwhile purchase. There will be times when you have to look up some help on the internet, but that's a feature, not a bug. Being able to see what others have discovered and learning from them is a great way to feel like you're part of the community, even if you are like me and don't actively participate in it. Seeing different strategies, funny stories, great builds, and watching endless lore videos makes the game less a single-session experience and more a multimedia one. Like everything else (except Bloodborne), I don't know when/if I will return to this game. So far, I've spent about 100 hours in Bloodborne, 70 in Sekiro, 60 in Dark Souls, and 45 in Demon's Souls. That is a fair amount of time, now that I look at it. But it's also the order in which I played them, so it shows that there are transferable skills and understanding that goes into each one. I'm working through Dark Souls II and will probably pick up III (if I don't get it for my birthday), and it'll be interesting to see how long I spend in those other worlds. The idea of returning to any of them fills me with uncertainty; they all have robust New Game Plus options--each time through is harder than the first time, but you maintain your levels and gear--but I don't know if I want to expand my experience with the metagame of NG+ or be content to start over from scratch and try it in an entirely new way. Since I don't know which to do, I defer my decision by buying up the other games from the company. So, if you've read these 3,400 or so words thus far and feel uncertain about whether or not I recommend the game, I want to be unequivocal and clear: Demon's Souls is an incredible game and I highly recommend it. Easily the best thing I've played on the PS5 which, considering the age of the system, isn't really saying a lot. That does, however, include Spider-Man: Miles Morales, though…so take that into account, too. --- * "Cheesing" is when you find out some cheap trick to help simplify the fight and make it easier to defeat the boss. Sometimes it can be an accidental glitch: While fighting the Dragon God, I was accidentally picked up by his beefy hand and dropped into the second level of the area. The AI couldn't follow me there, so I ended up beating him without him ever really knowing that I existed. In the case of Old King Allant, I snuck up behind him and poisoned him. It took ten minutes or more for the poison attacks to whittle off his life to the point that a quick attack took him down, but I didn't feel bad about it at all. |
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