I have completed the catalogue of FromSoftware games (yes, they have games from before the Souls series…I'm not talking about that).
This is no small accomplishment. When I first heard of Dark Souls, I was living in my townhouse, had only two kids, and thought, Nah, I'll pass. I don't want to play the hardest games of all time. Now I've not only beaten that game, I've invested hundreds of dollars into other FromSoftware titles and related items. I have a Bloodborne Hunter figurine on my desk; Bloodborne-based board games (technically, one is a card game and the other is a board game); Bloodborne comics and artbook; Volume 1 of a book of essays about Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls II (with plans to buy Volume 2 shortly); and countless hours watching lore-analysis videos, playthrough tips, art contests related to the FromSoftware library, and more. I also listen to a couple of podcasts about the games every once in a while. I've written a handful of essays about the different titles, and even gone so far as to use Bloodborne as the basis for both an ambitious project of novellas (which I'm still sitting at about halfway through), but also the inspiration for my own tabletop RPG. These games have really made a difference in my life. And it's not like this is a long-term love-affair. I tried playing Bloodborne a couple of times before it stuck with me, which only happened because I listened to the VaatiVidya explanation of the story. I didn't know any of that, I thought as his smooth, soothing voice walked me through the intricacies of the Healing Church, the Vilebloods, and Byrgenwerth College. I didn't realize that people, y'know…actually beat the game. That it wasn't like Overwatch--something that you could pick up and play and then put down infinitely. It had an end-state. That…was revelatory. It also really only happened in the past year or so. After beating Bloodborne on Christmas Eve 2020, I immediately set my sights on Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. However, my retail therapy kicked in during Gayle's first chemotherapy treatment in early January 2021, and I started Dark Souls as well. So, really, between January 2021 and end of May 2021, I have beaten (in order) Dark Souls, Sekiro, Demon's Souls Remake, Dark Souls II, and now Dark Souls III. Not too shabby, considering everything else that's going on in my life. (I want to point out that I've also beaten Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Marvel's Avengers during the same time period, too.) That's a lot of video game time, though I have to confess that a lot of it has been a coping mechanism for the stresses in my day-to-day life. I don't think I would have done this exact thing had it been any other year. And now I'm "done" with these games. Elden Ring is an infinity away from being released; DLC (with the exception of Bloodborne) doesn't necessarily interest me; New Game + is intimidating. I don't know if/when I'll return to these worlds in any meaningful way. I plan on firing up Bloodborne again--that's probably always going to be a given, considering how it was my first entry into the FromSoftware library and is, by almost all counts, the best of all of these kinds of games--but returning to Lordran, Drangleic, or Lothric? I don't know about that. I'm pretty sure that Dark Souls II won't see me revisiting it…of them all, it was my least favorite. But I also have another conundrum: What actually counts as one of these games? See, the original Demon's Souls was made over a decade ago, but its remastered version was a launch title for the PlayStation 5. In the research I did about the game, the new take on it is pretty faithful--some changes here or there, but on the whole a very similar experience--to the original. But there are some differences. What should I do about that? Have I really played Demon's Souls? Both yes and no…I've played a version of it. But not the version of it. The same, as a matter of fact, goes for Dark Souls. I'm playing the PlayStation 4 "Remastered" version, which has some changes and tweaks to it, too. I, for instance, never had the problem of framerates dropping to almost-unplayable levels when I went through Blighttown, as that was an issue with the original PlayStation 3 hardware. The PS4 doesn't struggle with that area at all anyway, and when I play it on my PS5, I haven't had a single issue. Does that mean I haven't really played Dark Souls? My experience with Dark Souls II was exclusively through the Scholar of the First Sin version of the game, which includes the DLC but also has a lot of other changes to the game that have been controversial among the dedicated fan-base. So was my experience less-than-authentic to the true experience of Dark Souls II? (Frankly, I don't care either way about this one: I didn't really like Drangleic very much and while there were some enjoyable moments, on the whole it wasn't my thing. The others, however, give me pause. I don't think I'm hardcore enough to want to try out the earlier versions of these games, frankly. I don't even want to play through the DLC of some of them. So I think I'm probably safe in saying that, for me, I feel as though I've completed the series, despite the technicalities. But what of DSIII? What were my thoughts? Well…pretty positive. Playing a PS4-era game is always preferable to a PS3-era game (unless nostalgia is involved; that's a different story). There were some small tweaks that DSIII took from both Bloodborne and Dark Souls II that I thought were great. After going through Demon's Souls and Dark Souls II and really simply being irritated at the way my life-max was depleted after dying once, I liked how restoring my character's ember--either through using an ember item or defeating a boss--expanded the health bar, rather than simply restoring an amount that had been sitting empty while I was in the "undead form" or whatever. Like, there was a psychological frustration to see that the punishment for my earlier failures were constantly being rubbed in my face due to the inability to have a full health bar. I didn't see how it was being used in any way but that, and it was not something that I wanted to see again. Dark Souls III changes the formula in its effect, despite the fact that it is doing the same thing mechanically. By giving me a larger health-bar after restoring an ember, I feel rewarded for having done well, rather than punished for having made a mistake. And, since the game is designed for me to make lots of mistakes, it got tiresome in those other games to be living under that constant punishment. Another change to the format from DS to DSIII is the inclusion of dual-wielding. It wasn't something I really experimented with in Dark Souls II, but I had a lot of fun swinging around a couple of axes throughout most of my playthrough. I did end up switching over to a more traditional sword-and-shield combo in the late-game, but I don't regret focusing on the two hand-axes throughout most of it. (This was particularly nice, since I'm not very good at parrying, so the shield wasn't used to its best effect with me.) This may be my own ignorance showing, but I was happy to be able to level up a couple of weapons to +9 or even +10 in the course of the one playthrough. That was unexpected: I've always struggled to get my weapons improved quickly enough to justify a mid- to late-game switch from one to another, which means that I'm usually still swinging the same thing around that I started the game with. The ease of improving the weapons made it a lot more viable for me to experiment. In fact, my favorite weapon--perhaps of any of the games in total--would be the Abyss Watchers' sword-and-dagger combo. Two-handing that, with the unexpected moveset of diving low and swinging about wildly, is lots of fun and can make really short work of many enemies. While tried-and-true methods are still utilized, I felt much more comfortable branching out and experimenting with my approach to the game, and that definitely increased my pleasure at playing it. Now, as I already outlined above, I have blazed through these games in less than half a year. I don't have nostalgia connected to any of them (except Bloodborne). That isn't to say that they aren't important; I'm instead saying that I don't have any deeper connections to them that time often will generate. Nevertheless, it was quite the thrill to be back in Anor Londo again. I'd only been away from that iconic Dark Souls location for a few weeks, yet running up the flying buttresses again, knocking back the silver knights (or, more frequently, being smacked around by them), and revisiting the grand cathedral arena where Ornstein and Smough drained hours of my life was a really enjoyable experience. Seeing it with the enhanced graphics and smoothness of the PS4-run engine made it even better. It wasn't quite as powerful as when I returned to Shadow Moses in Metal Gear Solid 4, but it was still pretty great. The bosses were also a highlight of the game. While Dark Souls II tried to overwhelm me with its thirty-plus bosses, Dark Souls III was instead going back to a more Demon's Souls-style of variety. Some bosses simply required some smacking around, yes: Figure out their moveset, use the right weapons, win the day. However, there were more that required some thinking, turning them into hyper-dangerous puzzles rather than just a brute-force experience. I'm thinking of Yhorm the Giant as the best example of this. When I arrived in his fog gate, I was immediately concerned with the size difference…how was I supposed to topple this guy? But, ever the brave warrior, I leaped forward… …and barely even scratched him with my weapon. Uh-oh, I thought. This is bad. Then I died. Going through the process of trying new things--a new weapon, a new armor set, a new load of rings--proved fruitless. Maybe I needed to lure him to the pillars and let the ceiling collapse on him? No, that didn't work. No matter how I tried it, I couldn't get around that fact that he was fast, strong, and didn't take any damage. I noticed, however, an item near his throne at the far end of the arena. I normally avoid picking those up during the boss fight: They're a reward, I figure, or I'll get cut down because I'm busy looting instead of fighting. But I was desperate. Not knowing what else to do, I went ahead and picked it up. A sword. Great. I already have dozens of those. Yet it tickled the back of my mind. Why give me this sword in this place? What might it do? After dying moments past picking it up, I went into the inventory and checked out the equipment. It was a Storm Ruler…the same kind of sword that I picked up in Demon's Souls. One that has a unique moveset… Not only that, but the description says that the sword is particularly useful against giants. Well, that seemed to fit, then, didn't it? I took some time to level up the sword a couple of times, then brought it into the fight. It was a really easy fight after that. Of all the bosses I've beaten in these games, this is the one that gave me the greatest satisfaction. (Orphan of Kos was the one that I'm proudest for having defeated, though.) I had figured it out. I had put together the clues and deduced how to make the weapon work in my favor. Yes, I could have done what I often do--looking online for tips and helps--but I had decided to do this myself. And I'd pulled it off. That's a good feeling. Not all of Dark Souls III was that way, however. I'm getting better at these games--you have to, if you want to beat them--but there are still hiccups, hang-ups, and disappointments. The first that springs to mind is the online-default. A whole other side of these games is the online component, where other players may summon you to fight by their side--or invade your world to do battle. Some players love this component, and thrill at invading or beating back invaders. And while it's been thrilling on the rare occasions that I've been invaded of having actually defeated another player, I haven't put much time or effort into this component. For Dark Souls III, I figured trying out a new part of the series might be fun. I joined a covenant that frequently pulled me into fighting through others' worlds, running around and chopping up whoever I could. It was fun. A bit of a diversion, but still…fun. However, it got tiresome to be in the middle of a fight, only to be suddenly pulled into another's world. Returning, the enemies I was confronting had all healed up while I was gone--though I hadn't--and I sometimes ended up losing my own game's battle because of that. The real issue, however, was that the game kicks you back to the main menu when the internet connection is lost. My home's internet can be immensely frustrating, and it isn't unheard of for it to drop connections often. After being dropped from a boss fight I was on the cusp of winning, I decided to just turn off the online feature entirely. The benefits of the hints left by other players just weren't worth the frustration of losing progress because of buggy internet. In the other titles, losing connectivity simply shifted me to offline mode--a switch that the game notified me of with a text box. No such convenience with DSIII. Despite how much I enjoyed some of the boss fights in the game, I have to say that fighting King of the Storm (and The Nameless King) was so frustrating that I never ended up beating them. Unlike Orphan of Kos or some of the other incredibly hard bosses, KotS and its rider just…bugged me. Maybe it was my particular version of the game, I don't know, but the sound effects wouldn't always load. That put me at a disadvantage in fighting them, as some of the tells for certain attacks have an audio cue to them. I would kill the one snake shaman at the end of the hallway before attacking the boss, pulling in 2,400 souls with each kill. Since the souls were easy to recover, I would slowly pile up more and more souls. After pulling in over 200k souls this way (which tells you how many times I attempted the fight), I gave up. It just wasn't worth it for an optional boss. I similarly struggled with the final boss, losing often because of my own mistakes or--in one particularly frustrating moment--because my character didn't get up when I pushed the corresponding button. So I died. By this point in my experiences with these games, I'm accustomed to having to try a lot to win. I'm used to close calls and tricky fights, to close-calls and one-shot deaths. But being accustomed to them and liking them are two different things. Three consecutive game sessions (each ranging between one and two hours) saw me still struggling to get past the Soul of Cinders. It probably took me more than fifty tries to get past him. That was…a lot of attempts. That means the Orphan of Kos, Lord Isshin, and now Soul of Cinders are the full-stop hardest bosses for me in the entire series. There's nothing wrong with being a hard final boss, though. I mean, these games are supposed to be hard. But sometimes… The last criticism I want to point out is entirely a personal one: This game feels a lot like Bloodborne. I know that they were created almost simultaneously, and it looks like they run on the same sort of game engine. They definitely have a similar feeling as far as the art direction goes, too. More than once I (or even Gayle) observed, "That looks like something from Bloodborne." It isn't really a problem…except it kind of is? Okay, analogy time: A few Christmases ago, Gayle bought me the English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, per my request. It's filled with all of the no-one-outside-an-English-department-has-heard-of hits like Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Arden of Faversham and The Malcontent. I've read only a couple of them thus far (have I mentioned how bad I am at reading stuff? I'm really bad at it), and while they were pretty okay, the entire time I did so I was thinking, I could be reading Shakespeare right now. While not even in the same realm of power or importance as Shakespeare, the impulse is similar. If I'm playing a game that feels, looks, and sounds so much like Bloodborne, why not just play Bloodborne? The answer to that is pretty obvious: Dark Souls III is not Bloodborne. They are different. They are trying to do different things, tell different stories, explore different worlds. While Lothric isn't as engaging to me as Yharnam, by the end of the game, I was pretty fully on board. The quality that I've come to expect from these titles was fully evident, and despite some of my personal disagreements with certain choices (I still hate the "kick" mechanic--it almost never works as well as I want it to), the game is definitely one of the best in the catalogue. So, with them all completed, where do I go from here? I'll probably still be dabbling in Dark Souls, if only because my 11-year-old son is currently trying to beat it. (And can we take a minute to acknowledge two things here? One, I'm a bad dad for letting my young son play an M-rated video game; and two, it's crazy impressive that he's so far into the game--he's defeated Ornstein and Smough, for crying out loud! That is no mean feat.) I really want to go after Sekiro again, because I wasn't really appreciating what that game was trying to do within the FromSoftware formula. And the Old Blood beckons, of course. Yharnam awaits… I began creating my own tabletop role playing game (TTRPG) back in January. After about five months, I've written well over 35,000 words among the sundry components of the game: A loose outline of the rules for the game, a module that acts as a training manual for how the game begins, and a growing body of lore that fleshes out the world and tries to make a more interconnected, cohesive-feeling experience. I also have started a novel (I guess…I don't know how long it might be) that adds another 10,000 words or so. With all of these and the occasional notes and outlines and miscellanea, I have almost 50,000 words invested in this world.
I keep coming back to the question: Why, though? I mean, there's always the "safe" answer of "I have an idea and a need to create so I should follow that impulse." And that's true, as far as it goes. After all, I've dumped over one and a half million words into my different novels over the past seventeen or so years (not counting all my before-marriage writing). So I've clearly put a lot of effort into generating new worlds, new stories, new characters, new ideas. This, however, is different. It's not just because it's a game. I've designed games before (though it's not quite what I wanted, I do like the Quidditch-inspired board game I made a year ago), and I've done pure world-building exercises on occasion, too. Really, what I think is perhaps the biggest thing that's fueling this question is one that Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence". He uses his prodigious reading career to try to trace the ways in which certain authors are so heavily influenced by a certain source that it affects how they end up writing. In some cases, there's almost an exorcism of the influence that he can see in some of the works--Shakespeare's exorcism of Spencer and Marlow are, I believe, a couple of his posits (though I haven't read his book on it yet, so I can't say for certain). I bring this up for two reasons: One, because I believe that, were Bloom alive and knew about my using his theory for discussing board- and video games, he would likely be rather put off; and two, because I think it's a salient point. Perhaps his readings aren't entirely accurate, but the theory of an anxious influence on an artist is something that I certainly feel myself. It isn't just about writing in the shadow of Shakespeare (as Mark Edmund--another fantastic writer--asks, why write when Shakespeare already has?), as everyone is writing in his shadow, whether they know it or not. That doesn't bother me so much. It's about knowing what to do about the things that I get involved in. See, this game world, Drimdale, is not simply a TTRPG: It's a response to the fact that I wanted to try playing a hunter from Bloodborne in D&D and was tired of trying to figure out how to tweak the rules enough to make the hunter work inside of that game system. Now, I'm a big fan of D&D, even if I'm not the most knowledgeable about it, and so the idea of having a Bloodborne hunter as a character was really exciting. Despite the versatility and flexibility of D&D, however, I just wasn't getting out of these homebrew solutions what I wanted from a Bloodborne-inspired character. So I just…made up my own version. It isn't particularly good--I think it has potential, but I don't have a lot of playtesting opportunities to refine the ideas--though it certainly has a lot of the Bloodborne vibe. However, after a few pages of work, I realized that I was really making my own thing, my own version of a grimdark, Gothic world filled with monsters and violence. I switched it up, tweaking the terms that are from the video game and generating my world moving forward. I've written tens of thousands of words of lore for Drimdale, and every time I sit down to work on it, I have to ask myself if it's worth it. The influence is so large, the changes feel almost more like an insult than anything else. Why should I bother pursuing something that is so derivative? I recognize that there are no original ideas--everything is based off of something else. Heck, even Bloodborne is indebted to Lovecraft and gothic England for much of its verve, art-style, and concepts. And I know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I'm not trying to flatter Hidetaka Miyazaki, though. But I can't really say what it is that I'm trying to do. A couple of years ago, I did an etude of the beginning of Stephen King's It. I practiced it (It) to try to figure out what King does and why it works out so well. I also attempted this etude in order to exorcize the Losers' Club and Pennywise from my mind. To a certain degree, it worked: I didn't feel the need to reread It during the summer of 2020--which was the first time since 2017 that I skipped the book. (That I watched the movies as a stopgap is a fact we shall pass in silence.) To another degree, however, it didn't work at all. I wrote a novella, Mon Ster, in a very Kingesque way. My Pen+ notebook, handwritten novel--a tortured little piece called The Strange Tale of Charles Green--is another attempt at capturing what fascinates me about Derry and its monstrous past. I'm still haunted by King's work; his influence gives me, as it were, anxiety. There's nothing wrong with me continuing to work on Drimdale, of course. There's nothing wrong with my fanfic-as-a-game, of taking another's idea and twisting it into my own version. I know that. What I still struggle with is how much time I'm investing into this project. I'm not a published author, but when I write one of my own stories, there's at least a possibility that I might be able to turn that into something potent enough to sell. The odds are long, but they're there. When it comes to Drimdale and this goofy little TTRPG, this constantly-expanding document of lore, I have to wonder why I always want to write more. I don't know how to find the answer to that. It's time for another bit of writing about my bits of writing.
I've talked a lot about my penchant for recording how many words I write per day/month/year. It's a way for me to see if I'm really doing anything in my chosen craft, and it has been really helpful in showing me where I focus. In fact, one of the reasons that I have fewer posts on this website is because I saw that I was spending a huge amount of my writing time focusing on my non-fiction and I wanted to change that. Today, I started looking at my word count for the year. It isn't where I want it to be: At the end of April, I had written about 150,000 words. These were split between my book about Metal Gear Solid, worldbuilding the place where my TTRPG is set, rules for my TTRPG, and picking at a bizarre retelling/remake of the Little Red Riding Hood story. There are other, miscellaneous additions, but that makes up the bulk of it. The thing that stood out to me, though, was how April 2021 compares to other Aprils. In other words, where do I stand as far as my word count after four months during the past four years? It breaks down like this:
Clearly, I'm doing about as well as I was at the same point during our first month of quarantine. Considering how much has happened to me and my family in the past half year, I think it makes sense that I'm still writing as if the world is on fire. Because it is. So, I'm not publicly flogging myself for having not written more in 2020. I was spending my school days in front of the computer, draining myself into cyberspace. Writing did not come easily then. By the time I became accustomed to the oddness of my school year, my wife was diagnosed with cancer. I even tried to do NaNoWriMo…then I contracted COVID. (I also got three or four rejections on my submissions for War Golem, if we're really adding to the pile, here.) In other words, I wasn't in a particularly creative headspace for a good portion of last year. And it doesn't really surprise me to see that 2021 is following suit. No, what really surprised me the most was the next bit of information that I gleaned. On my spreadsheet, I have a tally of all of my completed novella-length or longer projects. Because I've been doing NaNoWriMo since 2015, I've been finishing a couple of books a year pretty consistently. I mean, I even finished two novellas in 2020, despite everything else that was going on. But when I looked back at 2019--which was not my most productive year--I was surprised to see that it was 2019 where I finished the highest number of projects. How many? Seven. Seven books, totaling almost 300,000 words. Three were part of my novella-world project. Another was finishing up a NaNoWriMo from 2018 that I hadn't completed during the month. The next was a short story that morphed into a novella, one that I had been working on occasionally for a year or so. Novellas aside, I had two novels that I finished, both of them Shakespeare-adjacent: One was my Da Vinci Code but with Shakespeare book, Raleigh House. The other was my NaNoWriMo for 2019, Elsinore Ranch, which is a retelling of Hamlet. It makes me wonder what I did in 2019 that I've clearly forgotten how to do in the two years since. I know that a big portion of it is that my video game obsessions aren't easing up. For some reason, indulging my addictions doesn't satiate them. And I know that my life will not be "normal" again anytime soon--perhaps ever. It's hard to say. Will I ever get back to that level of prolificacy? Will I ever be so excited about my stories that I'd rather write them more than anything else? I mean, it isn't that I wasn't writing at all. It was just that nothing really sang to me. And I know that writers have to write, regardless of if their muse is crooning inspiration to them or not. But I'm not a professional writer. I don't know if I ever will be. I don't have a contract or a deadline to meet. I don't have to hit a quota. Yet I'm not happy that my numbers are trending downwards. I want to improve my output, my editing, my craft. I don't want 2019 to be my bumper crop for finished projects. So I guess I gotta figure out how to get what I'm after, huh? |
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