At the beginning of 2021, I taught a D&D Winterim with a coworker. As is common in almost all of my Winterims, the big assignment of the students is to make their own version of whatever it is that we're studying. When I taught Lord of the Rings, I had the students make the beginnings of their own language. When I taught video game theory, they created a concept of what video game they would like to make, had they the time and expertise. When I taught D&D, they made their own TTRPGs.
I usually find it enjoyable to make a similar product while the students are working. It isn't always very good (my Quidditch game from the Harry Potter Winterim was an interesting, albeit very flawed version of multi-leveled chess), but it's always really fun. Last year…er, rather, eleven months ago…I started making my own version of a TTRPG that was heavily inspired by Bloodborne. (I had finished the game for the second time just a few weeks before and it was big in my brain…still is, as a matter of fact.) I wanted a game that had the same sort of frenetic kind of action, one where the dice rolling happened simultaneously and frequently. I started it off as simply a Bloodborne RPG, using the names of weapons and locations from the video game as my starting point. Eventually, I pushed away from the streets of Yharnam and instead created my own city wallowing in its own destruction, a place called Drimdale. I concocted an interconnected introductory campaign in a single location to help me conceptualize what the game would feel like and play like, only to hit a bit of a roadblock part way through the summer. Maybe, I thought, I'm looking at this from the wrong medium. I started writing a novel set in Drimdale (it was part of my abortive attempt at winning NaNoWriMo this year), I tried to write lore and a catalogue of background information…it just wasn't working. While I really like what I've made, it wasn't gelling as it was supposed to. As the year has worn on, a new hobby emerged: Miniature painting. This is also directly influenced by Bloodborne, as I bought the board game of the video game from a Kickstarter campaign. Unfortunately (or not, depending on how I look at it), I "accidentally" bought a good $200 worth of the game--with four expansions on top of the base game. They contain dozens of miniatures of creatures from the game, and I quickly ended up spending several orders of magnitude more on painting the figurines than in playing the game. (I still play it, occasionally, and I have a lot more fun with the painted minis than I do the unpainted ones.) As my hobby time and money started flowing into this new exercise, I picked up a lot of interest in wargames (Warhammer, as cool and robust and deep as it is, can't justifiably fit into my budget--though some of the Age of Sigmar and Necromunda stuff is just so tempting). Nothing was quite right for me, though, despite some really cool looking things. Then, on Black Friday, two things happened: Miniature Market had a massive clearance sale on its Wrath of Kings stock, and Amazon was selling one of the most highly-rated board games of all time, Gloomhaven, for about $80. I had received a $200 Amazon gift card from a student's orthodontist's office (I don't know who the student was, but I'm flattered that they thought of me) that was burning a hole in my pocket. What better way to use some of that unexpected money than buying a new board game that I would likely only end up playing by myself? I'll give another post about Wrath of Kings later (once I've actually managed to, y'know, play it), and this isn't a review about Gloomhaven (which I'm liking mightily). The point is, this all converged in making me want to revisit some of the core mechanics that I made for Drimdale. I'm still trying to figure out how to get the flavor and theme of my own board game to stick right, but the modification of my TTRPG ideas into a modular, tile- and dice-based board game is coming along really well. I've created a bunch of small cards, a player mat, the tiles, and a few thousand words of rules. I've even used my 3D printer to give me more tactile, more interesting versions of some of the terrain. (It makes a big difference when you can see a pile of stones and think, Hey, that's a pile of stones, rather than a red cube and think, What is that supposed to be again? Oh yeah. A pile of stones.) Utilizing a lot of the miniatures that I've acquired over the past dozen months--including the stuff that I've 3D printed as well as purchased for Gloomhaven or the Bloodborne Board Game--I've cobbled together a fairly strong prototype. It's far from finished: I want to have five classes with different abilities depending on the gender the player selects, as well as a card system to help mitigate the randomness of the dice-rolling process, and a host of other issues. However, it's basically playable in its reduced form right now. In fact, I played it with my son yesterday. We started at about 12:30 and didn't end until 2:45. I hadn't realized that I'd created a multi-hour experience. More than that, though, is the fact that it was actually fun. I mean, I know that's the point of a board game--of games in general--but this isn't the first time that I've tried creating something like this, only to be severely disappointed in my prototype. Part of what really speaks to me--and, indeed, is the core inspiration for the combat mechanic--is that I get to use a lot of the dice I've collected over the years since I started playing D&D. And by "a lot" I mean that, at the two-player minimum level of play, you need to have approximately 25 dice of different types. There are times when you're holding entire fistfuls of dice and dropping them on the table, then picking through them like a prospector seeking out some golden nuggets. This game was designed for dice-goblins (you know who you are) and fully justifying having spent way too much on plastic polyhedrons throughout the course of one's life. It's also fun because you get to play as your own character, but also as the enemies who challenge your opponent. (It was originally thought of as a co-op game, but that possibility no longer really fits…I think. We'll see.) So your turn involves making life harder for your opponent while struggling to win the game yourself. It means that turns are quick, and you're never long from rolling dice again. And again. And again. The fact that there are still a lot of kinks and bugs to iron out is frustrating only in the sense that it's hard to playtest something solo. My son is a good sport and I think he really enjoys the game…but he's also 11. He has other, more digitally based things to do. So I often find myself sitting on the couch, staring at slips of poorly-trimmed pieces of paper, a notebook with so many contradictory notes scrawled into it that it's essentially incomprehensible, trying to devise what I actually want from a Trap Card, and always thinking…Who's going to play this? That is, of course, the wrong thing to consider at this point. Having almost fully given up on creative writing because I got so enamored of the idea of publishing that almost all desire to write has evaporated, I don't want to accidentally poison my passion for this game by trying to think that it will become more than what it is. Then again, there's a strong motivation in wanting to see one's internal vision become external and tangible. The dream of seeing the game fully realized with artwork, miniatures (original ones, rather than stuff cribbed from other sources), and polished to the point that other people might enjoy it? That's a powerful dream. I've learned, though, that powerful dreams can sometimes overpower reality, and that discrepancy can really hurt. So I'm trying to manage my expectations. Still…it is a lot of fun. 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. 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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