Around the beginning of October 2020, I decided that I would play a "spooky" game for the month of Halloween. I spent an inordinate amount of time playing Resident Evil: Resistance, the asymmetrical multiplayer mode bundled in with the (too short, sadly) remake of Resident Evil 3.
I should've played Bloodborne instead. As the end of the month neared and my scratch for something spooky still unitched, I pulled out Bloodborne. There was a good chunk of time during November 2020 that I spent shivering in bed as COVID ran through 4/5 of my house, so I didn't put a great deal of time into the beast until around December. But then I hit it hard, with an obsession that I don't normally experience with video games. (Case in point: I own not only the video game and its DLC, but I also purchased the card game and the newly-released, more-money-than-I-care-to-confess Kickstarter board game, as well as three of the four comics and an overpriced-because-it-was-rare artbook. Plus an action figure and some 3-D printed pieces, too. It's…unhealthy.) Because I had finally cracked the code on how FromSoftware games work, I started to expand my repertoire. I asked for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice for Christmas, and was thumping my way through that when January came. The first day of Gayle's chemo, I sat in my car feeling immensely out of sorts. Because of COVID (BoC), I couldn't be with her during her treatment: I had to settle her in a chair and then say goodbye (it's hard to give goodbye kisses with masks on). At that particular moment of me waiting for her to go through her first (as it turned out, horrible) treatment, I felt rather powerless and in need of some retail therapy. Of course, BoC I couldn't really go hang out at a store and just browse. (I have tried that a couple of times, but I find myself so anxious and stressed out about being somewhere I don't have to be that it ends up not really doing very much for me.) So, instead, I jumped onto the PlayStation store on my phone, logged in, and browsed through the Dark Souls titles. As I was planning--at some point--to pick up a PlayStation 5 and the remake of Demon's Souls, I focused only on the trilogy. At that moment, they were having a sale on all three of them, but I decided to have some modicum of restraint and only purchased the first one. I had bought it for the PlayStation 3 back at the tail-end of that generation's lifecycle (and at a pretty low price, I seem to recall), but had only gotten an hour or two into it before setting it aside. Now I could buy the remastered version of the game for the PS4 and have my PlayStation download it while I was away. By the time I got home with Gayle, I had a new game waiting for me. I had Sekiro, Ghost of Tsushima, and now Dark Souls to play with. All three of them helped me to cope with what ended up being a pretty miserable couple of months, at least as far as my non-work life. Seeing Gayle get ravaged by the chemotherapy every couple of weeks was no easy thing, and so, paradoxically, I wanted to play games that were similarly no easy thing. I know that it's sort of twisted. After all, the FromSoftware games have a well-earned reputation of being immensely punishing. It takes me over 60 hours to beat one of them (which does mean that I get a lot of gaming for my dollar bills), and it can be immensely frustrating to die again and again as I strive to beat a boss or a single section of the game. In other words, these games are ruthless and hard and why should I bother going through something so hard in the digital world when my real-world difficulties are weighing me down? That's a fair question, and I think it boils down to the fact that these games--Bloodborne, Sekiro, and now Dark Souls--have shown me that, with enough resolution, study, help, and effort I can defeat hard things. Gayle still has nine treatments to go before we're done with chemotherapy, then over a month of daily radiation after that. We have a ruthless and hard journey still to go. The only way to overcome it is to go through it, which is a lesson that these games help me to internalize. It's more than just a platitude of "this game shows me I can do hard things", too. In the case of Gayle's treatment, there's nothing that I can do to control it. We have steps we take, of course, to help mitigate some of the harder aspects (for example, we shifted her treatments to Fridays so that neither of us has to find a substitute to take our classes). However, it's simply a matter of endurance at this point. We make and keep the appointments; the chemicals do their hellacious thing; we mitigate all we can. That's how we interact with the treatment. But in the video game world, I am again confronted with an enormous, almost insurmountable task--and then I do something about it. Yes, I sometimes have to look up maps, walkthroughs, or guides on how to beat a particular part (I didn't do that nearly as often in DS as I did in BB and S:SDT, though). Much like the chemotherapy, I'm not going through the experience alone. I don't know how else to explain it: I play these games almost as if I want to be able to confront difficult things and beat them; since I can't take Gayle's treatment into myself for her, these games act as a kind of surrogate. It's strange, I know, and I'm not declaring any sort of real equivalency in terms of what she's going through (physical illness and exhaustion, emotional strain, baldness, and much more) and playing a video game. Instead, I think of it as the most fundamental purpose of play, which is to gain vicarious experience. It isn't about Dark Souls somehow competing with cancer as though one is harder than the other--that is a foolish kind of comparison at best and insulting at worst. No, it's more about coping via strain. These games have a formula that is clear to anyone who's played them thoroughly that I think helps to explain why FromSoftware is now so highly regarded. In my view, these games (in general) and Dark Souls (in particular) succeed because of story, environment, and improvement. Story I'd be hard pressed to tell you the ins-and-outs of Dark Souls. (I'm mildly better at explaining Bloodborne, but that isn't because I've played the game enough; I've just watched more videos on YouTube.) I know that there is something about darkness, a dwindling flame, and the need to defeat Gwyn, Lord of Cinders. It's a glum, gloomy world, filled with monsters and darkness, but it's a story about that world. Yes, you play as the Undead Chosen, the one who can--perhaps--defeat Gwyn, but on the whole, there isn't a lot of character-based narrative that's going on in the game. Instead, the narrative is told via the deliberate design of the levels, very brief cutscenes, occasional conversations with NPCs, and the descriptions inside of the items. This is a minimalist way of telling a highly complex and complicated story, which is--from what I can see--the best example of what makes video game storytelling unique from all other media in the past. I've long wondered what the video game storytelling mode is, how it can excel in ways that no other media could. I mean, each major medium has an advantage that's a part of the appeal of it. Cinema has a strong visual component (which, obviously, video games share) and the ability to communicate setting more easily than almost any other medium. Also, naturalistic dialogue--especially crosstalking--is so wonderfully contained within the medium that I view it as the greatest boon of cinema. Theater has the ability of creating intimacy and immediacy because of the proximity between audience and story. Novels can delve into the inner feelings and desires of a human soul. Comics allow for intense control over the speed at which information is communicated. But when it came to video games, I couldn't see what the medium could do that wasn't already done by another (particularly film), and usually better. Then I started to understand what FromSoftware had done in creating the Soulsborne games and I saw it: Video games excel at providing audience-chosen levels of interaction with the text. In other words, you can choose how much--or how little--you learn about the story when you're in a video game. Because the player has the choice in how long to spend reading descriptions, looking at environmental details, or seeking out conversations with NPCs, the amount of story told is within the control of the player. Overwatch came close to this, I think, but nothing that I've played has come close to the skill with which FromSoftware tells its stories. Environment Not only is the environment a major component of FromSoftware's storytelling toolbox, it is also a captivating place to be. Lordran is a mysterious place, filled with an immense diversity of locales. From Firelink Shrine to Undead Parish to Anor Londo, each major area of the game feels integral to the world, yet is distinct within it. When I was in the poisonous pits that comprise Blighttown, I once spun the camera up…and saw the flying buttresses of Firelink Shrine. I could see where I had originated from. I saw how far I'd come. Because the game is so tightly tied together, it feels as if everything is a logical extension of what came before it. And the environment has its own internal consistency, too. No, I don't know the reason why the Tomb of the Giants was made, necessarily, but I'm not surprised to see that most of the enemies in this area are gigantic--big ape/dog skeletons, giant skeletons, enormous tombs…it all makes sense that they're there. And the mystery is compelling. Why are there ruins beneath? Why is Anor Londo pristine, a land of perpetual sunset, without even a speck of dust or debris to clutter its marbled halls? How does Sif, a gigantic wolf that wields a massive sword, tie into the flood that killed thousands--perhaps millions--in order to keep the Four Kings locked into the Abyss? I don't know the answers. Some of them are, as a matter of fact, unanswerable. Yet that only serves to strengthen the allure of the game. Just like the player is allowed to choose how she goes about playing and in what order she approaches the challenges, she's also allowed a great deal of interpretive choice. The game has some clear boundaries--obviously, there is a giant wolf that swings about a massive sword and no amount of interpretive arguments undoes that reality--but also an immense amount of room to play within, too. Not only that, but there's always so much to explore. Admittedly, some of the ways one gets from place to place is…rather opaque. I mean, how was I supposed to know to associate the Peculiar Doll (found by returning to the Undead Asylum by climbing to the top of the Firelink Shrine and curling up into a ball in a bird's nest) with the massive painting at the far end of the cathedral in Anor Londo? Yet the thrill of discovering a new place--usually after the thrill of defeating a boss who's been giving you grief for the past hour or so--is intense. Popping open a secret passageway, discovering a shortcut that allows you to circumvent some previous difficulty, or just the excitement of hearing the ominous tolling noise and seeing the new location's name spread over the screen…it's all satisfying and almost addictive in its pleasure. Improvement The game is an action-RPG, but the role you play in the game isn't particularly well defined. Yes, you can level up and choose how your character advances within the stats. The point isn't, however, to come to some great understanding of the past of the character or why she's involved. No, what matters here is that you as a player--the human being holding the controller--will grow and improve. Your growth is commensurate with how much time and effort you put into learning about the game, its mechanics, and how the world works. At the outset, you will die. A lot. And by the ending, you will also die a lot. In between, however, is a massive amount of change. The enemies that gave you so much grief in the early hours of the game will, by the time you're running through on your way to another section of the world, provide almost no difficulty to you at all. You will be able to breeze through the Undead Parish so rapidly that the knights who slaughtered you so often when you first encountered them will barely have time to react to you. And if they do manage to attack, well, you have gained the skills necessary to easily dispatch them. Your character levels up but you also level up. That is something that happens in other games, of course: I'm much better at playing Final Fantasy VII Remake at the end of the game than I was at the beginning. Nevertheless, there's something more tangible in how I improved through Dark Souls. As I mentioned before, I arrived at Dark Souls after defeating Bloodborne, but also as I was tackling Sekiro. Bloodborne has a lot more in common with the mechanics of Dark Souls than Sekiro does, but there were still a lot of things about the originator of the series that I had to learn. The parry mechanic was a crucial thing to understand (one that I still don't have a lot of proficiency in), as well as things like managing the stamina bar. Not only that, but I was trained by Bloodborne to play more aggressively, to jump into the fights and let the rally system help me survive encounters. Dark Souls' reliance on shields makes battles more ponderous and careful, trying to learn how and when to react to the attacks of enemies in a studious, cautious way. Not having the rally system was something that took time to understand--yet I learned. And that's the thing: I learned. I genuinely feel like I'm a better player of video games having beaten three FromSoftware titles. It gives me confidence to keep playing these punishing games--I have Demon's Souls for the PS5 and I'm planning on picking up a copy of Dark Souls II soon--and that is encouraging. Not only does it mean that I feel as though a purchase of more FromSoftware games won't be a waste of money, but it also invites me to think about the games much more than some of the other enjoyable-but-forgettable titles that clutter my hard drive. In Sum In case it was unclear, I do highly recommend Dark Souls. They aren't for everyone (obviously), but there is so much to commend them. I didn't even talk about the dopamine rush you get when you finally beat something that's been your bane for X number of hours, nor the intricacies of the souls economy work. In other words, there's much more to enjoy and explore and learn about in this game than I touched on in this weird review. I'm excited to play more of these games, and I'm glad that there's this back-catalogue for me to enjoy before I, like the rest of the "Souls community", have to wait for Elden Rings to come to pass. |
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