Assuming everything goes according to plan, Winterim 2023 will see me and a score of kids playing, dissecting, and creating our own board games. It’s going to be good--at least, I hope it will--and I’ve been prepping for it for a few months already. I’ve purchased a lot of games on the school’s dime: Too Many Bones, Wingspan, Carcassonne, The Big Book of Madness, Azul, Mysterium, Marvel United, and a handful more. Part of the class is to talk about the history of board games. There’s a pretty great video by the Shut Up & Sit Down guys (one of the preeminent board game reviewers on YouTube) that takes about an hour to watch and gives a good overview. However, I wanted to have something a bit more substantial. I often want some sort of book read before the Winterim starts (for my dinosaur Winterim, for example, I had them read Raptor Red; for the fantasy Winterim, I had them read Elantris), so I set out to see if there was an accessible and worthwhile look at the history of board games. I found It’s All A Game: The History of Board Games from Monopoly to Settlers of Catan by Tristan Donovan. And what do you know? My local library had a copy. I picked it up at the beginning of the summer, picking at it as the mercury climbed. Donovan has an easy and approachable style that weaves through the key points and puts in context a lot of pieces (pun, as always, intended) that I hadn’t thought of before. Additionally, he includes a lot of the connective tissues of how one game inspires another, responds to it, or fails to catch the imagination of the masses yet opens up pathways to future inventions. It’s really fascinating, and I enjoyed my time in the book overall. A couple of points really stood out to me. The first one comes from my own sensitivity towards public perception of video games. I’ve been a gamer all my life, and while I’ve had a healthy love of board games, most of my adult life’s entertainment has been in the digital realm. There’s a pretty obvious reason for this: You don’t have to coordinate time, schedules, or energy levels with other humans to get to play (most) video games. I can plop myself down on the couch and away I go. My wife enjoys board games, too, but a lot of her downtime is spent at the sewing machine. So while board games have always been in our home and we’ve waxed and waned on different titles, video games have held a place of primacy since the beginning. Because of that sensitivity, there’s always a raising of hackles when the idea of “video games are bad for you” starts cropping up. A recent study indicates that one’s well-being is not necessarily negatively affected by video game playing, with a caveat that compulsive or addictive playing makes for a noteworthy exception. While it’s important that we continue to do research into this new medium, I have to admit that the stigma around video games, particularly their influence in increasing violence in participants, has always left me a bit uncertain. I do believe that what you absorb through media can affect you--it’s why I think there needs to be more diversity in the genders, races, and situations that are depicted on all of our screens everywhere. Positive representation really does make a difference. And yet, there are loads of examples in Donovan’s book that explain how board games have led to real violence. He talks about how the crossword puzzle was invented back in 1913 (originally called Word-Cross, but, due to a negligent error, turned into Cross-Word). A decade later, finishing the crossword puzzles had become so addictive to some that it strained relationships. Some took their puzzle-solving way too seriously. In 1923 one Chicago woman filed for divorce because her husband stopped going to work so he could focus on his crosswords. The following year a man shot his wife because she refused to help him with a particularly vexing crossword. (139) From Monopoly’s original intention (a critique and condemnation of the rapacious greed of landlords) to the Japanese game go and how it’s influenced AI development and neural networks, It’s All A Game provides wonderful stories, fascinating anecdotes, and worthwhile glimpses into the histories that have created so much of the world that we live in. And that’s the other thing that I really took from this book: Each game on my shelf has a story behind it. And while most of what I play right now isn’t in the book, each one could have been added in without any real detriment to the overall thesis. Every game I have had some motivation in making it (probably profit for a lot of them, though I know for certain that isn’t the case for all of them), and every game that I have tried to make likewise came from a place of desire. Though I’ve only three or four games in different stages of development, each one came from a desire at a certain time in my life. (Example: During 2020’s Harry Potter Winterim, before the world ended, I wanted to try to make a game based on Quidditch that utilized the idea of height--not a 2D game, but one with a vertical ability, too.) The last thing that stood out to me was the eerie explanations of the roots to the game Pandemic. The book, written in 2017, has a couple of chilling paragraphs as Donovan looks at the global response to SARS in 2003. He writes, The world watched on [at China’s response to the virus], wondering if this was the start of a terrifying global pandemic similar to the 1918 influenza outbreak that claimed the lives of at least fifty million people. […] The SARS outbreak infected several thousand people and killed more than seven hundred, but the rapid global response saved the world from an epidemic that could have been much, much worse. (225) Yeah. It’s kind of creepy to read that.
So, yeah. This book is great. I really enjoyed it and I look forward to assigning it to my students. I will have to tell them that they aren’t required to read the chapter entitled “Sex in a Box” that talks about how Twister came to be and what games it inspired. While it doesn’t go into anything shockingly explicit, it’s not really the direction that I want to take the class. (Obviously, students will likely still read that chapter, but it won’t be assigned.) You could give it a whirl. Kind of like board games, it’s 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… 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. 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. 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. (All right, so the title is misleading: Technically, Jin is a samurai, not a shinobi. But I thought it was clever, so I went with it. Okay, moving on…) During Fall 2020, a lot of really rotten things hit me and my family, not the least of which was an infection of COVID that narrowly avoided hitting my heart-warrior son. Due to this (and a host of other things), Gayle obliged me by letting me buy a new video game. I wanted Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Ghost of Tsushima. As the latter was on sale, I bought that. Christmas was around the corner, so Sekiro arrived on my PlayStation 4 shortly thereafter. Suddenly, I had two games set in feudal Japan that required a lot of sword swinging to get things done. Playing the games concurrently--sometimes switching from one to another in a single evening--led to a unique juxtaposition, an insight into how wildly different developers approach a similar concept.
What's the Same The setting: Both games take place during a historical moment of Japan--GoT during the Mongolian invasions of the late-13th century, S:SDT during the Sengoku period in the 15th century--and each relies on getting many details right. I'm no expert on this, but my brother (a Japanese teacher and translator) assures me that GoT has a pretty faithful adherence to historical accuracy. There are some liberties taken, of course, but on the whole, it's a faithful adaptation. Sekiro takes place in the fictional nation of Ashina, so there's a lot more room for flexibility. Still, the lightning-angled paper streamers known as shide abound in Ashina as much as Tsushima (perhaps a bit more in Sekiro), and sake features in both games fairly heavily. Pagodas dot the landscapes, miscanthus grass covers the ground, and inspiring vistas of a cloud-capped mountains and foggy valleys add depth to both worlds. Obviously, with both games set in Japan, the characters speak Japanese (though there are English tracks) and approach their duties with a strong sense of duty, honor, and loyalty. The gameplay: Smacking bad guys with swords, throwing alternative weapons to distract or kill enemies from a distance, hiding in shadows to stealth-kill thoughtless guards, and navigating what ought to be unnavigable terrain feature heavily in both games. There are ways to distract guards, manipulate the environment, and even light enemies on fire, regardless of which title you pick to play. Fast traveling, leveling up the character, and even alternative costumes are available, albeit in very different ways from each. Oh, and they're third-person action RPGs, so even genre-wise they're playing in the same sandbox. As is typical for video games, there are also a number of mini-bosses that can be defeated, which helps improve the character's stats, plus a number of larger bosses to defeat. In such high-stakes, one-on-one battles, the enemy has a stamina bar in addition to health bars. Deflecting enough damage--or meting out enough of your own--can lead to the stamina bar dropping low enough to deal major health damage to the boss. The story: In order to save his part of the world, the hero must embark on a quest to resist the influence of an evil usurper who wishes to harm someone the hero loves. By using his skills with the sword--and a trusty grappling hook--he will traverse a wild and dangerous world, filled with enemies in enclosed fortresses and vicious animals who will attack him at a moment's notice. In the end, the hero must confront the man he always considered his father, the man who trained him in the ways of the warrior. The life of the father will then be decided by the hero. This confrontation comes about because the hero has chosen to betray his family and the demands of tradition. Also, both have ghosts. What's Different The setting: Both games are stunning in their executions, albeit in different ways. There's no doubt, though, that Ghost of Tsushima has a superior graphical and visual delivery. Sucker Punch's game is jaw-droppingly beautiful, having taken massive inspiration from Akira Kurosawa's cinematic language to create engaging, powerful cut scenes. Top-notch performance capture work, along with subtle facial animations to match the nuances of the acting all combine with the eye-candy of a late-stage PlayStation 4 game. The world feels almost tangible, with wind whistling through the leaves of grass (and the controller's speaker) and stirring the cloth of the characters. A day/night cycle, as well as weather effects work together to make Tsushima variegated, engaging, and enjoyable to traverse. Not only that, but GoT is an open-world game, allowing the player to explore many nooks and crannies, rivers and streams, mountaintops and valleys. Light platforming mechanics gives Jin--the player character--a chance to clamber around, swinging from branches to boulders in well-designed side-missions. Indeed, discovering the shrines was one of my favorite parts of the game, as I've always reveled in well-made platforming sections (I think the early Prince of Persia titles were superb examples of this). The melding of strictly linear approaches in these mini-missions versus the otherwise open-ended options of the main game is a seamless and logical construction. By contrast, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is an amalgamation of open-world philosophy and conscientious, deliberate "level" design. As is almost always the case with FromSoftware games, Sekiro has a progression of areas of the map that is ideal for certain levels of skill. At the beginning, Sekiro must fight through a memory at Hirata Estate. When I first played this section, it took a solid hour (or more…probably more) to learn the pathways through the streets, the best order to attack enemies, and doing my best not to engage with the soldiers in anything less than the ideal situation. As I beat my head against the final boss fight of the game, some seventy hours later, I chose to return to Hirata Estate and slew my way through without hardly even taking any damage. This is what I mean by deliberate design: Ashina has many places to explore, but they're all within the "tracks" of the main pathways. There are shortcuts--crucial to find if you want to play through without going crazy having to fight your way through the same areas three dozen times--and secrets, but the design is recursive, bringing you back to earlier areas. This creates a really cohesive but small world, one that is finely tuned for its purpose. There are hints to a broader world beyond the conflict in Ashina, but that's all they are: Hints. Yet, I also mean that it's "open-world" because you don't have to play through the game in any specific, set way. There are some required early-game areas, of course--as is the case with Ghost and most every game--where options are highly limited. However, once you reach a certain point, progress can be done in any way you wish. I got stuck on mini-bosses a number of times, so I would go elsewhere and shinobi-stab some fools for a while. It would help me level up, get me better at the game, and sometimes lead to other boss/mini-boss fights that I could challenge myself with. The freedom to choose how to explore the world is contracted compared to GoT, but it still gives the impression of being in control of when and where I fought. Graphically, I have to say that it was always a bit jarring to switch from GoT to S:SDT. The former was always rich with color, its HDR10 color palate expansive and crisp. By comparison, the latter always felt a bit dingy, with washed out colors and a grimy feeling. (This may be a PlayStation 4 issue: I've seen some breathtaking footage of Sekrio on YouTube, which I assume was captured with a high-end PC.) The game is still pretty--mostly in the way that video games are now, with the sharp details that look as good close up as they do at a distance--but not the gasp-inducing beauty that GoT pulled off. The gameplay: Of the two, I vastly prefer playing as Sekiro. That isn't to say that Jin wasn't fun; on the contrary, I had a great time playing as the Ghost of Tsushima--especially when I played the online mode with my brother. It was always satisfying to get a fifty-meter headshot with my longbow (Sekrio doesn't use any bows at all) and watch the enemy rag-doll to the ground. And the way that I could easily flow from one fighting style to another was a brilliant bit of design on Sucker Punch's part. Part of this is because FromSoftware's sense of how to use the controller is so good. It doesn't sound like there'd be a lot of variability in this--there are limited number of buttons, after all, so how could one game's use of the controller matter so much? Yet there is. In the case of Sekiro, the shoulder buttons being the attack buttons means that running and jumping can be done without having to reset my thumb to switch to an attack if necessary. This game moves quickly (not in terms of story…that's a different thing altogether), so the slightest advantage I can have, I want. By way of (yet another) comparison, I recently started playing Marvel's Avengers. I remapped the controls as much as I could to be like a FromSoftware game. I use my right fingers to attack, leaving my thumb open for dodging and jumping. But because the game isn't designed for that level of finesse, it doesn't have the same feeling. Like, at all. In fact, I'm planning on switching back to the defaults, because it simply isn't satisfying. It's sort of like trying to run an HDR10 game on a TV that only outputs 1080i: The higher quality stuff isn't really doing anything for the experience. Sekiro moves like a shadow, practically gliding over the earth, stealth-killing and slashing his way through Ashina. Because of the sound-design, animation sequences, and controller interaction are so well welded, kills feel substantial and satisfying. Flying out of the air to land on an unsuspecting monster's neck is a frequent thrill. And, with the ability to stealth-kill or deathblow an enemy being the same button as my basic attack, I almost never flubbed one. I can't say the same for Ghost of Tsushima. It was always clear when I played Sekiro before Ghost: In the latter game, the R1 button throws a kunai at the bad guys. I can't tell you how many times I thought I was about to chop my opponents down, only to find myself throwing some small knives at them, staggering them backwards. The muscle-memory took rewiring each time. More than any of these specific components, the reality is that nobody can touch FromSoftware when it comes to boss fights. (The closest would be Hideo Kojima during his prime years on Metal Gear Solid, and maybe a couple of times in Bayonetta and Devil May Cry.) The common refrain on FromSoftware games is that they're punishingly hard. That is true, but it isn't about being hard that makes the game worth playing; it's how satisfying it is when you finally make that last deathblow and defeat the enemy that has sent you back to the checkpoint countless times. There's a thrill not unlike going on a rollercoaster when you're squaring off against the Blazing Bull for the fifth or sixth time and you've finally got him on the ropes. Finally putting down a boss (or, as happened so much more often with me, a mini-boss) after so many attempts feels so good. It's honestly addicting, and part of the reason that, after beating Bloodborne a few months ago, I've been flirting with the idea of replaying it. (I have a couple of other games to knock out before I do that, however.) And while I was always satisfied when I defeated a difficult boss in Ghost of Tsushima, they didn't provide the same level of satisfaction as when I defeated someone who had given me grief for a solid hour in Sekiro. All that being said, both gameplay styles are good. Not just good, but really top notch. The designers brought their A-game (I honestly don't know what that phrase is supposed to mean) to the products, and it shows. I thoroughly enjoyed both offerings and had fun while I was there. The story: Despite my earlier, glib way of pointing out plot similarities, the two games are drastically different. And while both have "ghosts", the supernatural is pretty muted in Ghost of Tsushima, while it's crucial to the story of Sekiro. Ghost of Tsushima is a story about revenge and fury, about repelling invaders and unifying a fighting force to stop a great wrong from happening. Its scope is large, yet it remains tightly focused on Jin. He is an interesting character, one who struggles with what he has to do in order to save his island home, an exploration of what happens when one gives up morality for Machiavellian advantage. More than that, the story really resonates because of the aforementioned performances. By being able to see the characters' faces, their emotional responses to the different subjects they discuss, and even seeing the changes in the costumes to match the new moments in the story, I was pulled into Jin's journey much more fully. Video games are unique in their interactivity, but their ability to use cinematic language can't be overlooked. I felt a gentle give-and-pull of being in control of a character but willing to let him go when the story intervened. Sekiro, on the other hand, has very few cutscenes, and though there are lots of conversations, they feel like puppets delivering dialogue. There isn't any emotion in the body language, as the interlocutors remain stiff as they run through their lines. The camera remains free, allowing me to spin around and try to see Sekiro's face to try to gauge his emotional reaction. Unfortunately, this tends to distract me, making it hard for me to pay attention to what's being said, as well as failing in the point of drawing me more into their world. Sekiro takes all information in with the same stoic resolve as he would if someone pointed out that he has a nose. I know why game designers do this (they're trying to get the players to more fully invest themselves into the avatar, and don't want the character's personality to interfere with it), but I really wish they'd stop trying. It doesn't make sense. It didn't work for Solid Snake, it doesn't work for the Hunter in Bloodborne, and it won't work for Sekiro. Blank-canvas characters aren't interesting (I'm looking at you, Bella Swan), no matter the medium. Of course, one thing that video games can do in ways that no other medium can, is tell a non-linear story based on the amount that the audience wants to hear. Sekiro's story is told through small "remnants" of memories that you find as you explore, as well as item descriptions, notes found in the world, conversations over sake with other NPCs, details in the environment, and--occasionally--a cutscene. It's a fantastic way to tell a story, because a player gets as much as she puts into it. For me, this is the great strength of interactive storytelling: Giving the player choice and control, not over narrative trees, but over quantity and detail of the story. That's the other ingredient to FromSoftware's secret sauce, and it's used to perfection in this game. Except for one thing: Sekiro is an actual character, not solely an avatar. Neither of these games allows for character creation--all people who play Ghost will play as Jin; there is only one Sekiro in Sekiro--and that means that the story can be focused on the character qua character, rather than inciting incident for the events of the world. In other FromSoftware games, you can create what your avatar looks like--skin color, gender, height, and more--and pilot that avatar throughout the dark world. And it is that world wherein the story happens. Bloodborne, for example, is about a Hunter who seeks the paleblood. However, it isn't about the Hunter. That is, the player may interact with the world, but that character is in something much bigger than herself. The characters with names, motivations, and backstory are those who create the tapestry and world that the player explores. It's highly enjoyable, but it mostly works because it isn't about the way the player character changes through the course of the journey. Sekiro tries to blend the two, and I don't think it fully succeeds. It tells Sekiro's story competently enough, inasmuch as the plot points are clear (-ish) and give strong motivation for what your objectives are. However, there isn't a lot of emotional grounding. When it comes time to decide whom to betray, there isn't any sort of background to rely on for an emotional feeling. I could pick one of four options in how I got to the end of the story (and then watch the others on YouTube) without having any sort of character-based reason for choosing the way I thought Sekiro might. Since he's such a stoic character, I wasn't able to "read" him in any significant way. This is, perhaps, the biggest flaw of this game. Ghost is replete with emotional moments. There's genuine pathos when a friend dies horribly, and I really wanted to help Yuna whenever her missions popped up, as I viewed her as a great ally. Jin grows and learns as a person through the course of the story, and with the superior cinematography and editing of the frequent cutscenes, I felt much more connected to him. Sitting and composing haikus in the forest, giving time over to watch his naked self contemplate important thoughts while in a hot spring, listening to him discuss ideas and stratagems with his friends--these are the components of a strong connection with a character. There's an emotional vulnerability to Jin that Sekiro simply doesn't have. There's nothing wrong with a stoic, resolute character--but they certainly aren't one that I would want to watch a movie about. I like Sekiro because I can play as Sekiro; I like Jin because I feel for him and see parts of myself in his struggles. Final Thoughts It shouldn't surprise you to know that I don't recommend one game over another. They're both incredible, and they both do their jobs with stunning aplomb. Neither is perfect, and I think both should be played by anyone interested. Perhaps the supernatural dive into Japanese mythology (complete with an eventual slaying of a dragon by the end) is more interesting to you: In which case, Sekiro is the better choice. But maybe historical fiction with a bit of ancestor-help-as-gameplay-mechanic intrigues you more: Take Ghost of Tsushima, then. Either way, you'll have an enjoyable experience. Despite how many times I died because I hit the wrong button thanks to the control scheme of the other game, I'm really glad that I played them this way. Where one lacks, the other shines, and vice versa--though I must emphasize again they are both superb games--and I think anyone interested in spending some more time in the Land of the Rising Sun could do worse than playing one of them. Or why not both? New year, old habits. I've been in the habit of tracking things I do for a number of years. Whether it's words written or books readen, I try to keep a running list. This is to give me a sense of movement in an otherwise very similar existence: The cyclical nature of my job is reassuring in its familiarity, but it can be disorienting if I'm not careful.
To that end, I jot down the titles of everything I complete during a year. For esoteric reasons I don't fully understand, I categorize my entertainment input in two: Books, and Everything Else (except music). In 2020, I read/watched/played 119 comics/movies/video games. The number is not necessarily accurate. I will put things like "Christmas cartoons", which was probably a good two hours or so of The Amazing World of Gumball, Captain Underpants, or Teen Titans GO! Yet I lumped them all together, rather than counting each one separately. I didn't count Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was watched by my boys in the van during our commute time. I will put something like Deluxe Invader ZIM #2, which is actually a dozen comics in one. Also, it's only completed things. That's easy for something like movies (I watched all of the Jurassic Park films with my kids this summer), but I ended up stopping my rewatch of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles season 2 with, like, two episodes to go. So it didn't make the list. Even The Haunting of Bly Manor, which I have three or four episodes left, didn't get added on, even though each episode is nearly an hour long--meaning that two episodes combined is more than some movies' runtime. And while 119 titles is quite a bit (especially considering how many hours I obsessed over Bloodborne these past few weeks--and, let me just say, that completing that game was a personal accomplishment), what really strikes me is that I only had 37 books or plays read in 2020. I'll admit that there were some…interruptions to how I normally live my life. I did find it harder to concentrate on the written word during the pandemic, and I even fudged my numbers a little by including books that I wrote and finished during 2020 (two novellas actually, my lowest output in years). Some of the books are the annual retreads: Pride and Prejudice, Things Fall Apart, and All Quiet on the Western Front always crop up in the first half of the year. Hamlet…well, I don't actually reread Hamlet each year. I do watch the film with my students though, so… My point is that despite my best intentions, I don't do a lot of reading. Author Joe Hill said that you can get a rough sense of how many pages you read per day by seeing how many books you finish in a year. At 37 titles, I read only 37 pages a day, on average. Part of me feels insulted by this. The rest of me realizes that's probably more true than I'd like to think. It's also tricky, because I only count what I've completed during the year, regardless of how long it took me to get there. I started The Iliad a couple of different times throughout my career, but I only finished it this summer. (That was a complete read, though; I restarted and finished it in 2020.) I finished London: The Biography after it sitting on my nightstand for three years. So it's really an incomplete list. I put all of that down because it's on my mind and I think it provides a bit of context for what I'm about to describe. I finished Stephen King's The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower I today after trying to read it for…I dunno, twelve years? Something like that. An old work buddy gave me his copy of The Gunslinger (and the frustratingly titled The Drawing of the Three, which is the second book in the series…why does it have the number 3 in the title, then?) and I've picked it up a handful of times since then, only to put it back down. After becoming more accustomed to King's writing style, I decided to give The Gunslinger another go. This is in part because I bumped into a former student who was picking up one of the later Dark Tower books and said that, once you get to the third entry, it is really good. That's a bit of a slog, if you ask me. Still, I decided to try it. After all, I reread The Eye of the World and The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan in the hopes that, by the time I eventually get to the third book I'll actually really like it. A man can dream. And I think that's what my problem is with The Gunslinger: It feels like a weird dream. There's a place for that, of course. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are excellent examples of dream fiction (both of which I read this year, as a small aside). A lot of Neil Gaiman's work fits into that mold, too--a place where imagination is the fuel of the story. The thing is, I'm not a huge fan of the genre. Or, perhaps more evenly, a little goes a long way for me. And when it comes to King, I've come to expect a different kind of story. Part of the reason It is one of my favorite novels of all time is because the world is grounded, making the fantastical seem more plausible. King does this in other works, too: 11/22/63 and Pet Sematary stand out to me in that way. (The Stand, which I picked up again when the pandemic struck--wonder why--kind of blurs the line a bit more than I prefer.) But when it comes to The Gunslinger, well… The problem I have with dream fiction is that the stakes feel artificial. Since nothing can be taken as real, sacrifice and death, pain and worry all become meaningless. The impermanence of the situation leads me to apathy. In the case of The Gunslinger, I had a hard time believing that Roland was in a real world with real people. He may shoot his way through much of the book, knock boots with a tavern wench, and traverse a seemingly-endless underground tunnel, but is any of it "real" to him? Chapter Five is essentially a twenty-five page conversation, which turns out to have somehow taken ten years and maybe the skeleton is the corpse of the man in black he's been chasing… King himself admits that the book is a cowboy Western take on The Lord of the Rings, which in and of itself both sounds amazing and totally bizarre. The execution of the book--for me, at least--was tedious and meandering. The rich characterization that King does so well in his other books felt lacking here. Forgive a digression here: For almost all authors (Austen and Shakespeare feel like exceptions to this, though I'm sure there are others), the way that we get to care about characters is through exposure to them. Why does it mean so much to see Hagrid carry Harry Potter out of the Dark Forest? Because we've spent so much time with both characters. Why does It clock in at over 1,400 pages yet leave you wanting more? Because we've spent a lot of time with those characters and we have come to care about them. Why do shows like Doctor Who and Supernatural have such loyal fanbases? Because they've spent time in those worlds. The best short story can't connect with the reader as securely as the tenth book in a series for the simple reason that we readers haven't gone through the adventure with them. Now, there are seven books in the Dark Tower series, so there's definitely a chance to get to know Roland. In fact, I can't really fault this first book for not being more since there's a long journey ahead and this, the slenderest volume of the series, isn't going to give me a lot of time with the gunslinger. However, the time I spent with him felt inconsequential. I think this comes from a couple of things. One, Jake comes into the story with his own confusion and inability to remain connected to the world that he came from. At this juncture, Jake feels like a narrative add-in, a character dropped into the story because the idea struck the writer and so he put him in. Then, unsurprisingly, killed him off. I didn't get a strong sense of the gunslinger and the boy becoming close or gaining a lot by being together. Sure, Roland explains how he earned the right to become a gunslinger because Jake was there, but the narrator could have given us that section of the backstory by having Roland reflect on his own past. Jake felt extraneous and randomly included. I don't know if that is a criticism that stands up with the rest of the series, of course. But it is how I felt for this individual book. One thing, however, that I really did like, was what I mentioned earlier: The last chapter of the book--what should be the climax and resolution, a full-fledged battle, according to most fantasy tropes--is a twenty-five page conversation. The book begins "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." That sets up the goal, which is attained by the end of the book: Roland the gunslinger catches up with the man in black. But, rather than duking it out, the two sit down around a magically created fire and talk. Thanks mostly to the video game Bloodborne, I've been thinking about eldritch horror a lot more recently. (I had a spat with it about thirteen years back; I even have a couple of Lovecraft anthologies on my shelf.*) And though that game does an excellent job of dealing with the cosmic horror themes, I don't think I've seen anyone describe the terror of that genre as well as the man in black does to Roland. Chapter Five does a lot of things, and while I rather doubt that this Western/fantasy/grimdark tale was meant to also include eldritch fear, the existential dread conjured by the man in black pushes the story into that genre, too. Here's a passage: 'Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?' (287-288) Can you imagine what it would be like to be that fish? To be dragged out of the world you know and then, suffocating in an unfamiliar ocean of air, die as you watched beings oblivious to--or worse, the causation of--your plight pass you over? That is an almost unimaginable terror…an eldritch one. Eldritch horror is facing the insignificance of humanity in the face of powers larger and darker than ever before dreamed. In "The Call of Cthulhu", Lovecraft writes, The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to corelate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Black Seas of Infinity, 1) For the man in black, we humans are the fish in a small pond of existence. The idea of so much being out beyond us, past human ken and comprehension, is humbling to the point of disheartening. We do so much in our small scale and view ourselves rulers of the world, yet what can we do in the face of our own mistakes and the turns that consequences inevitably bring back home to us? Like a virus can take a human life (a reality that we've seen iterated thousands of times these past few months--a reality that many millions more outright deny), so too can the comparatively tiny actions of humans accumulate into trophic cascades that may end up ruining the only home we have. We don't even have to go into cosmic horrors to see the effect that size has on us. A single individual's actions can no more change the climate than a twig in the Mississippi will dam it. But you get enough twigs… The idea that there are things bigger than us is maddening. For Roland, it's about interacting and becoming part of light--a metaphysical escape from the eventual nihilism this kind of thinking often leads to. For us, we rest more comfortably in our "placid island of ignorance" than trying to confront the larger (or much, much smaller) worlds that surround us. In Bloodborne, the world the player inhabits is surrounded by enormous eldritch beings called Amygdala. They hang from gothic spires and observe the player from afar. However, until the player gains "insight" (a currency in the game, but also a metaphor), these creatures are invisible. After gaining enough insight, the player is able to perceive what had been there all along. What the man in black is pointing out is that there is so much more in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, just like Hamlet told us four hundred years ago. From what I can tell, we have two ways of approaching this: To embrace the reality that there is so much more than we can every possibly learn or understand, or to cave inwards, cocooning ourselves against all uncomfortable aspects of reality. And it's a choice that we have to make again and again. So, should you read The Gunslinger? I don't know. For me, I didn't really like the vast majority of it. Nevertheless, I'm curious to see where it goes. I would say that if a seven-volume epic is too intimidating, don't start. Now that I've begun the journey, I may just have to see it all the way to its cyclical end… ___ * I know about Lovecraft's disgusting racism. I'm not a fan of the guy, and his writing is…well, it certainly exists and can be read. His impact on the horror genre is inescapable, even if I think, as a human, he was a sleaze. Squeaking in at the tail end of December, I finished reading the 37th book of the year. (I finished number 36 three days ago, a Young Adult version of the Spider-Man origin story, told from the point of view of Mary Jane. I may write about that later.) Since I'm trying to finish Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson (in order to be able to start Rhythm of War; or perhaps the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin; or maybe another Art of Magic: The Gathering book; or a history book called Plantagenet that is, as one might assume, about the Plantagenets; or maybe Hamnet, a rave-reviewed novel about the death of William Shakespeare's son; or perhaps the new Attack on Titan that arrived on Christmas Eve, to say nothing of the scores of older, unread books adorning my shelves), I feel as though I've read enough pages to constitute more than simply 37 books. Maybe in 2021 I'll do a page-count instead of title-count to see how that makes me feel.
Anyway, the reason I read Of Dice and Men is because David Ewalt's history about the creation and progress of Dungeons & Dragons is key to my upcoming Winterim. January 2021 will see me and another teacher at my school doing a three-week intensive course on tabletop RPGs, with the original brand smack dab in the middle. We'll also be looking at a handful of other versions of RPGs, then tasking the students to create their own new TTRPG. It should be a lot of fun, and though I'm not quite as excited for this Winterim as I have been in the past (truth be told, I've never been less pumped for a Winterim than I am this year, though it has nothing to do with my topic, coteacher, or students enrolled), mostly because my life feels like a pending storm is on its way. That has left me feeling a bit despondent, a topic I wrote about here, if you want details. Nevertheless, I am on break, which means that I'm reading new D&D manuals, watching YouTube videos of people, trying to wrangle enough patience to try playing with my kids, and finishing up the reading of this book. You know…teacher on break stuff. One of the things about Ewalt's book is his unabashed appreciation for the game. It's true that there is a level of geekery that Dungeons & Dragons attracts, so it shouldn't be surprised that someone who is interested in the past of the game is also interested in the game. Nevertheless, I liked his tone: It's inviting and general, yet clearly connected to the source. He'll use metaphors that require footnotes, but it's not done in a condescending tone, and they always help add to the world of the game that he's documenting. And though I knew a bit about the beginnings of the game thanks to the documentary In the Eye of the Beholder, there are a lot of extra details that Ewalt puts into the book that contextualized what I saw in the film. Not only that, but there is space in a book to go over parts that aren't as tightly refined as what In the Eye of the Beholder could cover. One example that I thought was interesting--and, frankly, underserved--was the chapter on the satanic panic of the eighties. The passing awareness I have of that particular moment in the pop cultural history has always been light, and I was hoping that there might be more in it with Ewalt's book, but he remains focused on D&D for the entirety of that chapter. (I'm interested to see what my students think: They were given the assignment of reading the entire book before we start in January, so they should come in prepared to discuss sections like that with me.) I also liked how he walked me through the history of the different editions without getting bogged down in minutiae. I've only recently started playing--a handful of students introduced me to D&D 5e (fifth edition) a couple of years ago--so though I've been aware of tropes and how to play TTRPGs to a certain extent, I didn't see how there could be so many changes to what seems like a pretty solid foundation. And what's the difference between Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and the others? Ewalt manages to navigate this area pretty well, bringing about the salient historical points and putting everything into the narrative of a small, ambitious business, complete with the missteps and mistakes that led to nearly losing the game entirely. It didn't all sing to me, though. There are moments when he narrates a campaign that he's in with his friends, and while I appreciate what he's trying to do with that, it felt a little self-indulgent and not really the point of the book. This happens more toward the end, as Ewalt's love of the game and his excitement interacting with the potential of the new edition (this was written before D&D 5e came out) overpowers the narrative structure that he's been working so hard to establish. His digression on trying a LARP-lite experience was puzzling, as it didn't seem to really connect with the point of his book. I mean, I'm glad that he had fun at Otherworld where he had an opportunity to play a scripted campaign beyond the tabletop, but…how does this really fit in with discussions about the original creators, their own foibles, the process of creating a game with such massive influence on the pop cultural landscape? Admittedly, the subtitle of the book is The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It, and since Ewalt is one of those people, I guess it makes sense that some of his own life leaks in? I found it distracting, though. I read Ethan Gilsdorf's Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks a number of years ago, so I had already passed through a contemplation about what it means for someone to try to join in with the LARPing community and to balance an interest in exploring fantasy fiction. In fact, a lot of Ewalt's experiences mirrored Gilsdorf's. It made that particular section of the book a bit samey, though that's not really Ewalt's (or Gilsdorf's) fault. On the whole, however, I found the book to be worthwhile. I like history, I like pop culture, I like D&D…this is definitely the sort of thing that would resonate with me. I would probably recommend it to anyone who's looking for a bit of an insight into what might otherwise be an opaque topic--why do people pay so much money to just sit around and tell each other stories?--and also fans of the game will likely enjoy this trip down memory's dungeon. If you're only passingly interested in how tabletop RPGs got started, then you're probably fine missing this one. Note: I focus on what I'm learning from Black scholars, activists, and academics in this essay; however, I want to note that people of color throughout this country deal with similar--oftentimes worse--situations because of racism. Native, Latinx, Asian, and other minorities also suffer immensely because of the pernicious poison of racism. I am a huge beneficiary of the systemic racism in the United States of America. Some of the privilege I have comes through no fault of my own, of course--I didn't choose to be a white cis-het male born in Utah. I don't have a problem with those aspects of myself; despite what some people might claim about the purposes of race- and gender studies, learning a type of self-loathing because of my privilege isn't the end result of studying these topics. (Besides, I'm a Mormon--a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--so I don't need an academic course to learn how to self-loathe; I already know how, thank you very much.) I recently finished Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Dr. Beverly Tatum and I'm working through Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall--I recommend both of them, by the way--as I, along with the rest of the country, tries to come to grips with the continued protests against police brutality. I've denounced racism before and I do it again: I'm anti-racist and believe that the current system in America needs radical and permanent change. What I've lacked up until now is a stronger understanding of the ways in which racism rots the American experience. What's valuable to recognize, I think, is this simple question: Why does racism keep getting blamed for what's going on? In other words, if Einstein couldn't find a universal theorem to explain physics, what hope have we to figure out a unifying theory of social inequity and problems? Adjacent to that question is another issue, one rooted in the conceit of the "best possible world" and millenarian theology, which I think helps explain the equally puzzling reality that so many people actively shore-up, defend, support, and apologize (in an academic sense) for racism, misogyny, and the patriarchy. What I hope to do here is trace a couple of things that I'm seeing on both of these issues. This post tackles the first one: Why can racism be blamed for so many ills? I find it helpful to follow the Socrates-attributed concept that "the beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms" and define a couple of terms. I found Dr. Tatum's definitions incredibly useful as I started to see the larger, more complex components of racism in our society. First, she uses Ven dem Berghe's explanation about what race is: "a group that is socially defined but on the basis of physical criteria, including skin color and facial features" (96). She goes on to include the definition of ethnic (which is something I've struggled to understand) as a "a socially defined group based on cultural criteria, such as language, customs, and shared history" (96). These two concepts are closely intertwined and can often be self-generating and -reaffirming*. The other definition that Dr. Tatum operates under is a simple, six-word definition of racism that helps demonstrate my thesis: Quoting David Wellman, she says that racism is a "system of advantage based on race" (87). I've been teaching my students that racism is a description of the operations of power--who has it, who controls it, who can face it--within our society, but I like Wellman's more. That simplicity underscores why it's so useful to use when considering the racially-centered problems in our society, and it also shows why it feels like "everything is about race". It's because it kind of is. Before looking at that, though, I feel like there's more to the question of "Why does it have to be about race?" Really, it's the assumptions that are going on beneath the question that deserve some attention. I don't want to craft a strawman to argue with here, so I'm going to recognize that there are many lived experiences that I don't have access to--many of which I don't care to learn about at this point in my life, if I'm being honest--and that not everyone who asks this question is a bad faith actor, antagonistic to the idea, or any other criteria. However, there's a strong likelihood that someone who asks this question out of a sense of genuine confusion and frustration is A) white, B) comparatively socioeconomically secure, and C) misled by what is being asked of society when race is discussed. The reason that this conception is important is because there's a lot that the questioner reveals by even asking the question. It assumes that it isn't already about race, which argues that the speaker hasn't had to be racially aware in any significant or consistent way. Dr. Tatum explains this anecdote that drives the point home: I often begin the classes and workshops [on racial inequality] by asking […]: "What is your class and ethnic background?" White participants […] often pause before responding. On one such occasion a young White woman quickly described herself as middle-class but seemed stumped as to how to describe herself ethnically. Finally, she said, "I'm just normal!" (185) If you're in a system that doesn't provide advantages based upon race, then racism isn't affecting you**. That doesn't make it not real, just less influential. Almost all systems--educational, religious, bureaucratic, justice, consumer, political, medicinal, and more--have been constructed on the premise of white superiority. To focus on just one area, there is an abundance of evidence supporting what many Black people already knew: Black patients are not correctly treated by white doctors. Over 40% of first- and second year medical students have bought into the falsehood that Black people's skin is thicker than a white person's, and that they don't feel as much pain. The students may not harbor animosity towards Black people, but they are still operating within the confines of a racist system. There's still harm; there's still trauma.
Better qualified and smarter people than I have laid out the case--backed by decades of research from sundry areas--for all of the other systems I noted above. (Again, Dr. Tatum's single-volume take helps provide a good groundwork for many of them.) When the forest is racism, you can sometimes mistake the trees as "social justice warriors'" protest du jour. The brutality of police against Black bodies, the disenfranchisement of Black voters, the starvation of Black youths, the hyper-, over-, and premature sexualization of Black girls--all of these things are all tied back to one specific and clear source: Institutional, perpetual, and enforced racism. There's a paradox at play, here: People prefer simple answers over complex ones…or maybe they prefer complex answers when a simple one will suffice. (People are complicated…or maybe we're really simple. I don't know.) The point is, when it comes to complexity versus simplicity, we run into hypocrisy. One stance is that life is so large, complicated, and multifaceted (which it is) that we can't reduce the behaviors of people and institutions into "racist" and "not-racist". Ironically, it is a simple answer to the complexity of the question. Another stance is that racism itself is large, complicated, and multifaceted, infecting and indoctrinating its hate-poison into and throughout the histories, institutions, and programs that people create, causing lasting harm and perpetuating sundry types of violences on to all people of color. Another is that "Blacks are racist, too!", as if that claim (which doesn't work within the context of systemic racial problems, though might fit within the bigotries and prejudices of individual Black people) justifies a failure to engage with and interrogate racism and its many manifestations. Additionally, this point of view is absolutely "thing-adjacent"*** and not the point that needs to be addressed. I wonder if it comes from a suspicion that Occam's Razor isn't sharp enough to apply in most situations--which is not necessarily a bad take. However, the more you learn about how racism intersects with things like gender identity, socioeconomic inequalities, school-to-prison pipeline, and educational opportunities, the more you see that the simplicity of the answer ("because racism") only opens the door to discovering the solution. Kimberlé Crenshaw's efforts in expanding the role of feminism to better incorporate these intersecting difficulties is one of the ways that helps to provide the nuance that's needed to the question of why racism exists--and why that's such a big deal. And maybe that's another component to the question in the first place: Why does it matter so much if [fill in the blank with institution of your choice] is racist? I struggle to take this particular question seriously. I definitely believe that there's a lot of good to be had by having conversations. Debates, Socratic seminars, thoughtful panels--these are all good and healthy things. However, I'm at a loss to understand why certain things are considered fair game. I was under the impression that we had already answered questions like, "Are Black people humans?" and "Do Black people deserve rights?" I've always believed that, when it comes to the concept of Nazism and the foul toxin of fascism, we fought against those ideas. How many times does a bad idea need to be brought up and defeated before people stop zombifying it? How is it that some people think that they can run a Socratic discussion on whether or not another human being counts as human? As the police continues to riot against people protesting their brutality in the name of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter; as the country fails to again confront the bitter roots of racial injustice that are fundamental to its history; as the states fracture over their proper role and their people die in the interim; as corruption at the highest levels of the government go unopposed--if not endorsed and empowered--by political parties; as life-altering decisions about educational needs and public health requirements become infected with politicization; as our world bakes through the hottest year on record; as cabin fever and reckless indifference stokes the flames of the pandemic; as we reel from headline to headline, never being able to grasp what a moment may mean before another one avalanches us; as life continues to be so complicated and difficult, it can be hard to see how so much of these issues are coming out of the same fount. And for someone who is pretty opposed to conspiracy theory thinking, it's tempting to dismiss the idea that we can just blame racism for so many of the problems that we see. I feel that recognizing the problem as racism is too often conflated with solving the problem of racism. It isn't enough to point out that there are Confederate generals whose statues are in front of state capitols. Doing something about that is what's necessary. And though statue-removal is definitely "thing-adjacent", it's a way of working into the deeper, more difficult work of understanding the rotten legacy that racism has left us. It is an example of praxis as an answer to the question. I have a lot more to learn, understand, and believe. I can take certain points as axiomatic, allowing them to be the foundations on which I can build my clearer view of the world--the reality of racism, the personhoods of people of color, the recognition of my privilege. Moving forward from there will be its own challenge--one for another day. --- * As a lifelong Mormon, it makes me wonder if there may be a time when the religious culture of Mormonism becomes so disparate from the way mainstream Christianity operates (as if it isn't already like this) that Mormonism eventually morphs into an ethnicity. I think there are a lot of reasons why it fits Ven dem Berghe's definition. For example, if you don't know what a Mormon means by FHE, Mutual, or food storage, then it shows that you're outside of the cultural taxonomy Mormonism uses. (Or, to push it further, if you aren't aware of the way my use of the word Mormon affects members of the Church, there's another example of lexicographically generated cultural differences.) There's a lot to process here, more than a footnote allows, so I'ma put a pin in this and see if we ever return to the thought. ** Writ large, the American system is most definitely racist, so there's technically no escaping its pernicious influence. However, there are other systems that abound, and sometimes, within the contexts of those smaller systems, racism doesn't have as strong a hold. Family dynamics, for example, may not see many directly racist effects (assuming, of course, that there isn't a problem within a mixed-race relationship) within the interpersonal experiences. *** I happened upon the thinking of Jane Coaston via a Twitter thread--which I can't find right now--that helped to draw focus on why it feels like there are a million fires to put out and more keep springing up. She talks about "the thing" and being "thing-adjacent". The example she brought up is the face mask hullabaloo. The "thing-adjacent" is that masks are an infringement of rights (in a way that pants aren't, I guess?) and so on and so forth; "the thing" is the absolute, unequivocal failure on the part of the United States to get a handle on the pandemic. If the "thing" (pandemic response) had been taken care of, the "thing-adjacent" (mask wearing) wouldn't need to be focused on. Because we tend to focus on "thing-adjacent" controversies, we leave the underlying "thing" uncontested or unchallenged. I'm not a fan of the terminology, if I'm being honest, but it's an effective way of conceptualizing the issue. I like to think that I'm a pretty easy person to birthday shop for: Get me a book in something I'm interested in and that goes down well. Still, my family prefers to do things a bit more specific, so I try to keep my Amazon wishlist updated. This birthday, with it being in quaran-times and without the ability to do the annual tradition of going to a movie to celebrate my ageing up, I spent a quiet evening at home with the family, doing essentially the same thing that I've done with them for over two months. Though the party wasn't particularly memorable, the situation was, and I'm grateful that my family and I can have moments like that despite the strangeness of life in the spring of 2020.
One of the things that I put on my wishlist was a Magic: The Gathering book called War of the Spark: Ravnica. My son bought it for me, and I finished reading it yesterday. It is…good? And bad? It's complicated… What Worked As a teenager, my friend, Mark Wyman, was big into the Rifts TTRPG. He had a novel set in that world which he liked. I asked him if I could read it, but he didn't recommend it. After all, I wouldn't know what they were talking about. I figured that I'd be fine--it's a science fiction world, and I'd read quite a bit of science-fiction with weird worlds and weird things. I tried reading it anyway, and returned it to him after about twenty or so pages. It was just too hard to deal with how much was assumed of me as a reader. When it comes to these types of spin-off sff novels, there's always a bit of a problem with lore. How much backstory for characters, events, or locations should be provided? How much can the author expect of her readers in terms of preexisting knowledge? What kinds of details are necessary, especially if it's an art-heavy kind of IP? In the case of War of the Spark, Greg Weisman has a lot of ground to cover, as the story's premise is, for lack of a better comparison, the entirety of Endgame. I mean, Endgame doesn't really work that well as a movie qua movie, does it? (I haven't seen it since it came out, so I may be wrong about this.) That is, the emotional stakes, the personal desires, the consequences of the Snappening…all of that is foreground that other movies established. So Endgame has a really strong foundation that assumes a great deal of investment from the audience. (For the record, I think it really did pay off.) So how does this connect to Weisman's book? Well, there was an intricate plan to stop the Big Bad (an Elder Dragon named Nicol Bolas) from attaining god-like power. The book begins with the aftermath of that plan's failure. (See? Kind of a lot like Endgame.) The events of the next day as the heroes of the Magic: The Gathering universe (called Planeswalkers) scramble to fix the situation fills the rest of the novel. As far as it goes, this worked well…but only because I'm an ardent enough fan to know the mythos, lore, locations, and even abilities of a great many of the characters. (Weisman head-hops from Planeswalker to Planeswalker, going through at least a dozen different ones in the course of the story.) I knew what Jace Beleren was capable of doing, I knew he had a relationship with Lillianna Vess (I didn't know about his fling with Vraska, which was a surprise), and I knew his commitment to protecting the Multiverse from destruction. The card game from which the book is based has a rich and complicated lore that comes through all sorts of different avenues, including art books (of which I own five), novels, and articles, and more. So there's a lot of information that a reader has to absorb before this story can make sense. And, in a lot of ways, that makes this book an excellent piece of fan-service. Everyone gets a bit of the spotlight, with the ten different guilds of Ravnica participating in one form or another. Planeswalkers galore fill out the ranks, and the stakes are tangible. The action is persistent, but there are still moments of connection and emotional empathy--provided, of course, one already has an understanding of these characters. What Didn't Work I have to admit, I felt like I was reading the second book in the series, though: The web of intrigue and feelings that connected the Planeswalkers was already so advanced that I checked online a couple of different times to make sure that I hadn't picked up the wrong book. (There is a sequel, which I will likely buy at some point.) This sense of not-quite-knowing but being able to pick up enough of the pieces is a testament to Weisman's skill as a storyteller. Unfortunately, though I was able to figure out what happened before the book began as I read along, it meant that the reasons for people's behavior throughout much of the story I had to take for granted. I didn't know their specifics well enough to understand why everyone felt the way they did about, say, the betrayal of Vraska. By the end, yes, I got it. The result of storytelling this way, though, is that I watched the consequences of choices that I didn't understand until much later. That made the story feel out of order, and the ramifications of the pre-story actions weren't as strongly felt. Additionally, though I think Weisman tells the story well, his sentence-level writing is perfunctory and sometimes even bad. His pacing is cinematic--there are page-long chapters, as well as chapters that sprawl for a dozen pages--and that works well, but his descriptions are consistently inconsistent. This, of course, is part of the problem of adaptations: How much should one describe a character whose face is plastered on a thousands of copies of cards? Usually, Weisman will throw a single sentence--maybe two--about what a character looks like, focusing on the important details. Ajani is a leonin, so his head looks like a lion's. For players of the game, that's all that's needed. So it came as a surprise to see the loving and lengthy descriptions of the Cult of Rakdos. Multiple paragraphs were spent describing the dark, bloody atmosphere as some of the Planeswalkers made their way through it. The criticism isn't that the details of the Cult of Rakdos were expansive; it's that the rest were not. The inconsistency stood out to me. Going along with that, the various problems that the Planeswalkers needed to solve were done quickly, often within their short chapter. I understand the impulse: There's a lot of story here, so a focus on moving the plot forward was probably a good one. Unfortunately, that choice led to the book feeling skimpy. There were chapters that should've been an entire third of the novel. Trying to pack into 360 pages such an immense and complicated story with a dozen POV characters in a fantasy world (which are notorious for being longer, as there's more explanations needed for how the fantasy world works) is a task that might very well be impossible. Should You Read It? Weisman did his best--and it's an enjoyable romp that I'd recommend to Magic: The Gathering players--but that isn't enough to make it a good book. It's good at what it's trying to do, but I think there are enough dings and flaws in it to make it a book for Magic-lovers, rather than someone who's curious what a Magic: The Gathering book is like. (If you want one that doesn't require a lot of knowledge about the game, check out Arena. It's the first novel set in the game's universes, and though it takes some shortcuts, I found it an enjoyable read.) As far as a flat out recommendation, I'd say your mileage will absolutely vary. My younger brother will probably like it quite a bit (though I'm sure he already knows all the events that the book depicts anyway). I think my middle son will want to read it once he's done a bit more reading of the art books I own and played the game a little longer. But I don't think my mom's going to be interested in this one. |
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