This essay, part of my series on the Fromsoft souls games, ended up getting a bit long in tooth. So I’ve divided it into two parts, the next part should be done in March.
During the pandemic, I was getting deeper into DND and dark fantasy. Dungeons and Dragons was a game I had played with my babysitter in grade school and had always wanted to play more of. And fantasy was something I was into when I was in junior high encouraged by my father’s books like “Elric of Melnibourne”. Both things have always been among my interests, but in the summer of 2020, I began to deep dive into both in an obsessive way. Part of the reason was that I was sheltering in place in an apartment with 8 people. Escaping reality had become of paramount importance.
Much like the pandemic returned me to my childhood, fantasy was a part of this and immersing myself in sword and sorcery was like starting to collect action figures which I also did around this time. Both had a certain regressive joy to them and both were art that had fascinated me and that I thought I had moved on from.
A similar regressive joy was in the realization that I was obsessed with video games. I had stopped playing in my pre-teen years and had not allowed myself to play games because of the well-warranted fear that they would make me less productive.
But as the pandemic upended any hope of productivity, my gaming was growing pretty in depth. Initially this consisted of emulating retro games, but after a while I received my tax refund and used it to buy a gaming laptop. My first newer game was Hollow Knight which I fell in love with. My goal had not been just to play 2d games though, I had gotten my gaming laptop because I wanted to try newer 3d games. The only 3d games I had played was “Resident Evil 0” on the Gamecube back in the early 2000s.
I really wanted to play a dark fantasy RPG but hadn’t found one yet. I messed around with a variety of roguelikes, but I wanted to try something that had the immediacy of modern gaming.
My friend Davey recommended I play “Dark Souls” especially as I had been dabbling with other soulslikes such as “Salt and sanctuary”. He recommended that I start with “Dark Souls 3”.
This was the first 3d game that really affected me. It demanded much more precision than other 3d games I had tried and felt incredibly hard. Like a lot of older gamers, I struggled with the camera controls. I was used to only using a single analog stick so operating the camera with the right stick as I moved my character took a lot of practice. And not knowing how to operate the camera meant that enemies and hazards were out of my line of sight.
Compounding this was my not being unfamiliar with the lock-on targeting which was the basis of the combat in Fromsoft games. In “Dark Souls 3”, you lock onto enemies by pushing in the right thumbstick so your camera, movement and attacks focus on one enemy. While skilled players find that not locking on can help in certain situations, it’s a lot more difficult when you’re just starting the game. And so, I not only couldn’t see what I was doing but would wildly whiff attacks on enemies that were right in front me.
I played the tutorial level of the game for two weeks. These two weeks consisted of going from the opening bonfire making it through the groups of enemies and getting killed by the tutorial boss, Iudex Gundyr.
Gundyr is actually easy, more intimidating in his appearance than in moveset. But myself and other new players were not only flummoxed by his appearance but by an unpredictable turn in the boss fight. His second phase involves him turning into a Pus of Man, one of the enemies introduced in “Dark Souls 3”. These blobby creatures erupt from human enemies in a rippling wave of synthetic textures. These textures then wildly swing all over the place and just need to be mostly ignored to finish him off.
Fromsoft might have been showing off the graphical power that the new game engine was capable of (This may have been the same engine Bloodborne had just been made in). However, the Pus of man are one of the things in the game that didn’t age well graphically. They were reskinned as Ulcerated Tree Spirits in “Elden Ring” and look much more impressive with the brighter colors of that game.
(The youtuber Zullie the Witch has a great video, where they tie both enemies to an unused boss referred to as “Snake Soul”.)
The first phase of Gundyr is an understandable tutorial boss, but it feels as if they made the second phase too hard out of a desire to please souls veterans. Reading the wild liquid movements of the Pus of Man is difficult. Thus, for first time players, he ends up not being a very good introduction to boss mechanics.
I texted my complaints to Davey, who had recommended the game with frustration over how hard the beginning the game was. This difficulty was not entirely misplaced though. After weeks, I finally beat him and got to the first real level When I got to the high wall of Lothric, I realized that the average enemy of the game was as complex as Iudex Gundyr and just as hard for me to deal with.
I remember my progress being painfully slow. It took me forever to make it past the opening parapet where you must kill a hollow bell ringer before he screams, turning a huge group of hollow supplicants hostile.
If you manage to kill the bell ringer before he alerts all the others you can kill the rest of the hollows individually. After countless attempts, I had made my way through this first battlement and cleared a second room full of enemies hiding in the dark. I remember descending the ladder in the center of the room and just stopping there because I was so full of anxiety about losing the very small progress I had made.
The moment where the game clicked with me was oddly the moment when I stopped playing for a few weeks. After making your way past several waves of enemies, a dragon lands on the roof of a nearby building, and you dash madly up a staircase to avoid being incinerated.
What stood out to me more than the cinematic device of the dragon was the appearance of the first Lothric knight in the game. All the other enemies were greyish undead in rags, the knight was well-polished and a silvery contrast to the hollows all around. And with his violent robotic force, he obliterated me in seconds.
His appearance showed Fromsoft’s talent for creating cinematic moments in the introduction of a new and fearsome enemy. Similarly in “Dark Souls Remastered”, the first Black knight you see is an intimidating silhouette glimpsed at the end of a hallway. While the Lothric knights don’t have the memorably insectoid armor, they still are interesting by the contrast between their heroic exteriors and their atavistic and mechanical actions.
I stopped playing the game because it was so hard and each hour playing was filled with unbearable tension, I experienced my first playthrough of “Dark Souls 3” as a horror game. And no wonder, for me learning 3d controls for the first time, the fluid combat of a Fromsoft game might as well have been playing with tank controls. Much like the gameplay in the original “Resident Evil”, the tension was exacerbated by my inability to control my character
But like many first-time souls players even though I initially thought the game was not for me, I soon became fascinated by it.
I started a new character, choosing the knight class instead of the assassin I had initially picked. I still struggled with Iudex Gundyr but was not stuck on him for two weeks as I had been before. My second playthrough was still incredibly tough, more an act of attrition than a definite skill increase. The long suffering Davey had to receive numerous salty texts of me complaining about how unfair everything in the game was. Nevertheless, the game had gotten it’s hooks into me. I began to obsess over it.
Partially, this was because it was the right place at the right time. The pandemic’s pervasive anxiety unglued me, but it also was a period of smothering coziness. At a time when everything seemed to lack meaning, Dark Souls was something to fight against that felt unfair in a solvable way and there was something to achieve in mastering its difficulty.
Part of how I made it through was by simply learning the encounters, drawing enemies out with a bow. And of course, Dark Souls 3 has quite a few summons for some of the bosses. I eventually beat the game, summoning a player to defeat Soul of Cinder and feeling burned out on my first playthrough. But I quickly moved onto “Dark Souls Remastered” and began making my way through that game. And of course, I kept returning to “Dark Souls 3” throughout.
Many times, I’ve had the conversation with friends about what it is about Dark Souls and Fromsoft that makes the games so immersive. What I find interesting now, is that the games which I once found unbearably tense and unforgiving have now become my video game comfort food.
When things are bad and the chips are down, I retreat into one of the Dark Souls games, usually 2 or 3. This interminable January going into February, I was full of anxious horrible rage. In these first few months of our administration’s frenzied pace of returning us to the Stone Age, I again picked up Dark Souls 3 and replayed it.
This was partially as I had started writing this article. But I think I also just needed comfort, the game wrapped me in its warm embrace and for a few hours every night I was able to forget the erasure of trans people or the inhuman actions against migrants. The game kept me sane to a degree by offering a familiar retreat from reality.
Part of this retreat is the joy myself and others take in the feeling of mastery. As much fun as it is to explore these games for the first time, tense and exciting joy, there’s also something to be said for knowing exactly where each item is.
Noah Caldwell-Gervais described his NG+ experience as being joyful because a great deal of the difficulty of Souls games was in the surprises it throws at you. And while some of this is true, there’s also the power curve of knowing enemy attack patterns, knowing your weapon’s moveset and understanding how to build your character correctly.
I feel as well that there should be a reminder that this sort of mastery is entirely illusory, but that’s precisely why the game is so immersive. I get attached to a weapon’s moveset and believe that it has become my own.
And part of this immersion is remembering these early anxieties and first playthroughs so vividly, they become experiences I had. The contrast I can draw between my early flailing at the game and present skill, is pleasurable. It becomes a story that can be retold, if only in this article.
With my many playthroughs, my greater familiarity has made me develop a growing respect for the interesting things “Dark Souls 3” does. While it has been my comfort game, I often thought of it as the least interesting of the series. Part of this was when I was first playing the game but also realizing my frustration with it, I discovered the show “Bonfireside Chat”. The podcast entertained me for a while but really fed into my salty early perceptions of the game. At the time, I didn’t realize that the season they did on” Dark Souls 3” was one of their most negative. On relistening to it for writing this article I now find a lot of it hard to listen to.
“Bonfireside Chat” instilled an opinion in me that I now realize was wrong. Their frustration and my frustration came from two different places; mine from a lack of experience and theirs from the lack of coherence to the game’s story. This convinced me that “Dark Souls 3” was more of a guilty pleasure than the rest of the Souls series, where Fromsoft went astray. But now as I have replayed the game multiple times, I have realized that it is a great game on its own merits. While “Dark Souls 3” might seem to be the opposite of “Dark Souls 2” the two are kissing cousins. “Dark Souls 2” expresses its weirdness in its slowed down chunkiness and dreamlike narrative “Dark Souls 3” is equally dreamy but with a more fluid and frenzied pace. This dreaminess is expressed it by being a self-reflexive form of art, more so than any other Fromsoft game.
Partially this is because both suffered from troubled development cycles. Attempting to follow the success of “Dark Souls”, both “Dark Souls 2” and “Dark Souls 3” are incredibly misbegotten as narratives. Both arrived in their final form as last-minute restructurings of previous narratives. “Dark Souls 2” was taken from the original director and had a new game grafted onto the pieces that were left over. “Dark Souls 3” also started with a different director and was originally supposed to be the first of three different games. These eventually ended up as one game, thus there are several wildly different narratives that feel only barely patched together.
“Dark Souls 3” self-reflexivity is often dismissed as fan service. But I believe this self-referential nature was intentional beyond exploiting fan’s good will. Along with trying to iterate on their past successes, Fromsoft was also mediating on what it means for the series and characters to come to an end. And ultimately the game makes us as players contemplate what it means to reach our endpoint.
This existential narrative fits in with the meta-narrative concerning the Dark Souls series, Fromsoft being exhausted with Dark Souls and Bandai Namco demanding they extend the series beyond what it could be. In fact, it might have been only that Miyazaki taking over Fromsoft as president that allowed them to make “Elden Ring” and end the “Dark Souls” series.
“Dark Souls 2” was an existential feeling game as well, but in a more pessimistic vein. “Dark Souls 3” is an existentialism based in telos (an Aristotlean word for each things purpose.) Each character struggles and ends up either going hollow because their purpose can no longer be fulfilled. Or if the proper steps are fulfilled by the player, they can die a dignified death. The game itself is struggling to end the series in a dignified way. It struggles movingly to fulfill all the strands left behind in other games. But, in a very Fromsoft way, It instead introduces complicates this mission by introducing new strands which go off in unresolvable but evocative directions.
This is cool but it adds to the sense of the game not being a coherent narrative. But luckily “Dark souls 3” can use its superior gameplay to give the game, the coherence it needs.
If the game was only its patchy and confused main story it would be a failure. But all this narrative dissonance is tied together by Fromsoft’s increasing confidence in their craft. The DLC of “Bloodborne”, “The Old Hunters” saw a huge leap in terms of what Fromsoft was capable of from both a programming and design standpoint.
“Dark souls 3” is another huge leap forward technically. While bosses such as Pontiff Sullyvahn have been largely surpassed in term of their aggression by Elden ring bosses, they also can feel a bit fairer. The Dancer of the Boreal Valley is an amazing iteration on the Mergo’s Wet Nurse fight in “Bloodborne” where instead of fighting you with teleports, she instead fights you with inhuman grace and swordsmanship. And in terms of the drama and look of the fight, the Dancer is as much of a leap forward as from Mergo’s Wet Nurse as the Pus of Man in “Dark Souls III” is to the Ulcerated Tree Spirit in “Elden Ring.”
But Dark Souls 3 is not just about technical innovation, despite its scattered story the game manages to make a statement about what the series has meant to Fromsoft and its fans. Granted, it’s a confusing statement that twists and contradicts itself and a bit of a shaggy dog story, but I think the game is as interesting as any of Fromsoft’s games and worthy of being talked about much more.
In the next part of the essay, we’ll go more into the mixed critical reception and mechanics of the game as well as some aspects of the story and bosses.
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