Lucatiel of Mirra from “Dark Souls 2”
One odd thing about the Souls community is that there are people who play the “Dark Souls” series constantly from New game to NG+107. It’s not entirely a bad thing as replaying games can be deeply comforting. However, treating a “Dark Souls” game as your forever game does reduce the whole “Dark Souls made me realize that other games are bad” concept into an obsessive outlook.
If “Dark Souls” game design causes you to realize the flaws in other games that seems valuable. However, it’s less useful if this outlook causes you to lose interest in the medium. This kind of thinking leads to the toxic fandom that Fromsoftware has developed where people claim to be superfans but hate everything the studio has put out after 2016.
Some of these people have a sort of Stockholm syndrome with Fromsoftware, where they claim to love the studio but resent the studio for not letting them play other games.
I share in this obsessiveness, but I play other games. Nevertheless, I’m constantly drawn to writing more about the “Dark Souls” games because like these people, I constantly turn to these original games for comfort.
Of course, I find all three games inspiring as works of art, but when I’m replaying one of them for the umpteenth time, I’m not really considering the inspiring moments.
In fact, my playthroughs often become routine where I’m mentally looking for a laundry list of items that will create an interesting build. And then searching for upgrade materials that will make my character powerful. But even though my playthroughs are not as high-minded as I would like, they still inspire me to write more about the series.
It should be said that I’m considering putting all my Souls essays into a book. So this has made me want to finish this project I have started.
But I am doing it in an odd way, I should probably now write about “Demon Souls” or the first “Dark Souls”, as that would be a better starting place. But I’ve decided on writing a piece about “Dark Souls 2” instead which has always fascinated me more than any other in the series. My order is based on my engagement rather than chronology.
“Dark Souls 2” has engaged me not only because of its aesthetics but also the playstyle it encourages. “Dark Souls 2” keeps the anti-aesthetic of the 1st game and the open world structure that “Dark Souls 3” mostly lacks. And this non-linear structure appeals to the sort of player I am who is focused on creating a build and making it stronger.
“Dark Souls 2” is also a game that attracted me as a contrarian, I like the idea of standing up for the underdog (even if it might not work out in practice).Even though, enough time has passed that “Dark Souls 2” has been largely reevaluated by the community, it still has a much more mixed reception than the other titles.
This mixed reception is partly because the game took more risks than Fromsoft had since “Demon Souls”. In a way, “Dark Souls 2” was the Scholar of the First Sin so that “Dark Souls 3” and “Elden Ring” could study it. Or to hopefully put it in a less stupid way, “Dark Souls 2” threw stuff at the wall to see what would stick and ignored safely giving fans what they wanted. “Dark Souls 2” was hated. But the ways it challenged the existing formula meant that subsequent games could follow in its experimentation.
That’s why I love “Dark Souls 2”, it had the courage of its convictions. But a lot of this might have been unintentional. Part of this experimentation might have come out of its troubled development process, much like the similarly tortured process that made “Dark Souls 3”. Luckily in both cases, the final work of art is much more than its messy development.
Before Hidetaka Miyazaki became president of Fromsoftware, the studio was run more like a sweatshop churning out series for Bandai Namco on a semi-annual basis. With the success of the first game, a sequel to “Dark Souls” was demanded even though Miyazaki had seen it as a singular game.
Hidetaka Miyazaki was working on “Bloodborne”, so the project was given to Tomohiro Shibuya, a journeyman director. Shibuya had experience in creating games but was unknown as a game director. There is some sense to this. Shibuya had experience and may have created the “Dark Souls 2” game engine. However, it is odd that Fromsoftware would put one of their most successful series in the hands of someone unproven.
As much as there is something likable about the small hardworking culture of early Fromsoftware, it does seem that there was some mismanagement in that this same failed pattern was repeated for DS3 before Miyazaki was brought back on to salvage the game. It feels as though the specialness of the series had not been recognized.
Statements by Shibuya that Dark Souls 2 was going to surpass the first game in terms of action, have a certain arrogance. Whether he was arrogant or merely misquoted, Shibuya’s words didn’t seem to recognize how singular the achievement of the first game was.
It’s not entirely certain why Shibuya was removed and Yui Tanimura was placed in charge of the project.There seems to have been a lot of backlash at his insistence that the game would be more linear and more accessible:
“Accessibility to players who haven’t picked up Dark Souls is definitely a key topic,” Shibuya tells us. “Right in the beginning when players first pick up the game is something that I will definitely focus on. To not immediately throw them into Dark Souls but provide a good introduction in terms of what the game’s about and how the game should be played“ Dark Souls II's new director on making one of the toughest series in videogames "more accessible" | News | Edge Online
I am curious reading this, was Shibuya screwed over by “Edge” Magazine? It seems like the magazine was trying to fan the controversy a bit by making Shibuya’s statements a headline. They surely knew the small audience of a hardcore action rpg like “Dark Souls” would react poorly to statements about making the game more accessible.
At any rate, fans and journalists such as Keza McDonald expressed anger and concern about “Dark Souls” going in a new direction. Whether it was this outcry or a difference in vision, it’s hard to say. But something ended up making Fromsoftware remove Shibuya from his job as director and put Tanimura in charge.
It should be said, I’m relying on the historical data of a great Youtube documentary series linked here. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHns_yOoV6A) This series painstakingly goes into the development of “Dark Souls 2” and anyone seeking a true history should look at that rather than reading this article.
Basically, the existing structure of the game was junked and out of this salvage came DS2. To quote Tanimura from the translated Design Works:
“Due to a number of factors we were actually forced to re-think the entire game midway into development. “
It would have been interesting to see what Shibuya wanted to do, it definitely seems as if it broke with the original game. We are left with the strange first trailer where a knight battles enemies who look a bit like the Mario Shy Guy characters, an ironic choice given that Super Mario 2 is very much the Dark Souls 2 of the original Mario trilogy. Interestingly, in the “Edge” magazine feature, a figure similar to Aldia is described. There is some cut content including time travel and the Emerald Herald as a child. As well an NPC who later became Lucatiel was supposed to be a female Don Quixote with a dwarf Sancho Panza.
It’s hard to know what to make of these fragments. Given that in the same interview, Tanimura says that Fromsoftware had to sit down with what Shibuya had done so far and struggle :
“We really had to go back to the drawing board and think once more about what a Dark Souls game should be.”
As there wasn’t time to completely start “Dark Souls 2” over from scratch, it ended up being a paste-up job of destroying what was left and making an entirely new game out of it. Many of the game’s inconsistencies could have come out of trying to synthesize an unfinished story into a different more coherent game.
Despite all this chaos, “Dark Souls 2” had an improbably successful launch. The game sold 2.5 million copies, an improbable success for the series given its turbulent development.
And the game got very respectable reviews upon release. Perusing the metacritic page shows a critic’s rating of 9.0, with a slightly lower user score of 7.7. Gaming critics generally liked “Dark Souls 2”. It was instead a backlash from the gaming fans which gave the game its more mixed reputation.
Months after DS2’s release, gamers blasted Fromsoftware and publisher Bandai Namco with a campaign called “You Lied” which attacked the graphical difference between the trailers and the released game. The trailer had shown a much more sophisticated lighting engine than the actual release, which had very flat and bright lighting.
In theory, a grassroots uprising by gamers against the corporate publishers sounds cool, but reality was far grosser. If we bear in mind that the “You Lied” campaign occurred around the same time as Gamergate, we can imagine how problematic it was.
What the two movements had in common was a bad-faith reading of developer’s actions. Basically, fans believed that Fromsoftware had deceived them by giving them a game that wasn’t as graphically beautiful as what was promised by the trailers.
There are theories that the lighting engine seen in trailers had to be much more limited for the actual release because it caused the frame rate to drop drastically. Since the team who took over barely managed to finish it in time, it’s not hard to imagine graphical compromises were part of this crunch.
Fromsoftware are pretty mysterious about their decisions. This leads often to unchecked speculations. These by fans lead to the idea that the game had been graphically degraded due to having to run on PS3. A lot of people hoped that a PC Port would have much improved graphics but the PC version only made fan disappointment worse. Even now, Fromsoftware is notorious for doing lousy PC ports of its games and the release of the PC verwsion was no exception. Anyone hoping to see the lighting of the trailer found the look of the game was pretty much unchanged from the PS3 version.
I’m sure people were let down by this. But to make it into a seeming conspiracy by Fromsoftware feels unfair. This was part of the attitude that Gamergate fostered; the war of the gamers against the developers making games for them to play.
We have to admit that this entitled attitude worked. “Dark Souls 2” is the only game that Fromsoftware re-did after its release. The studio ended up putting out a new definitive edition: “Scholar of the First Sin”. As much as the thinking behind the “You Lied” campaign was flawed, without the pushback we might never have gotten the graphically superior “Scholar of the First Sin” edition.
Even though this new release won over some critics of the game, “Dark Souls 2” couldn’t shake its muddied reputation. The graphics and the lighting engine were never the real issue. The issue was that to those critics, “Dark Souls 2” didn’t feel like a “Dark Souls” game.
Part of the issue was the engine; the engine of “Dark Souls 1” was tossed out in favor of a more graphically advanced but more awkward looking engine.
The differences weren’t just appearances either. The game also literally felt different, playing “Dark Souls 2” doesn’t feel like other games in the series. This is partially due to the 8-way analog dead zones which are more restrictive than in other games. I’ve never read any explanation of why this was changed but it contributes to the overall stiffness of the controls.
This stiffness continues to the animations. An interesting but questionable decision was the “Dark Souls” character animations were redone by motion-captured HEMA performers in the interest of greater accuracy. But this accuracy was combined with less frames of animation making it look stilted and odd.
Fromsoftware really isn’t interested in accurate medieval warfare. Even though I still see HEMA (Historical Martial Arts ie: medieval weapon’s scholars ) asking Fromsoft for greater accuracy in weapons animations, they don’t seem to realize their interest is wonkish rather than popular. Video game fans mostly want to see their character using a weapon in a exaggerated and impactful way. They like to see their character swinging a greataxe into the dirt, not straining to hold it upright. People want stylish combos, not realism.
Moreover, while some of the “Dark Souls 1” animations have been improved upon, many of them have an iconic style which the leaden style of “Dark Souls 2” could never replicate. When parrying enemies; they now fall to the ground and await helplessly to be riposted. This makes more sense than the riposte animations of enemies in the original “Dark Souls”; enemies that stand sullenly in front of you as if awaiting punishment. But the enemy lying down helplessly isn’t necessarily more realistic than them standing helplessly; it just looks less cool.
Likewise, the simple brutality of a backstab in “Dark Souls 1” just looks horrifying in a great way. And your character adds insult to injury by pushing the skewered enemy off their weapon and onto the ground. In “Dark Souls 2”, your character performs a goofy animation that looks like it belongs in a Three Stooges film, smacking the enemy on the head and pushing them over before dispatching them . This is funny and has a nice variant where if the enemy starts to turn towards you as you press the input, your character seems to say; “Oh no, you don’t!” and turns them back around so you can perform the animation. But this burlesque sacrifices the elegance of the original animation.
With all these criticisms, the HEMA influence seems to have been valuable as a learning experience for Fromsoft as many of the more interesting animations were reused and improved for “Dark Souls 3” and “Elden Ring”. The silky animations of the Milady light greatsword have their roots in medieval fencing styles. These were originally modelled for the strangely dainty animations of the Black Knight greatsword in “Dark Souls 2”.
But with these dropped frames and the stiffness adds to a slightly cursed feel. This is combined with the frankly terrible sound design. Instead of the kind of flesh hitting metal sound of the other games, the sword impacts in “Dark Souls 2” are much less evocative, like a sort of “Whack” sound not unlike a punch sound effect in an old kung fu movie.
“Dark Souls 2” seemed to be going for a more realistic approach to combat, but it’s exaggerated in its slowness. This is pretty much in stark contrast to the more popular games that followed “Bloodborne” where every entry including Elden Ring seemed to get snappier, more fluid and more expressive.
This realism is part of the strangeness of “Dark Souls 2”. It’s often ignored that the term realism refers to an exaggerated depiction of reality, one in which the grain is much harsher than the real world. For instance; while conversations as inarticulate as Harold Pinter do occur, a lot of conversations are uncomfortably straightforward representations of people’s desires and problems.
“Dark Souls 2” with its slowness and awkwardness of its execution, seemed to be the ugly duckling of the bunch. But it gradually stood out in a way that its better-heeled siblings couldn’t by virtue of its lumbering weirdness.
This weirdness increasingly has stood out in subsequent titles. “Bloodborne” released soon afterward and proceeded to do the exact opposite of the slow brutality of “Dark Souls 2” . And unfairly, “Bloodborne” has never weathered the same kind of controversy. (other than fans wanting a remaster)
The engine used by “Bloodborne” was a graphically upscaled version of the original “Dark Souls” engine. This has been the game engine used by other Fromsoftware games and the slower moving engine of “Dark Souls 2” despite its technical advances has only been used once . Fromsoftware from “Bloodborne” moved further towards the stylishness and fluidity of its later games.
In light of this trend, it's the anachronism of “Dark Souls 2” that makes it stand out as something interesting, the way it doesn’t fit in the series entirely. But within this anachronism are a lot of paths Fromsoftware would follow for “Elden Ring”, the power-stancing, the open-world and the brokeness of the character builds. It’s both the quintessential Fromsoftware game and a strange detour from the rest of the series.
“Dark Souls 2” is both the road not taken and a blueprint for the future. And in the next two parts, I’m going to go more into the game itself.