A Mentally Challenged Man's Souls Retrospective: Prepare For Cynicism Edition

> design your own difficulty
I think the biggest notion is "do I summon or not". If you summon you're basically playing easy-mode or not even interacting with the game in some cases. But yeah otherwise it's just a simple case of 'how good is your build' and good builds can compensate for bad skill. Having seen Elon Musk's build while playing I can fully understand why players think the series is hard.

> scholars
It's a gamers game, bereft of any type of nuance or whatever. It is closer to an arcade game I'd reckon than their other works. There's so much weird shit like that you go on to kill multiple ancient gods just so you can go through a door that has another way around it that's blocked by literally 3 stones of rubble. But I also feel that those things get waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much attention as it has zero bearing on the exploration and gameplay itself. Yeah the elevator was badly coded and goes the wrong way. Who. Cares. Play the game.

The game really, really tried a lot of shit and a lot of it was great, and a shame it never returned (like bonfire aesthetics). Agree on the notion "abandoned believability for experimentation". Which is something in a series that has (strangely) been so scared of trying something else outside of minor tweaks to the formula (though it is enough to fool most..).

> NG+
Highly recommended, it's Master Ninja levels of changes imo. One boss even gets helpers, and the giant spider boss makes a jump-scare appearence earlier on where you can fight her (and if you 'win' she has less health in the actual fight).

>Isn't it true for any game?

for making games harder? sure, but the difficulty thing you're talking about in regards to Souls is about making the game easier on the first playthrough, not harder. you do that through your actions in the game rather than a difficulty slider and the "challenge" of the first playthrough is ironically much more about figuring out ways to saw off the edges of the difficulty rather than getting good at the enemies.

>Who. Cares. Play the game.

puh reeeeech it brother

>DS2

i'm excited about giving it another chance. as noted the other day, DS2: SOTFS fixes my biggest gameplay issue with this series, so that alone is a big deal. i had a kneejerk reaction about the way they did it but that was unfair and at this point i'll take that regardless of whether it's stupid or not over running past every enemy because i can't be bothered. DS2 retroactive GOTY 2024 incoming.

Rebooted, Revived, Rechallenged

alright alright boys, my Souls escapades continues; Dark Souls The First is up.

>I can only wonder what happend here.

ironically this thread resembles Souls storytelling now


just started a new game, i'm really early on (just got to Undead Parish, haven't beaten the Gargoyles yet). going with a Quality/shield build with a Claymore.

the Taurus Demon on the bridge is the only boss i've beaten so far, got him first try. went up and took care of the archers, didn't use the jump attack on Taurus or gold pine resin or firebombs or anything. i played keepaway; baited his attacks and moved in and hit him after he attacked. solid first boss, i like the narrow bridge and how both you and the boss can fall off of it; i didn't try to make him fall off the bridge and he didn't (he tends to accidentally back up off of the bridge if you rush him when he first appears which is cool, it's like you get a reward for being brave), and i stayed away from the open edges myself.

the combat takes some getting used to coming from ER, DS3, and BB; 4-way directional rolling if camera-locked, no sprint while locked on except for forwards (that's how it is in BB so i'm used to that), methodical combat pace with slow enemy attack speed and movement while the same applies to your character. it's more about patience, attack commitment and stamina management. attacks use a lot more stamina and stamina's a lot slower to regen. can't move while healing and it's a longer animation. the environment has a much bigger effect on combat due to the level design (ex. your movement is more restricted/pressured).

hub areas: haven't commented on hubs in these games at all yet so i'll say something about each of them in the games i've played so far:

ER: bad. looks alright but i hated the layout of it, was extremely annoying that the npc that sells upgrade materials is on the opposite side of where the blacksmith is. don't remember the music which tells me everything i need to know.

DS3: bad. nothing about it stands out, don't remember the music, doesn't look good, and the layout is a bit of a burden.

BB: bad. don't like the music, hate the constant zombie groans, doesn't look good.

DS1: great. having the hub be an area within the world, with the sheer amount of areas it connects to, fits this game super well although the fact that it's not an isolated hub comes with my personal downside of making me feel less safe/comfy. great music. the fact that npc's come and go as the game progresses isn't my preference gameplay wise but it works within the context of the game-- it's like a fantasy adventurer version of a truck stop minus the holes between bathroom stalls and dicks in men's mouths.

i never knew that the towerbell ringing when you're online is another player somewhere ringing the bell after beating the gargoyles in their game. it's a cool little addition to the immersive non-pvp online mechanics-- like seeing phantoms of other players-- that this series has completely stagnated on as of late.

i have a new revolutionary idea for Fromsoft's next Souls game; take the dungeons from ER, yeah? but make a whole game around them-- like every area is a dungeon but without a huge boring Open World between them that you have to waste a ton of time on traversing through and the multitude of other heinous issues an Open World brings. that would insane, maybe call it "Dark Souls" or something.

it's cool how the Depths are an optional area, you can just take the Valley of Drakes entrance to Blight Town (Master Key) which makes the vast majority of Blight Town optional as well. the only thing you need in the Depths is the Large Ember which is right at the beginning.

a huge relief to have bonfires and runbacks back, those are unique integral parts of the series.

the Sphincter Factor of some of these areas is insanely high. i will never forget my first time in Tomb of the Giants; paralyzed with fear the entire time, bordering on a fuckin panic attack trying to navigate that pitch-black nightmare with giant skeleton enemies popping out of the darkness. i also remember New Londo being pretty brutal because of how dark it was and the spirit enemies that no-clip through everything, Blight Town was a dark grimy insane-status-effects-pressure hell hole, etc.

it's funny how i haven't played this game since 2011 and i can still remember all the areas because each one has a completely distinct look and level design. meanwhile i can't remember shit about the levels in DS3 and even though i played BB very recently a lot of the levels still blur together for me because of the aggressively shit aesthetics which mostly look identical to one another at that (dark grey shadows on dark grey environments), and i find the level design of both BB & DS3 to be super bland; really linear, mostly big open areas in which the only thing that's a danger are the enemies, and really limited exploration.

the hub bub surrounding the Drake Sword is crazy; it's still talked about to this day when it's just a nasty noob trap.

>Dark Souls The First
Truly a classic. Doesn't have the strongest combat in the world but the game is super solid and memorable, banger DLC too. A shame about some of the later areas (Lost Izalith, eugh).

>Drake Sword is crazy; it's still talked about to this day when it's just a nasty noob trap.
The high base stats make it a decent earlygame crutch, the trap is upgrading it. But also funny that Drake Sword got famous, when the Halberd is available just a couple minutes after and is easily the better weapon.

TEMP

> Drake sword
It's infamy also heavily showcases how little people play these games blind, as the player has had no in-game advice about tail-cutting giving different weapons, arrows being rare at the time outside of the hidden vendor/starting weapon and most players not being nearly brave enough at the start of their first run to decide to fight that dragon with the 3 pine resin they have.
Everyone that used that weapon found it through a guide or forum.

> Tauros demon
Legit one of the best bosses in the series imo for just how mechanically interesting he is. There's the archers, the jump attacks, you can ring him out, they give you bombs and resin beforehand - really showcases that open ended gameplay Souls wants but rarely gives. We lost this in favour of dodge-rolling.

> hub
Demon's Souls was the only one that nailed it imo. For a few reasons:
- NPCs constantly changed states, moved positions or straight up left. They all really felt like travellers with their own agenda.
- fantastic music and atmosphere
- actually featured quite a lot of exploration, with hidden treasures that gave curious players an early boost.
- despite being quite big, all useful NPCs were very close to eachother.
Later hubs were either extremely depressing, dark, or just big empty places of nothing with far too much walking between them for no reason. Dark Souls generally did the same, but as you noted built it more into the world.

> dark souls openness, skip depths
Definitely it's strongest feature and by the gods I still don't know why they removed it from DS2 (returned in Scholar), BB and DS3. I still have fun replaying DeS and DS1 and just doing weird-ass routes. You can legit do bosses in nearly reverse-order. You can go all the way to the bottom of the Tomb of Giants and climb back up. You can have Sif be your first bossfight and Four Kings your second. It's all possible and it rules. BB looks great, but it's just a lineair hallway from start to finish for the most part.

> tomb of giants
Noted it before, but it's really, really intense to do the Effigy run. Basically rule of the run is to have the first shield you pick up be the Effigy Shield, which is AAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLL the way down the Tomb. Then use a bonfire there, and climb back up. Very memorable gaming experience imo.

rescued Lautrec from jail, beat the Gargoyles first try, kicked Lautrec off the ledge and put on his ring, went down to the Lower Undead Burg, beat Capra Demon first try, went to the Depths to grab the Large Ember and rescue the Pyromancer. couldn't find the bonfire in the Depths but ended up finding Gaping Pussy so i said fuck it, i'll fuck it without the bonfire. turns out i got fucked and i respawned at Firelink. didn't feel like running back there, went to Blighttown instead.

died on Quelaag once. was doing quite low damage to her with my +5 Claymore, i couldn't really use my shield because of her fire damage bleeding through, and i kept stepping on lava, so after i died i explored Blight Town before trying her again. the only thing i remembered was down here is Power Within and thankfully remembered the location, grabbed that and discovered my 8 Attunement was too low to use it, so i went off exploring more of Blight Town for cool shit and to level up my Attunement so i can use Power Within. had no idea where to get Large Titanite Shards in this game other than a merchant selling them in Sen's Fortress and the blacksmith at Anor Londo but figured there must be some in Blight Town considering my low damage. found 2 or 3 on the floor, and then found out that the leeches have a percentage drop because one of the first ones i killed dropped one. farmed them a little bit, upgraded my weapon, went back to Quelaag, buffed up with PW and beat that ass, rang the bell, went to Firelink, went to Undead Asylum, got the doll, beat the boss there second try, ran to the blacksmith, beat the Butterfly first try, ran around stomping on the Black Knights, taught Havel a lesson, and now i'm at the bonfire before Sen's Fortress.

areas:

Undead Burg and Undead Parish are both great, the only thing i don't like about them is how short they are. the vast majority of the fights in these areas are with multiple enemies which is good. in the church before the Gargoyle fight i was fighting whatever those knight looking guys are called and the magic guy on the 2nd floor surrounded by all the zombies dropped down onto the first floor of the church, so i had to deal with him at the same time; i don't remember that ever happening before, fun little jank.

the Depths: everything looks the same and the whole area has maze-like level design-- obviously intentional but it was tough for me because i am a navigation/exploration-challenged mentally challenged man. the way that me missing the bonfire affected my game was awesome; i got presented with a decision-- go back and explore to find the bonfire or take the risk and fight the boss without it-- and because i lost that gamble and didn't want to go all the way back there i made the decision to skip the Depths, leaving me with less souls to use and not getting everything in the area, which then forced me to go to Blighttown through the exit which is a very different experience than going through it from the front. my choice in response to one decision the game presented me had the domino effect of significantly altering my playthrough and that wouldn't have been possible in the recent games because it requires rare and sometimes hard to find bonfires + open-ended progression.

also i fell through one of those open floor traps in the Depths and ended up in the curse frog area; love how there's a severe punishment for falling for a trap (and that there are traps in this game unlike as of late). i did not remember at all how many curse frogs there are in that area, there is a stressful amount of them, although i didn't end up getting cursed.

i agree with the "Dark Souls is hard but fair, if you get hit or die that's on you, etc" religious mantra that Souls fans love to chant but the Depths has one of the very few DS2-esque cheap shots in the game; near the beginning you walk into a room and there's an item to the left and you go to get it and then that blob enemy drops from the ceiling onto your head. that's the very first time you're introduced to that enemy, there's been no other enemies on the ceiling in the game, and obviously it's not a natural tendency to look up for threats; unless there's an online message in front of that warning you, there is no way to anticipate that and anybody who claims they did is a liar. not that this is a big deal or even a small deal, just noting a nitpick.

Blighttown's a fun area, the first half of it is pretty oppressive (along with the framerate on the original release); dark lighting which for example cloaks the dart guys, you have thin ramps and tiny cramped areas and lots of enemies thrown at you, mobs blowing toxic darts at you off-screen, poison mobs and swamps (that actually mean something here). it's obvious why this area is infamous but if you come prepared it's an entirely different scenario. how hard this game rewards you for good preparation/planning ahead-- or punishes you for the lack of it-- is intense. like if you come into Blighttown without prepping for it (bringing Toxic and Poison clumps) you're in for a rough ride. you've got no warping and the only way you're getting those items is a limited amount in the level itself.

Asylum revisited: little secret area, i like the idea of revisiting the tutorial area but there's not much to do or find; there are black knights, the item to get to the Painted World, and a boss.


bosses:

the Gargoyles are a great fight; this series has a number of shitty dual boss fights but this is one of the times they were done right. the concept of a dual Gargoyle fight may be re-used from Demon's Souls but the movesets and environment here are different. it's cool that if you're able to beat the first one quickly enough you get the reward of a much easier fight. if they're both out in the field one tends to cover the other with his flame breath while the other is attacking you, it's a fun dynamic and they can both flame breath the fuck out of the floor. the arena is deceptively big-- you may look at this arena and think no way could i fall off of it or have any issues space-wise because it's fairly big but these bosses will surprise you.

Capra Demon: cool boss. another one that plays with the environment in an interesting way-- a pretty big demon in a tiny cramped room with 1 short set of stairs + he has 2 dogs with him. unfortunately my shield trivialized it so i didn't get the proper experience this time.

Gaping Dragon: only fought it once and lost so i don't have much more to say other than "cool design". the reason i lost was because i've only been positioning and using a shield on bosses so far and this one threw me off because my shield didn't work and i was naturally playing keepaway trying to get a feel for what this giant boss's attacks are but turns out he has some insanely long-reaching attacks that kept hitting me from a mile away so that's interesting.

Quelaag. first off, hot boss: literally and figuratively. i like her lava attack; the lava stays on the floor for quite a while and she's always laying down new lava so you have to keep in mind where you're stepping. this would be a much more engaging boss if her lava was more intense-- like it covering a lot more of the ground-- or the arena was smaller because her moveset is very easy and she pauses for a long time to lay down lava. but she's okay.

Moonlight Butterfly: shit. i'm cool with an easy boss-- obviously not every boss should be trying to be the most brutal challenge possible-- but if her attacks are supposed to do any damage then i guess i waited too long to take her on and the fact that i can only wait around and dodge/block her shit until she lands is just not an engaging design. good looking boss and music though.

Asylum Demon: boring as fuck. stay on his back, back off when he attacks, walk in and attack afterwards, rinse and repeat-- there is zero possibility of this thing hitting you. maybe you can fight him in a more fun way but i couldn't risk it because i was doing shit damage.

every boss i've played so far with the exception of the Asylum Demon has implemented the environment in some way; whether it's something about the arena itself like the shape or size of it or being able to fall off of it or whatever like the Taurus Demon and Capra Demon, or attacks that put environmental pressure on you like Quelaag, or both (Gargoyles). wasn't expecting the bosses to play so much into that. and every single instance of this has been unique.


lol how they introduce Oswald after you ring the tower bell is mean-spirited, it's clearly an attempt to try to jump-scare the player into attacking him. the Pyromancer's yes or no trap question is also hateful as fuck; if you skip through his dialogue, you're not gonna know how to answer him and if you say "Yes" then i think he won't sell you anything and then leaves Firelink to go off and die in Blighttown.

this series in general (BB in particular) has really toughened me up, my asshole was extremely loose in the Depths and Blighttown; practically prolapsing. i wonder how Tomb of the Giants is gonna be now.

>The high base stats make it a decent earlygame crutch, the trap is upgrading it.

sure if you just use it for a little while and then move on but even without upgrading it i think the risk for a new player is using it past its expiration date. some fucked up scenarios can arise from that, like using it until you're stranded in Anor Londo where not only has your damage dropped off but everyone there and their grandmothers are resistant to Lightning damage. have fun beating all those enemies and Ornstein & Smough with the Drake Sword.

>banger DLC

i've never played it. which is weird now that i've played BB and DS3 because the DLC to those games is so integral that i couldn't imagine playing them without it and yet my entire experience with DS1 is without the DLC.

>A shame about some of the later areas (Lost Izalith, eugh)

i'm curious about how i'm gonna feel about the infamous drop off in quality in the later areas because i thought BB had that problem to the extreme where most of the game is trash but i've personally not heard a lot of people say that, yet DS1 is famous for it.

>It's all possible and it rules

yeah it's awesome. the fact that we've only gotten non-linearity back recently with the last one and it had a Faustian open world deal tacked on is tragic.

>Demon's Souls was the only one that nailed it imo

trust me i'm with ya, DS1's hub isn't even fit to lick DeS's hub's balls. not gonna go there now because i'm not on that game yet but that is by fucking far the best hub in the series and the best video game hub period.

>extremely depressing, dark, or just big empty places of nothing with far too much walking between them for no reason

agreed, they're really horrid, coming from those games gave me a new appreciation for DS1's hub.

>Quelaag
Pretty interesting boss. You can infinite her with specific weapons that reach her body, as hitting her female form has a 100% stagger chance. You can use bows to do this as well, or large polearms.

> weird janky fights
In general the original title had a ton of wacky encounters. That one's a highlight, but also the random boar with the gate closing (and ability to use the fire to roast yourself a fine meal).

> depths
Pretty fun yanky area, also considering there's (again) multiple ways in. Most enter it through the trap-door iirc and don't encounter the ceiling-blob until you leave. Also liked the little rat that runs away, which leads you into a trap. It's also the first area where you can get the NPC invasions.

> curse
Vanilla Curse was a nightmare, it's understandable but kinda a shame that it was nerfed.

> Blighttown
One of those "never knew that item was there" areas, despite 20+ runs you'll always find an item you never saw before.

If you explore the depths you actually find the spidershield, which completely blocks poison darts. IIRC in v1.0 the poison darts didn't despawn either. Also love the hidden area, finding that by myself pre-launch is something I'll take to my grave. I was so amazed when I reached the bottom of that tree. A literal "where the fuck am I' moment, and then the realization....I gotta climb the fuck back aren't I.

> bosses
You sorta understanding what I meant now with my opinion towards bosses in Elden Ring?

> Oswald
Guy scared the crap outta me and I wacked him a good one haha

> DLC
In general the series has great DLC. The Artorias expansion is basically a perfect extension. Dark Souls 2 has DLC that elevates the game (and has arguably the best dungeon in the series) and Bloodborne is just cheff's kiss. Can't comment on PhonedInSouls3.

done using a shield, i see why shields got a bad rap in this game and soured people from trying it in the later ones; the way the game is designed doesn't work for shields, like the bosses just don't hit often enough so either you can tank everything or you have a shitty shield and it's useless because it can't take 1 hit. i'm also done with the Claymore, i need a big powerful slow weapon in my life and that weapon was just a half-step, it was me trying to resist but it's just not good enough, i'm now using the Greatsword. i can't escape from who i am, i am addicted to the Str style of play and big hard throbbing veiny swords. the Greatsword's R2? you can't beat. that long powerful thrust your character puts everything into with that sound effect and the screen shake? goddamn. the R1's? you can't beat. those horizontal swings to the floor that your character struggles to do? phew.

Sen's Fortress: one of my favorite areas in the game, i just enjoy a 'house of traps'. swinging axes through long thin rail-less walkways, floor traps, and rolling boulders; this is the Dark Souls version of Indiana Jones, we even get snakes in the form of snake monster mobs. the challenge is more the level itself; there's not that many enemies and they're very easy to wallop, they're mostly here to try and get you fucked up by a trap (like chucking lightning spells at you when you're trying to run through axes). i think the traps work well despite DS1 not having the best controls of the series; if you take it slow and really examine the traps and the environment, you can get past all of it without dying or getting hit. it's not hard but it is set up to ruin you if you're not playing carefully and patiently.

this area introduces your first mimic chest which i think is a fun concept for an enemy. the downside of the mimic chest though is a huge one: once you fall for it once, you have to be completely spaced out to fall for it again. this enemy would be improved if you couldn't just R1 check them so you had to examine chests and make a judgement call on whether a chest is a trap, and making different tells on every chest. if you're too scared to open a chest? tough shit.

other than that, this level has the other DS2 moment of bullshit; in this case it's an instance of the game not playing by the rules it established. the very first thing you're introduced to in this level is a floor trap in the entrance to the fortress and i remember when i first played this back in the day taking notice of one of the Snake guys walking over it and springing it and thinking "okay, enemies can spring traps too". later on there's a part of the level where there's a small, thin hallway with a floor trap in the middle of it and a Snake guy comes waltzing through there only... the trap doesn't spring, and my expectation that it would somehow ended up getting me killed although i don't remember how.

The Iron Golem: the entire arena has no barriers, the boss's attacks send you flying, and you can send the boss falling backwards. this is ring-out: the boss fight and it's a fun idea. and i've always enjoyed huge slow knight bosses ever since the Tower Knight in DeS. i've never actually not killed the big guy on top of the place who's been throwing explosives, if you don't kill him will he lob bombs onto the arena during the boss fight?

Anor Londo: you know right away when you first get there and see that view that there's going to be something about this level. an iconic area with some infamous segments like the thin rafters you have to walk on with the white-cloaked ninjas flinging throwing knives at you and fight you on there. or the stretch of the big knights with huge shields, winged demons, and the silver knights shooting arrows at you and you having to run up and beat that silver knight on that thin ledge and the long runback if you fuck up.

once you get inside the castle i feel like the level deflates; the area inside of what is a huge castle on the outside is disappointingly small but i still like being inside the castle just for the environment. the excitement picks up again once we get to the boss.

Ornstein & Smough: not hard to see why this boss became an instant classic and the talk of the game until the DLC. an asymmetrical dual boss fight (one big slow fat guy with a huge hammer, one small fast guy with a spear) with a different 2nd phase depending on who you kill first, superb character design of both bosses which also plays into the complimentary idea, it's the first challenging boss fight in the game (i remember how fucking brutal this fight was for me back in the day, and this is the first one i died on more than once on this playthrough) and the biggest difficulty spike. and last but not least, it's a fun boss fight.

i took out Smough first and found out that against solo Ornstein if you can back him up against a wall (or preferably a corner so it's harder for him to get out of) you can get a pretty good loop on him of him doing his jump up and ass slam move which is an easy attack to deal with. you just run or dodge in afterwards and hit him, back off when he starts it again, and rinse & repeat and that's how i beat him. this boss continues the DS1 tradition of implementing the environment in a unique way; using the columns to your advantage (separating them and blocking attacks) is a key strat. i'm surprised they haven't tried the asymmetrical dual boss fight more-- all i've seen is the Friede boss in 1 out of 3 phases and the Godskin Duo, and they were really lame compared to this.

Lordvessel and Gwynevere: i don't give a shit about narrative or characters or whatever in games to begin with (unless that game is called The Darkness) and i have almost zero idea what the fuck is going on in this game other than the broad strokes of the situation/your quest because that's the only thing that's straightforwardly told to you and it's essentially the same in every game-- but i thought this was a cool moment.

you just beat the hardest boss yet, you walk into this nice looking room and this epic heroic inspiring music plays with a bright and warm gold light glowing behind Gwynevere, a goddess with her tits spilling out who's laying down on a couch in front of you. she gives you the Lordvessel which gives you the ability to warp to bonfires and speaks very nicely to you and encourages you to continue your quest. which is all very odd for this game... then if you hit her she crumbles away and you see that she was just an illusion created by her brother to try to manipulate you into linking the flame. yep, now that's the Souls i know.

the lighting disappears from the room and the entire level, revealing that Anor Londo is actually set at nighttime with super dim cold blue lighting and now you have an angry god telling you that you're done; it's a big "oh shit" moment. i'm surprised more people didn't figure out the illusion for themselves. just everything about that moment sticks out like a sore thumb, this isn't Elder Scrolls or something-- i actually laughed as soon as i heard that music. Gwyndolin's strat was basically to try and turn me into a simp but he fucked up by making Gwynevere so big; how could i possibly fuck that? plus i've only talked to her once. this was no Ranni situation but nice try asshole.

snake legs femboy: one of my favorite gimmick bosses in the series so far. an infinite hallway is a cool idea and i like how we actually got to see him turn the hallway into that. the idea of chasing after a boss endlessly running away from you in an infinite hallway and having to figure out how to deal with his ranged spam to get to him is great. and so are the dramatics after you discover the truth, the boss fight not just starting after you wacking his illusion but you having to seek him out and his followers putting themselves between you and him. the use of environment here is the infinite hallway he abuses and the columns on the side that you use to get to him. this boss fight reminds me of a certain type of mage player who only spam magic from afar and endlessly run away from a boss because they're scared of their shit health and don't know how to fight bosses up close, it's like the reverse scenario here; you're the boss going up against a literal and figurative twink mage.

Gwyndolin has the basic concept of two bosses i hate, which is Moonlight Butterfly (mage boss that you can't physically reach most of the time) and Micolash in Bloodborne which obviously Gwyndolin was the boss they were channeling when making that one (human/humanoid mage that runs away from you) but it's all done correctly here. this is the purest definition of a 'gimmick boss'-- it's only a puzzle, once you figure it out then you have him solved forever-- but it's a prime example of how to do it; an interesting narrative moment, cool and unique concepts, not annoying, enjoyable puzzle (albeit very easy) that's not too obscure, excellent character design, and it's an optional boss.

>hitting her female form has a 100% stagger chance

that's cool and surprisingly obscure; i never knew this and never would have thought to try that.

>Dark Souls 2 has DLC that elevates the game (and has arguably the best dungeon in the series)

speaking of, there's an infamous part of DS2's DLC-- a snow level. i don't know if people hate the boss or level or both-- i think part of the reason is because of an atrocious runback if i recall correctly-- but what's your opinion on this if you know what i'm talking about?

>You sorta understanding what I meant now with my opinion towards bosses in Elden Ring?

yeah i see where you're coming from

> greatsword
I usually get the one from the hidden dragon below Blighttown, that guy's tale has such a sick sword, always love using it. Feel that those type of weapons really shine in these games, same with the DragonBoneSmasher in Demon's Souls.

> Sen's
Probably my favourite zone tied with the Painted World, which was the first designed area (and it shows in terms of design, it loops so perfectly with just a single bonfire). Felt the traps in Sen's were great too like you said, you can predict them all, but there's also some nice treasure hidden away if you fall for them. Like if you fall of the first bridge, you see some demons walking around, hinting that there's a way to get down there etc. Just great design.

My only issue with it is the rollingball controller, which magically just turns back to the 'fuck you' mode, which I always found to be super weird. Feels like there should've been a non-respawnable enemy there that's turning the thing or something. Also love how they hid BigHatLogan behind a wall that you can only break by being a sadist (or luck, as the snakes can break the wall for you).

> iron golem
If you leave the guy alive the boss becomes pretty rough, since he indeed chucks bombs the entire time.

> mimics
The idea was that if you hit chests enough times, or too hard, they break and the treasure inside is lost. But they kinda took a halfmeasure with it, since just a small strike is already enough.

> Ornstein
The pinnacle of dual-boss design imo, since it plays with so many little things. They are two completely complementary designs, slow hard hitting and fast but weak(er). It's alright, but I love how the second phase is decided by who you kill first and that the game's rewards are tied to it. Feel that element doesn't get enough time in the spotlight, really elevates it.

> warp
Should note, I really enjoy how late you get the ability to warp in this game. Really makes you appreciate the worlddesign more and build a map of the game in your head.

> snakelegs femboy
Fun fact, it's not infinite. Just really, really, really, really long. You can technically have him reach the end.

> snowfield
It's an optional area in the DLC that's specifically designed as a 4man co-op raid. The walkback is a nightmare though, but I commend them for trying.

> sees the light of bossdesign
My man

>DS2 snowfield
This runback is infamous because even the optimized route is over 3 minutes long. If you're just winging it, it could easily take 5 to 10 minutes.

The boss itself is an entirely optional extra challenge for those who want it, like DS1 Kalameet or DS3 Midir. Personally, I think all 3 of these are pretty bad bosses, but at least I can just ignore them.

i've probably given the impression that i'm loving this game but i've actually been extremely bored and now even more so because i'm at the post-Anor Londo parts. i've just been talking about it so far from a distant perspective of reviewing the series, noting the aspects that i like about this game and wish they would have continued etc. but as far as actually playing it goes, i hate it. part of the reason why that is, is because i played this game more in the past than i thought i did-- i assumed i hadn't played it since 2011 and i didn't remember playing it much but neither can be true because i know this game way too well; the levels, exploration paths, etc.

so i'm getting nothing out of the levels, any enjoyment i could have had from this game has long been extracted. like Sen's for example, i have that level solved; i got through it 1st try, it was trivial. i'm only continuing to play this because i want context for the entire series and wanna see the DLC. another problem is the mobs, brought this up before but i'm just so fucking over the mob gameplay in this series. the enemies in this game wish they could even hit me much less kill me.

>My man

well i said i understood where you're coming from but that doesn't necessarily mean i agree or think these bosses are better. i agree with you that ER/DS3 (and i would include BB) have a number of similar boss types and have slacked on the "gimmicky" bosses, with those being fewer in number in general and mostly rehashing something from a prior game. as recognized in my notes, i also agree they never implement the environment anymore or have stuff like the Iron Golem thing where if you don't kill that guy on top it changes the boss fight. of course, i would prefer if they didn't lose those aspects but as far as the better bosses go it's no question for me, the bosses in this game are just far too simple/easy, the bosses and combat mechanics in ER are leaps and bounds ahead of this. i understand you're not interested in bosses in games to begin with or the combat in these games so the fact that the bosses are simple and have these elements works for you.

hope you still think i'm cool

>But they kinda took a halfmeasure with it, since just a small strike is already enough

yeah if they made it so that hitting a chest would break it and the treasure goes bye bye, that plus the other improvements i mentioned would make this a great enemy

>that's specifically designed as a 4man co-op raid

ah i guess that's a part of it, solo players trying to do it

>the optimized route is over 3 minutes long. If you're just winging it, it could easily take 5 to 10 minutes.

wow

>You can technically have him reach the end.

oh i didn't know that, i actually kinda like that

>and that the game's rewards are tied to it

forgot to mention that, yeah another great design element




Sif: i don't know the lore so i don't know why this is supposed to be a sad kill but i don't know, something tells me i'll still be giving this boss the 'Agent Coulson award' even if i learn it. beyond the tears or lack thereof, i found this boss to be extremely boring-- he swings a sword around twice and that's about it-- and it's the first one i've played that didn't have anything to it in terms of the environment. the only thing that stands out about him is that he has a bit of mobility but that's it.

Vagrant: i just got my first ever Vagrant in the Tomb of the Giants. i think the idea of rare mysterious enemies popping up is a cool and this is the type of weird obscure shit that i wish they would do again but considering this is the first time i have EVER encountered one and he didn't even drop anything, i think it's a massive missed opportunity. same deal with the Resonance thing which is another great idea i've never ever seen work.

Catacombs: garbage. the pinwheels are either a joke or a truly obnoxious enemy depending on whether you're wearing heavy armor or not. if you are, you can just ignore them but if you're not, you will be hounded across the earth by a gaggle of enemies that are faster than you, do a ton of damage, and will endlessly stunlock you. i just didn't like the level design and i can't put my finger on why that is fully. a part of it is that it's a "everything looks the same" nightmare just like the appropriately named Nightmare Frontier from BB which was the worst level in that game and this even visually reminds me of that level, it looks like fucking shit. and a stupidly long runback to the beginning of the Tomb which i had to do because the first bonfire in the Tomb is deliberately tucked away in an obscure location and so i chugged along thinking it was further ahead.

Pinwheel: have nothing to say about this boss because i hit him 3 times and he died. i don't even know one of his attacks, all i saw was that there were multiple versions of him. as usual though, really striking character design.

Tomb of the Giants: trash. i like the idea of a super dark level on paper but this level really isn't that; you only can't see in the very beginning which is 10 seconds long, and past that you get the skull lantern once you kicked into the pit by Patches and then it's basically functionally identical to any other level beyond its visuals, and once you get the lantern you can (and will) run past the rest of the level in 10 seconds. the only difference is a bad one because you can't use your weapon and the light at the same time so that just makes Tomb of the Giants running past every enemy: the level. the tower-skeletons are an annoying environmental hazard. the big skeleton dog enemies are annoying.

Gravelord Nito: not very neato. an annoying attack (spell that comes from underneath your feet that you can't see coming, can't outrun, and only has an audio cue if he's not in your sight) and a completely brainless fight; you just rub up against him and mash, his melee attacks miss you when you're up on him, back away or use a shield when he does his AOE, and that's it. doesn't play with the environment either. cool looking design though.

Painted World: not seeing the hype on this one. i thought the quality of the level design was in line with the rest of the game, the only thing that stood out was the look of the level and the structure. Roy mentioned that this was the first level they made for the game and i can tell because it's a Demon's Souls level; the bonfire in the beginning is decorative, this is a self-contained level that you appear in the beginning of and unlock shortcuts for.

Priscilla: she can turn invisible but it's a nothing gimmick and she is a nothing boss. i don't think it's even possible for this boss to hit you, i really don't. no environment play either (i guess you can theoretically fall off the arena but that's not going to happen). only thing that stands out about this boss is the character design and the fact that she talks to you and encourages you to move along and you can actually do so instead of fighting her. every single boss i've played since Anor Londo has been greasy balls with shit smeared on the underside.

> bored
Not too surprising since you're still kinda mashing these games out one after another, had the same happen to me with Yakuza games at the time. Love them, but the thought of playing even one more of them made me want to shoot myself.

> vagrants
It and having your world grave-lorded are really scary. Wish that there was an in-game npc or item that allowed you to gravelord your own game, as it completely changes areas. Currently only possible with mods. Vagrants are so obscure they remind me of soul-tendency, nobody understood what the fuck they were smoking but loved it.

> catacombs
I like it as a 'fuck you for exploring you moron' level, as many players went down there and thought "okay so the game is hard, this is probably where I should go, man this is unfair". Bonus points if you experienced vanilla, where skeletons gave 0 souls (!).

> tomb of giants
Didn't find the lantern first two times I entered it, so i was in complete darkness. Really fucked me up.

> painted
Yeah it is really the 'ideal' souls level, multiple levels of elevation, optional areas, a weird wonkey miniboss, ton of hidden items, a hidden invasion and all that with a single bonfire that you constnatly unlock new shortcuts too. It's a far cry from Dark Souls 3's "two bonfires you can see from one another"'s design.

> Priscilla
Kind of interesting if you look at it from a distance, as a prototype boss for the rest of the game as it checks nearly all the boxes.
It has:
- dialogue making you 'care' (not me though)
- has a unique twist (invisibility)
- can be skipped (just walk out)
- has a tail that can be cut, which is extra difficult since it's so small
- has a very high weakness to Fire, which is sorta hinted at by the invader using fire magic i guess.
Only thing missing is jump-attacks from elevation honestly. Not a big fan of it myself, but as a regular boss in a demo-area you can sorta see how it was a good template.

>Not too surprising since you're still kinda mashing these games out one after another

yeah i've been questioning if burnout's a factor but also this isn't too surprising because DS1 is a game i never connected with to begin with; i was a Demon's Souls guy and was excited for DS1 but found it to be a massive disappointment that didn't give me any of the magic that DeS did-- some things never change. if i didn't like it back then when i was new at the game experiencing the levels for the first time(s) and the combat not being trivial then there was no chance for me to like it now. i do appreciate the game more now though; credit where credit's due, the Metroidvania world, covenants, use of environments for bosses, estus, etc. there's cool stuff here

>"okay so the game is hard, this is probably where I should go, man this is unfair"

i remember a friend of mine getting the game and bitching about the skeletons saying how he went to the graveyard first and kept getting killed there and i told him he wasn't supposed to be going in that direction yet, go to the Undead Burg, and he said something like "oh that's stupid, how the fuck was i supposed to know that?". certified classic.

>Didn't find the lantern first two times I entered it, so i was in complete darkness. Really fucked me up.

now that's interesting

>by the invader using fire magic i guess

invader? fuck i always forget to restore my body, what epic item did i miss out on?

>you can sorta see how it was a good template.

for sure, it's a good prototype. i thought maybe "that's the point, she's supposed to be super easy because of this, this and that in the lore and to make you feel like a monster for killing a sweet innocent half-dragon waifu who couldn't defend herself and was just minding her own business" but i found it to be very ambiguous. i kinda hesitated saying she was easy because i didn't want a group of Souls fans tracking me down irl and stringing me up in a local stadium for a public shaming and execution because i missed the point of a Souls boss, like one of those cretinous mouth-breathers who didn't understand that the final boss in DeS was supposed to be pathetic.

needed a break from DS1 and i was really itching to get to Demon's Souls so i played the first level. this was a giant mistake... for DS1's sake. impressions coming soon. i think i'm a Demon's Souls snob, i apologize in advance.

right from the get-go, when that character creation/Load Game music hits... whoa. my massive cock got so hard when i heard that, not kidding you guys. it's such an insanely ethereal mysterious atmospheric minimalist piece; i lament the fact that it's nowhere else in the game.

Vanguard Demon (tutorial boss): i like how you fight him in a small and simple room-- it's just an octagon with brick walls-- and it's pretty brightly lit and gold colored. the boss's theme is awesome; it sounds very old-school fantasy game/movie, it's very foreboding, and has a martial music sound to it with its drums and trumpets obviously tying into the theme of this boss being the 'vanguard' of a demon army, which fittingly he's the first demon you fight. i've not played the remake but i watched a video of the Vanguard fight and they completely changed everything; from the design of the demon to the arena to the music is now all horrific and bombastic, completely stripping out all of its character and turning it into Bloodborne with a western, Doom-ish look. it offends me.

as for the boss design, it's funny, the way people (and myself) reacted to the change from the original Vanguard Demon to the remake one is how i also feel about the change from the Vanguard to the Asylum Demon in Dark Souls 1. obviously Asylum is a better design than Remake Vanguard but it's a similar shift to me of going from an off-kilter, more interesting design to something more grotesque and uninspired. but that is just one example-- amazing visual design is something they've carried through the entire series other than fucking Bloodborne. i like how 'clean' Vanguard's design is, it's not overly busy/detailed like the remake version or the Asylum demon and it's a striking design; those big ornamental teeth that cover its mouth, the 3 big glowing yellow eyes (that are just glow-spots, you can't see any details of an eye) in a triangular pattern, the nubby little wings that can barely lift him off the ground and come out off the top of the back, the downward pointing horns.

The Nexus: an incredibly important aspect of a hub to me is that it provides the player a comfortable place to relax in between the levels-- this is especially important in this series because of how oppressive the levels are. and you just can't beat The Nexus for that, the comfort factor is off the charts. every single aspect of this hub is untouchable; it looks, sounds, and feels like nothing else. The Nexus music? you can't beat. another beautiful ambient track and it perfectly fits a hub; relaxing, atmospheric, ethereal, mysterious, the long pauses between the verses, and it's 'light listening'.

the look of The Nexus is also amazing; the golden magical glyphs and the muted gold glow to the surrounding environment, the dark steel in between, the wild architecture. it's small on the first floor with the npc's and Archstones all laid out in a compact area so it's all very convenient to access, but also big outside of that to give the place a sense of scale and mystery. the Maiden in Black is the best level-up waifu; her character design (the wax covering her eyes, the staff, the wrappings she wears), her dialogue (could recite the speech she gives when you level up by heart), her voice, her feet. DS1's lack of a maiden was an unfortunate consequence of its lack of warp system and every other maiden in the series is a joke.


combat: this is what i was most curious about because i loved this game when it came out, i knew i still would-- i figured i'd appreciate it even more now-- but the one thing i didn't know about was how the 'mob gameplay problem' was going to be. this was a challenging game back then but nowadays every Souls game's (DS2 aside) mobs try to lull me to back slumber as if i was the Old One. so i was worried given the series trend and because this was the first game but i'm pleasantly surprised-- shocked actually, i was getting hit in the first level. going from DS1 to DeS felt like going to a sequel weirdly enough; the mobs are faster, more aggressive, and have more challenging movesets, enemy placement, and numbers. the blue-eyed knights were blocking my hits which i don't recall the knights doing in DS1 other than a certain very rare type of silver knight. so i already think the combat is way better than DS1's (we'll see about DS2). enemies hit hard in this game as well. i also didn't expect your character to be faster and better controlling; movement speed, attack speed, healing, it's faster than DS1/DS2 and the controls are better, much closer to Elden Ring's tight precision than DS1's shitty movement (don't remember how DS2 controlled). so the combat overall is more in line with DS3/ER than DS1/DS2 which is interesting, also interesting that stamina consumption seems quite harsher than DS1's despite the faster character.


Boletaria, 1-1: classic. love the look and level design of this place and i really appreciate the variety of castles in these games; Boletaria is not a fancy royal castle like Stormveil, it's a very plain looking pragmatic defensive structure. took me a second to figure out how to get down there to save Ostrava, i 'vaulted' over the ledge by accident; totally forgot about that in this game and they don't teach it in the tutorial. great shortcuts, i like how they're both stairs left and right to the gate to the boss which is right at the beginning of the level. it's nice they introduce a few blobs right before you go up against the boss so you're not figuring that out during the boss battle. that path to the left near the end with not one, but two dragons just chilling there before a big open field of items is awesome.

i like how it also rewards exploration and using your noodle because first of all the very first thing you're introduced to in this level is a cutscene of a red dragon flying around and landing on the bridge you start the level out on. then if you come here you see that one of those dragons is that same red dragon from earlier. and now you have a long bridge to cross which is right next to where that dragon is so you could put it together that perhaps that red dragon might be paying that bridge a visit. this scenario was repeated in DS1 but i think it was done better here, it ties into exploration and i think it's more subtle-- no burnt markings on the floor of the bridge like there was in DS1.


Phalanx: i really liked this boss. the boss itself is a harmless blob that can't attack but is defended by a ton of blob mobs using spears and ranged attacks with shields on the front of them and an exposed back; it's fun whittling down a horde of slow defensive enemies and having to be on the move and manage this many enemies. there's a DPS element because over time both the boss and its minions heal themselves and the boss continuously regenerates more minions until you kill all of them. it's a very dynamic fight; at first the vast majority of them are covering the boss with only a little on the field but as the fight goes on it gets really messy because so many of them detach themselves off the boss to make formations around him, there are stragglers that'll come after you, and they can also re-attach themselves to the boss as well as re-position themselves on the bosses body to fill in gaps on his body. all of these elements work really well together.

it's got multiple approaches; you can play it safer by whittling down the blobs until there's none left or try to carve out a weakpoint and go for it, and there's firebombs to throw and turpentine to light your weapon on fire with. also environment use; columns to hide behind to recuperate and heal or for defensive reasons. another great boss theme, leans even more into martial music (befitting this even more military-themed boss), it wouldn't sound out of place in a game like Rome: Total War.

awesome boss, i thought it played really well

some thoughts on the direction this series has taken:

i was ready to call DS1 an awesome game because i went in assuming that it would be a 'proper Souls game' but honestly, now having played it, i think ER is just as legitimate a Souls game-- more so actually. there's this idea being pushed that this series has gone mainstream lately and, in the process, has stagnated and been watered down, but that wasn't a recent thing; DS1 is a mainstream game and i feel that it was already totally stagnated/watered down there. the difference for me is that ER is wayyyyyyyy better to DS1 in some core parts of the series-- levels, combat, difficulty-- while DS1 didn't even improve upon DeS (it went backwards).

all this to say, don't be surprised to see DS1 at the bottom of my ranking of the Souls games.

notes for DeS:

i love how old-school DeS is. it's so rooted in arcade and early console game design from the level select, music, difficulty, crypticness, levels with little to no checkpoints/shortcuts, and extremely high gameplay density with no bullshit and minimal cutscenes and dialogue.

i nearly had a goddamn heart attack in The Nexus because i was going to Sage Freke and i used a shortcut through the stairs and it damaged him on the fall down and he lost his shit-- thankfully he didn't actually aggro and try to kill me because it was too little damage. fuck's sake, man.

i don't have a problem with the consumable health and mp item system in this game; once i started being consumable-starved, i found a health regenerating ring and shield not long after (and after the first playthrough you'll always know where that stuff is to begin with). there's a lot of that stuff in this game so you just use regenerating shit and then healing and magic items become items for topping off your shit in the middle of a battle and from that point forward you'll never run out of those items again. so the only problem i can see with this system is just the sheer amount of healing items you can always have stocked but you can just restrict yourself-- i want to say that the Estus system fixed that but it ends up being the same thing where you need to restrict yourself because you get so many uses, the only difference is that Estus or the blood vials tops off at around 20 every game which is technically less than 99 but it's still an absurd amount.


Stonefang Tunnel, 2-1:

not my favorite level; it's just straightforward with nothing much to it and it's visually bland

gotta love the non-respawning crystal lizards, almost had a vietnam flashback the first time i saw one

really convenient shortcut; it's right in the beginning of the level and it takes you to both the blacksmith and the end of the level

forgot how many sneaky enemy placements there are in this game, there's always a chance some jagoff is hiding around a corner waiting to cheap shot you

weapon type resistance matters in this game, pulled out a mail breaker for this level


Armored Spider:

another awesome boss. i really like that you have to fight your way to the boss; you start off in a tunnel with the spider firing projectiles at you and you have some cover on the sides, it has a projectile that webs you up and makes it so you can't dodge-roll or run, and has a huge AOE that 'resets' this after you're up in the spiders face for too long so that you're forced to go back into the beginning of the tunnel and do the loop again. interesting melee attacks; they come out very quickly and i like that he varies his swipe-attack with an attack that doesn't hit you if you're standing in the middle. another banger boss theme.

so far the bosses have aged very well. they hold up because i get something different from these bosses than i do the rest of the series, whereas with DS1/BB/DS3 i get more primitive versions of bosses i play in ER and without the mechanics of that game. another giant problem is that the more i play of the former games in the series the more i see that all of their 'gimmicky' bosses past DeS are rehashes, and horrendous ones at that. like i praised Gywndolin at the time but now i have to take it back because it's just a really shitty rehash of Armored Spider.

the Gwyndolin fight reuses the exact same concept and puzzle-- you're in a thin corridor and you need to run to the boss while it fires projectiles at you, the puzzle aspect being that there's cover on the sides, one of the projectiles is a fast single-hit that goes through cover and one is a slow multi-hit projectile that doesn't. and the Armored Spider is an actual fight once you get up to it, whereas Gwyndolin runs away so it's just a puzzle boss, which the puzzle is way better in Armored Spider because the cover is so subtle-- there is no not noticing the huge columns sticking out of the walls in the Gwyndolin fight.

the projectile segment is way better in Armored Spider as well because he has more interesting, varied projectiles and they're harder to deal with. AS has a fast web ball that webs up the player, a web projectile that covers areas in webs and if you run into them you'll get webbed up, 2 different types of fireball attacks, and he can use projectiles up close as well.


Tower of Latria, 3-1:

the sound design is intense. the buzzing of insects, bells ringing, singing from that lady, the super loud jumpscares when Rydell groans in pain or shouts "save me".

great labyrinth level design. i like how many keys and locked doors there are to keep up with. i reached the boss without having found the key to unlock Rydell's cell, i have no idea where that is.

rich atmosphere and visuals. love that there's no roof to most of the prison so you can see architecture outside and this weird dark green sky which bathes the vast majority of the level in green.

first DS2 moment: the iron maidens with mobs in them. it's literally impossible to dodge the attack and they poison you. it's not even a one time thing because even past the first time, what am i supposed to do, not open them when there's also ones with treasure in them? pretty lame.

Mind Flayers: you got Bloodborne in my Demon's Souls. it's an oppressive enemy but not annoying like the eyeball guys in BB.

really cool shortcut. you could try to run through the bridge and dodge the nonstop onslaught of arrows but it's really difficult (i tried a few times and i never got through-- just thought right now as i'm typing this that perhaps a shield would work) and has a long runback if you fail, or take the longer safer path which eventually puts you behind it. either way, once you get behind it there's a lever to turn off the mechanism.

Fool's Idol:

3rd banger in a row. the "boss will not die until you take out that dude" is a great puzzle the first time, i'll give it that, but every time after that is a chore-- the guy is just so out of the way.

thankfully there's more to this boss past the one-and-done puzzle. i like how the magic traps are invisible and only briefly appear when the boss and her duplicates disappear so you have to move carefully and observe and memorize where the traps are. and how the bosses don't come after you, you have to go to them or attack from range.

i had no healing items left, my Kris Blade was doing low damage, and i didn't want to get reamed by those traps so i mostly hanged back at the entrance where i saw no traps and hid behind a column and used Soul Arrow. i noticed how the real one mixes up her position even if you're just hitting the fake ones so i shot the fake ones until the real one was within my range.

another great boss theme and character design. interesting use of environment and mobs; columns to hide behind to recuperate and observe the field and plan your attack, tons of indestructible benches to restrict movement and make getting to and away from them more complicated, and a lot of zombie mobs that don't attack you-- as i found out they're there to fuck with your lock-on if you don't clear them out before you start the battle.

Been wanting to get back into this. Kid's asleep, wife's out in the city. What better way to spend my time than talk about Demon's Souls.

> remake
I have very few nice words to say about it. Soulless is an apt phase to use. Every ounce of personality, design, and atmosphere - ruined for some particle effects. I generally also miss the vasaline look, made the whole game feel super dreamy. It's doubly sad knowing that the original is now basically abandonned, and will never be ported or supported. So unless you want to play on the PS3, you're out of luck with that game.

> nexus
Made a post about it before, but it just fuses everything together perfectly. From the shopkeepers in handy locations, to hidden items, multiple layers, a good atmosphere - it has it all, while also being very ' gamey' with the warpzones being easily accesible. Bonuspoints for having the Maiden in Black say her text WHILE you level, instead of before it (a mistake they made in later games for some reason).

> combat
It's a bit more simple, but very apt and effective. Speed is higher, fire has an active purpose as shown in the very first level, blue knights are agressive and a nightmare in groups. Red Knights are great too, and I love the little one they hid away ... with the reward for beating him being a locked door. Delightfully evil.

> ideabox
In general my biggest regret with the series is that you can already see the ideas on how to challenge and fool the player was getting empty by the end of Demon's Souls. Now with Dark Souls I could kind of excuse the re-use, since it was now multiplatform and many (understandably so) didn't play the original due to its limited release. But many traps and tricks afterwards are just...the same. Again and again the same Patches tomfoolery, the same boulder, the same rain of arrows (except now, worse).

The feeling of everything being permanent was also great, which was lessend with each game, to the point of it basically not mattering in the end.

Feel that the single-bonfire concept worked way better than the multiple bonfires in later entries. Especially Dark Souls 3 which was just a disaster on that front.

> healing
I liked the Estus system in DS3, in how you had to choose between mana and health - it wasn't perfect, but it had good ideas (for once). Think Estus as a system is great, but do think they break it usually in the end game with you having like 15+ sips that all heal you 100%.

> Iron maidens
This sort of plays into the online system, you are supposed to help and or/trick other players. I get that this is basically dead now (sadly) but those maidens tended to have messages around them like "trap ahead" or "treasure ahead" with another going "liar" etc. It's those little mechanics from Souls that have mostly vanished.

> fool's idol
Always liked that boss. It's a long dungeon, quite mazelike. So it's nice that it's more of a puzzle than a straight up 'memorize the if.rames". boss. I remember my first time fighting her going "please don't die I have no idea how to get back here". hahahah.

> kris blade
IIRC that blade makes you take bonus magical damage, so beware. Could be remembering wrong.

>Every ounce of personality, design, and atmosphere - ruined for some particle effects.

i didn't know how heinous it was until i watched some videos of it when i first started my DeS playthrough-- it's sacrilege. everything i saw didn't look or sound like Demon's Souls whatsoever, they changed everything. Blueballs Games wins my worst developer award, they're true hacks. not a single ounce of vision and talent, which is why they've exclusively done ports, remasters, and remakes since their inception almost 20-fucking-years ago* and they can't even do remakes right. they now solely exist to parasitize, ruin, and replace other developer's games-- i mean is it even possible to be a worse developer than that?

*with the exception of their very first game, some bottom-of-the-barrel twin-stick shooter called Blast Factor that i and nobody else has ever heard of or played-- i just learnt of its existence on their wiki page.

>It's doubly sad knowing that the original is now basically abandonned, and will never be ported or supported. So unless you want to play on the PS3, you're out of luck with that game.

yeah that's the biggest offense of all, it usurps the original. such a giant missed opportunity as well. it is beautiful purely technically speaking (that's the only thing Blueballs has going for them), how amazing would it have been to have that graphical fidelity but as a real remake, with active online and on a modern console. online would be a legitimate reason to play the remake but by the time i get a PS5 it'll prolly be just as dead as The Archstones server.

>made the whole game feel super dreamy

i'm a big fan of this game's stylized, surreal art style. this and Elden Ring are their best looking games for me by far.

>I get that this is basically dead now (sadly) but those maidens tended to have messages around them like "trap ahead" or "treasure ahead" with another going "liar" etc

well that's embarrassing... the messages weren't on my mind because i've been playing DeS offline (i didn't want the online median skewing my world tendency).

>Bonuspoints for having the Maiden in Black say her text WHILE you level

good catch, forgot about that

>Blue and Red knights

agreed, awesome enemies. they shit on the black and silver knights for me, both visual design and gameplay wise. the only good change/addition the remake did that that i'm aware of is the inclusion of wearable blue and red knight armor. that's sick, i'll give them that.

>idea box running on fumes

why do you think that is? correct me if i'm wrong but the sense i'm getting from you is that you think they're creatively bankrupt. i'm not a creative myself so maybe i'm naive/ignorant on this matter but the idea that Miyazaki and co. cannot come up with new ideas after making a game like DeS is extremely difficult for me to believe, i just can't comprehend that. obviously an enormous part of this is that they purposely play it safe and water it down because these are big mainstream games now but beyond that do you think they're also tapped of creative juices?

either way, i know we're never getting another DeS; even when the popularity of this series dies i'm certain they'll just stop making them.

>The feeling of everything being permanent was also great

yeah it's a unique, paranoid, and sometimes heart-attack-inducing thing-- it's awesome. like Yurt, that is a genuinely mind-blowing troll. they have never, ever, come up with such an amazing, ballsy character/quest like that again. even their rehash-- Lautrec in DS1-- is such a pussified version of it. Yurt can leave an entire body trail and fuck your game up, whereas Lautrec can... kill 1 firekeeper/take away 1 bonfire-- big whoop, there are other firekeepers and bonfires-- which you can even undo that by killing him in Anor Londo.

>but do think they break it usually in the end game with you having like 15+ sips that all heal you 100%.

Estus is a more elegant system but that there is the problem


notes for DeS:

now playing online, figured it would be dead for random co-op/invasions/Old Monk but i should have done this sooner because i'm seeing signs of life; i tried invading and didn't find anyone in the first couple of levels i tried but i got a hit in 1-2 and beat that ass. thankfully for me he was clearly new at these games.

got another hit in 1-2 but he had a butt-buddy with him and sent him out alone to get me. we're both horrid at pvp so it was an even match but he got the best of me.

i need to find/make the disgusting pvp shit like the Scraping Spear

i love the concept of Faith, i just wish it was more than a Second Chance dip and health regen tank, mages have all the cool shit in this game. i picked the Knight class but immediately pivoted to mage as soon as i found that out.

this is the only game in the series (other than DS2 SOTFS) that has the 'the level is the boss, and the boss is a cap to the level' design which i wish they'd have found a middle ground for in the current games. their focus now on making the bosses really hard and deep encounters and not the levels is, ya know, kind of a problem when so much of the game isn't bosses.


Shrine of Storms, 4-1:

this level ain't fucking around. right out of the gate you're facing a gauntlet of 6 oppressive skeletons in a row, and the last 2 you fight at the same time. love that they hound you with their rolling, that the roll itself is an attack, and that once you hitstun them for too long they roll out of it.

cool section where you fight gold skellys at the end on a ledge with flying manta rays launching barbs at you (being a mage was really handy for those rays)

a Vanguard Demon is out in the open waiting for a beatdown

no shortcut in this one

skellys in the tight underground tunnels

Sparkly the Crow jumpscare

a black skelly dual-wielding katanas with red eyes is guarding a Crescent Falchion which is now the weapon i'm using

awesome level; fun mobs, fun exploration, looks great


Adjudicator:

i heard this boss was garbage but i don't know, i thought he was decent. he has the least stuff going on of any of the bosses so far but he still has some neat shit. nice environment where you can go upstairs and use ranged attacks on his bird weakspot or go melee on the ground floor-- might be some interesting ways to fuck with him using the environment, will have to try that next time. his weakpoints are a clever way for preventing circle-strafe or keep-away abuse; you have to stay in front of him to hit the blade in his gut weakspot, or if you're playing ranged you'll be in danger of his ranged tongue attack.

sick looking design too. when you first go in and you're on the roof looking down on him through the hole, he kinda spooked my guts off by knocking me down with his tongue, wasn't expecting that. now i see where they got that moment in the DS1 tutorial.


Boletaria, 1-2:

i appreciate how straightforward this area is-- it's literally a straight line. nice change of pace. you fight enemies and dodge a dragon on the bridges, done-- gotta love it.

Part 2 of saving Ostrava, whatever i eventually get out of this quest better be good

merchant in the tunnels underneath the bridge but sells nothing of interest to me

mysterious locked door before the fog gate

this level has a beautiful view

my Soul Arrow cannot catch this coked up dragon doing bombing runs


Tower Knight:

don't have too much to say because i crippled him with my ass-beating. ignored the archers, ran up and knocked him down. i hit his feet for a second and then thought "wait, lemme try his head". ran over there, hit him 2 or 3 times, and was shocked at him dying on the vine-- i had no idea about the head taking ridiculous damage. by the time i could even register the amount of pain i was dishing out he was KO'd.

that was really fun, awesome boss. love everything about him; his super weakspot, the look of him, his intro cutscene, the glowing blue magic that spews out of his heels when you cut them, the archers, his shield, the shockwaves, and that he falls down when you fuck up his heels. next time i'll fight him without bopping his noggin so i can see what a duel with him is like rather than an unceremonious execution.


Boletaria, 1-1 revisited for the Pure White event:

crystal lizard jumped off the cliff with a smile on its face

Executioner Miralda sounded intimidating but she was a chump

that sewer at the end had to be a deliberate troll, it looked like the continuation of the level so i dropped in and died. was in body form too but luckily i got my body back with my successful invasion afterwards.


Tower of Latria, 3-2:

such a weird fucked up looking place, love it. i don't know why Bloodborne and the horror parts of the Dark Souls games couldn't look cool as well.

good detail of the gargoyle mobs pretending to be statues

whoa, one of those things on the ground floor swampy part instantly broke my armor and weapon with one vomit attack. took me like 2500 souls to repair all my shit. there's no warning, it's just you get hit and all your shit is totally wrecked; that is fucking ruthless, man. luckily i had a backup weapon on me and Soul Arrow but i died soon after that anyway because i thought climbing that tentacle wrapping itself around a tower would lead me to a secret but it didn't lead to anything and then i died falling off on the way down. i played this level in body form until i died, no invaders yet. didn't finish this level, left off here.

> atmosphere
My most hated change is the Tower of Latria. In the original, the place is covered with yellow tapestries and banners - to connect the place to the Monk boss. In the Remake they made these banners red...cuz that's scary. But the monk is still yellow. They had no idea what they did.

> remake replaces original
Imo a remake should always come bundled with the original, if only as an unlockable. Especially with older games where the original is usually like 5mb...

> message system
It was always pretty well implemented, and worked well with the game's obscure nature. The game could technically get away with unfair ambushes or other things since players could learn from it and teach other players about it in-game.

> remake armor
First I heard of this, did hear about the super obscure hidden Penatrator armor.

> ideabox is empty
Hard truth: the combat and traversal system isn't deep enough and options are ironically too wide in breathe to know what a player has in it's kit. So most traps and tricks have to play around players being able to roll, run and smack something. Which is very limited. They can't even assume a player has a bow.

I'm not saying they're creatively bankrupt, but they are very actively re-using the same traps and tricks over, and over again probably since they're the only one's that work. Trapfloors. Falling boulders. Trap-tiles. Enemy-ambush around the corner/ceiling. Arrows coming from afar that you need to circumvent. This door is locked from the other side.

I do feel, especially regarding the latter, they've gotten very complacent. All the shortcuts in Demon's Souls were extremely organic. You literally unlocked the two realistic towers in 1-1. You killed a dragon in 1-2 to make the runback easier. In 2-1 you make mining-equipment work so you can use that to skip a part (which is well done too, since the mining-equipment goes from the smith to the mine, makes sense in the world). etc. They all felt very part of the world. Now it's just a bunch of locked doors that go one way.

> Lautrec
He was pretty cool, but also he had a few flaws aside from what you mentioned:
- they already did it once, so people were more cautious
- he is UNDENIABLY evil and constantly talks about murdering that bonfire maiden.
Yurt was way more subtle. He leaves a trail of bodies and doesn't gloat about it, they just die and you go "huh, where did they go"? There's also a pretty cool other quest where you have to actively kill all the NPC's. Pretty sweet.

> invasions
Note, the system in DeS is weird as it temporarily bans you from PvP with a user after you've played him, so you don't mass invade the same guy over and over.

> pvp
Moonlight Greatsword is great against noobs, as it ignores shields. So they often panic. Scraping Spear + Acid Cloud ruins their day too.

> 4-1
Always loved that there was a pretty big skip in this level and they kept it in because players found it and they didn't want to take that away. Definitely one of the best levels in the series imo. Love that big staircase at the start with those menacing skeletons.

> 1-2
Still has a lot of depth too, with the dual-layered bridge. You can go on top, and go underneath for other things (like Ostrava).

> 3-2
IIRC even Gametrailers did a level-analysis about this before they died, great site.

>In the Remake they made these banners red

i saw that, they completely butchered the sound design of 3-1 as well. they also have a huge sound problem throughout the entire game because they made the music so low in the mix by default that you can't hear it so you have to pump up the music and/or pump down the sound effects to get it balanced.

>They had no idea what they did.

yeah but that's why Bluetip was the perfect developer to hand off the remake to-- who else could have been better than people who don't know/don't give a fuck about the visuals, sound, and lore of Demon's Souls and will just make arbitrary changes?

>but also he had a few flaws aside from what you mentioned

i didn't spot a lie. Lautrec is cool in a vacuum for sure but it's an example of Fromsoft's balls dropping off.

one of the interesting aspects about the Yurt quest is how it ties into the message feature. the way you get a sense that Yurt could be bad news before bodies start dropping is from messages-- even now on the Archstones server there are multiple messages like "Bad guy up ahead" with many likes. so the scenario the player is put in is, do you trust people's messages and kill him where he stands or do you decide that it's the community trying to troll naive new players into killing an important npc? and the whole situation is brilliant because the game is set up so that killing npcs is the last thing you ever want to do, every npc you've gotten has been very important, so you're naturally going to be extremely hesitant to just kill one when you don't know anything about him, and nobody could possibly foresee how much of an absolute menace this guy can be.

>pretty cool other quest where you have to actively kill all the NPC's

there are other RPGs that have a questline like the assassination one, like the Dark Brotherhood in the Elder Scrolls, but killing random npc's that makes no difference to you is not the same thing at all.

>most traps and tricks have to play around players being able to roll, run and smack something

that's an astute observation which hadn't occurred to me. i guess the solution to that would be to implement some Zelda-like features; inherent abilities like Runes in BOTW/TOTK, tools and items you can't get rid of, shit like that.

>Moonlight Greatsword, Scraping Spear + Acid Cloud ruins their day too.

classic. it's a truly sad sight to see where their pvp went after this game.

>Gametrailers

whoa, blast from the past. totally forgot about Gametrailers.


DeS notes:


the spells/miracles in this game can be very expensive, i purchased Evacuate and it cost me 20k souls

i need to kill an Archdemon to go to 1-3? what's a fuckin Archdemon

i love the soul/body form system in this game, it's a total joke in the rest


Shrine of Storms, 4-2:

i just came here to rescue Saint Urbain for now

it's cool that you can just drop down to where the grim reaper is from the start instead of having to go through staircases with enemies


Stonefang Tunnels, 2-2:

worse mobs than 1-1-- lots of lava/fire enemies who are boring chores to fight, particularly those big lava bugs-- but better exploration

nice maze tunnels

when i reached the end of the tunnels to get to the boss i thought it looked too high to drop down there

all i could think about when using the shortcut was the reuse of it in Bloodborne

Patches tries to fuck me over again, i guess that big lava bug that drops in front of me was supposed to seal the exit but he just plopped down and didn't move so i just left-- classic Fromsoft jank.

it's cool that there's no unlocking the shortcut, you can just skip straight to the boss from the start

that lava still cuts through my health like crazy even with the fire defense ring that Patches gave me, maybe if i had my Water Veil spell with me i could have picked up those items in the lava at the end of the tunnel


Flamelurker:

i remember this guy brutalizing me back in the day, it's a weird experience revisiting this game and seeing how tame he is/how lame i was. was surprised to see a boss being hitstunned, and i'm just using a Falchion.

this is the first boss i've played so far that's the closest to a "straight up fight" in the parlance of Roy; he's got no major gimmicks. he also has no unique moves either but to be fair within the context of this game his fighting style-- quick, mobile, aggressive-- stands out, and being hitstunnable and the fire trail are unique elements, so taking all that into account i think it's fine, this is a good boss.


Valley of Defilement, 5-1:

tough level, these mobs are no joke

the rats that instantly Plague you after hitting you once are annoying as fuck

really cool vertical design

the push attack the mobs use on this level is evil


Leechmonger:

i like his projectiles that cover you with leeches that drain your health and slows you down a bit, or if you stand in the swamp parts too long the same thing happens except half your body gets covered in leeches (good detail) but i don't know if your health drains slower or you're not as slow than when you get a full body of them.

i'm also a fan of health regenerating mechanics, you can stop it if you destroy those leech piles on him after he starts. there's something else about this boss/level which not many people know about (i had no idea myself) that's not been done anywhere else in the game or the entire series. what happened was that i ended up fighting Leechmonger twice because i was using an unupgraded weapon and ended up dying, and the second time i was there i could have sworn there were more corpses lying around and looked up what was going on and found this video by Illusory Wall:



basically, mobs that fall off the level end up in Leechmonger's arena with items on their corpses-- crescent grass, a few upgrade materials and a great club. it's an interesting concept that takes advantage of the vertical level design which has the boss on the bottom and i wish they would have developed this idea further in future games.


Dragon God coming up next. i remember Dragon God and Storm King being the two bosses that i found to be chores in my original experience with DeS so we'll see if anything's changed.

> archdemon
A 'final' boss of a zone, i.e. the 2-3 of 4-4 boss.

> soulform
The body/soul form balance is the best in the series and they keep trying to replicate it by doing something else and jobbing entirely. What's great about the system is that they both have pro's and cons, unlike other games where one is just horrible and the other is great. They also tie into each other very well and constantly rotate so that there's a good selection of both forms on the server.

If you're in Soulform, you can't be invaded, but you can assist or invade players. If you beat a boss or help kill a boss, you become human. If you kill the player through invasion, you become human.

If you're human, you can be invaded, but can't assist players. If an invader kills you, you become soul-form.

They also have great set of differences:
SoulForm:
+ fully silent, allowing you to sneak up on players / enemies
+ immune to Invasion
+ immune to negative world-changes
+ damage buff based on Character Tendency
- less HP, potentially loses a ring-slot to compesate somewhat
- cannot summon helpers

HumanForm
+ more HP and thus a free ring slot
+ can summon helpers
- no damage bonus
- not silent (requires Thief ring to compensate)
- can be invaded
- dying leads to darker world tendency

NOTE: the Remake ofcourse botched this, by removing the 'silent' buff to Soulform.

As you can see, both are pretty interesting forms with strong pros and cons. It's a brilliant fucking system honestly.

> kill NPCs
Yeah in Skyrim nobody cares if you kill a random guard or w/e for a quest, too bad he's gone. Killing Freke means no magic spells or changing what spells you have - it's a brutal questline.

> PvP
Sen's had the right idea with all the oppertunities for the camo-spell to hide as a statue and ambush players, but the online is super busted in that game since you have to actively active it with no real benefit outside of drop% (which is still only a minor buff). People ruined PvP for themselves the day they made it into a FGC-lite.
And let's not forget the fact that you can become a boss-fight in this game - just a timeless masterpiece. Had a blast with my invincible build just walling people's progress hahaha

> 2-2 shortcut
It's such a crazy shortcut too, you can legit skip the entire level if you know the route.

> flamelurker
Yeah he's one of the few 'straight up' fights, but even he has a few interesting gimmicks. His magic weakness aside, he's got a unique rage-buff. After taking 70% HP damage he will gain a pretty significant attack-speed and agression boost. And as an aside: being one of the few bosses that is a straight-up fight, in itself makes him unique and interesting. It's all about contrast imo. Add 20 more Flamelurker bosses and he becomes forgetable.

> leechmonger secret
I remember this, it's a super cool little idea. In modern games you'd get a tooltip for it.

> most traps and tricks have to play around players being able to roll, run and smack something
They really need to add something into the mix, though to be fair they did with Sekiro and it still didn't amount to much. Wolf can jump, enemyhop and even walljump yet there were no real traps that used these mechanics iirc. Maybe they just want to play it safe.

> Yurt
IIRC he also doesn't even say he killed them. The NPC is just gone with his bloodpile and equipment lying on the ground. You can tell the devs really just wanted to make something wacky and unique since the project was already written off as a failure. The message-system is so unique and plays into so many things.

> dragon god
As far as 'cinematic' bosses go, I think this is still their best one in that he's just...there. You can easily do him in a few minutes, he's no threat to you if you know what you're doing. Meanwhile Bed of Chaos, while still interesting, is just a nightmare even if you have a strategy.

>It's a brilliant fucking system honestly.

agreed. the human/soul form system is fucked in every game past DeS; BB has no body/soul form system or equivalent at all, ER has an equivalent but it's absolute garbage and doesn't open you up to invasions, DS3 does have an incentive but you can just pop an Ember right before a fog gate. i guess you can also do that in DeS but that's not nearly as much of a problem because in that game it's the levels that are difficult, not the bosses generally as there's few bosses that don't have a major weakness to exploit if you want to. DS1 had the right idea of forcing you to go human at a bonfire, if only it had an incentive to do it to begin with. there's another issue with DS3/ER i'll address later in this post.


more brilliant shit about DeS's human/soul mechanic:

the way it feeds into itself. like, Terry just beat a boss and is now going through a new level in body form. he's feeling great, teeth looking like Chiclets, but uh oh, Terry gets invaded. Terry struggles against invader and dies, losing his body. now Terry invades Gerry to try to get his body back, et cetera.

the risk/reward of the system is intense, when i'm in human form i fuckin feel it. not only am i gonna lose it when i die (and Eyes are pretty hard to come by) but it makes that world's World Tendency darker, there's huge consequences.

i feel that bosses giving you back your body is an underrated part of the equation and i think the only other game that does this is DS3. it gives a way for people to get back their bodies without popping a limited item or winning an invasion and it's not optional so it continuously puts people back in their bodies to fuel the system and constantly gives people a taste of having a body, getting them hooked to the rush of the risk/reward and wanting more, further encouraging them to invade and pop Eyes instead of hoarding them.

another underrated thing that no other game did is invasions directly giving you your body back rather than giving you an item to get your body back-- a seemingly insignificant difference but one forces you to use it while the other one runs falling risk to Gamer Hoarder Syndrome. details matter.

also, when did these games start being able to summon 3 co-op players instead of 2?

>NOTE: the Remake ofcourse botched this, by removing the 'silent' buff to Soulform

that's weird, what was even the reason behind that change?

>but the online is super busted in that game since you have to actively active it with no real benefit outside of drop% (which is still only a minor buff)

it's the worst. it's also the worst that you don't get the Red Eye Orb until you beat The Four Kings and you need to be human to invade. so many problems with that, i mean even just from the perspective of: want to restore your Humanity? try invading. oh but you need Humanity to begin with to invade... to get Humanity. good one! really cool, hope ya like grinding rats. everything that could have been done to destroy invasions has been done in this series, RIP.

another important thing that the rest of the games never did (except DS2) was the difference in framing the health loss (for games that even have this); in DS3 and ER it doesn't show you not having full health when in soul/basic form. they made this change to make pussies not feel like the game is too harsh and that they're missing something.

the feeling of harshness is important to these games, and not feeling like you're missing something impacts the gameplay; a lot of players are going to feel much less incentive to go human because they don't think about it because it's not on-screen and even if they do they're more likely to feel like they don't need that because that's just "extra health" rather than "getting back my proper amount of health".

>People ruined PvP for themselves the day they made it into a FGC-lite.

i like how it wasn't enough that this fucking normie cunt community begged Fromsoft to destroy this unique feature forever, which of course they obliged, but they also had to ruin what was even left via the FGC-lite thing you're talking about. DS3 is nothing but fight club bullshit, invasions were officially replaced by matchmaking arena in ER, and i remember back when DS1 came out there was already a widespread enforcement of 'invasion etiquette'; they actually expected invaders to play it like a duel with tons of rules therefore destroying everything unique about it and turning it into any other fighting game. and not just any other fighting game, but a fighting game where you have a high chance of fighting someone who'll throw the game if you do anything "cheap". DS1, i'm sure, is nothing but fight club shit by now.

>he's got a unique rage-buff

i forgot to mention the buff, good catch

>'cinematic' bosses go

what other bosses in the series would you consider cinematic?


DeS notes:

forgot to mention: 5-1's an awesome level, Leechmonger's an alright boss, and 2-2 is awesome-- brought down if you go through it just because of the shitty enemies, but elevated when you skip it

Pure Clearstone from Ostrava? all that effort and that's it? i mean that's a decent reward i guess, just no use to me because i'm a mage

i love the voice acting in this game but one thing that's an odd choice is that Boldwin and Biorr clearly share the same voice actor and the guy is barely even trying to sound different.

this is about DS1 but i just learned that Curses used to stack, lol that's good, i wish they didn't change that


Dragon God:

by far the shittiest boss so far. i mean i like the core concept of indirectly fighting a sick looking enormous dragon but they couldn't come up with something that was interesting to play. i agree with Roy in that he's just there; it was a chore to learn, it's a shitty janky trial & error stealth section, but now that i know how it works he's not frustrating or anything, it's just a minor chore i'll have to do every time. which isn't a big deal but it is a waste of a few minutes of my life doing something boring. verdict: trash. oh and at the start i got the Dragon Bone Crusher or whatever it's called but i won't be able to use it.


Boletaria, 1-3:

love this level, you get it all here; brutal mobs, great exploration, cool looking and well-designed level

hey those guys from Lower Undead Burg are here trying to ambush you in the same way

so many enemies in this level, it's a gauntlet

i've been waiting for that unholy trinity of red knights with spears at the end of this level the entire game, i certainly did not forget about those guys. i pulled them one at a time with a bow because i was in human mode and i wasn't willing to lose it. even by themselves they were stomping on me, goddamn. next time i'll man up and face them at the same time.

dogs are always an annoying enemy in games

the second mage vendor, Yuria, is really easy to miss and she's the one with all the cool spells. having to remember about the locked door at the end of 1-2, which was quite a while ago, is kind of ridiculous. then once you get to the end you need to figure out to put on the Official's Cap to unlock the staircase which would be a pretty obscure puzzle if you were playing offline. you'd think this would have been for secret shit rather than an important vendor.

enemies are hitting hard as fuck in this level, jesus. and my World Tendency in Boletaria is on the brighter side.

holy crow at that runback, you can fuck right off with that. there's like 10 dudes guarding the fog gate and 3 of them are the red knight spear guys. i don't know how to run past them but i figured out a solution: don't get good, but do use Warding and tank hits pushing your way through. hey if you're gonna be a scrub, be a clever one. i guess Cloak would have worked but i didn't have that on me.


Penetrator:

fucking died the first time and lost my body because i was trying to switch to a different weapon because the un-upgraded weapon i was using was doing too little damage and then died fumbling in my menu like a moron.

second time Biorr was fighting him and i wish i could have chosen to not have him assist, i wanted to make this fight last a while but i didn't know if he would permanently die if Penetrator killed him so i killed Penetrator quickly while he was distracted. so yeah i'm not gonna have too much to say here and i'm filling in gaps with info on him from fextralife.

he's an action boss like Flamelurker. i think i like Penetrator's fighting style, attack pattern, and gimmick better than his. Penetrator's gimmick is modeled after his namesake; you'll take partial damage through any shield in the game and one of his attacks is completely unblockable. and while that didn't apply to me because i wasn't using a shield in this game, i think that's a really interesting unique mechanic. i like using shields in ER so that's something i'd like to see there or one of the future titles.

i'll go ahead and say this is an awesome boss even though i barely fought him

> humansoulform
Yeah it really always makes sure, as a result, that there's always a batch of both forms on the server. As people that beat content, become human, and will eventually die (either to NPCs or to invaders looking to become human). It also gave invaders and helpers actual incentive to engage, since there was a tangiable reward that you needed (human form). Good note on it also not giving an item, but really the form instead, otherwise you just hoard it.

> 3 man co-op
I think that was Dark Souls 2 which tried to have 'raids' with its optional super content in the DLC.

> silent form buff removed in remake
Probably just an oversight.

> invasion in Dark Souls 1
Fact that it's a limited resource outside of extremely well hidden Covenants was a big mistake. Again, Demon's Souls gives those tools immediately. Hell you could even miss out on messages in Dark Souls...

> healthbar loss
It was especially brutal in DeS since it was the first title and people had never seen this before. Dying rewards you with half health? What the fuck. It was such a 'flip of the script' that it was immediately interesting just by being counter to what was being released at the time.

> Dark Souls 1 pvp
Most of the PvP is now either fight clubs, or people going after new players and making their life hell (as god intended). Meanwhile I'm preventing a guy in Sen's from progressing by just hiding away in a corner disguised as a statue; the gentleman's experience.

Doesn't help either that the combat is very barebones for PvP imo. You've got very busted builds, the online is a mess, backstabs were always an issue. It's literally about reading roll inputs and punishing hard, paired with some infinites. Not a fan.

> cinematic bosses
Probably Storm King, most dragon fights and Bed of Chaos - they really try to be 'epic' in those and they tend to be more one note.

> 1-3
Fantastic level, one of my favourites too.

> Penatrator
Interesting due to Biorr, as it's the only real way to play co-op in this game when the servers go away (or are they already dead?). Love this sword design, had a build once where I used that weapon but it is absolute trash sadly. Ironically you find it in 1-3.

>Hell you could even miss out on messages in Dark Souls...

oh right because you only get that from the hidden merchant in Undead Burg. so stupid.

>(or are they already dead?)

co-op is dead on the Archstones server, i've never seen a summon sign. i've never been invaded either, but i have invaded a couple of times so there is a tiny amount of people playing, they're just not invading or throwing down signs. i've been in body form lately so i haven't been able to invade recently but i'll try again soon. i'm gonna try afking in 3-3 until someone Old Monks me-- just feels wrong to not get the real Old Monk experience.

>Meanwhile I'm preventing a guy in Sen's from progressing by just hiding away in a corner disguised as a statue; the gentleman's experience.



>It was such a 'flip of the script' that it was immediately interesting

apparently it's objectively horrible game design according to... Souls "fans".


DeS notes:

the online median has made my World Tendency pretty dark today, that's so cool! World Tendency is such a wicked mechanic, can't fucking believe normies prevented us from getting shit like this ever again.

love that playing magic and faith is actually viable on the first playthrough and not a mind-rotting giga-chore for repeat playthroughs-- every other game fails at this, especially ER which takes it to new absurd heights. finding Yuria is a bit difficult but that's it and once you find her you won't have that problem again. you get all your spells through vendors and new ones unlock through boss souls, done.

beat Old Hero so it's Second Chance time

that laughing boss music, the one for Tower Knight and Penetrator, is so iconic

i never realized that DS2, Bloodborne, and DS3 all came out back-to-back 2014, 15, and 16; Souls fans were eating damn good then. and then there was a 6 year gap between DS3 and Elden Ring, with ER's DLC taking years. i wish they would go back to making normal Souls games instead of spending so much development time on giant open world monstrosities.


Shrine of Storms, 4-2:

some manta ray no-scoped the fuck outta me from outside when i was well into the entrance

all the encounters are fun; grim reapers with spirits giving him backup, skellys on thin ledges with manta rays taking potshots at me, beam firing spirits in tight stairways and rooms

this level is clearly what Catacombs from DS1 is based off of. you got skellys, enemies that respawn unless you take out the guy bringing them back, small indoor crypt areas-- the difference is that 4-2 isn't garbage. it's a short level but no bad parts; tough mobs with tough use of environment, a little area with tunnels to explore and slugs to fight and exploding things to dodge, and then you're at the boss. another banger.

Old Hero:

his gimmick is that he's blind. it's a great puzzle because the Thief Ring isn't found in this boss arena-- that would be lame as fuck non-puzzle-- it's one of the first rings you get in the game in the very first level, the first one iirc. using the ring completely nullifies this boss's ability to do shit.

i was fucking around with him to see how he works and what's strange is that when i wasn't using the ring he didn't actually hear me walking or running around or anything, it's only until i hit him did he zero in on me for a period of time until he went back into blind mode-- i was in body form too. is this how he operates? i could have sworn i remember him hearing me move back in the day. regardless, awesome boss.


Tower of Latria, 3-2 revisited:

not a fan of this level

there's a lot of long distance running with no enemies or items

the gargoyle mobs and the bigger bug things are weaklings that exist for you to hitstun to their graves. i like the acid attack from the small bugs that instantly dissolves your shit but that's a one-time thing; once you get hit by that once you'll never allow that to happen again

the big heart with the chains that you undo and it drops-- that whole thing is re-used in BB with an eyeball monster replacing the heart

that black phantom Mind Flayer on those thin rail-less stairs before the boss is such a troll enemy placement, love it

other than the middle section where you go to the bottom floor, the beginning and end sections are identical to one another. the level design is the same, the enemies are the same, you're undoing chains again; it's a copy & paste

sick looking level and enemies but not fun to play for these reasons, the only encounter that's good is the Mind Flayer before the boss and unfortunately this is not a short level. the first Latria level has better level design but it has similar problems for me with the mobs, pretty much the only mobs there are 1v1 Mind Flayer encounters which is trivial, the only Mind Flayer i like so far is the one before the boss in 3-2 because the environment elevates the difficulty.


Maneater:

the granddaddy of the dual boss fight

this is a unique boss; the dual boss thing, they fly, have lots of unique moves and a high total move count, they use a mix of melee and magic attacks, a unique thin/small environment and they have multiple moves that are designed for the purpose of hitting you off of it, they have tails you can cut off which permanently takes away a couple of their moves (their self-buff and homing soul arrow attack). this boss holds up.

fucking died the first time and lost my body because the first gargoyle tackled me right off the map but i got them the second time

their visual design and music is primo stuff

love this boss, only bad thing i have to say is their AI is janky as all hell; they were doing shit like taking a while to land/getting close enough for me to hit them, fly-away-fly-back loops, all sorts of stupid shit that you have wait for to stop.

> online is dead
Later games did handle this slightly better, by having 'offline' online stuff like dev-created messages and npc-helpers/invaders to at least give offline players a sense of what they missed when the servers would eventually cease.

> 3-2
I always liked its design. There is one oddity though, which always felt out of place - you can find Ostrava's weapon and shield in that level. It is very well hidden, you basically have to commit suicide, but it's there. I never understood why it was there, since Ostrava still has his own and his set looks unique enough to think there's only one set...yet it's still there, even when he's alive.

> 4-2
In general I feel DeS has no bad levels. The ones that people dislike often have something to them regardless, or can be circumvented. I hated 5-2 like most players, but when I just sat down and learned the map for like a minute, it is now just auto-pilot for me and I'm through it in like a few minutes.

> Old Hero
IIRC his hearing is based on your gear and how heavy it is. In human-form if you're just wearing leather or a loincloth he probably won't hear you.

>IIRC his hearing is based on your gear and how heavy it is

oh right i forgot about gear affecting sound, yeah that explains it; i was wearing a light wizard's outfit.


DeS notes:

so i checked out a video of the remake's Latria 3-2 and i gotta say... it looks incredible. 3-2 was already a cool looking level to begin with and the remake blows it out of the water. for instance, you can't see jack shit in the original; all the buildings and shit in the background are just silhouettes and virtually everything outside the cone around you is pitch-black. so everything is a black blob that all mixes together and the sky is dark to the point where it's not distinguishable enough from everything else-- you're essentially playing the game with your monitor/tv turned off.

you can actually see the buildings/background stuff and shit in general in the remake and the new architecture, lighting, color, detail, etc. looks insane; it both stays true to the spirit of the original (the red banners aside) and is new and massively better at the same time. i wish i had the game so i could look around and take in the sights instead of watching some shitty compressed HDR-less youtube video of some dude rushing through with the camera pointed forward and to the ground. the new Maneaters and boss music-- whatever, but the level itself looks crazy, i have to give Bluepoint credit here.

wait, i just found out there's no online median affecting World Tendency in the remake. are you joshing me? that's such an awesome part of WT, what the fuck Blueballs, i'm already back to hating your ass. i've heard over and over again that the remake didn't touch the gameplay but that's not true at all, it's just shills pushing narratives. omni-directional rolling is another example.


Tower of Latria, 3-3, Old Monk:

i thought i would be able to afk but i forgot how it works; a little up the stairways the Old Monk cutscene happens and it searches for a player so either a player is summoned right then or you're getting the npc. so because the game is dead you have to sit through this long unskippable cutscene, Evacuate back to the Nexus, run up to the Archstone, run up the stairway, rinse and repeat. i was planning to just leave the game running in the backround while i do other shit until someone takes the Old Monk spot, i wouldn't have cared how long that took, but this? no way, i tried like 9 times and moved on.

there's a feedback loop going on here for the online features, like there's not enough people playing so people try to invade for a bit and they don't immediately get hits so they give up entirely, et cetera. but i see bloodstains and messages, i mean shit there's a message in the Old Monk stairway that has 188 ratings warning about the black phantom Mind Flayer, and yet i can't get a single person to Old Monk me or invade me? yeah, there's definitely another enormous factor at play here; Fromsoft's audience.

the vast majority of "Souls fans" would exclusively play in soul form and/or offline as to not get invaded or darken their World Tendency, and they wouldn't have interest or incentive to invade either. so i can only imagine the remake is dead as fuck too plus it's a PS5 exclusive that came out 3 years ago. the people i invaded seems to fit this as well; i only got 2 and one was clearly brand new and didn't know shit yet and the other guy was only human to play co-op, which how many people are getting their buddy online to do that? i know no one is playing organic random co-op, there's not a summon sign in sight in this game.

about the boss itself, i mean i played the npc version which is a throwaway npc fight, which one could criticize them for not making a proper offline version of the boss fight, but there's no denying that online Old Monk is a cool idea and one of those things that Fromsoft doesn't come up with anymore. only other thing i have to say is that it's a really memorable looking arena, boss design, and cutscene.


Valley of Defilement, 5-2:

the OG Blighttown/poison swamp. i don't understand the bitching about status effects, it's a non-issue. i brought the Cure miracle, and between my Regenerator's Ring and Adjudicator's shield, the healing prevented health loss from the poison, and i used Cure whenever i could to free up the poison so i could get my typical health gain from regeneration.

you can't dodgeroll or sprint in the swamp and if you press that Circle button out of muscle memory your character goes through a useless animation to make you vulnerable for a bit-- that is all so, so good. they've never had the balls to restrict your movement like that or make a challenging poison swamp area again, every poison swamp in the series other than this one is a joke. Bluedick added a ring in the remake that makes it so you can sprint and dodgeroll in the swamp, what a buncha clowns.

just like Blighttown for DS1, this is the biggest level with the most exploration

cool circular level design and shortcut; the ramps and shit are all around the edges, the swamp is in the middle, and you circle around the entire map to get to the end/unlock the shortcut which is a little bridge you knock down at the beginning.

tough mobs in a harsh environment

smart use of limited draw distance

i hadn't forgotten about that little island surrounded by swamp with the big guy and little dudes on it-- love it. there's other succulent scenarios in the swamp i remember that i didn't get this time because i didn't thoroughly explore this level-- i'm saving that for whenever i do my next DeS run (NG+ Pure Black World Tendency).

found the Moonlight sword, cool little scenario to get it, knocking down the source of the leeches and the sword being surrounded by them afterwards

that merchant lady price gouges the fuck out of healing items

i like those glowing mobs that manifest a ton of poison everywhere

i thought this level was a delight


Dirty Colossus:

he basically has the same gimmick as Leechmonger except it's more brutal. so here it's flies that drain your health instead of leeches but the health drain in the Colossus fight is much more aggressive, lasts longer, and his projectile that puts flies on you is very fast.

he lacks the health regeneration thing that Leechmonger has and is replaced with some nothing gimmick; he has some wooden armor that your initial attacks will knock off and from there he'll take more damage. that's the one thing i'll put Leechmonger ahead on over Colossus.

same huge fire weakness

like Leechmonger there's a neat little secret here that i never knew about; there's torches throughout the arena and if you go up to them when you're covered in flies the fire burns them off. i like that. never would have discovered that by myself unless it happened by accident, i learned about that right now through fextralife.

this was another boss i heard was shit but i thought it was okay. Leechmonger and Colossus are definitely not different enough but i prefer Colossus because he's tougher and less annoying to fight.

DeS notes:

just realized i've never had to look up where to go next, what a relief. after DeS you're always lost and trying to figure out a million different hoops to jump through just to progress and then memorize it all for replays. hate that.

a thought occurred to me about level design. so, one of the many things bothering me when i was playing DS1 were the levels. first off this definitely had to due with expectations to a degree; i thought Bloodborne and DS3 were different to DS1, i assumed DS1 had bigger levels and had more of a focus on exploration, and it didn't meet those expectations at all. the levels in DS1 are the smallest in the series-- like they are tiny-- which was exacerbated by the fact that i wasn't dying during the levels. but what also didn't help was the way the levels are designed in that game; they often try to make the levels look expansive when they rarely are and that makes me even more aware of how limited they are.

Anor Londo is a perfect example of this. you get this amazing view of this enormous city and this huge outside area and giant cathedral and obviously you know the city part is just a skybox but the outside looked big when it really wasn't, it was mostly empty space; 2 short sections and then you're inside and what was a giant cathedral on the outside is just some tiny rooms, a staircase, and a main hall to the boss on the inside. it was a very 'wet noodle' experience.

whereas with DeS, i was never taken out of the game/disappointed due to the way the levels are structured (plus the levels are longer anyway). i'll use the most favorable comparison i possibly can which is Boletaria 1-2, the most straightforward, linear level in this entire series and yet it makes perfect sense due to the level design-- it's a straight line of bridges. what you see in the beginning of the level is exactly what you get and they're not trying to disguise it or promise something you're not gonna get-- if anything they overdeliver with the tunnels you get underneath, the little areas on top, and the bit at the end.


Boletaria, 1-4:

3 black phantoms right out of the gate

not many enemies and it's very straight forward, the main thing is dealing with the dragon in some way. this is the only boss level that's an actual level (even if it's short) which is nice-- Dragon God level is just Dragon God, Old Monk is a single staircase, etc.

second time Biorr forces me to save his useless ass; i never would have talked to this guy if i knew i would have to become his full-time babysitter

ah there's one final part to Ostrava, i remember now

oh he's the one who gives me the Mausoleum Key. i remembered that place, i just forgot how to get to it, been wondering all game. now that's a reward.

you're a chump, Ostrava. sit down.

dragon fight. shit took me like 20 Fresh Spices to kill with my Soul Ray, what a brutal slog. and people say magic is overpowered in this game.

a short but sweet level, i'm just never killing that dragon again unless i get a way to do it quickly


False King Allant:

the original badass old man-- love that character type. you know you're in for an amazing boss fight when you see an older dude with gray or white hair.

was hanging on by a thread the entire fight. this was the only boss i struggled against although ironically i beat him first try. but only because this was the only boss i wasn't fucking around with, i have Second Chance now, he has no insta-kills like getting hit off the level by a Maneater or shit like Dragon God, and i have copious amounts of healing grass which i normally don't use in boss fights but did here-- and even then there were many times he almost killed me. he has a lot of delay attack-y moves so that was tripping me up. didn't help that he seems to be the only boss resistant to magic.

this is the only boss that stayed on top of me and tried to prevent me from healing or punished me afterwards

he robbed 4 fucking levels from me, what a brutal and cool attack

massive AOE

sick design, love those magical wispy wings coming off him

those organs-- another banger theme. also cool that the Nexus music changes after you beat Allant to something that resembles his theme.

i think Allant is the perfect final boss to the game. although i didn't beat him last, i still have Maiden Astraea and fucking Gimmick King left on my plate. but mooooooom, i don't wanna eat my vegetables.


Old King Doran:

holy fuck at this overpowered cunt. i wanted his armor, it's the best armor in the game, and you need to beat this guy for it. i don't have Poison Cloud because i bought fucking CURE instead because i thought "psh, when will i ever need to cheese something?" completely forgetting about the details of this encounter-- classic. i did attempt to fight him legit 2 times because i didn't know how to cheese him. on my second try i got half of his health down and watched in amazement when he healed it all-- couldn't believe my eyes, i thought i was hallucinating. it was at that exact moment i decided to look up how to cheese this guy after he inevitably killed me.

he has a billion health. you can spend minutes whittling him down and he will just heal it all in a split second. every attack of his is a one-shot. he has a long runback.

fuck. you. that's not fun, that's not challenge, that's absolutely fucking retarded. npc fights are the worst, i got a PTSD flashback to Bloodborne with this shit. they're the only things in these games that piss me off. and i don't wanna hear a phrase that rhymes with "mill tissue". post a video of you beating this guy with a +2 Crescent Falchion + the deaths you suffered + no cheese before you say that horseshit to me.

DeS notes:

DeS is finished, DS2 up next!


Maiden Astraea:

rare story/lore talk coming up

"there is nothing here for you to pillage or plunder" i beg to differ; there's a crystal lizard, items, and your soul.

died the first time because i accidentally fell down into the corner of the swamp, caught the plague, and enemies endlessly spawned in front of me keeping me in the corner

Vinland is a tanky npc bitch

and the Agent Coulson award goes to... Maiden Astraea! could give a fuck about killing a literal Archdemon/a literal Archdemon committing suicide. and i'm not criticizing it, this is 100% not a "am i the bad guy/you are the bad guy" moment-- which is for the better because i hate that. people assume that just because she's a defenseless woman and she commits suicide.

you're the bad guy for... doing what's necessary to end this? at best it's a "the ends justify the means" moment where it's just an unfortunate tragic reality that you have to kill her to put a stop to this. but it isn't tragic, she chose to become an Archdemon and it's not like she willingly gives up her soul when the time comes to pay the piper-- she sicks her guard on you, or attacks you if you get to her without killing Vinland first-- so she's actively trying to prevent the Old One being put back into its crib. so even if she was healing people that would mean absolutely nothing (and without a doubt she isn't-- look at her arena). fuck her, the Umbasa crowd was right about her. and that "take your precious Demon soul" line in that shitty tone and her suicide? ewwww, what a gross guilt-trip. good riddance you cunt.


Gimmick King:

it's garbage but at least there's no trial & error on Storm King like there is with Dragon God and it's more cinematic; i got no sense of scale from Dragon God. on NG+ i'm sure my ranking of these two bosses would reverse because i hear that the Storm Ruler doesn't scale with the NG cycles which sounds like a nightmare. i have nothing more to say about Gimmick King.


True King Allant:

wait, i don't understand... THAT'S the final boss? a pathetic blob? what a ridiculously lame anti-climax.

(kidding, don't lynch me Souls boys)


Ending:

i picked the good ending of course. what kind of sick twisted fuck would kill Waifu in Black? disgusting.

Short reply cuz kid:

> final boss
Always kinda liked him for being this pushover, always find hard final bosses a bit weird...somehow. Like they are supposed to be memorable and great closers, but with Souls a hard final boss always gives me a feeling of "yeah, I get it, let's just get this over with okay" - not sure why.

> Maiden
Feel it's still the emotional highlight of the game, if only again by contrast. You have to kill her, obviously, and in today's games there'd probably be a hidden method to barter with her for the soul and spare her for a Pacafist Achievement +5 Gamerscore. I like how it still just says "yeah, you gotta do this, shank the bitch".

> dragons
Always hated these, they are cool but mechnically they were always just "wait with many items until they die from tickles"

Roy:

>Maiden

for sure, it's definitely an interesting "boss"/story moment

>"yeah, I get it, let's just get this over with okay"

i definitely get that feeling with ER's final boss. the first phase with Radagon-- excellent, that's all i needed. but Elden Beast can become tiring. it wants to be both cinematic fair and a challenging final boss fight, and that's a fine idea  but it has a lot time-wasting bullshit attached to it; constantly runs away from you, lots of hoop-jumping (literally one of his attacks forces you to jump through hoops).

as for DeS, i don't see how anyone could be disappointed with True Allant, it's just a fuckin story moment/in-game cutscene and it's not even like it robs you of a hard final boss anyway. someone prolly shouldn't be expecting a difficult final boss with the True King given the False King was that and every other final world boss was not that, and there must be a reason why he made an imposter to begin with.


DS2 notes:

my reckoning has come. will i continue to be an ignorant naysayer of Dark Souls 2 or will i finally wise up? The Dark Souls 2/Jackie Estacado Redemption Arc starts... now

for the record, there will be no rage-quitting this time. i am completing it whether i like it or not

spoiler:

it's funny that people kill themselves before the exit of Betwixt just to spook new players with tons of bloodstains

i don't like that a cat just hit on me

the no warps/limited warps later thing was an interesting experiment in DS1 but personally i much, much prefer the DeS/DS2/etc. way so i'm glad that was a one-time thing

i'm really digging Majula; the theme is beautiful and the location looks awesome.

should i be using Bonfire Ascetics on my first run?

i hear magic was nerfed hard in the DLC, is it so nerfed that only experienced players should be a mage there? because i was thinking of respeccing to some kind of a mage

been spicing it up, not using big heavy str weapons, although i can't promise i won't end up there at some point. started off using a spear and then switched over to the Grand Lance when i had the stats.

this is a really well done health system, will talk more about that later

i love this game's multi-fights and crowd control


Things Betwixt:

the beginning and particularly the house captures such classic fantasy imagery, it's beautiful


Forest of the Fallen Giants:

great first area

big level

oh you can hit down some locked doors, didn't know that

fuckin invader mage npc

well-designed item locations

thanks for the key, cartographer guy relaxing in a random cave

those turtle guys are fun to fight and i like their anti-backstab move


Pursuer:

i didn't know that he can show up earlier in the level, i went on some roof and then an eagle just drops off a boss on there. he was tough but i got him. and then where he normally is in the level i was still expecting him there but he wasn't-- cool stuff. fun boss to fight against as well. do you get that ring from him that increases your attack when you beat him at the end of the level or only when you do it early? i don't remember.


The Last Giant:

hole face giant, striking design

fun-- standard giant fight but there's prolly more to him i just haven't seen yet. i like that he rips his arm off and uses it as a weapon.


on the path to Heide's Tower:

how the fuck are you supposed to see that tiny pull chain that blends in with the background? fuckin hell


Heide's Tower:

beautiful looking level

the giant knights are fun to fight

this level seems to be about teaching the player a specific lesson: "don't run past enemies"

one example of this is when you beat the third giant a little mechanism pops up from the floor behind where he was and if you use it, it brings up extra space in the boss arena, which is really cool and rewards the player for not running past enemies

the other example is a punishment, which happened to me on my first attempt at this game early last year. they fucked me hard by putting the Cling Ring equivalent in the area with the fog gate to the boss, so i missed it because at some point i got frustrated and ran past enemies straight to the boss. that was a very harsh lesson but i respect it.

got my first invader. was by the first bonfire and he just sat up by the stairs watching me struggle against the first giant and i ended up dying against it because i fell off the map. he didn't do shit and i died, how embarrassing.


Dragonrider:

is that a euphemism?

really fun boss, his shield usage and his unique, fun arena elevate him beyond "typical tutorial boss"

tight arena that you're at genuine risk of getting hit off or falling off of if you don't use the device


The Lost Bastille:

so in my original brief playthrough i encountered a stupid horrible glitch here where the guy who rolls down the explosive barrel never did it and i had to first off survive the onslaught of dogs, then kill that dude without him hitting the barrel, and then roll down the barrel myself and hope the physics worked out and it didn't do something fucked up like make a sharp turn into the side walls or land in some weird spot away from the wall and i couldn't get it out from the wall, etc, it was just a nightmare-- took me like 10 attempts to get it right. this time i got here through the other bonfire so i had to come from behind him which worried me because that means he won't roll it down but i did it myself and it worked out.

Pursuer part 2: spooked. love how this dude can just pop up anywhere. he's back stronger, tough fight but i got him on my second try.

Mirrah's whole outfit is sick, i want it

i open a door to nothing but a drop to my death and then a guy comes behind me and pushes me through it. brutal, shouldn't have ignored the bloodstain in front of it.


Ruin Sentinels:

ugh... lost 10k souls because i died the first time; went down and got swarmed by 3 of them. second time i stayed on that ledge and took one out, but then two of them jumped up at once and i panicked so jumped down to the ground floor to get my souls back but the fall damage killed me.

nice environment play

tough fight

they have shields, a lot of moves and a surprising amount of mobility

that reach, man

that quick jump attack, fuck

ahh, they dodge now!

they dodge now?

...they dodge now

super fun boss, hard to deal with 2 or 3 of these fuckers at once, they work together really well

Majula:

went into the mansion and got an Estus Shard courtesy of the cartographer. i love the build-up to nothing more than 1 spooky scary skeleton.


Things Betwixt revisited:

came back to use a branch to unlock an area

Peruser part 3: spooked my guts off for the 3rd time

sex change coffin: jumped right back in again. i thought this was gonna bring me to a new area, really weird place to put this feature.


Heide's Tower revisited/Cathedral of Blue:

never been to this place before. it's gatekept by a dragon, i knocked him out with my Long Bow from a distance-- fuck fighting that thing up close.

it's cool that after you beat the first boss to the level those mobs that were just lying around throughout the level before now attack you


Old Dragonslayer:

the glorious return of Ornstein. i'm sure there's some people who don't like this boss because it's boss reuse but i'm totally fine with that, and he's not exactly the same either. fun boss.


the Blue Sentinels npc (don't remember his name):

thought i had to be human for this guy to take me seriously so i wasted an Effigy and he still didn't. looked it up and you need to use the White Sign Soapstone (but not the Small White Sign Soapstone) and beat a boss in co-op to get an item for him to talk to you. good luck figuring that shit out without looking it up.

i threw down a sign in Heide's Tower, the host had another phantom with him, he threw himself at Ornstein and got smoked. i threw another down and it ended up being the same guy again, thankfully this time he learned his lesson.

shouldn't have bothered anyway because i'm getting no hits, maybe later when i get a higher level i will


The Lost Bastille revisited:

this is a big level

Pursuer part 4: popped up for his regular ass beating

that dragon screaming is the loudest sound on earth

found that bonfire in the cell behind the petrified enemy and there's supposed to be an npc in there although i don't see him now, i guess he pops up after you rest at the bonfire. i don't have any branches left right now, i think he's a mage vendor anyway.

Pursuer part 5: oh that's what Cursed does, that's brutal; i was hollow every time i faced him before so i had no idea.

i love the idea of Pursuer-- a boss that eternally hounds your ass-- but i'm starting to get concerned because only in the first random encounter did he get an upgrade and he's been the same ever since. please someone tell me this isn't his final form.


Lost Sinner:

don't you knock out those lights ya goofball, how am i supposed to see?

this motherfucker can jump

this motherfucker can thrust across the room

fun mobile melee boss


Belfy Luna:

joined the covenant, hopefully this one's active

got invaded and won my first pvp fight

really short level, tell me there's more locations in the game that work with this covenant


Belfry Gargoyle:

5 fuckin Gargoyles, holy crow. hilarious way to fuck with player expectations--  "oh another dual gargoyle fight..."-- and then wham, hit ya with the quintuple. super fun boss.

> actually likes the game with the most gameplay
No surprise there, you have seen the light. DS2 tends to have no qualms to ditch all the pretense, art or subtletly in favour of just doing bonkers shit. In art-history there's a time period called the Mannerism era, which followed the Renaissance. In that era artists were basically content knowing 'perfection has been achieved by the previous generation' so they just went nuts and did all kinds of crazy shit. That's DS2 for me. DS3 is the Deviantart artist pretending to make a painting.

> bonfire asthetics
Definitely use them to respawn specific enemies or to refight bosses on 'hard mode' with added rewards. It's such a genius system that never returned because it's tained by being in a good game.

> warps
It fits here. DS1 was very much built around the total interconnectedness of the world and building a mental map, whereas this world is just a collection of zones. The warp is just a level-select ala mega-man or what we saw in DeS.

> magic
Yeah Magic was nerfed into the pavement, same with Lightning Spear. It is still very workable though, you just won't be one-shotting bosses anymore.

> Forest of the Fallen
Very cool area and again, highlights the gameyness. It's just a set of challenge rooms with optional content sprinkled in. In previous games enemies were in 'logical' places. Here there's a turtle guy waiting there for eternity because that makes for the best encounter possible.

> Pursuer
IIRC he doesn't always drop stuff, and is more there to haunt you. There are exclusive versions of him only present in NG+ iirc, or exclusive to the Scholars edition, I forget.

> Last Giant
Just a derpy fun boss. IIRC he's weak to fire.
NOTE: the Covenant of Champions is an added Hard-Mode if you wish it.

> Heide
DS2 starts a weird but fun trend of leveldesign playing into the boss. It doesn't happen too often, but Dragon Rider and Fume Knight both have their challenge changed based on what you do in the level itself which is very nicely done imo. Ironically Dragon Rider is easier if you just ignore the levers imo, since you can then ring him out easily for an early kill.

> lost bastille
Fun area, especially when you consider there's two entry points (no man's warf and the forest(?)).

> sex change coffin
Always weirded me out.

> Ornstein
Think it's a good addition. We never got to fight him one on one, and it's a hidden optional fight anyway. This was the start though of the entire fanserviceness of the series imo.

> lost sinner
This guy becomes a Ninja Gaiden boss on NG+ haha. I will say I never liked him for his tracking.

> gargoyles
This is the best meta part yeah, you think "oh lol another one of these" only to get swarmed by half a dozen of them.

>NOTE: the Covenant of Champions is an added Hard-Mode if you wish it.

that and Bonfire Ascetics are amazing features

>IIRC he doesn't always drop stuff, and is more there to haunt you.

that's fine that he doesn't always drop stuff, it's just that this boss would be a lot cooler if he got an update to his moveset every fight or every other fight; other than his health upgrading he's been the same since the first moveset upgrade he got in his first random appearance. i still fight him anyway just for the fun of it, and in case he drops something.

>if you just ignore the levers

levers plural? totally missed the other one.

>That's DS2 for me

great analogy


DS2 notes:

i can't believe i didn't get this game before, i was being such a stubborn scrub. it's strange because i'm usually great at adapting to different games and figuring out how they're supposed to be played and usually don't just write-off a game like that. must have been in a bad mood.

i remember complaining about tons of enemies, runbacks, stamina, bullshit traps, and... i think that's it. first off the enemy count is optional; if you don't run to meet enemies (and certainly do not run past them) then most of the time you won't aggro any more enemies than you do in the other games, and for any exceptions there are options, like pulling enemies with a bow. i didn't realize all this when i played it before although now i like fighting lots of enemies anyway. it's awesome that the game gives you so many options when it comes to difficulty. for traps/actual ganks, there's always signs, just requires paying attention and taking your time. they definitely made enemy-skip runbacks in this game much harder to do but i'm fine with that-- i understand not everyone wants to clear enemies every time they die on a boss but it's not impossible, they just made it so that it takes skill and knowledge. the game is the hardest on stamina consumption but i like it.

despite not doing the interconnected map thing, DS2 feels the most 'adventure game' to me. the torch stuff, by far the most focus on traps, environmental hazards, and 'ganks'. i've never taken my time and observed what was ahead of me and around me like i have in DS2, and this is the first game i've used a bow in. this is also the first game that forced me to switch up my equipment in general-- i'll touch on the specifics later.

not only is stamina consumption for actions the harshest in the series but you also get punished really hard for letting it drop to 0-- you can't sprint for a brutal amount of time.

i love ADP-- customizable iframes and healing speed is an amazing feature and adds to build diversity. i keep my iframes at 8-- fun stuff. it's really unfortunate that people shit on this for some dumb fucking reason. my only problem is that i wish there were separate stats because i want my iframes low but i want to increase my healing speed.


No Man's Wharf:

fantastic locations in this game, this one's a cove with pirate ships in them

you can sacrifice a Lockstone to light the whole place up immediately or save it by doing it manually, that's excellent

specific enemies are afraid of fire

the pirates fight dirty like pirates would; they hide and ambush you and fight you in groups. great attention to detail.

i love the torch stuff. i thought i would hate it because, you know, dark levels, but carrying a torch is the antidote to spooky darkness, very comfy. and you make entire levels comfy by lighting them up-- No Man's Wharf goes from "ugh, fuck this" to "pirate cove wonderland" when you get the cove and ships fired up. also interesting in that you have to choose between a torch or something in your left hand/two-handing. this needs to make a return to the series-- now.

super fun level


Flexile Sentry:

more great self-awareness-- "try circle-strafing this boss; conjoined twins with no back"

i had come across this guy the first time in the water before the Lost Sinner fight

cute attack where they both attack you at the same time via the guy in the back leaning backwards

i appreciate that when they do a boss with a basic moveset they make up for it with something interesting outside the moveset, like Flexile is 'basic melee guy' but he has the no-back gimmick or Dragonrider with his arena


Bell Keepers covenant:

you get Titanite Chunks for winning your invasions, nice

the covenant's active, i'm getting a regular stream


Huntsman's Corpse:

that guy pushed me right off that ledge, goddammit

fell right through that hole in the bridge

i complained about that moment with the guy knocking down the door and being surrounded by a gank but now i see that section was designed to fuck you if you panic and rush it. although i still don't know if there's a way to not get hit by the guy behind the door, i tried knocking it down myself but when i started doing that he knocked it down and hit me.

the enemies on the way to the Skeleton Chariot are tough by themselves but i remember aggroing them all at once in my original playthrough

awesome level


Skeleton Chariot:

a unique gimmick boss post-DeS? in MY Souls series? it's funny, i figured that the only seemingly original gimmick bosses past DeS weren't actually unique but just ripped from DS2, and i was right-- Miyazaki's a hack! i technically didn't see this one coming; this boss wasn't rehashed for a boss fight, but for the hazards in the Hero's Graves dungeons in Elden Ring. lazy stuff.

having to deal with the skeletons and mages while you're in the little cubbyholes to avoid the chariot was brutal, had to equip a shield to deal with them and fix my character going forward with my Lance lunge-- same with dealing damage to the chariot.

i figured out that you're supposed to either hit him with range or find a safe spot to hit him with your weapon as he goes by, i don't know if there's anything else i'm missing

awesome boss, it's a breath of fresh air to have original and fun gimmick bosses


Shaded Woods:

i like that you can't lock-on to the spirit enemies, interesting gimmick

no lock-on is kryptonite to my Great Lance so i had to switch weapons-- again, interesting gimmick

two paths ended up to places where i can't go yet

the foggy section reminded me of the Lost Woods in Breath of the Wild but without the insanely obnoxious gimmick of resetting me back to the beginning if i take one wrong step

i like that the spirits are camouflaged by the fog

really cool level


Majula well:

finally bought the cat ring so i can go down here, dunno if that was a waste at this point and i'll be coming up to another way to get to these places soon but whatever.


Huntsman's Corpse revisited:

nice shortcut and torch stuff through the cave

the forest area in BB looks a lot like this place

some guy warned me about Pate, i guess that's this game's Patches


The Skeleton Lords:

3 mini-bosses and a shit ton of skellies, really fun. i always love the incorporation of mobs into boss fights-- the Phalanx fight is exclusively mobs and that's probably my favorite gimmick boss in the entire series.

i didn't realize that the skeleton mobs spawn when you take out a mini-boss so i was rushing to take out all the mini-bosses at once because i thought it would end the fight but ended up having like 20 skellies on my ass afterwards.


Harvest Valley:

the Poison in this game is like Toxic, holy crow. and the poison cure item is really expensive.

cool little part where you have to get a big guy to smack down the planks to get items

crystal lizards trying to lure me to my death, no thanks. i shoot them with my arrow and then they zip off in a different direction to their usual pathing.

those sexy pyromancer women can't handle my bow

pyromancer's fireball explosion when you get close to them is insane

great level


Covetous Demon:

what the fuck is that thing

he flopped around like a fish; i'm sure he has more moves but i was overpowered for him so i didn't get to see them


Chloanne:

"you've been long away. what would you like? well, i've only one thing to provide, and we both know what that is! heh heh"

no comment

> champions+aesthetics
It's a damned shame it never returned because it's haunted by "being in that game nobody likes", you see that a lot with other games too. DmC:DE had some fantastic ideas that could've easily transitioned to DMC5 like Must-Style-Mode, but didn't.

> levers
Yeah you can make the entire arena filled up if you want to.

> enemy skip runbacks harder
It's countered a bit by the ability to kill enemies permanently, which also has some neat features. If you kill the last enemy of its kind in the game, you get all its items. So if there's an enemy that has a very rare stone or sword you want, then you can grind them or you can just kill them all until they don't respawn (15 times) at which point you will get all their items from their loot-table. Great design imo.

> adventure game
It's just delightfully gamey. You're in a poison-swamp, you take an elevator and are now in a lava castle in a vulcano. Videogames, gotta love them.

> ADP
It was a bit too vague, once you know how it works it's a pretty neat system.

> skeleton rider boss
You can actually make him fall of, by hitting a lever. This kills him instantly but you still have to fight the horse iirc. You'll see him run into a gate which is hilarious.

> torch
It was done nicely, though could've been better. You can kinda cheese it by just upping your brightness, making it easier to see. Also the whole 'sacrifice one arm to wield the torch' isn't as interesting as you'd hope. Still it has its moments, especially in THE GUTTER (great name), my favourite area of the game imo outside of DLC.

> covetous demon
Fun derpy fight, you can sorta do wacky shit with him. There's skeletons hanging from the ceiling. If you snipe them with a bow, they fall down and he starts eating them, opening him up for punishment.

my computer restarted while i was sleeping and apparently i forgot to save my latest rough draft in Wordpad so i had to rewrite most of my post                        


>Yeah you can make the entire arena filled up if you want to.

cool shit

>Great design imo

wait, you're telling me you didn't like grinding a specific enemy over and over again for a 0.000021% drop?

>You can actually make him fall of, by hitting a lever.

oh shit i didn't even see a lever, how did i miss that

>If you snipe them with a bow, they fall down and he starts eating them

what?! that's crazy

>though could've been better

i wish they didn't pull back on the torch/darkness stuff in the final version, there's still a decent bit of it left but it was a much bigger part of the game originally


DS2 notes:

the main menu song is amazing

love the levels and bosses in this game. each level is varied, they all have their own unique twists and locations, and they're all fun to play. despite the limitations Roy mentioned for the series they did the most with the levels in this game beyond combat and exploration and they came up with lots of new stuff.

the bosses are at a middle point between the design of Demon's Souls and the action direction DS1 and the rest of the games took, so there's lots of bosses here to enjoy for people who enjoy both styles or lean one way or the other. i think the quality of them is quite high; lots of awesome bosses, they're varied, they're doing lots of cool new stuff, and i haven't played a single trash one yet.

this is all doubly impressive considering that DS2 has by far the most levels and bosses in the series (until ER obv) and yet didn't sacrifice variety and quality to do so. DS1 and BB meanwhile...

that "dudes in armor" meme isn't true at all, there's a lot of variety here. it's just that most bosses that are humanoid wear armor so it's an aesthetic disagreement being passed off as a variety critique.

i feel like this game is the true sequel to Demon's Souls, not DS1


Royal Rat Vanguard:

is every gimmick boss in this game unique? this is blowing my little mind. this was ripped off in DS3 with the Deacons of the Deep, except it was worse there. i'm just glad DS2 came out so Miyazaki had more gimmick boss material to pull from beyond DeS.

fun puzzle and fight, it takes a while for the boss rat to come out and he blends in with the rest of them


Rat King covenant:

cool covenant, i like how it pulls the victim to your world and you can set up traps, i did a little pvp here before my soul memory drifted outside of its range


Majula:

tried out a new, the Uchigatana. but i regret dumping titanite into it because the swings push enemies away so they're out of your range after one swing-- really annoying to me-- and the range isn't what i thought it was gonna be. i'll see if i can get used to this.


The Gutter:

takes vertical level design to a new level, takes "everything looks the same, dunno where the fuck i am and where i'm going" to a new level, and poison to a new level with those goddamn statues

the labyrinth level design here is the craziest in the series, took me quite a while to figure out how to get outta here. and it's weird; at first i came across different paths but once i found the main path, i now can't find the other paths i discovered at first so i still haven't found everything in this level. the second bonfire was driving me nuts for a second there-- eventually figured out you're supposed to hit down a wall that's really not obvious.

where do these hollows keep coming from

this is a long maze to be on a timer for

these poison statues are actual torture

some knight enemy is just laying down in some obscure part of the level and i regret fucking with him, he got up and knocked me out for disturbing his rest and this was fairly deep within the level so that was great

the type of level where if someone described it you'd probably be disgusted but it's a super fun hell hole


Shaded Ruins:

the Curse jars are a unique environmental hazard

an enemy sprung the trap to the Basilisk gank, thanks for the heads-up bud

found the guy from earlier and he's still fuming over Pates


Weaponsmith Ornifex:

okay so the game tries to get you to panic-attack Weaponsmith Ornifex, fuck off with that first off. but what is with the hoop-jumping and annoyances with the boss weapon npcs in this game? the first one you get is in a room full of mobs that you have to kill every time but at least they don't attack unless you fuck up (which you'll always have stressful paranoia over that because they can get him killed) and he's right there when you get out of the bonfire. that's bad enough, but with this one, i mean... to begin with, she doesn't tell you where she's gonna relocate to, that's really frustrating. secondly, when you do find her later on (which you can very easily miss, which you can very easily miss her the first time as well), you then have to go out of your way into that level every time and you're forced to kill mobs (who actually attack you) outside her room (every single time) otherwise spells are gonna fly in there and try to kill you and her. it's the worst.


The Scorpioness Najka:

lol at that "naked woman half buried in sand" trap

a nod to Quelaag without being a rehash of her

you can cut off her tails/stingers

cool burrow attack

nice mixture of tail attacks and magic

i thought i would do more damage to her by hitting her human part but it seems i did more damage to her scorpion parts

you could get her to knock down a tree to get an item but ofc i only noticed that after i beat her. was probably the best thing in the game.


Earthen Peak:

that motherfucker is hiding behind a treasure chest, you can't do that

DS2 has by far the most poison areas in the series and the most brutal

ninja guys are brutal, i like the part where they sneak up behind you

oh that's Pates, the guy in the first level, got it

great level design

they pack in a lot of stuff to discover for a short level

appreciate the hidden bonfire above the boss


Mytha:

what the fuck was that? did i fall asleep while playing and this was just a horrible dream i had or was this actually a boss fight where the entire arena is filled with poison? and not just any poison... Dark Souls 2's poison.

it was like the stars aligned to give me the worst experience imaginable. first, i picked the best time to respec into some trash magic build and i had a shit Uchi. then, they really expect me to attack and dodge this boss but at the same time maintain my health when it's constantly flying off my screen. what on earth do i do to counteract the poison-- use Lifegems and Poison Moss so when i die those precious expensive resources are wasted? tried that the first 2 or 3 attempts but then moved on with my sunk cost. i have no ADP because i want limited iframes but what comes with that is crippled healing speed so the boss can hit me when i'm a sitting duck stuck in an animation that takes not a single second less than 5 minutes to finish and Estus is garbage for counter-acting poison anyway because it's not a slow heal. then the poison water makes you fatroll so i have a slower stamina recovery and it slows your movement speed so i had to rely a lot more on my dodgeroll that has a measly 8, count em, 8 iframes so that's a perfect marriage of bullshit there. oh yeah, and the cherry on top of all this, psst, get this shit-- sheregeneratesherfuckinghealth. i mean while you're at it why not just change my death screen to "SKILL ISSUE" in red font and automatically uninstall my game and delete my save file?

holy smokes, that was the stupidest shit i've ever played. what disgruntled employee came up with this horseshit and what maniac thought it was acceptable and let it slide? somewhere a Japanese dude is laughing himself to sleep every night because he got away with putting the height of clown shit in a video game.

a miserable experience. insane. obscene. ghoulish. borderline objectively garbage game design. didn't hate it though.


Things Betwixt:

respecced into a faith build


Iron Keep:

the infamous Iron Keep, one of the levels that gets showcased in youtube clips to demonstrate how crazy DS2 can be. but that's taken out of context; if you mindlessly run to the fog gate then yeah you're gonna have a train ran on you but that's not normal gameplay. this level is a brutal gauntlet though to be sure. i love the level design here as well, it's a short gauntlet-- there's very little distance between where the first enemies are and the fog gate is-- but the enemy density is very high and the enemies want blood.

2 npc invaders in a row at the beginning, right away you know this is gonna be a brutal level

found a Zweihander, switched to that. a pox on you, Uchigatana.

that section at the end with the tunnels and flame hazards and turtle guys was quite stressful

excellent level


Smelter Demon:

wasn't expecting 3 phases

really cool gimmick starting from his 2nd phase, if you're near him you take constant chip damage. which is tied in really well with his fire thing.

a quicker more aggressive combo-y boss

really fun moveset, awesome boss


Old Iron King:

really well designed arena. it's built for you to discover that hole in the back of the middle of the arena by accidentally walking off of it and dying. and then it remains a menace because his attacks send you flying backwards. and then even if you try to avoid being in the middle of the arena, he can knock you off the edges. the arena is a big part of the boss.

i always appreciate a well done big slow boss

i like how he pushes you off into the lava if you rub up against him


Black Gulch:

instantly makes ya wanna kill yourself when you walk out of the cave and see a hundred poison statues lining the walls but when you play it you find out it's nowhere near as bad as Gutter's

nice detail where you can roll in the little puddles those monstrosities come out of and it sets them on fire if you have your torch lit, provides a great defense

discovered a little secret area and it involves having to kill 2 giants with monstrous health that deal disgusting damage


The Rotten:

i'll call you... Corpsemonger

i summoned Mirrah cuz i can only imagine you have to summon her and win X amount of times to get her armor set but she stole aggro the entire time and i couldn't do enough dps before she got herself killed even though i basically attacked the guy nonstop. fun boss but i hate summon quests, so stupid.

great arena, i like the fire pits all around; adds just enough of an environmental hazard without going overboard

surprisingly quick attacks for a big boss


Doors of Pharros/Brightstone Cove Tseldora:

did that crystal lizard explode and instakill me? jesus

most of the enemies are spiders which leave you alone if you carry a torch, that's good shit


The Prowling Magus and Congregation:

oh what do we have here, Deacons from DS3 ripped this off too

i stood behind the benches and chucked lightning over them, but their magic was low and get caught on the benches-- good destructable environment

they work well together; one mini-boss covers for the 2 ranged mini-bosses by exploding when you get near him, you're getting pressed by the ranged guys and harassed by crawling zombies


The Duke's Dear Freja:

love that this boss implements the torch

choose between your left hand free or not having to deal with the little spiders (i went with the latter this time)

another double-sided boss like Flexile Sentry

you can only harm the heads and i like that each head has its own portion of the health bar pie so you have to take out both

fun moveset, great boss


Drangleic Castle:

what a view

love the look of the castle

that was a really stressful amount of time before finding a bonfire and if you die before you reach it you got a long runback

great puzzle to get in the place, and stressful because i didn't immediately catch on

that crazy room with a ton of brutal mobs and Ruin Sentinels

love the statues everywhere, you never know which ones are gonna come alive so you're always on your toes

got caught by my first Mimic

everything tries to kill you in this game. the walls try to kill you because there's ghosts in the walls. the statues try to kill you. the chests try to kill you. i walk in front of a random painting and it tries to curse me (which was a jumpscare btw). definitely getting that early video game feel like Roy said.

another classic level


Dragonrider twins:

prepare for trouble

nice to have a ranged option in this fight, i used lightning spears for the one on his perch

archer dragonrider has shit health, he drops down and goes into melee mode with the other guy after getting hurt enough

good dual fight, it's better fighting them both at the same time so next time i won't ream the archer


Looking Glass Knight:

it's like Tower Knight and Old Monk had a baby-- beautiful

love that you have to have correct aiming and spacing so you don't hit that impenetrable shield

aesthetics are on point here, the arena and boss look incredible. first thing i did after beating this boss was buy his armor and sword, the Thorned Greatsword.

turns out it's a low damage pos-- sucks because i loved the moveset and animations. i basically just dumped all my Dragon Bones into a trashcan.

awesome moveset

really cool how the npc breaks out of his mirror shield

his invader summon is such a great idea for a new take on Old Monk

didn't get a human player in my fight but afterwards i tried to get summoned-- took some time and eventually i stopped getting any but i got to spread some joy for a while. looked up how it works and it's really dumb how it doesn't really work unless you throw down a red sign every 10 seconds so you can't just throw it down and do other shit until you get summoned. horrible, awful, insanely idiotic design; no wonder i didn't get a human player summoned in my fight.

jumping into another player's boss fight and healing the boss with miracles and being an assbeating gatekeeper is delectable. really glad i had a faith build for this, a Soul Vessel was worth it just for that.

this boss shits on Old Monk for me, much more fun and clever take on the concept-- implementing pvp within a boss fight, having to fight a boss and a player at the same time or vice versa > just a pvp match. no matter your preference i think we can all agree that DS3 simply repeating Old Monk is lazy as shit.

love this boss. now THAT'S a dude in armor, fuck you Yahtzee.


PVP:

i really wish the pvp design in these games was better; each covenant/thing you can do you can only do for a very short period of time until you're inevitably carted away because of the matchmaking level range. just the worst.


Shrine of Amana:

i have such a knack for trying new shit at the worst possible time. so, i joined the Covenant of Champions for the first time and tried that new weapon (Thorned Greatsword) which ended up doing no damage, plus i was on my shitty faith build with no health and no armor. the results were... beyond brutal. eye-popping amounts of damage to me, soul-crushing chip damage to everything else with my +4 Thorned. i trudged through this shit and ate this gruel like a masochist, almost tapped out on that npc mage invader at the end with his ludicrous oneshot buckshot magic but i somehow beat him on my third try. then i get to the boss and i get oneshotted and i finally broke; quit the Covenant and respecced into a not-shit pure physical build and tried a new weapon i found in the level (Red Iron Twinblade) which ended up being great.

the mages in this level make me sick. i can't close my eyes without seeing them.

that was a whole new world of fear and pain-- an insanity-inducing level under the conditions i played it on


Demon of Song:

i wouldn't go as far to say that it's a trash boss but it's the only one i didn't care for so far. you have to wait until he pokes his head out before you can hit him so it's this slow waiting game and his moveset is boring. sick visual design though.

> wordpad
Use Simplenote. Syncs across devices, fully free. Was made by the owner of Wordpress since he hated Evernote so much.

> ds2 areas are varied
For sure. They tend to play with what they have, even to the point of you being able to 'push' barrels to blow up walls etc. At some points it does feel like the game assumes you have a bow though, which honestly I'm fine with. Even stuff like the woods with those curse-barrels, sure it makes ZERO sense but it's a ton of fun and unique.

> royal rat
It's a super out of nowhere boss that makes zero sense, but this game had no editor to say no to wacky ideas so here it is. The game is super gamey and I feel that's why people bounce of of it. THey want this 'logical' game where everything makes sense. And here it doesn't. There's a giant dog boss with poison rats because...fuck you it's there.

> The Gutter
Always loved the name and just everything about this level. It's the first time where they pushed Valley of Defilement to a new level. It is just a horrid experience, it's dark, it sucks, there's a ton of traps and hard to reach items that you can miss entirely - best level in the base game. And I mean that.

> Najka
You can cut her tail iirc to reduce her moveset options, and in a extremely weird twist there's an item in the arena that you can only get by having her destroy the tree that holds it. Once you beat her you can never get that item, ever again. And it's a shitty item too hahaha

> Mytha
Ah man, welcome to "whatever Souls 2". You can drain the arena of poison, but to do that you have to do some fucking impossible shit that no-one will figure out outside of dumb luck or guides. You have to get a torch, and set the windmill on fire, which stops the machines providing the poison. I mean. Good luck figuring that out.

> iron keep
Fun fact, if you have a lot of protective spells and fire-resist, you can nab nearly all items pretty early and easily if you don't mind some dying.

> Smelter
This boss somehow always reminded me of World of Warcraft. It's such a raid-style boss, with the heavy damage output and DoT debuff that he gives. IIRC coating yourself in fire-resist gear works wonders (highlighting the rpg nature a bit more than usual). His hitboxes are a bit crazy, but in general it's a good boss. Note that this is the first boss where people tend to kill all enemies leading to him.

> The Rotten
Again a boss with a neat weakness. He's got a cage on his side, you deal bonus damage if you hit that IIRC or he staggers or some shit. Been a bit.

> Freja
As noted on NG+ you have an earlier encounter with her which lets you skip some damage on her.

> lookingglass
Very cool concept, boss itself was a bit meh imo and the runback is dumb. Still, pretty solid and again unique.

> PvP
Yeah it's super badly done, the online pool is already niche and this way it's even more culled. Finding players to play with is nearly impossible as there's so many barriers from Soul Level, Soul Memory and Covenants in the way.

> Shrine of Amana
Should note it used to be harder, they changed the tracking on the magical attacks in later patches/editions of the game.

>You can drain the arena of poison



>You have to get a torch, and set the windmill on fire, which stops the machines providing the poison.

????????????????

everything about that is lunacy, DS2 is the NES game from my nightmares

i saw the windmill and what's sad is that i even read a message in front of it that said "torch" but i thought it was just one of those nonsense messages people like to put down because torch what exactly-- the part you stand in front of... is made of METAL. what sort of NES logic is that?

by the time i got to the boss the windmill was already out of my memory anyway but why would i ever think that torching a windmill would drain this arena of its poison? and maybe i'm mentally challenged (i am mentally challenged) but i took that arena at complete face value, not once did i ever think that maybe you didn't have to deal with the poison.

sitting here laughing at what an amazing troll this boss is


>Simplenote

downloaded. your cheque is in the mail.

>At some points it does feel like the game assumes you have a bow though, which honestly I'm fine with

yeah it does and i'm cool with that as well, anyone can carry a bow

>best level in the base game

i respect that

>This boss somehow always reminded me of World of Warcraft

i've never even played WoW and it visually looks like a WoW boss to me

>they changed the tracking on the magical attacks in later patches/editions of the game

mental. i approve of this change.


DS2 notes:

you lose iframes on rolls for a while after your stamina drops to 0? broo-tall, i like it

the controls are off in this game-- it's just clunky and imprecise, there's a big deadzone (i went into Steam's control settings and lowered it) and it has this weird 4-direction movement where your character goes towards the up-down-left-right directions like a magnet and you don't get precision within those directions.

i can't tell for the life of me what chests are Mimics or not in this game

this game has amazing looking armor sets

this game introduced Hex magic which is an interesting idea-- spells consuming souls-- although it's pretty odd in this game specifically, considering its Soul Memory system

ADP: yeah the description is a bit vague but a ton of shit is obtuse in these games. the real problem is this obsession with the 'blind playthrough'. i understand avoiding spoilers, i'm staying away from that too, but i'm talking about being hung up on this giga-autistic interpretation of a blind playthrough where you can't look up anything at all. shit like how ADP works, how many iframes you have per AGL, how the Looking Glass Knight summon works, and so on-- you can't learn any of that in-game. this has nothing to do with a blind playthrough.

and same with getting help on stuff-- if you want to learn shit, like if you wanna learn more about the combat, or you can't figure out how to avoid Malenia's Waterfowl Dance and learning it yourself isn't gonna make your weeny hard, or whatever, then there's nothing wrong with getting help. that's what the community is for and it's called life-- nowhere else in life are you expected to learn everything by yourself in a vacuum, nobody does that. if it's to your benefit then do it, spoiling Ash Lake or Yurt is not to your benefit-- a little common sense here goes a long way.

powerstancing was introduced here and it's a great idea-- and it's still superior in one way in DS2 in that you can powerstance different weapon types-- but i was really disappointed to learn that you don't get more damage-- it's less damage than two-handing a weapon according to everything i've read online-- so i don't see how it's worth it unless you want different movesets for pvp. in ER, powerstancing gives you a massive increase in damage.


Doors of Pharros revisited:

didn't explore the other path before so i'm coming back for that

oh this is the other place for the Rat King covenant; a bigger map, more traps, and more/harder enemies

did some pvp here. i like the Rat King covenant, it's an excellent new idea for a pvp covenant.

some dude ran away from me the whole level and tried to go through the fog gate, not knowing that you're not invincible during the fog gate animation in this game. didn't end well for him.


Velstadt:

Vinland but his dick is 10 times bigger

mostly a melee boss but he pulled random buckshot magic out of his ass one time

i never know in this game when a boss is buffing up or unleashing an aoe so i always end up just staring at them like an idiot while they get stronger

really fun aggressive melee boss


Royal Rat Authority:

the dogs in this level and this boss aren't just poison, they're toxic

basically a better Sif + toxic dogs, and i'm okay with that

my twinblade took all the dogs out in one attack

love that his dying "fuck you" move is vomiting a massive acid pile onto the floor-- spiteful mutt


the fucking lever:

i pulled it. i read all the signs saying don't do it but it was like reverse psychology, it just made me really curious to what would happen and i was in a 'fuck it' mood so i did it on an impulse. the second after i pulled it i felt a sinking feeling in my stomach and shadows grew darker irl. i walk to where Navlaan was and his magical cage was gone. i go up and talk to him and he says something about me being his new mark and i can't do his quest anymore-- fuck my life. i bet you get some amazing shit from that quest and now i'm wondering what sort of hell i just unleashed upon myself. thought about ending him where he stands but maybe i can't get out of this and that'll just screw me over even more and i'm curious what this guy's gonna do. decided to move on for now and keep an eye out on my npc's in case this guy is the new Yurt/Lautrec.


Looking Glass Summon Adventures Part 2:

figured i wouldn't get any action here because my Soul Memory has grown a bit but i got like 4 hits until it dried up

you have to wear the LGK armor when you do this

not a faith guy now so the boss healing boss antics have come to a close

got connected to the same guy twice, is there no timer for LGK invasions?

someone summoned me through my actual pvp sign and he used an infinite health hack. i can't comprehend it-- what kind of mentally deranged mutant gets anything out of that?


Adia's Keep:

rings can break?!

giant basilisk just decides to break out of his cage when i get near him

that is one long dark hallway. thankfully there's a Pharros device that lights up the hallway a bit and i got a torch on me. slowly walking down this tense hall, there's quite a few enemies in cages on the ceiling-- i'm nervous but they're not breaking out so i tentatively move forward, taking out the dudes hiding behind paintings and checking the side doors that aren't closed. i finally get to the end of the hall, i try to open the door and then BAM! an Ogre bursts through the wall-- i nearly fall out of my chair and then i ran backwards away from it.

he keeps pushing me back until he's below a cage with an Ogre in it and its attacks free it, so now i have two huge hard-hitting tanks chasing me. i make a plan to run past them because no way am i taking on these 2 at the same time. they almost take up the entire hallway but i manage to barely scrape by. i'm running down the hall, go to open the next door and then BAM! another Ogre bursts through the wall. i book it for dear life. i see a fog gate at the end of my turd tunnel, i'm getting closer, closer... and then my blood runs cold: Navlaan invades me. i know i asked for it but now that i got it, i don't want it anymore.

i'm sweating, fighting for my life on this tiny bridge before the fog gate to what i presume is the boss, but i'm fighting the real boss; Navlaan's spells are SILLY, do stupid damage, and he has quite a bit of health. i'm worried that those Ogres are gonna come over here; if that happens then it's over. i manage to beat Navlaan and then one of the Ogres comes bumbling over-- at least he waited his turn. i beat him too and thankfully i'm outside the aggro range of the other two.

man, that entire scenario was Looney Tunes shit. first thing i'm doing after beating this boss is whacking Navlaan, i am never dealing with a bullshit invasion like that again. i'll go Hollow irl if killing him doesn't stop it.


Guardian Dragon:

welp, spoke too soon about this game having no shitty bosses. at least it didn't have a ton of health.

making a boss that's in the air most of the time is just great design

i cannot forgive a dragon fight


Navlaan:

so i come back here to end this guy and now he's a vendor, what the hell? is it because i'm in human form now? that's fucking ridiculous. he sells 2 incredible armor sets, 10 Ascetics, and a couple of spells; if i killed him before i found out about this i would have been totally fucked. unbelievable. and who knows what i missed out on through his quest-- fortunately these games have mellowed out my gamer OCD. bought his shit and ended him.


Dragon Aire:

another bonfire jumpscare, ugh, that's like the 4th one. that's something i forgot to re-write in my last post after i lost most of it, these bonfire jump scares where the bonfire explodes and that face dude pops up and talks to you. the first one almost stopped my heart and it still spooks me every single time. i could do without all these jumpscares, at some point this game went from trying to kill me in-game to trying to kill me in real life.

this level is proto-Farum Azula from ER

short level

my Dragon ring broke again after getting hit once by a leaping exploding acid guy. low durability is an interesting drawback to a ring.

nasty troll area with the sleeping dragon and the crystal lizard with the exploding acid guys all around

oh cool you can let go of the rope, found a little secret area

a lot of the secret areas in this level you have to bone out of (or you're boned if you don't have one)


Dragon Shrine:

why are all these Ornstein wannabes not attacking me

boss level/super short level


Ancient Dragon:

oh my god... i didn't know how good i had it. this jerk-off is quintuple the size and quintuple the health bar of the last one and with an even more boring and obnoxious moveset. kill me.

he flies up and shoots fire down to the ground and you have to run a MILE away from him to not get hit by this stupidly massive aoe and then run a mile back every single time he does it, which is every 5-10 seconds. insanely tedious, time-wasting bullshit; fuck off.

oh and if you get caught by it you might be stunlocked to red text. good one! i died once because of this after taking out half his health...

who thought this would be a good boss?

it's obscene how much health this thing has

a travesty. garbage made for mouth-breathers, "OOOOH I'M SLAYING A DRAGON, SO COOL!!!" yeah but it fucking sucks

i hate dragons, get em outta here


Giant memory:

boring boss but at least you kill it quickly



final boss time

dual boss fight (not looking up their names):

don't have anything to say because they had no health


Nashandra:

really cool looking boss and cutscene

odd how this is 2 bosses in a row with no break in between

those orbs she lays down that constantly Curse you and drain your health is a really cool move-- is there no limit to how many times you can be Cursed by that? didn't seem like there was.

a sloppy panicky fight for me because of the orbs


credits:

can't skip it-- classic


main game over:

the main game is obviously very rushed at the end as is almost tradition for games in this series to be rushed at some point; it's a shitty boss rush starting from the boss of Aldia's Keep until the end, Nashandra's cool but that's it. at least it goes by quick and the game was great up until then.



DLC coming up

alright so i've compiled a list of everything each Souls sequel changed for the sake of adding to the conversation and information. going off memory here and i'm not going super hard into detail but it's decently exhaustive of shit that matters and anybody's welcome to add to it. i wanted this list to center around features and changes that can be easily and quickly proven but still added a bit of stuff like "improved controls" where i saw fit.


DS1: new combat (slower & harsher on stamina, tougher bosses, easier mobs), interconnected & non-linear world, covenants, bonfires, no warping at first/limited warping later, estus, poise, pyromancy, you have to be in human form to invade, the beginning of the series going in an actiony direction, estus type system for magic, hidden and optional levels and bosses (ex. Ash Lake, Painted World), improved controls, plunging attacks, item burden removed, WT removed, no health punishment when dying (arguably slightly depending on the circumstance-- you do get a vague and slight amount of increased defense the more soft Humanity you carry around, which also increases item discovery), invading and getting invaded requires being in human form, weight matters more/greater variation of types of dodge-rolls, new indirect multiplayer features (vagrants, miracle resonance, estus kindling, church bell ringing, gravelord, curse statues, drift item bags)


DS2: new combat (further down the slower, harsher stamina path of DS1, emphasis on multi-fights & crowd control), torch/dark levels, worse controls, the greatest amount of gimmicks in the levels in the series, non-linear game, powerstance, bonfire ascetics, full warping, respec, enemies despawn after 12 kills, health punishment for dying (5% of max HP per death), hex magic, NG+/ascetics add new mobs, fragrant branches & pharros lockstones, omni-directional dodge-rolling, different infusion & weapon buff system, new health system (combination of estus and life gems), soul memory, semi locked-on sprinting, enemy attacks have stronger tracking in general, new covenants, being hollow or the boss being dead doesn't stop invasions, adaptability (customizable iframes and healing speed)


BB: new combat (much faster enemies/enemy attacks, much faster main character with a lot more stamina, a focus on risky aggressive sloppy combat), linear game, reduced iframes, new parry system, no respec, blood gems, smaller amount but greater uniqueness & nuance of weapons, trick weapon mechanic, insight, instability damage (take increased damage for fucking up a roll/sidestep), most detailed weapon swing animations in the series, no health punishment for dying, no teleporting between bonfires/lamps, Chalice Dungeons, runes replacing rings, weight removed, beasthood mechanic, transformation runes (beast and milkweed-- transforms your appearance and modifies your moveset with a specific weapon), one speed of rolls/quicksteps, new health system (blood vials), new mana equivalent system (bullets), blood bullet mechanic, limited RPG-ness/builds/playstyles, rally mechanic, sometimes you have to kill an enemy to get back your souls


DS3: new combat (a combination of the new faster style of BB and the old style, with enemies now focused around complex movesets), linear game, weapon arts, health punishment for dying, respec, full locked-on sprinting, respec, 1 new covenant, hyperarmor (Str playstyle now revolves around that instead of the weird facetank poise system they had before), return to the estus health system, improved controls, magic estus


ER: new combat (evolution of the DS3 path-- most difficult and complex enemies and bosses, deepest combat), non-linear, open world game, jumping, even tighter controls than DS3, minor dungeons, improved powerstancing, improved and customizable weapon arts, first magic overhaul (enemies react to magic now), respec, the biggest levels in the series, most dynamic bosses with extensive combo flowcharts, covenants removed, no more boss runbacks (other than like 2 exceptions), imp statues, stance breaking mechanic, physick flask mechanic, crafting, improved armor (only armor in the series that gives you significant damage reduction), reduced focus on pvp within the pve game and added a pvp arena, spirit summons, crouch attacks/guard counters/holding R2 attack/etc. puts you into a crouch position (which can duck attacks), guard counter mechanic, punishment for dying/Great Runes (customizable benefits for the Humanity system equivalent), (edit: forgot to mention hotkeys, stakes of marika, and transporters)


series-wide trends: genre shift (from RPG dungeon-crawler to action-RPG), each game has a different art style, cleaner hitboxes over time, less attention on pvp over time, less puzzle bosses over time, trends towards less distance between bonfires, trends towards respecs being available, upgrade system improved, removed the permanence of crystal lizards/crystal lizards equivalents, removal of npc death permanence, weapon/armor/ring degradation eventually removed, enemies became more challenging and complex



my first impression going over this is that DS3 sticks out because it didn't much new to the table. but i'll talk more about this in future posts, this post is already gonna be long enough. Roy, what would the ideal new Souls game look like to you, if you have an idea?



DS2 notes:

why don't i have iframes when i'm in the backstab animation in this game? annoying

armor is known to be shit in these games in general but it's particularly dogshit in this one. not only is the damage reduction garbage as usual but the stamina penalty is brutal and in this game more than any of the others you really want to do everything you can to lighten up the stamina burden, plus poise is nerfed. ER is the only game where armor is good.

been thinking about stuff they can do to improve these games. the most desperately needed QoL feature is a "recent items" tab to review the most recent shit you've acquired-- it's never-ending frustration getting items in these games not knowing what the fuck you got. you have a giant inventory to sift through which first off makes searching for it a massive chore that nobody's gonna do every single fuckin time they get an item and second, makes it even harder to remember what the name of the item is.

hate how scaling is useless in this game

at some point (before even the DLCs) you stop getting ways to improve your damage and defense


Iron Keep:

came back here to buy something from the merchant and received more joys of PC gaming. got invaded and it was a normal pvp fight at first but he eventually resorted to his hacks; he shot a billion corrosive urns at me and which broke all my shit and killed me. grow up, dork.


Crown of the Sunken King DLC:


Shulva:

enemies where you can't hurt them until you destroy their corpses, that's really cool

i went to hit the poison statues and it started moving and i was like wtf, there's these little slugs on the bottom moving it that i couldn't hit with my weapon but could with arrows. neat.

i like the level-shifting mechanisms

where. is. a. bonfire. haven't found one in forever.

ah found the little crypt that houses the corpses of all these fuckers

ugh these tunnels are so tight

the switch puzzles are great

took me forever to find the switch that unlocks the bonfire, pretty obscure spot

the spikes on the floor degrade my equipment? fuck

dark sometimes-claustrophobic labyrinth dungeon with enemies you can't kill-- Sphincter Factor was pretty high on this one

this was like a darker Zelda dungeon, really enjoyed this one


Dragon Sanctum:

the place inside dragon's sanctum is proto-Divine Tower of Caelid in ER. this level isn't as good as that and it's really short but it's the kernel of the idea here. i can feel the influence of DS2 on ER in particular.


Elana:

some of the bosses in this game use magic but i don't think there's been a full-on mage before so this a great addition to the roster

beat her pretty quick so i don't have too much to say but it was a good flurry of magic and summoned skellies


Sihn:

spear through his chest weakspot and you can cut off his tail-- doesn't get you a weapon but it nerfs his tail swipe attack for instance

i really like his corrosive gimmick-- if you hit his body it eats through your durability but his head doesn't do that. this is the first dragon in the series (from what i'm aware of) that encourage precisely hitting its head, which is what dragons in ER are like.

my immediate reaction to a toxic, corrosive dragon was    but it's much better than the other two dragons in the game, by far the best dragon fight in the series up till this point from what i've played


Shulva revisited:

ah okay i found the bonfire i missed, ya gotta fuck around with the level-shifting mechanisms. really well done hidden bonfires in this level.

npc invader right in front of a bonfire, thankfully he's a pushover


Cave of the Dead:

not poison statues, not even toxic statues... petrification statues, and they're everywhere. jesus christ.

snail statues make me cry

thought this was gonna be a brutal runback with a capital B but as long as you let your petrify bar go down before you run through the home stretch, you're good


trio npc boss fight (not looking up their names):

Havel, a sword dude, and an archer guy who turns into a sword dude when you get close

great arena design

smart use of petrification statues in the arena

Havel insta-kills you when he backstabs you. this happened twice.

beyond the fact that an npc fight for a DLC boss is lazy as fuck, the amount of kiting you have to do here is so tedious. the tracking on these guys is disgusting, every single attack of every one of the guys tracks 100%, their damage is brutal, their health in context is quite high, they can heal, their poise is through the roof, and you can only get 1 hit on a guy at a time before you can barely dodge-roll the incoming attack from someone else (and you have to work for even that). this is a "getting ganked in pvp" simulator.



thoughts on the Sunken King DLC: the level design and puzzle elements are awesome, fun unique mobs, Elana's great, Sihn is surprisingly good, the trio npc boss is unacceptable. on the whole, a high quality DLC.


Lost Sinner Ascetic NG+1:

using some Ascetics since they finally started rolling in recently. there was 2 red phantoms in front of those doors which were locked before, i have the key now and i lit them both up which lights up the boss arena-- cool stuff.

a couple of red phantoms with the boss now

got to get a better feel for this boss since the first time i had the Mirrah phantom with me


Twin Dragonriders Ascetic NG+1:

took out the guy on the right first this time, it's a better fight when you don't delete the archer


Flexile Sentry Ascetic NG+1:

i didn't realize the first time that the water rises throughout the fight (obviously must have taken them out before it even happened significantly), eventually getting to your waist which slows your movement down-- neat. 2 extra mobs now too.


Brume Tower:

items can be hidden in the snowmen, that's neat

i go to that area where you have to go across a chain (ER btw) and then there's an npc invader. i was kicking his ass and then he eventually runs away from me down the stairs that are there to lead you into a trap

i like the Ashen Idols throughout the level that you use the limited Smelter Wedge item on to get them to stop healing enemies, a curse effect, et cetera. the idea of having fun effects on you/mobs and promoting exploration is great but the execution was a wet noodle; they should have been scattered all throughout Brume Tower to actually promote/reward exploration but instead there's only 2 Smelter Wedge item pick-ups with a ton of them in each one and you don't even work to find them, the game just hands them to you. and that was it other than the single Wedge you get after Alonne which that isn't exploration-based either and after you beat him you're probably done with the level anyway. also, you generally have no reason to revisit rooms. it is cool that you're not aware of conserving them for Fume Knight until you actually get there.

took me a while to find the key to get to Blue Smelter Demon and Sir Alonne-- it's in a completely random and inconspicuous spot. it's just one among many random items on the floor in the bit outside in the snow where those 3 giant guys are-- doesn't seem like anything important would be there and it's very easy to die there (which i did) or get scared off of + it takes a while to get back there so i didn't go back at the time.

the part where you can light those things that have oil spilled everywhere which you can lead the mobs/npc invader later on to get fucked up by is cool in theory but feels more like "these mobs are annoying and time-consuming to fight against, let's just give the player an option to not have to deal with them"

way too many rooms full of barrel guys/barrels, it's just filler


Fume Knight:

Roy mentioned last year that this boss would get healed until you explore the level which worried me because it sounded like a "my mom is forcing me to take out the garbage before i can fight this boss" gimmick but it's actually really cool because you can beat him without doing that and it's actually more interesting to fight him with those left alone because he has to be near them for them to regenerate his health so you can keep him away from them to prevent that. i didn't have enough of the items to make the final regenerating health thing go away so i just went in there anyway to see what's up but then once i saw how it worked i wish i had left at least one more there because it was too easy to keep him away from the last one i left. if you can still keep him away from the health regeneration with all 3 things left by keeping him in the middle of the arena then i'll give this gimmick even more props. it's a shame Ascetics don't reset shit like this.

i like that he uses a long sword in his right hand and an ultra in his left, nice combination of faster and slower attacks and this is the only boss in the game that has mix-ups

the most dynamic, complex and challenging boss in the game with an awesome gimmick


Memory to Sir Alonne:

i afk'd in front of the fog wall to eat and the game eventually booted me out of the level-- why the time limit for the Memory sections, to what end does that serve? it's not quick enough to put pressure on you and there's almost nothing in these Memory levels other than enemies.


Sir Alonne:

really could have done without the runback on this boss

this and Burnt Ivory King are extremely similar to each other, both are heavily based around "dash attack/dodge backwards and then dash attack"

mostly just spams what i just said, it's extremely telegraphed and boring. and when he's not it's some very simple attack like "swing twice" and "send out 1 simple small magic projectile"-- just a super simple, repetitive boss. i thought DLC bosses were supposed to be more complex, not less.

unacceptable


Iron Passage:

i heard this was a brutal runback but it's not that bad, you just have to dodge-roll a few attacks. certainly no Iron Keep despite the similar name.


Smelter Demon... Again?:

a literal palette swap. if it weren't for the color change i wouldn't have even noticed that it's a "new" boss, the moveset is the exact same. unacceptable.


Frozen Eloyce:

i hate the overly long distances between bonfires in this DLC and Brume Tower, it wears me down. Shulva did it right for me because there are bonfires-- they're just hidden-- and the enemies weren't as brutal as the ones in this and Brume, but Brume and this have the hardest mobs in the game with the longest runbacks-- fuck off.

npc invader backstabbed me when i was opening a chest, spooked me like hell. he fuckin bowed at me too.

these ice hedgehogs are extremely obnoxious-- they track like hell, just one of them shreds through your health bar (so naturally they included ganks), and even attacking them hurts you.

seemingly friendly npc phantom but i was paranoid it was a troll encounter that'll backstab me as soon as i let my guard down so i attacked him. what a mistake-- he's tanky as fuck and he keeps running away across the map to go heal. the glut of npc invaders in this game was already annoying enough and then they take it to an extreme with the DLC. the idea of making npcs imitate annoying real player behavior is one of the worst ideas in the entire series, it's the worst of both worlds. i'll admit there's been a few cool interactions though.


Tiger boss (not looking up the name):

it's invisible until you get that item later on in the level. it's not very realistic to fight it when it's invisible and even if you can do it you would just be face-tanking it so this is just a superficial nothing gimmick.

stock animal Souls boss, it truly brings nothing to the table and for a DLC boss it's (drumroll) unacceptable.


Burnt Ivory King:

the more knights you find in the level the more back-up you have during the first phase of the fight where you go against a lot of knight enemies. each one closes one of the spawn gates eventually.

i only found 2 extra ones so i had 3 total but not the last guy, which ended up fucking me over because there's this stupid bug where the third guy doesn't close up the portal before the boss comes in so a knight walks through right after the boss makes his entrance-- one time he even let 2 knights in.

the first phase of this boss with all the knight mobs is a brutal chore you have to do every time you die and i don't think the gimmick of finding the knight helpers is good because it's not much of a choice-- who the fuck wants to take on all those knights by yourself and then have knights backing up the boss?

"uhh... what if we reskinned Alonne but gave him a really long sword"- someone who's running out of time and ideas

unacceptable


Frigid Outskirts:

no thanks. died one time and i simply will not do that runback even once, you can't make me. looked up the boss and it's just the tiger boss again except there are two of them now. i wouldn't put up with this runback for the best boss in the game much less for that-- unacceptable. wouldn't do it even if after beating it Emerald Herald came out of my screen The Ring-style and sucked my cock.


DLC thoughts:

Brume Tower's level design is bad and the Ashen Idol thing was a rough draft of an idea. very little exploration and what was there was obvious and i didn't feel that it put the verticality to good use whatsoever-- i didn't get the fun of vertical exploration and i didn't get any sense of verticality at all. at no point did i feel like i was above or below anything else, it's all just linear rooms and hallways that don't have anything to do with anything else and then there's one room with some elevators to take you to more disconnected linear rooms and hallways.

Frozen Eloyce is my least favorite out of the 3 DLCs-- the level design is again, bad, and again, has very little exploration. all the bosses here are trash. Frigid Outskirts is the worst Souls area of all time-- of. all. time. the longest/worst runback in the entire series, you can't see where the fuck you're going, the map is 99% empty space, it's filled to the brim with horrendous enemies you can't outrun because they endlessly hound you with tracking attacks, and your reward for swallowing that dookie over and over again is "reskin of the shitty tiger boss but now there's two of them and they have moves that heal themselves and increase their defense"-- go fuck yourself. this one lived up to the anti-hype.

for some inexplicable reason there was an effort made to make these levels often connect back to bonfires as if it makes any difference in this game with multiple bonfires and full warping.

the asset reuse is out of control-- Alonne and BIK are the same boss, the final boss to Outskirts recycles its first boss and pastes another one in there, one of the bosses in Shulva is just 3 npcs, they grabbed Smelter Demon from the main game and painted him blue, a mob from Shulva was reskinned & re-used for the vast bulk of the enemies in the next 2 DLCs, the Memory level to Sir Alonne is 100% recycled enemies from the main game (Alonne Knights and Fire Salamanders), and i could go on-- lazy doesn't even begin to describe it. they didn't have enough content for 2 DLCs much less 3.

overall, very disappointed with the DLCs. the only quality bosses were Elana, Sihn, and especially Fume Knight (excellent boss), the rest are insults-- scams actually. Shulva had the best level design and gimmicks-- fantastic level-- but the rest were whatever.

DS2 completed:

and with that, i've finished all of the Souls games (other than DS1, which i might finish at some point). i'll be starting a fresh run in Elden Ring soon to get ready for Erdtree and i'll be posting in this thread for that since it's my own little Souls thread. gonna be going over my thoughts on DS2 and all the games in my next post.

Was interesting to read this entire thread, wish I could have read your thoughts on BB since you seem to despise it. I started playing it and am at the end, before I fight Gerhman I want to: Do the dlc, beat up martyr guy at cainhurst, so most chalice dungeons, beat up dark beast paal, and other things. Overall I’d say the game is very good but not 100 percent “great” for me yet. Biggest issue is the focus on combat and man I really understand where Matthew came from, the thing I loved most about this game was the level design but due to the linearity many new runs are going to be a bit samey. And the combat is fun but due to enemies being sort of boring is sort of losing its fun factor a bit, wish they played into the level gimmicks a bit more(it has a good chunk but some like the frenzy thing is just a less fun turret guy from old yarnham and blue elixir 100 percent should have been able to not have the eye spot you to add cool outside of the box thinking but nope she sees you). I loved the amygdala laser gimmick and was a cool subtle way to hype up the boss(who was honestly pretty fun). And another issue I have with the level design is that the shortcuts are pretty predictable now and overdone. That being said something I do love about the level design is how it feels like a buffet of interesting discoveries and new locations, and how interconnected yarnham is. Forbidden woods can literally bring you back to the start of the game AND you explore more parts of it and even get access to cainhusrt castle which is a fun place and I love the look of it(snowy dark castles are BADASS). Wish it had more traps like send fortress(chalice dungeons have assets they could have used IMO). A very memorable moment for me was exploring cathedral wars tower and finding the old workshop, I legit got GOOSEBUMPS and finding the dolls old cloth was a cherry on top. Also had a nice story thing with her remembering something.

>Was interesting to read this entire thread

thank you

>wish I could have read your thoughts on BB

yeah sorry about that, but i'll be going over my thoughts about it again soon, as well as the rest of the series

>since you seem to despise it

haha nah, i can see why it came off that way but it's actually my favorite pre-Elden Ring game, i just have the biggest list of annoyances with it

you said you might try Elden Ring-- judging by your posts i would imagine you'd dig ER since you're so into the exploration

>chalice dungeons

it's definitely... an experience. the randomly generated level design is vile but the worst part is that it forces you to find/loot every room in these randomly generated hell holes to have enough materials to unlock the other Chalices-- a truly mind-numbing, mind-boggling chore. i would never, ever, do the Chalices again but it did give a memorable challenge. i can only imagine that you'll hate it because you're not that into BB's combat; you probably shouldn't bother but if you try it and start getting bored/burnt-out, just quit while you're ahead.

Anyways started the old hunters dlc and man I will say I do like these new old hunter enemy’s, they are pretty fun.

Upper cathedral ward is a really good location holy shit….

thoughts on DS2:

- Omar made me realize i have a tendency to backload my criticism so this might sound like i'm more negative about a game than i actually am or that i changed my opinion-- not the case so keep in that mind

- i personally enjoyed DS2 but i can understand why it has the reputation it does, it's a pretty flawed game and it didn't help that Bloodborne overshadowed it a mere year later (Scholar actually came out a month after Bloodborne which again, didn't help).

- the pvp system is obnoxious-- the fact that being Hollowed doesn't prevent you from being invaded. i'm so over the pvp/invasions in these games (will talk about this another time) and it really sucks that you have to go offline or endlessly dump Humanity into a bonfire to avoid hacks, twinked out pvp pros, and just pvp in general. this may initially seem appealing to pvp/invasionheads but it's even worse for them because in an attempt to balance this there's no way get non-cracked orbs, and people will go offline if they have too anyway.

- the more in the hole you get from spending souls on Lifegems, losing souls, and not being optimal with soul spending, the higher level invaders you'll get due to the Soul Memory system. insanely obnoxious punishment.

- the second half falls off-- a shitty boss rush, some extremely bland boring levels like Brightstone Cove Tseldora, and most of the DLC.

- this is the first Souls game to make puzzle bosses a very minimal part of the experience-- lots of bosses have a gimmick (ex. Lost Sinner with the arena you can light up), but Executioner's Chariot and Royal Rat Vanguard are it as far as puzzle bosses go and even those are light on the puzzle aspect. i prefer this, and whether someone likes puzzle bosses or not it can't be denied that this was forward-thinking in respect to the direction of the series because that's exactly where it eventually went.

- looking back, they went overboard with making 3 Souls games at basically the same time. DS2, BB, and DS3 all came out back-to-back 2014, 15, and 16 and this ended up negatively impacting all 3 games in different ways

- amazing troll with the Mytha boss

- far, far too many npc invaders. i guess this was done in the spirit of getting players used to invasions/pvp but that doesn't make any sense to me-- invasions from actual players will do this and will get them used to fighting actual players while npc fights will not. fact is, npc fights are garbage that nobody wants to play. to its credit there were a few cool unique interactions.

- lots of cool levels here and if someone likes levels to have more than exploration and combat then this will be the best in the series for that. lots of fun gimmicks, environmental hazards, etc-- most of the levels are really varied with ideas. the downside is that this focus had an obvious impact on the level design. take Shaded Woods for example-- unique one-off ideas like Curse Jars and translucent npc enemies that you can't lock on to and are camouflaged by the thick fog*. but the level design is a bunch of empty space littered with trees and a few shitty little square ruins-- everything's a trade-off. not that there aren't more complex, well-designed levels in DS2 and the upside is that the levels are still in general more expansive and intricate than DS1's and DeS's. *(also a neat secret is that they have trouble seeing you too and react to your sound, try hitting a tree to fuck with them, also the Eye of the Priestess item you get in the DLC reveals them)

- this is the one game that actually tried to do something interesting with durability. i'd rather not have durability at all but you at least gotta give credit for the attempt.

- i'm fine with runbacks being hard for one game because it's not the direction that the series went in but Iron Keep is a level where it seems literally impossible to do a skip-enemies runback, Frigid Outskirts is another one, and there are some unnecessary and annoying ones. already talked about Frigid but i like the idea of Iron Keep other than the impossible runback, it's just the specific enemies that this runback is littered with are the most one-note enemies in the game, and the boss is one of the harder bosses in the game, and it's not hard to see why this level is despised.

- your movement is horrible (massive gaping deadzone, d-pad directional movement, etc). the sound design is trash (weak hit sounds, etc). the new animations are terrible (floaty, sluggish, unsnappy, lacks weight and power, and so on). there's no hit-pause on landing hits so it feels like you're hitting nothing. enemies "slide" away as you hit them which can put them out of reach (this will affect you more you depending on the type of weapon you're using-- weapons like katanas are unusable). you have to manually aim Ultra's even when locked on. all this shit brings "don't fix what isn't broken" to mind; no other Souls game has these issues.

- this is a problem not just with DS2 but i absolutely hate how the Estus upgrades are done, it's far too much punishment for missing a tiny number of random obscure items. having to scour levels you've already gone through for Shards and Bone Dust with absolutely zero fucking hint to where they can be is either a true nightmare for people who want to commit to a strict blind playthrough or a chore for people who will just look it up.

- hotboxes are generally technically clean in this game but they can feel like shit due to issues like your character being teleported to a grab. a lot of issues with 'gamefeel' in general in DS2-- Estus animation is in reality the same speed same as DS1's (once you get enough AGL/ADP) but the animation is different-- in DS1 your character brings the flask to his lips very quickly and it's the chugging animation that takes a bit, which makes sense, but in this it's the exact opposite which is ridiculous and feels frustratingly slow, plus in practical terms it is slower because this isn't the same game as DS1. same deal with attack animations-- same speed (tho commitment is significantly slower in DS2) but the animations feel slower.

- bloated game length, could have cut out the bad parts and still had a lengthy game

- Peruser boss. great idea, not the best execution but fun.

- Bonfire Ascetics, great feature

- powerstancing: great idea, badly executed here. requires 1.5 stat requirements, the damage is a prank on the player (less damage than two-handing despite the much higher stamina cost when attacking), and the huge increase in stamina cost in a game where you're already starved for stamina is unbearable. i don't see a reason to use this in pve. the one thing it has over ER's is that you can powerstance different weapon types together-- that's great.

- i was lenient on the bosses because i don't have high standards for bosses in earlier Souls games-- as long as a boss doesn't annoy me i'll give it a pass-- and on a first playthrough in any game a level or boss or whatever has to be pretty fuckin bad for it to annoy me because i'm quite easy to please on a first playthrough for any game. but there's a strong repetition that sets in, they're just way too simple and easy and samey for how many there are and it's close to a flatline; not many low lows but almost no high highs either. there are some blips (ex. Mytha for the troll, the Gargoyles for the surprise, Looking Glass Knight, Executioner Chariot) but people don't like these bosses in general for good reason.

- i can completely understand people not liking or bouncing off of this game's combat. first off, it starts out rough in general because of the lack of stamina, iframes, and Lifegems and there's just a lot more traps for people to fall into than usual-- not leveling ADP/AGL, accidentally choosing the hard mode Covenant, choosing the wrong weapon class, not realizing the importance of stamina in general (ex. wearing heavy armor), missing the cling ring (you will miss it if you run to the boss), not figuring out ways to lessen the ganks, etc.

choosing the wrong weapon in particular is an instant fun-killer-- you need to use a weapon that can deal with multiple enemies, choosing the wrong weapon class more than anything else will make someone bounce off this game at the speed of light and in the other games you can make any weapon work so you'd naturally expect the same here. the mace was the weapon i used when i first tried this game and ragequit; using a short-range, slow, and vertical-swing weapon in DS2 is absolute fucking torture even at the beginning of the game, you need something with range at the minimum.

beyond that, the combat is slow as balls and your character has been gimped from DS1 (slower, less stamina) despite you having to stretch these resources a lot further due to the world around you having advanced (a lot more enemies per encounter, the enemies themselves are more dangerous in multiple ways, etc). your attack commitment is glacial (takes forever to move/roll out of an attack), all your animations are brutally slow (you have a slower roll here, a longer get-up animation, slow Lifegems, etc). you technically don't have that much less stamina than DS1 but in practical terms you really do. a little stamina management amongst a bunch of other things to deal with, great, but DS2 is so focused on micromanaging such a small amount of stamina which isn't enough to go around for the enemies/bosses, slows down the pace of combat, and isn't a deep enough mechanic by itself to focus on to this degree to begin with.

in the other games there's a lot more 1v1's, your character's are beasts, and you have the proper tools at your disposal to deal anything-- 1v1's with tough enemies/bosses, 1v2's, gank fights, the number and specific types of enemies you fight at the same time is extremely carefully designed-- while here you're very limited, there's almost no 1v1's, and they just throw whatever the fuck at you for 1v2's and ganks. the further you get into this game, the higher health, higher damage, and higher poise enemies there are until you hit the apex in the DLC where everything has been doubled down on; the highest number count with the most brutal enemies in the game, almost every enemy has a ton of perfect-tracking attacks, lots of sprinting attacks, some enemies have a "get the fuck off me" move (ex. 360 degree spins), and they nerfed pulling to boot.

DS2's combat just isn't as well designed as the rest of the games. in every other Souls game, the more you challenge/restrict yourself the better experience you'll have with the enemies and bosses, but here the weaker you are, the more you'll be kiting a clown car of enemies waiting to get a single safe attack in and a lot of people simply aren't going to be into that. personally, that's a lot more engaging to me than trivial combat so that's why i enjoyed Ds2's combat while i didn't with DS1. but i don't believe for a second that you're intended to game the ganks to this extent like the fanbase convinced themselves-- pulling enemies with a bow, plinking enemies to death from a distance, tip-toeing everywhere to not trigger aggro-- all that's just artificially smoothing over heavy gank fights that are supposed to be just that. and for people who don't like that, first of all most people won't think to do that sort of shit to begin with but it's also a tough ask to get people to game it because that further drags the pace of the game through the mud.

- overly nerfed all forms of magic in the DLCs-- melee is a must in the DLC

- it's absolutely true that this game does not feel like a living, breathing world like the other ones do-- the levels here are disconnected video game levels with no coherence in art style or anything really

- this game has a self-aware trollish "fuck you" bent to it which i thought was fun. i could never shake off the feeling that a Japanese game developer was watching me play and laughing his ass off.

- The Lever was memorable and i appreciate that it wasn't just the new Yurt/Lautrec, it's a creative troll, but it's really disappointing that you can get yourself out of it just by killing the guy afterwards. that's the one moment where they held back; they gave more enough warnings so just let it be permanent, it's not like it fucks up your game.

- it's nice that backsteps have iframes

- the worst npc locations of all time. lots of examples here but the faith vendor is a mile away in Majula, 1 boss soul vendor is surrounded by exploding enemies, and the other one is particularly the worst shit i've ever seen; she's tucked away into a level and she's surrounded by spiders and mages with heat-seeking magic missiles that will fly into the room she's in so you have to take them out every time.

- despise how your character's progression hits a wall early on. it's the exact opposite of ER where you have so much room to grow and so many different ways to make your character more powerful in general-- attack, defense, etc.

- mixed feelings about Majula's theme. it's beautiful but i also find it depressing and that's personally not the emotion i want to feel in a hub.

- first time the DLCs were (mostly) bad. lame stock level designs, the lamest mob and boss fights in the game, and Brume Tower is a linear vertical tower without vertical level design. the Shulva DLC and Fume Knight are the only worthwhile things about it.

- a lot of the levels were retroactively brightened after their decision to downgrade the lighting system and cut down on the darkness/torch mechanic, so much of the game has a shitty washed out look to it

- forgot to mention before that beyond the fact that there's virtually nothing to find (and nothing worthwhile) and all the enemies are re-used from the main game, the Sir Alonne Memory looks and plays like a shitty bare-bones featureless 90's FPS map. one of the most throwaway levels a Souls game has ever had, complete with an unnecessary and obnoxious runback, and all this for one of the most one-note bosses in Souls history modeled after one of the most one-note enemies in the game. this would be the worst level ever except...

- Frigid Outskirts. the most wretched level in Souls history, no contest-- believe the hype.



conclusion:

- this is the most anybody has ever and ever will write about Dark Souls 2

- i can't disagree with a lot of the criticism for this game but i certainly don't agree with the more extreme end of people who push it as some unmitigated catastrophe, and it happened to be one of the more enjoyable Souls games for me. in the context of how i've played these games (going backwards), it held up favorably because it's different; it has its own unique elements, not everything carried over, it's not been universally improved upon. DS2 will appeal to people who want something that stands out and/or a game closer to the classic Souls style and can accept/ignore the combat and overlook the issues/jank in general in favor of the unique ideas/features it brought to the table.

I still gotta read and reply to all this, will get to it! But good to see you see some of the light of DS2, feel that game gets far too much hate.

>I still gotta read and reply to all this, will get to it!

take your time, i know i pump out books

>But good to see you see some of the light of DS2, feel that game gets far too much hate

i'm with ya, i think the only thing we don't see eye to eye on is the DLC; i'm curious about your thoughts on Brume Tower & Frozen Eleum Loyce


will be talking about Bloodborne in the next post but for now some (relatively) brief thoughts on the Souls games as a whole:

there's been enough changes and improvements in general to make these enjoyable games for me but it's not an unfair perspective to shit on the direction of the series (particularly as of late), it is extremely frustrating; the general trend is that the more the games went along the less willing they were to come up with new ideas but the more they polished the gameplay, and that's a lose-lose scenario for me because i want both. a game like ER is much more enjoyable for me to actually play than a game like DS1 but DS1 is more innovative, less streamlined, and progressed important things like asynchronous online/multiplayer features. i fucking despise this dynamic and really wish we could get a focus on progressing the general Souls framework as well. when i played DeS and DS1 back in the day my desire was for these games to become more enjoyable to play and it's like i had my wish granted by an evil genie.

they've gotten better at level design, exploration, combat, build/playstyle variety, etc. since Demon's Souls and that's important but the games have become overly streamlined/sanitized (ex. the quality of the level design itself is superior in ER over DS2, but DS2's levels has way more variety/unique concepts and mechanics/challenging levels/environmental hazards/etc. while virtually all major dungeons in ER are devoid of any of that and have ample checkpoints, it's not really a dungeon-crawler anymore), overly focused on specific things (ex. boss fights, although i don't have a problem with the bosses in and of themselves), and the well of ideas/new features/evolution of prior concepts has gotten bone-dry. the potential of this series is far from fully realized.

Starting my demon souls playthrough.

Boltaria 2 is pretty cool and I like the dragon gimmick and the underground way to go under the dragon but you have to face dogs, although I wish the dragon could see you under the cracks and breathe fire in that small space.

Would it be a hottake to say demon souls has better enemy design than bloodborne?

Bloodborn has fantastic enemy design, in terms of their...visual design. In terms of combat they were always a bit 'whatever' to me.

I was mainly referring to gameplay yeah.