Dark Souls Remastered: Plat

I got every trophy in Dark Souls Remastered in about ten days. It felt like months. Apparently the Remaster introduced MORE bugs. Which is kind of like if Sonic '06 finally got patched, and all the patch did was add Big the Cat fishing levels.

With this, I now have the platinum trophy in all 4 Soulsborne games. To commemorate this, here is a doodle of my player character:

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Dark Souls 3: No Deaths Run FINALE

Welp, I beat Dark Souls 3 without dying. It took just under 40 hours in the one playthrough, and about a bazillion failed playthroughs where I would start a new game any time I died.

The only rules were to beat every boss in the game without dying. It wasn't about getting 100% of all of the items and secrets, and it was not a speed-run. It was just to see if I could do it.

Here's footage of the last boss fight in this run. Obviously there are late-game spoilers:





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Dark Souls 3: "Darkmoon Blade"

I just got the platinum trophy in Dark Souls 3.

I've been playing this game since the day it was released. It took over 400 hours to get one achievement. Which is 397 hours longer than I consider reasonable.

The last achievement/trophy I needed was to get all of the games "Miracles", a type of magic spell. The most time-consuming spell to obtain is called "Darkmoon Blade". The only way to get this Miracle is to offer 30 of a specific item to a dragon lady in a tower.

The items in question are white ears, human ears called "Proof of a Concord Kept". The only way to get these are:


a.) Killing "Silver Knight" enemies

or

b.) Defeating an invading player in someone else's game after you're summoned to help them.

The greatest foe in Dark Souls 3.

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Dark Souls 2: No Deaths Playthrough Ending

A couple of days ago, I beat Dark Souls 2 without dying. It took 9 months of constant fuck-ups and swearing and resentment, blaming myself, my controller, the game(and to be fair, I'd say they were all valid targets of blame at different points). But it finally happened.

I set a goal for myself last year, and now I've achieved that goal.




Granted, I overleveled the fuck out of my character, and I wasn't going for some kind of insane world record or anything. The point wasn't to try and be the best person to ever play the game, just to see if I could beat every boss in the game without dying in a single playthrough.

Was it worth it? I mean, I didn't feel any different. I always knew I COULD do it, theoretically. I'm just surprised at how many bullshit deaths these games threw at me before I got this far. If nothing else, it provided a welcome distraction from the upcoming US election.

So umm... yeah. That's what I've been up to this year.


END OF LINE

~A.H.

Dark Souls 3: "Soul Of Cinder"

You guys, I just had a really good idea:

The final boss of Dark Souls 3 should have been SOLAIRE. 


You go in expecting Gwyn or some shit, you steel yourself for the final battle, and you walk through the fog gate… and there he is, just sitting by the fire.

You walk up to him, maybe have a friendly chat. Maybe he thinks you look familiar. Maybe you can tell him you’ve met before, in a past life/cycle. Like how you can tell the darkmoon lady that you’re a bird. It can just be to fuck around, or it can be to cement your own headcanon that your character is the same as from the first game. Maybe share some Siegbrau if you have any left. One last toast, especially to those who couldn't make it that far.

And THEN the fight begins.


Same moveset.

Same music. 

Praise the fuckin’ sun. 


I am retroactively pissed they didn’t go with that. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess. I need to go draw that shit…

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Bloodborne: "Iron Woman"

Two months ago, I tried to beat Dark Souls 2 without dying. I failed several times.

Last month, I tried to beat Dark Souls 1 with as few mandatory deaths as possible(there are parts in the game where it's unavoidable). I failed many times.

This month, I almost beat Bloodborne without dying. I was only 7 bosses away from completing my goal. On my 27th attempt, a random human enemy in the DLC killed me. He staggered me from behind while I was healing. He shot me with this gun, which in this game does little damage but can stun enemies while they're in the middle of an attack animation.

The problem is that this enemy is supposed to have abilities and equipment and attacks that you, the player also have. But you cannot stagger enemies from behind just by shooting them. I've tried. It's not a feature.


Turns out, you can stagger enemies that use the same healing items as you, while they're healing. I learned this the hardest way possible. And this guy was rushing me, so I needed to heal or else his next attack was going to kill me anyway. So it was hopeless.

But then, why did he fire his gun if he was close enough to use his melee weapon?

My point is fuck this game.

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Dark Souls 3: "True Colors"

So, remember that post I made complaining that Dark Souls III looked too monochromatic? Where at the end I suggested that maybe we only saw a very bland-looking area, and that maybe the rest of the game was more visually interesting?





Damn it.

Also, whose idea was it to use the song “True Colours” for a game that doesn’t have more than two?


It’s like they looked at Skyrim and Gears of War and said: “Ugh, these games are just too vibrant! What is this, My Little Pony?!”. I was really hoping Bloodborne was just a game with monotonous art-direction, but it looks like that blandness and de-saturation is built right into the engine.


END OF LINE

~A.H.

Bloodborne: "The Old Hunters"

The standalone DLC pack for Bloodborne came out, and to my surprise it seems like it was built around my criticisms of the main game. It has interesting environments, better enemy variety and placement, a bigger focus on level hazards, and a greater amount of player expression through new and unique weapons and armour. Now everyone doesn't look like the same character. There's even a voiced narrator that actually tries to explain what the fuck is happening and why. It's still all balderdash, it's obvious From Software creates art assets in a vacuum, separate from any context or reason. But flimsy, half-hearted exposition near the end by a throwaway, nameless NPC is better than what Bloodborne offered before, which was literally nothing.

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"Bloodborne" Review

by Alex Hill

2/5 

There is something inherently wrong with Bloodborne's design philosophy. It is an inelegant, lopsided creature. It limps in the foosteps of the Dark Souls series, capturing little of their spark of genius. It throws away many of the conveniences and accomplishments of its' predecessors, in exchange for time-wasting nonsense.

You play as whoever, you go to some place or whatever, and then you're a squid. That's the entire plot of Bloodborne. There's no room for role-playing or head-canons. I never really felt like a part of the world it presented, the way Dark Souls allowed. You show up, you kill a bunch of things, you kill some more things, The End. There's no investment, there's no intrigue, there's no significant or interesting lore. Doom offered a richer narrative in its' between-stages loading screens. The people who tell you to read between the lines think that seeing something others can't will somehow make it profound. In that sense, Bloodborne is about its' own fans.

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