Dark Souls 3 is like "The Force Awakens"; It's the bare minimum of what it needed to be, a video game for the sake of a video game. It thinks fan-service, nods and references will carry it, because it offers little that's new or interesting enough to stand on its' own. It has more to offer than Bloodborne, but it's still a regression of the Souls formula. Someone shaved this wild, untamed thing, and whittled its' fangs down too far.
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.
This is what I think is great about Dark Souls games.
Think of how long it must have taken to figure out exactly how to fuck with the player's ingrained habits and routines for how they interact with these environments. 3 games in this series, and still they find new ways to catch people off-guard. It's cheeky and I love it.
I kind of wish the main game had content this clever.
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.
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.
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.
The first is a generic 3D brawler. You mash the attack button at every enemy, and then you do the same thing. And then you do it again. You do this for nine million years, and it never becomes exciting or interesting. The world is drab and lifeless, all of the levels are forgettable, there are no meaningful interactions and there's too much damned level grinding. There are obstacles that have solutions so obtuse, so nonsensically beyond what any sane person would ever think to do, I'd swear it was made by Tim Schaefer.
