Dark Souls Commentary

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. In this video, I'm going to be showing Dark Souls from start to finish, or at least as much as I can, and commentating on it as I go. If you've never played this game, then I would highly recommend doing so before watching this video, as it's definitely best experienced the less you know about it for your first time playing. I would also recommend watching my Demon's Souls Commentary if you haven't done so already, as Dark Souls is the spiritual successor to Demon's Souls. So it only makes sense to watch that one first. You can see I'm just going to be jumping straight in here. I'm not going to be doing anything fancy with my character, just setting up a basic knight character and jumping into the game. Once we start, I'm just going to be talking about anything that springs to mind. So there's not going to be any particular topic for this video. It's just going to be gameplay, graphics, lore, level design, whatever comes up as we go through it. The first thing you'll see after making the character is the introduction cutscene, which will set up a bunch of characters for later on in the story. We get much more backstory in this game than we got in Demon's Souls, which is just a different way of doing it. It's not necessarily better or worse. I think the approach that they used for both games suited both games. The main difference, though, is that the introduction to Dark Souls is done with a CGI cutscene and animated video rather than a series of stills like in Demon's Souls. The introduction to Demon's Souls was fine. The art that they used was quite nice and I liked the way some of it, at least, seemed to be reused concept art, which made a lot of sense. But here, you can see it looks like a bigger deal simply because it's an animated video instead. I think this firstly shows how much of a budget increase Dark Souls had compared to Demon's Souls because there's a lot of different scenes that happen in this introduction. But the other thing, as well, is that it's just a better use of resources than it was in Demon's Souls. What I mean by that is Demon's Souls actually had a video that was kind of similar to this one. It didn't go on quite as long. It didn't have as much going on in it. But it did have a video like this. The only thing is, that video was put as the attract-mode video on the main menu. Now, for those of you who don't know what I mean by that, the attract-mode video is when you leave the main menu running and a video starts playing instead of just leaving the menu up for you to use. It's called an attract-mode video because it originated in arcades, and the idea was, of course, that the arcade would mostly be sitting on the menu. If nobody was using the machine, then it would be sitting on the main menu. So after a little while, a video would play, then, to entice the player to come along and spend some money. It kind of can have some value on a console game in the same way because sometimes you would have those booths set up in places where, you know, you could play one of the latest games on a new console or something. I think those are pretty rare these days, though, and the main reason the attract-mode video probably got brought over to consoles is because of screen-burn. On CRT TVs, if you left the same image up for too long, it would get permanently get marked into the screen, and the attract-mode video is a nice way around that, because if the player - - you can imagine a player is probably going to come along and turn on their console, maybe walk away sometimes. So you have to protect them from burning the main-menu picture logo into their screen by having something play in the meantime. I kind of like that attract-mode videos have survived as long as they have. They're a nice little piece of gaming history, but I do think that this introduction at the start is a much better use of resources. The idea being that this is something that every player will see right at the start of the game. So it's best to put the work into that rather than having it placed somewhere else where they might not see it or it might not be as important. After this video, we can see the main character has been left in the Undead Asylum to 'while away' their days until the end of the world. I think this introduction is quite clever because it explains what happens to the undead in this world, which makes a lot of sense. If you can't kill something, you might as well lock it up. So I really like that that makes sense. But it's also just good because Oscar makes his appearance and explains, also, an easy way for the player to get out of their cell. In so doing, then, it also makes the player feel a bit indebted to Oscar, which will be important in a few minutes. Now the tutorial stage is very similar to the one in Demon's Souls in that it uses messages to guide the player. One thing I'll be demonstrating as I go through it here is just how comprehensive it is. Basically, when you start Dark Souls, the only thing that you need to know how to do before you begin playing is to use the left analogue stick to move. Once you know how to move, you get a prompt to open a door, and then there's a prompt to read the messages, and the messages will teach you everything you need to know to complete the game. Before I continue on too far, you can just see that there's a boss here, right in the very first part of the game that we won't be seeing again for quite a while. It's a nice little detail to have the boss down there at the start even though you don't fight him until later on. I won't be going through the entire tutorial, but you'll see as I make my way through it that I only use the techniques that I've been taught up to that point. And it's totally viable to get through the tutorial that way. And doing so gives you everything that you need to know to complete the game. So it's really quite an impressive tutorial, I think, anyway. I know I said this before in the Demon's Souls video, but I quite like, in particular, how skilled players can just ignore all of this stuff and just make their way through. Right after the first bonfire, we have our first encounter with the Asylum Demon. Now you're supposed to run away from this guy, but you can actually beat him, kind of similar to the Vanguard in Demon's Souls. You can beat him before you're supposed to. Killing him early in that way is very difficult and very tedious. That's why I'm not doing it myself, because I only have a broken sword at this point. But you can choose choose gifts on your character at the start. And if you choose the firebombs at the start, then it can make it much easier. You can just chuck those at him, and that'll do most of the damage. Unfortunately, if you do kill him early, you get the Demon's Great Hammer, which is a pretty lackluster reward because it requires 48 strength to use. You can half that strength requirement by two-handing the weapon, which brings it down to a more reasonable number. But, even so, it's quite, quite a heavy weapon and not really useful to the player for a very, very long time. This highlights a recurring problem with Dark Souls that we'll see later on, where it has Demon's Souls's nonlinear way of making your way through the game and various things that you can do but the incentives to do those things aren't as great as they were in Demon's Souls. In Demon's Souls, if you killed Vanguard at the start, the rewards that you got were very practical. They were very useful rewards to have at the start of the game whereas the Demon's Great Hammer isn't useful for a very, very long time. So your incentive to do that boss early is quite small. Once we finally got our equipment and made our way forward a little bit, we can meet up with Oscar. First of all, I just want to say that this is one of those scenes that the Souls games are very, very good at, where Oscar being knocked down onto this rubble looks very picturesque, and there's something really nice about it even though it's kind of grim at the same time. As I said earlier, Oscar is the one who frees the player. And the idea there is to make you feel at least a little bit indebted to his character. When you first arrive in the world of Dark Souls, even though the intro was much more comprehensive than the intro in Demon's Souls, you really don't know that much about the world. So far, all we really know is there was some big godlike things that killed some dragons, and fire is important to undead people, and undead people are becoming a problem. That's really all we know. Those would be the main points. As a result, when Oscar starts talking about the prophecy of the undead and blah blah blah blah blah, you know, I try and get into these games, but even so, it's a little bit hard to take that kind of motivation seriously right at the start of the game. But the beautiful thing, of course, is because he's freed you, you just have a motivation to go and fulfill his last request. So even though you don't know what the Bell of Awakening is and you probably don't even care, it's really nice to have this two-pronged approach to player and character motivation to really make sure that you have at least some reason to go out and do some of the stuff that you're about to do. Apparently, in the early stages of development, Oscar was supposed to be the player's rival. In other words, he would be around for much, much more of the game and you might actually fight him near the end. I think this explains why the developer notes use Oscar's picture. Most of the notes in the game use just a basic undead picture because they don't have many ratings, but there can be other pictures on notes as well. If a note is rated up enough, the picture can eventually turn into Solaire and Frampt, but you would very, very rarely see those. The developer one always uses Oscar, though. There's no other pictures associated with that. I'm just speculating here, but I think the idea was, early in development, Oscar would be one step ahead of you and so the notes would have been left by him. It would give an excuse for the notes to be there. And knowing how sadistic these games can be with their storytelling, the idea was probably to indebt you to Oscar even more before you had to go and kill him at the end. It would have been really cool to see that in the game, and it would have been interesting to see if they had pulled it off correctly or not, but you know, stuff always get cut when people are making games. So I'm sure there's stories like that for every single game ever made. One of the major new additions to the combat compared to Demon's Souls is the plunging attack that you can do when falling. This is put to really nice use on this boss, where coming down and taking away a third of his health bar in one hit gives you a lot of confidence. Where you might otherwise be discouraged by the game giving you a boss fight this early, you suddenly now have a lot of confidence once you've fallen down and taken off so much damage. The falling attack isn't a major game-changing thing. It's not an amazing improvement from Demon's Souls. But it does come in handy in a few places. The thing I like about it most is that it doesn't interfere with anything that's already there. In Demon's Souls, when you were falling, there was nothing you could do. So you might as well just have the option there for the player to press the attack button, and now they can do a falling attack. These are the kinds of additions that I really like in sequels, where a developer takes something that wasn't fleshed out or maybe couldn't do anything at all in the previous game and just gives it that little bit of functionality. So, on top of everything that you had before, you now have that one extra option. And it just - - it improves everything just that little bit more, just to add that extra choice. Just before we leave this area, the last thing I'm going to show here is Snuggly the Crow, who, for anybody who played Demon's Souls, this was a very, very strong indication that you would be able to come back here later on since Snuggly is used for trading. There's nothing else left to see here now, though, so it's on to Firelink Shrine. Once we arrive in Firelink, our first NPC that we'll see here is the Crestfallen Warrior, who makes his return from Demon's Souls. I say that. He's not the exact same character. But he is extremely similar and, obviously, voiced by the same person. I think he's even sitting in the exact same pose. Demon's Souls was published by Sony. And after Sony neglected to release Demon's Souls in the West, then From Software decided to partner with Namco Bandai instead for the sequel, Dark Souls. This is the reason why Dark Souls is not Demon's Souls 2, although I'm not convinced they would have made Demon's Souls 2, anyway, even if they had the choice. But this also explains why the Crestfallen Warrior returns, or at least I think it's the reason why the Crestfallen Warrior has returned. Basically, when From Software were making this game, they had to change the setting. They had to change the world. Everything about it had to be 'spiritual sequel' instead of 'sequel.' But there was probably that little bit of sadness, maybe some bitterness, about having to leave all of that stuff behind and start from scratch. So I think that's the reason why the Crestfallen Warrior made it into Dark Souls. Since they had to drop Demon's Souls, they probably wanted some ownership back over some of the things that they created, so they made the Crestfallen Warrior here to feel like they had ownership of that again. That's my speculation on it, anyway, but I think - - I really, really, strongly think if Dark Souls had been published by Sony instead, that the Crestfallen Warrior wouldn't be here. I don't think it would be a drastically different game. I could be totally wrong about that. But I think, if they still were working with the people that they made Demon's Souls with, there wouldn't be any desire to bring the Crestfallen Warrior back. I'm not really that fond of having the same character appear again, but since Dark Souls is a different world, it's not that big a deal. The only other character here for now is Petrus, who I'll be talking about a bit more later on. But for now, the important thing to know about him is that he gives you a Copper Coin when you first meet him. This hints towards his character and explains why he does some of the stuff that he does later on in his story. The Copper Coin description says: "Those who dream of returning to the outside world are fond of carrying these around." So, for whatever reason, Petrus doesn't want to be stuck in the land of the undead, which is a pretty reasonable thing to feel all things considered, but it might cause him to do some less reasonable things later on. I think, from Firelink Shrine, that the level design leads you towards the Undead Burg, but considering the number of people that end up going towards the graveyard and getting killed by skeletons and complaining about it, I might be wrong. Personally, I think the introduction where the crow flies over and drops you in Firelink Shrine was supposed to point you towards the Burg because it does highlight it quite heavily. And so I didn't have any difficulty with that on my playthrough. I won't be talking about the graveyard or anything like that for now. We'll just be going straight to the Undead Burg. The Undead Burg is, of course, the first area that the player is supposed to visit after doing the tutorial, and the enemies are quite similar to what they've been up to now, and they'll just continue to be undead warriors for the meantime. This doesn't make a bad introduction to the game. The enemy design will certainly pick up later on, but you can see how, at the start of the game, it's best to pit the player against something which is kind of similar to themselves, something that they can read very easily. There's a couple of things I like here. I think the level design is quite strong in this area. First of all, there's a semi-secret area hidden right at the start here near some barrels, and off to the side, you can fall down here to pick up some stuff. The rewards aren't great, but it's nice to have some stuff hidden right at the start. There's a couple of things I like about this area. First of all, there's some hanging enemies, which are introduced with just two of them at the beginning, and they're quite easy to kill, and it's quite easy to see them coming. Then, not long after that, there's four hanging enemies waiting for you in an ambush. So I like that gradual introduction of that threat there and just the fact that you can just plan ahead and be ready for that when it happens. It's very easy to see the enemies waiting there before it begins, so it's a nice little trap for the player at the start of the game, where they're not really likely to die, but it keeps them thinking about things that might happen which might be kind of unexpected for them. The other thing I like about this is the fact that this loops back around to the start of the level. You just get a Humanity by coming back near the start of the level. You can pick that up, and then you come back down to where you were at the start. In a lot of games, I think the secret areas are much more poorly implemented than this. You tend to have a sort of main trunk that you're supposed to go down, and then the secret areas are where the extra items are, kind of off on these little branches. And the branches are just like spikes that just go out in each direction, and they don't go back to where they started from, or they don't loop back around in any kind of interesting way. It's only a very small thing, but having you come back to the start of this area really makes you feel like you're always moving forward because you don't have to walk backwards through any of the areas that you already came through. You do have to go through the area that you were through before. It's only a few seconds. But at least you're not going back through the same area backwards. You're just walking forwards, and it's nice and smooth. The nice thing, as well, is that it does almost the exact same thing again shortly afterwards, where you can come down towards an undead merchant, and then you go back up a ladder, and then you're back near the start of the level again. And the shape of this doesn't work out on the map, but the way I think of it is kind of like an infinity symbol, where you're walking in one straight line the whole time and you loop back around on yourself twice, but in the end, you end up going up the way that you started from. And you know, I'm not going to overstate it. I don't think this is the "greatest level ever made" or anything even close to it, but it's really nice that they were able to just smoothly bring you back around in a nice loop like that by just changing your height on the level. Once we move on a little bit, we'll see the introduction of the Hellkite Drake, which is very similar to a moment in Demon's Souls. In the first proper stage of Demon's Souls, there was also a dragon that swooped in. The difference is, in Demon's Souls, it was a cutscene that happened at the very, very start of the stage whereas in Dark Souls, it's delayed a little bit and it's also done outside of a cutscene. Personally, I think this second approach is far superior because it keeps you more in the moment. If you're just watching a cutscene, it doesn't feel like it's really happened to you whereas the drake swooping down in Dark Souls is something that you experience as the player. I also really like this because this is your warning shot for later on when the drake will light the bridge on fire and you have to avoid it. But rather than showing the drake shortly before the bridge, it shows you the drake well, well in advance. First, the drake appears. Then, you go through a whole area's worth of enemies and you find little things hidden about here or there. Then, you have to defeat a boss. Then, you probably talk to Solaire afterwards. Then, the drake attacks. It's very tricky to have this kind of setup with the long delay in the middle. But I think that's one of the things that I really like about these games, is they reward skills other than the usual ones that you would see in most games. Usually, when you're talking about "skill" in game, you really mean "mechanical skill" like "Can you hit the buttons fast enough? Can you input the right movements at the right time?" and all that kind of stuff. And I really like that kind of stuff, myself, but there's also other skills that I don't think many games explore as much as they could. This scenario in Dark Souls rewards you by having an adventurer's mindset, or being able to keep things in your head, and keep track of threats, and what's happened to you in the world. And I would say that's a skill. I think it takes skill to go through the level, and then fight a boss, which puts you under a lot of mental pressure, and still try and keep in mind that "Oh yeah, there's a drake somewhere flying about. Something's gonna happen with that drake." I'm not sure exactly what I would call that skill, but I do think that it is a skill. It is something that you can learn and you can get better at, and the Souls games are the types of games that will make you better at that kind of skill. As we can see, on this second little offshoot here is the Undead Salesman. Now this is a really interesting thing for me because a lot of people have a lot of speculation about who Yulia is because the Undead Salesman refers to Yulia. And, he also seems to be petting an invisible cat next to him, if you see him there working away on his little cat there. It's really hard to say what exactly is going on with this guy, but this, to me, really highlights one of the interesting things about games, especially in comparison to other mediums. Games are, obviously, relatively new. They're getting on in age a little bit now, but they're still a relatively new medium, and I'm sure there's going to be a lot of improvements made to the technology behind them in years to come. That said, games are a huge amount of work, and they will continue to be a huge amount of work, most likely, unless there is some massive breakthrough in the way games are developed. It takes a lot of work to make something like Dark Souls, a lot of people to make something like that. The time constraints are actually pretty harsh. Dark Souls was put out only a couple of years after Demon's Souls. It's a lot of work to do in two years. That's why anytime you see something in a game, rather than speculating on what it means for the world, or the story, or anything like that, the first question you have to ask is: "Is it intentional?" And that's the question with this guy, if you ask me. Is it actually intentional that he's petting something invisible next to him? In all likelihood: yeah, probably. Dark Souls is pretty weird. The characters can be quite strange. It's easy to see how somebody would lose their marbles if they were stuck in Lordran. But, there's always the possibility that maybe it just wasn't supposed to be that way. Maybe they ran out of time. Maybe something went wrong with the model they were going to use for whatever he was petting. And if that kind of stuff happens late in development, then sometimes there's very little you can do other than just ship it with the problem still intact. Especially with a game like this, where, and I don't want to slander them or anything like that because I really respect the storytelling, but they know they can get away with a few things like that in the Souls games because the story is so ambiguous. This problem of how difficult games are to make and stuff being cut and stuff being buggy and all that, it really complicates the issue of interpreting games and the meaning behind them. I'm sure that's a really large topic, and I don't want to get into it all, but for me, the Undead Merchant really makes me think of that whenever I see him. So there are all sorts of theories about what Yulia is to him. It could be his Uchigatana. It could be an invisible cat. There's really no way of knowing for sure, and it's just one of those things that's gonna have to be left to speculation. One thing I do want to point out before moving on is that the Undead Merchant will use the phrase "Hopped the twig" when referring to death. It's a British colloquialism, but it's surprisingly apt for Dark Souls as we'll see later on, so try and store that in your memory. Another thing I want you to store in your memory is this gate here that I'll be coming back to later on. I will have a lot to say about this gate, so keep in mind that this is the gate that I'm talking about later on. This is the one right here. Keep this one in mind, 'cause I'm gonna have a lot to say about this one later on. Anyway, before we get to the boss, there's a few more enemies, and then the first Black Knight is coming up. The position of this Black Knight is something that I really, really don't like, especially in comparison to Demon's Souls. In Demon's Souls, the equivalent of this enemy was the Blue and Red Eye Knights in Boletaria. The first time you came across the Blue Eye and Red Eye Knights, it was very easy to see them from a distance and prepare yourself for a much tougher enemy. I'm not really sure why they had him turned that way. I know you can drop down to him, but that's really something that new players are very, very unlikely to do, so they should've probably had him facing the other way. Black Knights are, of course, much tougher than the other enemies so far. Once you've played the game a few times, they're not that bad, and, thankfully, I get away killing him here instead of making any stupid mistakes. If you buy the Residence Key from the merchant earlier on in the stage, you get some Gold Pine Resin, which is useful against the boss coming up. And I also just want to point out, next to the chest, you can drop back down to where you were. So, again, just a nice little smoothening of the stage just makes it that bit easier to get around. The first proper boss I'll be going up against is the Taurus Demon, and one thing I really like about this, before the boss even starts, is the archers that are placed behind you, which draw your attention backwards. They don't always work perfectly, unfortunately. Sometimes they don't even manage to fire at you. But if you're listening, you can hear that something is shooting at you from behind. And what that does is it makes you turn around and, hopefully, you'll see that there's a ladder there where you can get up, which is very important for the boss fight. Whereas before, with the Asylum Demon, you were basically told right beforehand to use your plunging attack, now it's up to you to make the connection between the ladder, the plunging attack, and the Taurus Demon, which is just that slight increase in difficulty. Of course, he also has a lot more health. He's more aggressive. The environment isn't quite to your advantage, either. So it is a step up in boss fights, although it's not massively different from the Asylum Demon in a lot of ways. One way this is different from the Asylum Demon is that you can repeatedly use the plunging attack by going up the ladder over and over again, which is what I'm doing here. They've compensated for this, though, by having the Taurus Demon jump up after you if you wait there too long, so if you delay yourself, he will jump up and start attacking you. It was necessary for them to do it that way because the Asylum Demon was a very tightly controlled fight, where it's in the tutorial and there's not much else you can do. But with the Taurus Demon, now you can suddenly have a lot more tools at your disposal. So, theoretically, the player could have a lot of arrows now, at this point, and they might have just been able to shoot him to death, which would've been really bad. With that out of the way, we're going to make our way on a bit further and come across everybody's favorite NPC, Solaire. One thing I'd like to point out about Solaire before I go and talk to him is that he has his back turned to you, which makes him look a lot less hostile than he would, otherwise. This, of course, is a bit of a safety measure to make sure that the player doesn't go up and just start attacking him straight away or shoot at him from range. You'll be a bit more curious about him if he has his back turned to you. There's always some thought put into how the NPC can be made to look non-hostile compared to the other enemies in the game. I'll list a bunch of them off now rather than explaining them all individually when they come up 'cause I'm sure that would get annoying, but just for some examples: Griggs, Lautrec, Logan, Rickert, and Anastacia are all locked up, which makes them difficult or impossible to attack, Laurentius is stuck in a barrel, Crestfallen Warrior, Siegmeyer, Domhnall, and Quelana are sitting down, Dusk and Sieglinde only appear after killing certain enemies, Chester is slouched against a wall, and, lastly, most blacksmiths can be heard before you see them and are obviously busy working. So there was a lot of consideration put into this to make sure that the players didn't attack people for no reason. I think it's one of those things that goes unappreciated about it whereas it probably took a lot of effort on the behalf of the development team. It's also a nice way for them to give the characters a little more personality. For example, Chester being slouched against a wall. That says something about his character compared to the other characters. And this is probably why Solaire is the one who has his back turned to you, because they probably just wanted him in a regular standing pose, looking kind of determined the first time you saw him. One of the things about Solaire that's kind of interesting is, when you speak to him, your responses to him are set to "NO" by default. It's especially interesting because there's no downsides to agreeing to him. In fact, it's required to agree with him in order to be able to do co-op. So that's a pretty important thing to have the dialogue set to "NO" by default. On the different dialogue choices in the game, they have all sorts of different answers set by default. Sometimes, it's yes. Sometimes, it's no. I'm not sure if there's a logic behind it or not. I do think, especially because decisions in these games are so important and can have such ramifications on you, that they shouldn't have defaulted any of the answers to "YES" or "NO". I think they could have very easily just put something in the middle of the "YES" and "NO" options, so that would be highlighted and then you would just move to "YES" or "NO," left or right, without any sort of biases, then. It's only a little thing. It doesn't really bother me, but I just think a system which doesn't highlight anything by default would've been that little bit superior. The central theme of this game is, of course, fire, and Solaire ties in very nicely with that with his obsession with the sun. So there's a nice, picturesque moment of Solaire looking at the sun. And it's really, really great how this all ties into the central theme. I really like that. Now, although I praised the drake earlier on for being a delayed trap, which I quite like, I do think the way that it actually hits the bridge is less fair than it was in Demon's Souls. In Demon's Souls, the dragons gave you a bit more warning before they hit the bridge, which gave you enough time to kind of back away or make a decision or do something. But here, the drake just kind of swoops in behind you, and there's very little warning. There are some audio cues, but, otherwise, it's quite harsh. There is a hidden developer message around here that says "Imminent drake..." which is, of course, a big warning sign, but you have to be using the Seek Guidance miracle. If you ask me, that miracle doesn't even come remotely close to being worth equipping because it's just not all that useful. It is kind of interesting to go through the game and try it out in various areas and see the hidden developer messages 'cause there are quite a few of them, but it's really not worthwhile. It's not worth wasting a spell slot for. One thing I will say in favor of the drake in this game is, after the initial encounter with it, where it swoops in from behind, it attacks you from the front, instead, which is one of the little things I complained about in Demon's Souls. It makes the drake feel less like just something that you're encountering in a game and more like a genuine obstacle that you have to get past, like it's behaving somewhat intelligently, which is quite nice. There's a couple of shielded enemies here on the bridge where the drake is, and they drive me kind of mad because they're annoying to kill. I don't mind a challenge, but when a game just puts something in your way that's clearly there to annoy you, it gets to me. There's a kick maneuver you can do on this ledge here, which will break this guy's guard, but it's a little bit risky, and you kinda never know what's gonna happen with the lock-on in close range and close to a ledge like this. The best strategy is really to wait for him to come to you a little bit and try and knock him off the ledge, but it can take some time before he feels willing to come out. Just after this guy, there's some rats here. And I like the rats here because, at this point in the game, status ailments are really quite dangerous. So far, I haven't picked up any way to heal poison. So, if I get poisoned by the rats, then I either have to go back to the bonfire to reset my status or push on and waste a lot of Estus. You can just about see here the status ailment meter pops up for the poison, which tells you how close you are to getting poisoned. In Demon's Souls, it was kind of opaque. You didn't really know how close you are to getting poisoned or not. So, it's nice that this is turned into a little bar in Dark Souls that you can keep track of. Again, it's nothing major or anything like that, but it's just another one of those little sequel improvements that they probably didn't think of the first time around, and now that they have it, it's something that will be hard to live without. In an optional area at the start of this place, we have another Black Knight which is much harder than the previous one, I think. He does a lot more damage, and his moveset is a bit more difficult. One thing I want to demonstrate with this guy, though, is how you can chain back-stabs on a lot of enemies, including these Black Knights, which makes them very trivial. There's no other way of explaining this other than to say that it's just a problem. It's a problem with the way the enemies work. It's a problem with the way the back-stabs work, and it shouldn't be possible. I try not to exploit it myself too much, but since this guy is so tough, I do resort to it a little bit. But it's also a good opportunity to show it off, I suppose. I won't be mentioning it too much in this video, but this is one of the things that Bloodborne has really fixed, and it seems like a really obvious solution in retrospect. Basically, in order to get a back-stab on an enemy in Bloodborne, you have to charge it up first, which makes it much harder to accomplish. It seems like such an obvious solution, but it's just not in place here in Dark Souls, possibly because they just wanted to get a sequel out to Demon's Souls without reinventing the wheel too much, and I don't really blame them for that. It would be nice to have it fixed, but you can't have everything, and Dark Souls is a good sequel all things considered. Pushing on here, we have a very unique encounter here with this armored boar. One thing that occurs a lot more often this time around are enemies which only spawn once, and once you kill them, they never come back. This boar here is one such enemy, and as a result, it kind of ends up feeling a bit like a mini-boss. It's the kind of thing, you do it once, and you never have to do it again, but it's tough. I think the main reason why this is is because the player can't warp around in Dark Souls whereas they could in Demon's Souls. In Demon's Souls, the Archstones were the bonfires of that game, and whenever you found an Archstone, you could warp back to the Nexus and, thus, warp to any other Archstone in the game straight away. In Dark Souls, though, the world is all interconnected, and you can't warp around, which means if you want to move from one location to another, you have to actually physically go there. Now that is one of my favorite things about this game. I love that there is no warping at the start of this game. The fact that you have to walk from place to place, even if it's a little bit of an inconvenience, really brings you into the game a lot more, I think. That's why the enemies that only appear once are a lot more common, I think. You can think of them almost like shortcuts in a way. Obviously, they don't unlock any extra paths or anything like that, but they do make your world that little bit safer and make it that little bit easier to move more freely from one area to the next. That stuff becomes a lot more important if the player is going to be going back and forth and back and forth between an area several times, which they'll probably be doing a lot on their first playthrough. One thing I want to point out here are the Alluring Skulls that you can find here right next to the bull, which are very deliberately placed. If you read the description on the Alluring Skulls, you can use them to lure the enemy to certain places, which works really, really well against the boar, especially because there are fires littered around this area. This is the kind of thing that you actually see in a lot of games, where a game will give you a tool right before you need to use it, which makes a lot of sense. In Dark Souls, though, the tool, first of all, is optional, which is nice, and secondly, it respects your intelligence. There isn't anybody who comes along and says, "Oh, Alluring Skulls work really well against boars," or something like that. Your character doesn't comment on it. Nobody points it out to you. It's up to you to look at the item, find out what it does, and formulate a strategy by yourself, which makes it so much more satisfying than when a game just points something out to you. If there was a pop-up box that said "Use the skulls to lure the boar," then all sense of accomplishment will be gone. But even though the Alluring Skulls make the boar much easier, it can still be satisfying because you came up with a strategy by yourself, and so you have a right to feel good about that. So they don't rob you of that sense of satisfaction, which is really good. Later on in this area, we have the Balder Knights, who are considerably more skilled than the undead that we've been fighting so far in the game. These are one of the few enemies that can actually parry you. So they go into a parry stance, and if you attack them during that, they will parry you and do a critical attack against you. It seems like a bit of a strange step-up in difficulty to allow the player to be parried early on when many of the later enemies can't do that, so I'm not really sure what the story is behind that. But apart from that parry move, they're not particularly threatening, so I suppose it's not too bad. It's just a bit of a weird step-up in difficulty in comparison to the rest of the game, I think. This area in particular is one of those areas where, the first time through, I remember being very relieved once I got to the bonfire, but on every subsequent playthrough, it's been incredibly easy to make my way through this area. Partly, it's just getting to grips with the mechanics, and partly, it's just knowing where everything is. For example, there's an ambush right here, where you walk out and you get ambushed from both sides, and once you know that, it's very easy to avoid it. It's kind of an extension of the Undead Burg level rather than a brand new stage. It just happens to take place in a slightly different area. But for the most part, it's quite similar in difficulty apart from those Balder Knights. A little bit further in is the tower with Andre the Blacksmith. This tower here connects to three different areas. It connects to the Undead Parish, Sen's Fortress, and Darkroot Garden. To me, this highlights one of the most impressive things about Dark Souls in comparison to Demon's Souls. It's the lack of load times in between each stage. In Demon's Souls, the load times were pretty egregious. It was probably around 20 seconds or so just to warp into an area. But in Dark Souls, of course, it only needs to load whenever you die because you've snapped back to a different location. So that's pretty reasonable. How this works is through a technique called prefetching. Any time the game wants to use something, be it a texture or an enemy or something along those lines, it has to be loaded into the RAM of the machine. The RAM is what's called the memory, and it's where things are stored when they need to be accessed very quickly. You can think of the RAM as the place where you store things that are in use. So, if you're in an area and there's going to be an enemy type in that area, the enemy type should be in the RAM because you're going to be using it. The reason it needs to be in the RAM is because the RAM is very fast in comparison to other storage methods. When you think about the data of the game, you think, probably, about the game disc because that has the entire game on it. And that's true. It does. And that's the great thing about discs, is they have a lot of storage capacity. But in computer terms at least, they're relatively slow. To us humans, they appear to be very, very fast. But in reality, they're actually kind of slow for what a computer needs to do. The problem with it is that a disc has to physically rotate around in order for it to be read, which is relatively slow. If anything has to physically move, that's slow. There's also a certain amount of variance in the time it takes to get something, which makes it a little bit unpredictable. Hard drives work in a similar fashion, although they're faster than disc drives, generally, anyway. When you compare that to the RAM, the memory, that doesn't have a disc. It doesn't have moving parts like that. It's much, much faster as a result, then, because nothing has to physically move around. For comparison's sake, the time it takes to retrieve something off a hard drive is usually measured in milliseconds, which to us is very fast. That's one thousandth of a second. However, the time it takes to retrieve something from RAM is measured in nanoseconds, and the difference between the two is very vast. One millisecond is one million nanoseconds. Prefetching is just kind of the fancy term for it. If you think of it, you can kind of think of it like "loading." It's what happens in your typical loading screen in a game, where things are taken from the disc and put into memory so that they're ready to go whenever they're needed. In Demon's Souls, then, the prefetching would have happened all in one big chunk. The game would have said, "Okay, I'm going into Boletaria. I'm gonna need all the Boletaria stuff right now," and it loads in all the Boletaria stuff. In Dark Souls, this is handled much more cleverly. It happens in the background. And the Undead Parish tower here is a very, very good example of that happening. As the player makes their way towards Andre's little tower, there's a lot of trees on the side, which obscure your vision. The reason it works this way is because this buys the machine time to dump the old assets and bring the new assets in. This is a pretty impressive leap in technology from Demon's Souls because it's a very, very core piece of technology of the game. And generally, you find in sequels that developers don't want to mess with that stuff if they can avoid it. The benefit of making a sequel, compared to just making a brand new game, is that you get all of that code that you used before, and you can build on it instead of having to work from scratch. So it's impressive that they were willing and able to make those kinds of changes in Dark Souls, I think. You can see, though, that it's as much a level design concern as it is just a basic programming concern because there's only so much the programmers can do to make this work. The level designers have to meet them halfway, and that's why this Undead Parish has a long tunnel of trees leading towards it, so that old areas can be dropped, new areas can be brought in. And when you're in this area, you should be able to see Sen's Fortress, Darkroot Garden, and the Undead Parish all at the same time, but you can't, just because of those trees. There are other areas in the game where this kind of stuff is done, and it's usually a lot less conspicuous than a big row of trees. Usually, it's an elevator because it's a nice enclosed space, and it means that the player can't easily walk backwards the way they came. Andre is, of course, a very useful NPC, and he has some very useful advise as well, both from a story standpoint, where he tells the player to trust their weapons because they won't betray them, which is an interesting line of dialogue, but also because he tells you about upgrading armor and all sorts of things like that. Obviously, he's still in it for himself because he does charge you Souls to buy things and repair things, but that's reasonable enough. Nobody could expect anything for free in this kind of world. Overall, he seems like one of the more relaxed NPCs in the game and obviously one of the most useful. The Blacksmith's Hammer that you can get by killing him has a pretty funny item description which makes a dig at the player. It says: "Can be used as a strike weapon but better left in the hands of its talented owner." In other words, this is basically the developer's way of poking at the player for saying they're either stupid or coldhearted for killing Andre. There's still some stuff left to do in the Parish, so it's back to there for now. The first thing on the inside is this large knight who's guarding a very important item, but I'll talk about that in a minute. As for the knight himself, he can hit pretty hard, but his attacks are pretty slow, so unless you let your guard down, there's probably not too much to worry about. You can parry this guy, but you can't riposte or back-stab him, so there's not really much point in trying to do anything tricky. You're better off just trying to play it safe. On the way further up the church, there's this Balder Knight here on the stairs, which highlights one of the problems with the combat in these games. When you're on uneven ground, the combat doesn't really work the way you would expect a lot of the time. In other words, it's very hard to back-stab or riposte some enemies when you're on a different height to them, which makes dealing with them kind of annoying, and especially this guy here. The problem being that he tends to keep his shield up or he'll go into a parry stance, so there's not that much you can do. You kinda have to wait him out and chip away at him. It's also a rather restrictive stairwell. It's quite small in and of itself, which means that your weapon can bounce off the walls sometimes, which, again, is just a little bit more frustration there. After him, there's a more interesting encounter with the first Channeler. And Channelers have something which is surprisingly unique amongst the enemies of the Souls games, in that they can use an enchantment on the other enemies around them. When these basic undead enemies are enchanted, then they do a lot more damage than they did before. It makes them a lot more dangerous. Thankfully, just like the boar from earlier, this is kind of like a mini-boss encounter where you kill the Channeler once, and then you don't have to fight him again. I like these kinds of encounters, though, because they make you change the way that you're thinking about the combat and make you just play a little bit differently. In this case, you have to be even more cautious than usual. There's another Balder Knight, again positioned unfortunately close to some stairs, but the reward for killing him, if you can call it a reward, is coming across Lautrec. Now, this is obviously a very similar proposition to the one in Demon's Souls where you freed Yurt from a cage, and then, Yurt went back to the hub, and some things could happen with Yurt which were maybe not so pleasant. Anyway, the unpleasantness with Yurt in Demon's Souls is something that's quite scary for players picking up Dark Souls for the first time. Lautrec capitalizes on this even though he's not the same character that he was in Demon's Souls. He's obviously supposed to be very, very similar to Yurt. The voice actor for Lautrec is the same voice actor as Patches, so it just goes to show that he's putting on a very, very similar voice to the one that he did for Yurt. As somebody who played Demon's Souls first, this made me question whether or not this was a double bluff because he's so similar to Yurt. It makes you wonder whether or not they're going to do the exact same thing that they did again. Now, the unpleasantness with Yurt is, actually, quite different from the unpleasantness with Lautrec. But the point is they are both unpleasant. So my next move with Lautrec will be to go back down to Firelink Shrine and murder him as quickly as possible. To get back down to Firelink Shrine, it's a case of taking the nearby elevator, and I think this is the moment where the level design of Dark Souls really grows on people and surprises them. I know, even though I was expecting shortcuts in Dark Souls, and I was pleased with the little shortcuts that I had found so far, coming across this one back down to Firelink Shrine was a pretty impressive moment. It's a real testament to the level designers that they were able to lead you away from Firelink Shrine for so long and then bring you back there without you even realizing. All of the NPCs in the game, of course, have different equipment, and it makes fighting them all that little bit different from each other. They're all humanoids, so they're all kind of similar, but their equipment does make a difference. Lautrec, for example, has a shotel, and he can switch out one of his hands to a parrying dagger, which means that he can quite easily parry your attacks. The shotel is quite dangerous as well because it can hit even through a 100%-block shield. So even if you have a shield up, he can still damage you. He's quite dangerous as well, especially when you get him on low health, because he has the Red Tearstone Ring equipped, which means when he's on low health, his attacks get a big boost. So if he parries you when he's about to die, you're in big trouble. He puts up a bit of a fight here for me, but thankfully I'm able to kill him. And this secures two nice things for me. First of all, he drops the Ring of Favor and Protection, which is one of the most interesting rings in the game, actually, because it's balanced very differently to all the other rings. What it does is it boosts your health, your stamina, and your equip load, which is quite a lot to get out of a single ring. The downside, however, is, if you take the ring off, it permanently breaks for the rest of your playthrough. This sets up an interesting dynamic, then. You have to question whether or not you're willing to put the ring on and not take it off for the rest of the game. This also kind of suits who Lautrec is because his full title is "Lautrec, the Embraced." And what that means is he was apparently embraced by the goddess Fina, which means that he gains her favor and protection, much like the Ring of Favor and Protection. So, I assume that taking off the ring, then, is seen as some sort of betrayal to Fina, which is why you only get one shot to be in her favor. Personally, I don't do anything too fancy with my rings, so I'm going to be using the Ring of Favor and Protection in one slot and just using the other slot to swap in whatever relevant ring I need from time to time. The second bonus to killing Lautrec is that it secures Firelink Shrine because the unpleasantness with Lautrec is that he kills Anastacia before he leaves. Anastacia is the Fire Keeper, and without her, Firelink Shrine ceases to function, which is a very big blow to the player because Firelink Shrine is your hub. Anastacia, herself, is one of the most enigmatic NPCs in the game, especially considering her very prominent position in Firelink Shrine. We don't really know that much about her. The main thing that we know is she had her tongue cut out. Crestfallen Warrior speculates that they cut out her tongue so she wouldn't say any god's name in vain. He's probably right because elinguation is a punishment most commonly associated with those who blaspheme. With so few details about Anastacia, it's possible to imagine that she has the most bleak tale in the game, even though we don't see any of it. Sometimes, what you imagine is way worse than anything that you can show. One thing that we can see regarding her in the game is you can use Fire Keeper Souls to boost your Estus Flask by talking to her. And that. in itself, is a pretty grim proposition because the Fire Keepers are women much like her. So, she's willing to use the souls of other Fire Keepers to boost the strength of your Estus Flask. With Lautrec dealt with, we can finally move on to the next boss, which is the Bell Gargoyles. I think I've been referring to Demon's Souls quite a lot so far in the commentary. I reckon that will taper off a little bit the further we get into the video, but there's no getting around the fact that these are 'Maneaters 2.0.' They are, however, less extreme in a couple of ways. First of all, there's the environment where you can still fall down. There's still ledges to fall off. But it has a lot more space to move around than the Maneaters gave you. It's also a little more forgiving because the second gargoyle comes in at half health. Lastly, I would say another thing that makes them a little bit more manageable is the fact that they have different attack patterns. It seems like the second gargoyle that comes in is more likely to use the fire-breath attack, and the other one is more likely to try and hit you physically. It's a really good feature of this fight because having the two enemies behave differently makes it a lot more dynamic. But it also gives you more openings, strangely enough. If the two of them were just trying to physically attack you, then you probably wouldn't get that many windows to counterattack. But when one of them is breathing fire, you can kind of lure the other one away or get around them and do some damage. This also shows a new, recurring feature of boss fights, which are tail weapons. By cutting off the tails of certain bosses, you can get a special weapon that you can only acquire that way. Personally, I don't use these weapons, but I do think that it's a good addition to boss fights. First of all, for the people who use the weapons that they get out of them, obviously, they are very happy to have those extra weapons in the game. But also because it adds another layer of difficulty or another layer of strategy to some of the fights. When you cut off the tail, the boss can't use the tail for any attacks anymore, so that does add a little layer of strategy to the fight, even if you aren't planning to use the weapon. On some of the bosses, as well, it can also act as a self-imposed challenge to try and get the tail from the boss, even if you don't intend to use it. I'm not sure how much work it took for them to implement them. I'd say it probably wasn't too bad. So I'd say the effort that they put into implementing these tail weapons was well worth it. This is also the first opportunity I've had to summon an NPC. In this case, before you fight this boss, you get the option to summon Solaire and Lautrec. Obviously, I can't summon Lautrec because I've killed him, but I could've summoned Solaire for this fight. Again, the summons aren't really something that I personally use, but I do think that they are a great addition to the game. The online in these games is quite unique and something really worth experiencing. It's become a little less unique over time, as some other games have built in some of the features of the Souls games, but it's still something that the Souls games have ownership over. Personally, something I think about a lot in regards to games, not just the Souls games, is the preservation of games going forward into the future. I mean, when I was a kid, games were already advancing rapidly, so there was a lot of games that I missed out on because I was only born, or games that were before my time, even. Thankfully, with old consoles dug up from attics or slightly less legal means, there's plenty of ways to experience those old games. And, part of the reason why they're easy to experience and go back and play, even well after their heyday, is because they were a simple package that you bought, and that was it. In other words, there was no online. There was no DLC. There was nothing like that. It was just a thing that you put in a machine, and it played a game. Those lines are really blurred these days, especially when you have games like the Souls games, where the online isn't really integral to the experience, but it does add a lot to it, even just reading messages. It makes me kind of sad to think that there are so many games these days where the online is such an important part of the experience that there are a lot of people growing up today who won't have the ability to go back and experience those games properly. Dark Souls is one of my favorite games, and I would really like to be able to show people ten or fifteen years from now what this game was like. Thankfully, thanks to the NPC summons, the game offline is a little better than it was in Demon's Souls because you get a little bit more of the experience even though you can't play online. The NPCs aren't any match for a human. They're not going to be able to imitate human behavior properly or anything like that. But it's just nice that, if you take the game offline, there's no longer a chunk of it that's missing anymore. So, that's why I really appreciate the NPC summons even though I personally don't use them, 'cause I could see myself using them many years from now when I go back to replay the game and want to remember what the online was like. With the gargoyles dead, we can finally ring the first Bell of Awakening, which is the first major objective in the game accomplished. At this point, we don't even know what the Bell of Awakening does, but this little cutscene accompanying it does give you a sense of satisfaction, even if you aren't really sure what you've accomplished yet. Once you ring the bell here, if you're playing online, it can be heard by other people who are on the same server as you. That's one of the really satisfying things about doing co-op on this boss. If you help somebody beat the boss, you get to hear them ring the bell shortly afterwards. You mainly hear it if you're in the Undead Parish, but sometimes you can actually hear it all the way down in Firelink Shrine, as well. It's a bit more rare, but it does happen. Coming down from the bell, we have the appearance of another NPC, Oswald. Oswald's appearance is interesting to say the least - the fact that he appears here without warning after you ring the bell. Personally, I know somebody who let out a very loud shriek upon first seeing Oswald thanks to his creepy pose. In fact, the only reason Oswald didn't end up killed straight away was because the controller was dropped on the floor in all the screaming. It's a good thing, too, because Oswald is the only Pardoner in the game, which turns out to be kind of important if you end up angering any other NPCs. If you do, you can pay a price with Oswald, and the NPC will forgive you. Personally, this isn't something I'm a big fan of. I think it takes away from the permanency of your actions as a character, and that's not really something I associate with the Souls games. That said, I can kind of see how this came about, because Dark Souls is a much longer game than Demon's Souls. So they were probably afraid of somebody doing something stupid really early on that would haunt them for the rest of the game. I think they should have just stuck to their guns on this, though, and if the player does something that they regret, then they do something that they regret, and their first playthrough is all the more interesting because of it. The last thing I'll say about Oswald is that he and Lautrec are both from Carim, which seems like a pretty interesting place given the NPCs that originate there. The impression I get of Carim, based on the NPCs that originate from there, is that it's a rather cutthroat place where everybody is out for themselves. Although this entire game takes place in Lordran, a lot of the stuff that you find or the people that you talk to originate from elsewhere. I like the little hints you get from characters and item descriptions about the places outside of Lordran, 'cause it really makes the world feel like it has a proper history, and it's not just one location that you're going through. So far, my route through the game has been very standard. What most players are going to do on their first playthrough is go straight from the Undead Burg to the Undead Parish and ring the first bell shortly thereafter. That isn't to say that this is the only route that you can take, just that it's the most common one. There are alternatives available if you pick the Master Key at the start of the game. To demonstrate this, it's none other than the shrieker herself, back after her humiliating defeats in Demon's Souls, to show us an alternate route through Dark Souls. As you can see, this character is fresh into Firelink Shrine and, actually, she'll be skipping the Undead Burg entirely. The very first thing she does after arriving in Firelink Shrine is run around and collect some of the stuff that I've neglected. There's actually quite a few pick-ups left around in Firelink that you can get straight away. They're mostly soul items that you can use just to get a few extra Souls, which can be useful to equip yourself at the start of the game or maybe get one extra weapon upgrade in from Andre. The first thing that she's gonna do here is take the elevator right down and use the Master Key on a gate that leads to the Valley of Drakes. The Valley of Drakes itself leads to several locations, and the one that she's going to be going to is Darkroot Garden. Keep in mind: Darkroot Garden is right next to Andre. So that's the area that I could go onto next, but there's this other path around to it as well. You do have to run past a couple of drakes here in order to get to it, but if you do so, then you end up coming out on the other side of Darkroot Garden, and you can continue around that way. Now, this path is laid out so that she can equip herself very well, and the first item that she's looking to get is the Grass Crest Shield. The Grass Crest Shield is a decent shield in and of itself, but it's main benefit is that it provides a passive stamina regeneration boost. It's a very useful thing for a shield to do, especially if you don't plan on actually using the shield very much. If you two-hand your weapon and don't plan on using the shield at all, then the shield can just sit on your back and still provide some benefit because you get that stamina regeneration anyway. Right around the Grass Crest Shield, there's another Black Knight that needs to be dealt with. This character is a Pyromancer, so it's very different from the character I'm playing, but in this instance, it's better to just try and knock the knight off the ledge rather than shoot fireballs at him because he'll often put his shield up to block those. Moving on, though, we can see the fireballs in action. At the moment, this is the only spell that she has, and it'll be the only spell that she has for a little while, but she'll be able to gear herself up in other ways. After speaking to Andre, then, the shortcut back to Firelink Shrine can be activated shortly afterwards, which means this character has essentially caught up to where I am. She's still several levels lower than I am, though, because she hasn't accumulated Souls from the Undead Burg and the bosses that I've killed. The enemies here in Darkroot are quite interesting and different from the ones that we've seen before. They have a much longer range, but they also don't have any kind of shields to protect themselves. They do a good bit of damage, and they have a very severely damaging grab attack that they can do if you're not careful. Most of the enemies in the game are humanoid in shape because humanoids are easy to animate. Animation systems are just set up to animate humans more than anything else. But the animations on these guys, even though they're humanoid-shaped, they're very different from the other enemies. They're very elastic. They stretch out almost kind of in a cartoony fashion. But it really works to make them feel that little bit different from the other enemies you've encountered so far. Just a little bit into this area, there's actually a hidden bonfire right behind an illusory wall. Personally, I didn't discover this one on my first playthrough, and I remember being very, very surprised by the fact that there was a bonfire hidden right there the whole time. The shortcut right next to this bonfire is different to most of the other shortcuts in the game, in that you need to spend Souls to unlock it. It costs 20,000 Souls to buy the Crest of Artorias and get through here, and the other way around is very, very far away, so it takes quite a lot of walking to avoid the shortcut if you want to be cheap with your Souls. It's kind of surprising that there aren't more shortcuts that work this way. I think if they had overused it, it would have been a really boring way to implement the shortcuts. But I could certainly have seen one or two more shortcuts working in a similar fashion. If only because your Souls are, obviously, very important and it just increases the amount of decision-making you have to do with your Souls to have to buy the Crest of Artorias to get through that door. On your first playthrough, it's a real question of whether or not it's worth it. I think most people would agree, especially later on in the game, that it's well worth the 20,000 Souls it costs. But you don't really know that early on. So I think it's an interesting little decision for the player to have to make: whether they spend those Souls on weapon upgrades, leveling up, or using that shortcut. I generally prefer the way the other shortcuts work, where they're just things that you unlock automatically after killing a certain amount of enemies or exploring properly. But I do think one or two more doors that you unlock with Souls would have been kind of interesting. The enemy designs here take a bit of a strange turn, and one of the strangest enemies are these things which are basically just trees. They don't even fight back, but you can kill them to get into other areas. I'm not really sure what's going on with these things, but I prefer them to the illusory walls that the game uses in other locations. The thing about this is, if you get close to it, you can see it moving. And if you're paying attention, you can see the area behind it as well. So it does help to keep the little extra area a secret there, but it feels a lot more natural than the illusory walls, where you basically just have to guess where they are. There's also some over-sized guardian enemies here with a giant sword. Generally, I find that over-sized human enemies don't really work very well in these games for a couple of reasons. But the enemies here which use Tranquil Walk of Peace, I find those to be quite interesting. The fact that they can use a spell against you which restricts your movement just makes them that little bit different from every other enemy in the game. Even though there's other enemies in the game that are very similar to these ones in size and in terms of moveset, the fact that they can use that spell just makes them stand out. They're the only enemy in the game that can do that, and differentiating enemies by just giving them something unique, just one thing that other enemies in the game can't do, is kind of enough to justify their existence. It also helps that they don't wear out their welcome. They're not the main enemy of this area. There's only seven of them split across the entirety of Darkroot Garden. So there's not that many of them to deal with. In this area, you can get Artorias's ring, the Wolf Ring, which grants you extra poise. Poise is a new concept in Dark Souls which, it seems, was mainly introduced in order to balance the armor sets a bit more. What it determines is how much recovery your character will have to go through when they're hit by an attack. Every attack in the game does a different amount of poise damage, and depending on the amount of poise damage in the attack and how much poise your character has, your character will respond differently when they're hit by that attack. In the worst case scenario, if your character is hit with a heavy attack and they have low poise, then they'll be sprawled out on the floor, and it'll take a long time to recover. In the best case scenario, if you have a lot of poise, even if you're hit with a heavy attack, your character might not even react at all. This can be most notable when it comes to attack animations. If you're in the middle of an attack animation, and you're hit with something, then if you have a lot of poise, you'll be able to complete your attack anyway. On the other hand, a character with lower poise will have their attack interrupted. So it's the difference between doing that little bit of extra damage to the enemy. Similarly, if you're using Estus, that can be affected by how much poise you have. Keep in mind: poise doesn't negate the damage. It doesn't have anything to do with how much damage you take. It's just whether or not you get interrupted by those things. Generally, the amount of poise your character has depends on what armor they're wearing. So if they're wearing light armor, then they have low poise, and if they're wearing heavy armor, then they have high poise. In Demon's Souls, there was less incentive for you to wear heavy armor. It did protect you from damage, but the poise was the same for every character regardless. It's just one of those little balancing tweaks, and personally, even as somebody who uses heavy armor all the time, I don't really care that much about its addition in Dark Souls. I do think it's a decent addition, but I wouldn't really miss it if it was gone. It does go a fair way towards balancing the armor sets better, but it comes into play when you're hit by an attack. So it's not the most important thing because, ideally, you should be trying to avoid damage if possible. The poise ring can be quite useful on a character like this because the poise of the basic Pyromancer set is quite low. Since she doesn't have any other rings, especially, there's no reason not to equip the poise ring here and just have that benefit as well. The area that she's exploring now isn't a very large area by any means, but it is one of the more open spaces in the game. In this little area, there's around thirteen enemies, and the nice thing about having an open space like this is you can slowly wander around and pick off the enemies one by one. The reason this works is because the enemies here aren't just standing around like most of the regular enemies in the game. They're waiting for you to get close and then they jump up at you. So, the challenge here is just a little bit different from the rest of the game. Basically, you just have to engage the enemies one on one and try not to stray too far from where they are so that you don't wake up anything else. If you panic and start running around, then you can anger a lot of stuff very quickly. Things can go wrong very fast, but if you take it slow and keep a cool head, then it's a relatively simple area to get through. I think this comes back to what I was saying earlier about these games rewarding different kinds of skills, and in this area, the skill is taking it slow and knowing where you can and can't fight. The boss of this area is the Moonlight Butterfly, and I think this one, maybe more than any other boss in the game, goes to show how different characters can have very different experiences with the bosses. For the Pyromancer, this boss is relatively easy because the Fireball is a powerful ranged attack. It's also easier to dodge the Butterfly's projectile attacks when you're wearing lighter armor. For the Knight character, this one is considerably more difficult. First of all, I don't have any ranged attacks, so I can only attack the Butterfly when it comes down to rest, and secondly, it's much harder to dodge the projectiles when your movement and rolling is much slower. I'm actually using a little bit of a trick here to make this boss a little bit easier for myself, though. Because there's a little wall between you and the Butterfly, if you intentionally equip armor which makes you do a heavy roll, you can roll so that the wall covers you from the attack. It doesn't work perfectly, but it's about the best strategy I've found for this boss wearing heavy armor. To do that, I've equipped the Elite Knight armor, which you can find in Darkroot Garden. The Elite Knight armor is basically the same as the armor set I started off with, except it's just a little bit better but also heavier. This fight also demonstrates just how much the Master Key opens up the start of the game. Keep in mind that, for the Pyromancer, the Moonlight Butterfly is the first boss that she's fought outside the Asylum. If we exclude the Asylum Demon and take into account the Master Key which opens the game up a lot more, then there's actually seven bosses you can do as your first boss. You can do either the Taurus Demon, the Bell Gargoyles, the Moonlight Butterfly, Sif, Quelaag, Pinwheel, or the Stray Demon. There's also a skip that you can do by falling down in the Undead Burg that allows you to do the Capra Demon first, instead. Even excluding that one because it's likely unintentional, seven bosses for the start of the game is quite impressive. Demon's Souls had a really nice, open structure, where there was always five different paths you could go down thanks to the Nexus. And, although Dark Souls tries, it doesn't manage to be quite as open as Demon's Souls. There is more things that you have to do in a single playthrough in order to get to the end. That said, at the start, you can do seven bosses, and that's more than you could do in Demon's Souls. So in some ways, they did a really, really good job with the openness of it. As I said earlier, the main problem is your incentive to do these things. In Demons's Souls, each of the five worlds had very different resources and different items in them, which made them all viable to choose at the start. You might want something in one that you wouldn't be able to get in the other. Dark Souls isn't quite as good at that, but you'll see with this Pyromancer's route there are items in each location that can be useful in the next one. For now, though, we'll be switching back to my character as I make my way to the second half of the Undead Burg. Thankfully, the route that I'll be taking back to the Undead Burg is a little different from before. Using a key that I found earlier, I can cut straight through Darkroot Garden back to where the Taurus Demon boss was. In here, we find Havel the Rock, who is interesting because he's not a red phantom, but he's not an NPC, either. He's just a unique character that you can't speak to because he's already hollow. He has a surprisingly fleshed-out history in the world. If you read the description to the Great Magic Barrier, it will reveal most of his backstory. It says: "Havel the Rock, an old battlefield compatriot of Lord Gwyn, was the sworn enemy of Seath the Scaleless. He despised magic, and made certain to devise means of counteraction." Given his animosity towards Seath, his friendship with Gwyn, and the fact that he wields a Dragon Tooth as a weapon, I think it's fair to say that Havel was around when the battles with the dragons were taking place. He hits very hard, and he has a lot of health, but he's also quite slow and susceptible to parrying. So once you figure out the timings on his attack, he's not that hard. He drops Havel's Ring, of course, which is one of the more valuable rings in the game since it increases your weight limit significantly. You can often use this one in conjunction with other rings like the Ring of Favor and Protection or the Dark Wood Grain Ring in order to get very powerful results. Personally, I'm going for a heavy build, and I think it sucks some of the fun out of the game if you're wearing heavy armor but rolling around like a ninja. So I'm not going to be using it myself. It does raise some questions about balance, and I do think that the rings could have been balanced better. It's hard to say for sure what exact tweaks you would need to make in order to balance out the rings a little bit better, but I think one way they could have avoided this is just by having one ring of each type. By which I mean, things like the Dark Wood Grain Ring, the Ring of Favor and Protection, and Havel's Ring, they all interact with your weight limit, which means when you stack two of them together, you get very good results. So, perhaps ideally, they should've just had one ring, just Havel's Ring, that would allow you to roll better, and maybe the Dark Wood Grain Ring and the Ring of Favor and Protection could have done something else, instead. I'm just throwing that out there. I do think it probably would have sucked some of the fun out of the game if you couldn't do interesting things with the rings by combining them together. But it probably would have made them better balanced overall. After Havel, we're finally back in the Undead Burg, and we can make our way lower thanks to a key that we got in the Undead Parish. Now we've finally circled back around to that gate I told you to remember earlier on. I have a bit of a vendetta against this gate because I think it stands for some of the problems that Dark Souls has in comparison to Demon's Souls. First of all, there's the fact that it opens inwards and blocks the stairs considerably, making it much more awkward to get back down the stairs than it should be. It's especially problematic because there's a bottomless pit just below that. So it's very easy to just fall down and die if you don't walk past the gate very carefully. That's really only a minor problem, though. The main problem is, if you were paying attention earlier, you would've noticed that I couldn't open the gate from the other side. This time around, I could open the gate. But I didn't have to use a key to do so. You don't have to pick up a key to do it. You can just open it from the other side. Obviously, though, this makes no sense because the gaps in it are very wide. So your character could just stick their hand through to the other side if they wanted to. This is one of the things that's weaker than Demon's Souls, and in most games, honestly, this kind of stuff wouldn't really be worth pointing out. You can suspend your disbelief about why the gate doesn't open from one side. The reason I have a big problem with it, though, is because it's one of the things that Demon's Souls did very, very well, and it's one of the things that drew me to that game over other games. If you think back to Demon's Souls, nothing in Demon's Souls had this problem. All of the shortcuts made sense for the world that they were in. In Boletaria Palace, you had to pull levers to open up gates, but that makes perfect sense because it's a palace. It's supposed to be locked from the outside and open from the inside, and a lever is a good way to do that. Similarly in Stonefang, there was an elevator, but the elevator made sense because it was a way to deliver ore from the mines down to the blacksmith. In Latria, there was lots of gates, kind of similar to the ones in Dark Souls, but they all required keys to open. Apart from one unintended exploit, there wasn't any shortcuts in Shrine of Storms. And the shortcuts in the Valley of Defilement required you to kick over a plank or fall down in a specific way, which makes sense for that part of the game. Demon's Souls is much smaller than Dark Souls, but it also feels much more internally consistent. Now, I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that think it's petty of me to care about little things like that, but it's one of the things that really drew me to Demon's Souls, especially compared to other games, because I find that these problems in Dark Souls are present in a lot of other games as well. So I think it's kind of sad when a series loses something that it does really well and it's one of those things that drew the fans there in the first place. This isn't to say that Dark Souls is bad at this stuff. It's not. It's actually quite good at it, but it's still worse at it than Demon's Souls. I also think, at least in that case, it would have been pretty easy to solve by just placing a key somewhere behind the gate. That way, you can still only open it from one side, but it just makes that little bit more sense. I'm not going to point out every little problem with internal consistency in Dark Souls, but I do think that this section of the game is pretty rife with them. For example, it's a little hard to imagine that anyone could have locked Havel up in that tower behind those little wooden doors that would probably shatter into a million splinters if you just hit them once with his Dragon Tooth. Similarly, there's no way for the player to break down a simple wooden door to save Griggs. And inside the little houses in this area, there's no beds or furniture or anything like that. They're just little stone cubes. Like I've said, this area is one of the worst areas for this kind of stuff, but it recurs from time to time. There are other gates that open in a similar fashion, and overall, it's just not as tightly designed as Demon's Souls in that regard. One thing I see from time to time when this kind of discussion comes up is people will throw out the argument that there's all sorts of nonsensical stuff happening in these games, so you should just accept it the way it is. I don't really buy into that argument at all. I mean, there are some things that you just have to accept for the game to work. For example, Estus heals your character even though it's fire. The reason it works is because you just don't know enough about Estus. You don't know where it comes from. You don't know what it tastes like. You don't know how, exactly, it heals the undead, and that's fine. The problem is, in a typical day on my day-to-day life, I will interact with several doors, and I have a pretty good idea how a door works. So, that's the problem for me. That's why I have no problem with something like the Crest of Artorias opening up a door, because that's magic.That doesn't need to be explained to me. But I do need to know how my character can open a gate from one side but not the other. This area is an area of ambushes, and I think this reflects how life probably would have been like in the Lower Burg even before things got as bad as they are now. You get the impression from the enemies here that people in the Lower Burg were probably of a lower class than those higher up. The Capra Demon also reflects this ambush philosophy by being an ambush boss. I think the main thing they wanted to accomplish with the Capra Demon was that startling moment the first time you walk through the fog and the boss is already on top of you. And while it makes for a very memorable encounter on your first playthrough, it doesn't hold up quite so well the more times you fight against him. The only reason he's difficult is because two dogs spawn alongside him, and the area itself is quite cramped. As with anything else, there are good ways and bad ways to tweak the difficulty of a boss, and I think throwing in a couple of extra enemies is not really a good way of doing that. It can be especially frustrating because the dogs are kind of unpredictable, so it's easy to get caught on one of them and then hammered by the Capra Demon while you're trying to get away. The only thing I'll say in its defense is the memory that I have of walking through that fog gate and seeing the Capra Demon for the first time is one of the most vivid memories I have of my first playthrough. Having played the game several times since then, though, I don't think that memory was worth the inclusion of this boss. Once the novelty wears off, all that's left is a relatively bland boss with the potential for a lot of frustration. Once again, the game manages to loop quite smoothly back around to Firelink Shrine. So I think it's time to give my character a rest for a few minutes and swap back to the Pyromancer. Another area that's accessible right from the start even without the Master Key is the New Londo Ruins. First of all, just tucked away on some stairs here, there's a blacksmith. So, it's interesting that, even though you might not find him for quite a while, there's a blacksmith right underneath Firelink Shrine the entire time. Blacksmith's name is Rickert, which is almost certainly an homage to the Berserk series of manga. Berserk is a dark fantasy series of manga, and in it there's a young blacksmith called Rickert. I think the relatively unique name and the fact that they both have the same profession is enough to be sure that this is a nod towards Berserk. If you're not convinced, though, there's also the Wheel Skeletons, which are very similar to a demon in Berserk as well. But, perhaps the biggest similarity of all would be Artorias, who is very reminiscent of some stuff in the manga. It's not really a surprise that Berserk is an influence on the Souls games, because it's a popular series, and it's of a very dark type of fantasy that you don't see very often. I would certainly recommend it to anybody who has played the Souls games or is interested in them and, particularly, who is interested in the atmosphere that these kinds of games have. Although the Berserk references seem a bit more overt in Dark Souls, really it's Demon's Souls which is most similar to it atmospherically, anyway. Dark Souls is still, of course, a dark fantasy game, but there's also this infusion of other elements which gives it a different atmosphere than before. This time around, the situation is explained with a pantheon of gods instead of just a single being who's motivations are unclear. The history recounted at the start of the game is more majestic this time around. Gwyn, the Witch of Izalith, and, even to some extent, Nito have understandable personalities and motivations, more so than the one god that was present in Demon's Souls. In Demon's Souls, you kind of get the impression that demons are something that are beyond human understanding whereas in Dark Souls, the enemies and, in particular, the bosses are much more easy to relate to as a human. There's a few more enemies this time around which are just basic flora or fauna that are defending their territory. The same is also true for a lot of bosses, some of which are just defending themselves and some of which have motivations for protecting something from you. The designs and the ideas behind those designs are a lot more dignified this time around. The difference in atmospheres between the two games doesn't necessarily make one of them better or worse. It just means that one of the games will probably appeal to your personal sensibilities more so than the other one. I don't begrudge anybody who prefers Demon's Souls, but personally, I prefer the atmosphere of Dark Souls, and I think it's one of the areas of the game that maybe doesn't get enough credit. Taken on a level-by-level basis, it is quite hard to compete against a game that has the Valley of Defilement, Shrine of Storms, and Tower of Latria, but while Dark Souls doesn't lay it on quite as thick in the individual levels, I do think there's a better sense of overall progression, particularly in the NPC stories. Watching the changes that occur in Firelink Shrine and what happens to the various NPCs is one of the more interesting parts of the game for me. Anyway, moving into New Londo proper, you can see the enemy types here are quite different to the ones elsewhere. These are some of my favorite enemies in the game because they take advantage of the fact that they're ghosts. Since they are incorporeal, it means they can attack you through walls, and it also means they have a special move where they can set some blades behind you as a trap. It's just the kind of thing that other enemies wouldn't be able to do, so it's nice to see the enemy take advantage of its unique properties to have a couple of different moves than before. In order to fight these, you have to be cursed. Getting cursed involves cutting your health in half, but there is an item you can use to get around this. The Transient Curse allows you to attack the ghosts for five minutes, and, thankfully, there's two of them placed right at the start of this level. Without those items, it would be impossible to kill the enemies in New Londo, so it was a good consideration to give the player a couple of freebies at the start in case they wanna tackle this area early. A bit further in, there's two more pairs of Transient Curses, so this gives you six total that are guaranteed at the start of this area. So even though it might be worrying that you only get a limited amount of time to attack the ghosts, it's really not that harsh a restriction, so it's best to play it safe as usual. There are two types of ghosts. There are ghosts that just attack you, and then there are screaming ghosts which alert the other ghosts to your presence. They each have a different model, and if you look carefully, you can see that the screaming ghosts are actually holding a baby in their arms. Presumably, these are the spirits of people who were killed when New Londo was flooded. One thing you might notice about the level design here is that there's no gradual pathways down into the water below. By which I mean, there's no stairways that lead down into the water or anything like that. Every piece of water is accompanied with a steep drop-off, the reason being that the developers didn't have the time or simply weren't interested in implementing any kind of swimming mechanics. That meant that if they had some kind of stairway leading down into the water or some kind of incline where you walked in, then your character would just arbitrarily start drowning at some point. Even that in and of itself probably would have required some kind of special animation of the character wading deeper and deeper into the water and then getting into trouble. You can see, then, why they didn't want to bother with all that work, and I would say that, overall, it's a good thing, because swimming sections are the bane of a lot of games. I think they tend to show up when a developer knows that they want to inject a bit of variety into the game, but they're not really sure what way to do it. The end result, then, tends to be something which is quite simplistic and doesn't represent the core gameplay very well. That said, it is a little bit strange that your character will sink like a stone even if they're naked. I think that means you end up having to suspend your disbelief a little bit about how your character behaves in the water, but ultimately, I think it was worth it, if only for the way New Londo works. It's an interesting moment on your first playthrough when you drain the water here and realize that the area has basically doubled in size now. Moving up and down between previously inaccessible areas is also quite satisfying, I think. This ends up being one of the shorter areas in the game, but I think that's probably because the two-tiered design of it made it a little bit more awkward to design compared to the other locations. The top half is entirely linear, but once you drain the water later on, it becomes considerably more open. For now, we're just exploring the top half, and when you make it to the end of the top half, you meet Ingward. Ingward has an interesting history. He is one of the Sealers of New Londo, which means he's responsible for watching over it. This likely means he was also present when New Londo was flooded in the first place, which was apparently not an easy decision for them to make. He and two other Sealers were then left to watch over the boss of this area, the Four Kings. Unfortunately, even after having to drown all of New Londo and stick around with their obviously-quite-pissed-off ghosts, things got even worse for Ingward when the other two Sealers decided to abandon their duty and leave him alone. So as a result, he's the only person left here, and he's probably been here for a very long time. I think most players just speak to him, get the key to the Seal, and then never think about him again, but if you speak to him after the Four Kings, he actually goes back to Firelink Shrine. He stays in a relatively shady location because he says the sunlight hurts his eyes, which is a rather nice touch. Although he's obviously had it pretty rough in the past, he's one of the few NPCs who never goes hollow and never attacks the player of his own accord. The only way he ends up dying is if you attack him first, so, at least as as the player character is concerned, he gets off lighter than some of the characters in the game. Ingward can also cure your curse if you give him one Humanity, and this is actually interesting because of the description on the Purging Stone, which says: "Humans are helpless against curses, and can only redirect their influence. The purging stone does not dispel curses, but receives them as a surrogate." I assume, then, this means if you allow Ingward to cure your curse, that the Humanity you offer him is used as your surrogate. So, as if you didn't have enough incentive to avoid curse already, there's now a good story reason for doing so as well. Every time you get cursed in Dark Souls, you bring more curse into the world. For now, this is all we're going to see of New Londo. It might seem a like bit of a waste of time to come down here and talk to Ingward without accomplishing anything, but really what she was after was the Green Titanite Shard. If you haven't figured out why, you'll find out in a few minutes, but for now, it's back to my Knight character who's descending into the Depths. Early on, there's a butcher enemy here in one of the rare instances of an enemy looking like it's busy doing something before you arrive. If you think about it, most of the enemies in the game are implied not to be particularly intelligent. You've got stuff like mindless hollows, rats, reanimated suits of armor, those kinds of things. So it kind of makes sense that they don't really have much to do. I think it's the kind of thing where the developers probably would love to go and make the world that little bit more believable by giving the enemies all sorts of different, unique animations and things that they could do while the player isn't around. Of course, all that stuff takes time, and time is something that they just don't have an abundance of. Thankfully, the player manages to intervene here just before Laurentius becomes their next victim. The setup here with Laurentius in a barrel is a bit of a strange one, a bit of a nerve-wracking one, on your first playthrough if you don't realize that rolling through barrels also breaks them. Thankfully, even if you hit him, Laurentius doesn't anger quickly. Each of the NPCs takes a different amount of abuse before they'll become hostile to the player, and that says a little something about their personality, which is a nice, little touch. Laurentius has one of the highest tolerances before becoming hostile to the player, which should tell you a little something about his character. Still, if you're a little nervous about this, you might want to roll through the barrels instead just to avoid damaging him. Since Laurentius is stuck in a barrel, and he was set to become their next victim, I think it might imply that the other barrels in the Undead Burg are also related to these butchers. It's hard to say for sure just how many people have been killed by them. One thing I really like about the Depths is the progression of enemies within it. On the upper level where you're basically just in a basement, most of the enemies are just regular hollows. After that, the number of hollows thins out, and Slimes are the prominent enemy. After the Slimes, rats are the prominent enemy, and then after the rats come the Basilisks. It's almost like there's some kind of ecosystem at work here, where each of the different enemy types has its own little niche within the Depths. So, I like the placement of the enemies in this area, but it's also great that once you get past the first couple of areas, the enemy types really start to diversify. Almost every single area in the game has at least one enemy type that's unique to that area. Demon's Souls is the same, but since Dark Souls has a lot more areas, I think it's more impressive that they were able to maintain that sort of variety even with the expanded scope. There is a bit of cross-pollination. Some enemies are found in several areas, but these enemy types actually tend to make a lot of sense as well. The Channelers, the snake men, and the Golems, which all appear in several different areas, are all agents of Seath. The Channelers, especially, are even considered to be Seath's eyes, so it makes sense for those to be out roaming the world. There are a couple of enemy types that appear in other locations, but it's never particularly jarring when they do, and they often have a pallet swap to accompany that as well. The variety in enemy types is great in and of itself, but it becomes something really special when combined with the number of one-off encounters, which is larger in Dark Souls. A good example is the giant rat in the sewers here. This isn't an amazing engagement by any means, but it does force you to think about this enemy differently than the much smaller rats that you've been fighting before now. Visually, it also makes for a nice centerpiece to this area. You end up seeing this rat several times before you fight it, and it gives a sense of foreboding to this place because you know, sooner or later, you're gonna have to go up against this thing. Lastly, another thing I like about this rat is that it's positioned directly below a chute behind the butcher earlier on in the stage. Presumably, the butcher was throwing scraps of meat down there, and that's how the rat ended up getting so big, which is a nice little detail. As well as the Channeler and the giant rat, there's also Kirk who appears here if the player has reversed their hollowing. Funny story about this guy. I think these games are best experienced with as little knowledge beforehand as possible. So before Dark Souls came out, I watched the initial trailer, and then I avoided all other information about the game, because I knew I was going to play it anyway. When I was making my way through the Depths, I got invaded by Kirk, and it was a bit of a pulse-pounding moment for me because this was my first invasion in Dark Souls. There was also red phantoms in Demon's Souls, but the difference being they didn't have a pop-up explaining that they were invading you. That was exclusive to human players. So when Kirk appeared, I thought he was a real person, and I didn't figure this out until well afterwards. Of course, since he's not player-controlled, he doesn't put up as good a fight as players do when they invade, so I ended up beating him. When I beat him then - When I beat him then, I was really proud of it because he looked like he was wearing really cool armor, and I figured that he must be a high level, and he must have been doing well for himself, and I just managed to beat him anyway. Yeah, I think it's safe to say the developers tricked me with that one, but I'm glad they did because it's a good memory. Dark Souls is all about the experience, and that's not an experience I'm likely to forget anytime soon. Provided you don't accidentally fall into their pit, the Basilisks here shouldn't put up too much of a fight. I do have four Humanity at the moment, though, and Humanity boosts your curse resistance pretty significantly. If I was on zero Humanity, these things would be a little bit more imposing. I do think the Basilisks are a bit too easy most of the time, but that was probably intentional since the punishment for losing to them is very, very harsh. Just for any of you who haven't played and don't know what I'm talking about, if you die to the Basilisks, your HP is cut in half until you use a certain item to get it back. Also, if you haven't played, you should go and do that because I told you to do that at the start of the video. While I'm at it, I'm just gonna give you one more warning that you should play this game before watching this commentary. It's not too late to turn back before you ruin most of the experience on yourself. The Ring of the Evil Eye is found in here, and this is one of my favorite rings partially because it highlights how smart they were about some of the design decisions in Dark Souls. Specifically, what I'm talking about is how healing works in this game. The Ring of the Evil Eye, of course, gives you some health back, but it only gives you health back when you kill an enemy. If you compare this to the Regenerator Ring or the Adjudicator Shield in Demon's Souls, it's not nearly as good. In Demon's Souls, you had some ways to get your health back passively, but the Ring of the Evil Eye doesn't allow you to do that, and this is very smart because healing in general is very different in Dark Souls. The Estus system is one of my favorite changes in this game, and I think it's a clear improvement over the healing in Demon's Souls. The problem in Demon's Souls was you could go to Boletaria, kill a bunch of enemies until you got tons of Grass, and then use all of that Grass to brute force your way past difficult sections. I think the Estus system is better for several reasons. First of all, it removes any need for farming. Every time your rest, you're going to get at least five Estus, and that means that you don't have to go out and kill enemies repeatedly to get Grass. On the flip side, for players who were never inclined to farm in the first place, this also sets a clear indication about how much healing you should be able to use between each section. Personally, I don't like relying on consumable items in games. I tend to get through games without them if I can. Partially, it's because using a finite resource out of the inventory just doesn't feel very good to me. When you have a single, massive inventory of healing items, it's also harder to draw a line between reasonable item use and something which makes the game trivial. This sets a reasonable precedent, then. You're allowed a certain number of heals between each bonfire. No more. No less. Lastly, Estus always heals for a fixed amount. In Demon's Souls, there was several different types of Grass which all healed various amounts. That meant if you took a small amount of damage, you could use the appropriate Grass to just heal that much damage, and you wouldn't waste a larger Grass by using that one instead. Dark Souls has the opposite effect, which sets up a risk-reward system for the player. If the player has taken some damage, there's a dilemma about whether or not they should heal. If they heal now, they effectively waste some of their Estus by over-healing. If they don't heal now, they get to keep the Estus for later, but they're more vulnerable the next time they get attacked. Ultimately, they might end up dying where they might have otherwise survived. I find that little bit of decision making makes the healing a lot more strategic in Dark Souls, and I really appreciate that. This all explains why the Ring of the Evil Eye works the way it does, because if they just had a basic healing ring, that would invalidate all the other changes they made. The whole point of Estus is that you are not allowed to gain health back for no reason. You have to use your Estus to do it. With the Ring of the Evil Eye, the player can gain some health back, but they have to put themselves in a combat situation to do it, which opens them up to more damage. So, I think all those changes are good. The only problem is the fact that you can kindle bonfires up to 20 Estus, which is quite excessive, I think. It is one of those ways where the game allows you to set your own difficulty, though, and that's personally why I never kindle Bonfires. So even though it doesn't affect me personally, I still think 20 Estus is quite extreme, and if I were in charge, I know I certainly would have lowered that number considerably. The other problem is Humanity simply isn't rare enough, especially once you get to this point of the game where the rats drop Humanity for you. Overall, though, these are balancing problems and not an inherent problem of the system, and I think that's an important distinction. The system in place is really, really good and, for the most part, encourages the kind of cautious play that works best with the Souls games. I just think the actual numbers themselves could have used a bit of tweaking. Anyway, we're nearly done with this area, but there's still an NPC to talk to before we get to the boss. Domhnall gets my vote for cheekiest NPC in the entire game for something that might not seem obvious to you at first. If you just speak to him, he's not very forthcoming, but if you buy something and then speak to him, he'll give you a tip. You can see he tells you to use divine weapons on the skeletons in the Catacombs. I say it's cheeky, and it is, but I don't dislike it. It's a nice little touch. I bought the Bottomless Box from him to get him to start talking, and this reminds me of what I said earlier about magic and suspension of disbelief. Once you give me an item and call it the "Bottomless Box," I'm pretty much sold by that point. I don't really need to know how a box can be bottomless. I just assume that it's magic. That, of course, explains how my character can store so much stuff. What isn't explained is how your character can just carry everything in the game without using the Bottomless Box at all. I feel like I would be in the minority on this, but I'm one of the people who actually likes the fact that Demon's Souls has a weight limit on a number of items that you can pick up. As I said earlier, one of the things I liked about Demon's Souls was those little attentions to details and the believability of the world, and the weight limit is a small part of that. That said, I can kind of see why they wanted to avoid it in Dark Souls in particular because of the way the world is arranged. I don't see why the Bottomless Box couldn't have just been an item on your character at the start of the game or maybe something you were forced to pick up in the Undead Asylum. Demon's Souls did something similar with the Augite of Guidance. That's just an item that sits in your inventory. Most players don't even really notice it, and all it does is it explains why light appears around your character in dark areas. Again, this is one of those little, tiny things that Dark Souls lacks, and I'm not really sure why considering this is stuff that was already in place in Demon's Souls. Most of the cutscenes which introduce bosses don't really accomplish much in their introduction. They just give a brief glimpse of the boss, and then the fight starts. The Gaping Dragon has a very memorable introduction, though. The gradual introduction of the threat and then the final reveal of its full design right before you get thrown into the fight is quite intimidating. It's a bit of a shame that the fight itself doesn't quite live up to this cutscene or the boss's brilliant visual design. That said, this also makes it a good boss for co-op, because you don't really feel like you're missing out on much if you have somebody else co-op it with you. It's also got a large amount of health, which means if you decide to co-op this, you're not just gonna get summoned and beat the boss in less than a minute and then thrown back into you own world. As with the Bell Gargoyles, you can summon both Lautrec and Solaire for this boss. Hilariously enough, since Lautrec uses a parrying dagger, he will sometimes attempt to parry the Gaping Dragon, which doesn't go very well. If you don't kill the Channeler that appears in the Depths, then this boss can put up a pretty good fight because the Channeler will shoot at you and will enchant the boss to do even more damage than it already does. I think this boss is a common target for co-op as well because of the large number of Souls that it gives. It's a good thing this boss gives so many Souls. A few extra levels doesn't hurt since the next area up is Blighttown. Before that, though, it's back to the Pyromancer who's gearing up to enter the Catacombs. Using the battle axe bought from Andre, the Divine Ember from Darkroot Garden, and the Green Titanite Shard, she can make a divine battle axe. This is good because skeletons are weak to this in two ways. Heavy attacks will make them crumple, and the divine element stops them from reviving. You'll see this in action as she heads in to the Catacombs, where hitting them with a heavy attack will make them just topple to the ground. This is especially useful if you're trying to fight more than one, as you can knock one to the ground and then focus on the other one. Some players end up coming to this area as soon as they reach Firelink Shrine and thinking that this is the way that they're supposed to go because they haven't seen the other routes that are available. In a worse-case scenario, they might get stuck here for quite a while and even give up on the game because of it, declaring that it's just too hard. I think this is at least as much a problem with the marketing as it is the game itself. Demon's Souls had very little marketing, especially in the West. It mostly spread by word of mouth. In fact, in the beginning before it was even released in the West, a lot of people were just importing it because the voice lines were in English anyway. Some people ended up talking about how it was refreshingly challenging or, maybe more appropriately, it was refreshingly punishing, in that death had consequences. Overall though, I think that that word of mouth gave you a more honest and complete idea of the game's strengths and weaknesses. It only makes sense. I mean, you have less incentive to lie or exaggerate if you're not selling it for your own gain. When it comes to marketing, one of the core principles is the idea of a unique selling point. For example, you might see the unique selling point of my videos being insightful commentary with a sexy, Irish accent. Now, uniqueness can be a very good thing. I generally appreciate innovative and new ideas, but the problem is advertisers tend to want something really snappy and easy to understand. For Dark Souls, this ended up being the difficulty angle, the tagline being "Prepare to Die." From a marketing perspective, this was a success because people bought into the idea of Dark Souls being some kind of badge of honor. The idea and the reality don't really line up, though, because there are much, much more difficult games out there that people could flock to if they genuinely wanted to challenge themselves as much as possible. The reason this worked so well for Dark Souls is because the difficulty setting is built into the game itself. It ends up being quite a clever design, though, because nobody really likes choosing the easy option on a difficulty menu, even if it would be the most appropriate choice for them. Removing that option from the main menu and just putting it inside the game makes people feel a lot better about using it. The clearest example of this are summon signs. There might be one or two examples where summoning help for a boss actually makes it a little bit harder, but by and large, using the summon signs makes the game much, much easier overall. That's just the most obvious example, though. There's all sorts of different ways you can make the game harder or easier for yourself if you want to. Personally, I never kindle bonfires, never use items, and never summon for bosses, and I find, for me, this makes the game decently challenging. Others players might take this even further. Some might not use Estus at all, and some might never even level up. Really, the point I'm getting at is that Dark Souls is as difficult as you want it to be. As I said, this is clever design, and ultimately what it means is even though players might play with all sorts of difficulty settings, in the end, they all experience the same level of accomplishment. All that said, this graveyard serves as a prime example of how a new player's experience can be impacted by the marketing or by the impression they get from the community. If the difficulty of Dark Souls hadn't been overhyped, then new players would easily realize that this wasn't the place that they were supposed to go and try looking somewhere else instead. The worrying thing about that, then, is what kind of impact it might have on the future of the series. Developers want people to be happy playing their games, so you can imagine, if they see a lot of complaints about the graveyard, that they might second-guess themselves about having such an open structure next time around. Really, I don't think this is much of a problem with the game itself, and I personally really like that you can go to several different areas at the start, especially since you can back out of them if you don't feel ready for them. Moving in a little further, we can see one of the Necromancer enemies here, and she's dealing with him by headshotting him from range. If you do a headshot to an enemy, it does a little bit more damage and also staggers them at the same time. It's only a very small gameplay element, but it's interesting that they went to the effort of implementing it. This would mean that the hitbox for the enemy's head would have to trigger a separate response from the enemy, which isn't really that much work, but it would've probably taken a fair bit of testing just to make sure that it works on every enemy all the time. I suppose this might be a good opportunity to talk about hitboxes in general. These are just invisible shapes which are wrapped around the player, the weapons, the enemies, and they decide where and when they can collide with each other. They tend to be really simple shapes like spheres, cuboids, and cylinders because those are easier for computers to check. For example, if you want to check whether or not two spheres are touching each other, that's a really, really simple operation. All you need to do is get the position of the center of each sphere, then get the radius of each sphere and just check whether the distance between them is further than the two radius combined. Basically, it's an extremely simple calculation for a computer to do. Those calculations need to be as quick as possible because the machine needs to check many different hitboxes against one another just to render a single frame. If I get you to look at the player's axe, when they swing it, you can tell just by looking whether or not it's hit anything. Computers don't work the same way, though. When the player swings their weapon, it needs to cycle through all the different possibilites and see what's happened. So basically, when the player swings their weapon, it will look at the axe, and then it will look at a bunch of other stuff and see whether or not they've collided. It needs to cycle through everything and say, "Okay, the axe and this object haven't collided. The axe and that other object haven't collided. The axe and the wall haven't collided. The axe and Skeleton 1 haven't collided, but the axe and Skeleton 2: that's collided," and then you do damage to the enemy. That's just one axe, then. If you imagine all the enemy weapons, all the enemies, all the objects, all the walls, and all that kind of stuff, collision detection ends up eating up a lot of processing time. That's why games use hitboxes, because collision detection is time consuming, and so, if you can make them into simple shapes instead, it'll be much easier for the computer to handle. So, hitboxes are used for the sake of efficiency, but unfortunately this incurs some extra work for the development team when the game is actually being made. This can cause problems if the model and the hitbox don't line up properly during an animation, but thankfully the hitboxes in Dark Souls are pretty good. So, since the enemies would all have these hitboxes anyway, it probably wasn't too much work to implement the headshots, but like I said, all that stuff needs to go through testing as well, so that's just another consideration that has to be made during development. From a level design perspective, I'm not too fond of this area because, despite being a stage you can access right from the start, it's surprisingly linear. That means, if you want to kill Pinwheel early, you have a long trek back out to Firelink Shrine, which isn't particularly enjoyable. While I might not like how linear this area is, there are a couple of nice things here. In particular, I like the statues. It's kind of difficult to see unless you use your Binoculars to get a closer look, but these statues here are based on the masks that Pinwheel wears. The statues which have the Father mask are harmless, but the statues which have the Mother and Child masks shoots spikes out of them. You can see that the spikes actually come out of the Child's face, and a nice touch about them is they're telescopic, which makes it that little bit more believable that they can actually fit inside the statue itself. It just goes to show that there's a lot of detail in the environments which you're not necessarily seeing all the time. You kinda need to stop and have a look around to really appreciate it sometimes. Another interesting thing here is, of course, Patches, who dumps the player off a ledge if they're not careful. One thing I like about this is, if you look towards the bridge when you first enter this little area, it moves, and that gives you an indication, then, that somebody is capable of moving this bridge back and forth. Before you even reach this area, there's a bridge above that one that you have to turn yourself as well, so you should have a pretty clear indication of what the levers do. Patches is, of course, nearly identical to his appearance in Demon's Souls, but they get away with this because they had a character in Armored Core called Patch the Good Luck. It's not really clear whether or not he was intended to be the same character, but they could argue that he's a 'FromSoftware character' rather than a Demon's Souls character, so they brought him back. Since he's basically the same character, I don't really have anything else to say about him, so I'm just going to move on. One more thing I like about this place is, later on, there's a destructible wall, and the developers have used a developer message to highlight this to the player by placing it halfway underneath the wall itself. It's quite obvious, and I'm not saying they should have used this for all of their secret areas because it would just make them all way too easy to find, but I do prefer it to the illusory walls. So, while I may not be a big fan of this area, I do think there's a few interesting things here, and, actually, I think it might have been one of the stronger areas in the game had it looped back around to Firelink Shrine. One other problem I have with it is the reward that you get for killing Pinwheel. Killing him grants you the Rite of Kindling, which doesn't really make much sense to me. This is an unfortunately common occurrence in games, where players who do something challenging are often rewarded with something which actually makes the game easier. If you go to the Catacombs right at the start, manage to make your way down to the bottom, and kill Pinwheel, then you probably don't have much need for the Rite of Kindling in the first place. Really, the kinds of players who are inclined to do something like that need to be rewarded some other way instead. If I had to change this, I'm not sure where I would put the Rite of Kindling instead, probably just somewhere along the main story path. Whatever the case with that, I do think that the reward for killing Pinwheel should have been access to the Gravelord Covenant instead. The way it is now, as you can see here, you can enter this sarcophagus and go down to speak to Nito without having to kill Pinwheel at all. It would have made a lot of sense to move this behind Pinwheel, though, because the Gravelord Covenant is best joined on New Game Plus. That would have been an incentive, then, for any player who wanted to join the Gravelords on New Game Plus to go all the way down to the bottom of the Catacombs and kill Pinwheel. By the way, the reason it's best joined on New Game Plus is because, unfortunately, 'Gravelording' doesn't affect players unless they're in New Game Plus themselves. You can still join the Gravelords on a brand new character, but you just won't be able to affect people unless they're on New Game Plus, so there's not much point in joining it early on. That's just one of a few things going against the Gravelord Covenant, another being that Nito is the only covenant leader who has to be killed in order to finish the story. There's also the fact that 'Gravelording' itself just isn't as satisfying as it should be. Personally, the idea of being a Gravelord appeals to me a lot. I like the idea of having enemies spawn in another person's world to try and kill them on my behalf. I think that's a really cool idea. Unfortunately, even if you do 'Gravelord' somebody, you don't really see the results of it. You can't see into their world. So even if a player does happen to die to the enemies you've spawned into their world, it's not particularly satisfying, 'cause you don't get to see it happen. I think it would've been much more appealing if you were spawned into their world as an invisible phantom so that you could watch the chaos unfold. Speaking of chaos, no commentary of the Catacombs would be complete without the wheel skeletons. These are one of my favorite enemy designs in the game because they're strangely hilarious and terrifying at the same time. Really, what I like about them, though, is how different they are to the other enemies. Wheel skeletons are the kind of thing where, if you get hit, you can die straight away, but if you manage to avoid their attack, they have a lengthy period where they're vulnerable. Of course, if you manage to anger more than one, then things can get out of control very quickly, and it makes for a very tense and frantic situation. These are absolutely one of my favorite enemies in the game largely because they're so memorable, but also because, even though I've played it several times, they still manage to make me quite tense. If you pull them one by one, they're quite manageable, but there's always going to be that threat of getting caught out and suffering a severe amount of damage. Just after these skeletons, there's Pinwheel itself, which most players find to be a very, very easy boss because they tend to tackle him well into the game. No matter what order you play the game in, he does end up being one of the easier bosses, but you can see, if you tackle him very early on, that he does put up a bit more of a fight. It's only natural that the boss would get easier the further the player advances in the game, but I think this goes to show that the boss itself isn't necessarily bad. It's just a bit poorly balanced. When it comes to items, you tend to get most of the information from the item descriptions 'cause they're quite lengthy pieces of text which will give you the history of the item itself. However, it can also be worth thinking about the picture that accompanies it or even the name of the item in question. The Rite of Kindling is an example of this, where by itself it doesn't give you that much information, but the picture really tells you everything you need to know. I suppose I'm gonna get a bit subjective here, but I think the picture for the Rite of Kindling looks like a Humanity sprite being burned alive. You can kind of see a vague Humanity shape in the middle, as though it's hunched over in pain. I also think that the basic picture of the Humanity sprite itself resembles a vagina, but I might just be dirty minded. The resemblance is interesting to me, though, because all of the Fire Keepers are women. This might also explain where Estus gets its name from. The estrus cycle is used to describe the physiological changes that happen in females due to their reproductive hormones, and within the estrus cycle, the estrus phase itself is when ovulation occurs. This might not have any relation to Dark Souls at all, but it is only one letter off, and if we continue down this train of thought, it results in some interesting speculation. The description of the Fire Keeper Soul says: "Each Fire Keeper is a corporeal manifestation of her bonfire and a draw for the humanity which is offered to her. Her soul is gnawed by infinite humanity and can boost the power of precious Estus Flasks." To parallel this with sexual reproduction, we can think of this like the females of some species which store sperm and use it at their own will. It could be, then, that Estus is what happens when one of the Fire Keepers allows a Humanity inside her to be burned. This is all just speculation, of course, and I'm not even saying that there's strong evidence to support this because there really isn't, but I think it's a very interesting way of looking at things. At the very least, this is a good explanation for why the Fire Keepers would be storing Humanity inside themselves. I'd also say it's probably not a coincidence that every Fire Keeper in the game is a woman, so it wouldn't surprise me if there was some thought put into that one way or another. Anyway, that's all we'll be seeing of this route for now, so while the Pyromancer makes her way back out of there, we're going to swap back over to my character who's about to head into Blighttown. One of the things that's really noticeable here is the color correction which kicks in as you cross the threshold between the two areas. This is kind of a cheap way to create the sort of atmosphere that you want the player to feel. In this case, Blighttown is an area of disease and death, so the colors tend towards a bluish green to reflect that. When I say it's cheap, I suppose what I mean is it doesn't mimic reality at all. Even if you walk into the most disease-riddled place on Earth, your color perception won't just suddenly shift towards the blue end of the spectrum. It's a very powerful technique, but it's obviously very artificial because it's just not something that we experience in reality. It's also surprisingly easy to implement, which is why you see it used so often. The last step of rendering each frame of the game is to output the color values of the pixels to the screen. Each pixel has a red, blue, and green value because they're the primary colors, so your screen can mix those to make whatever other color it likes. Graphics cards are set up with pixel shaders which can alter the color of the pixels very easily right before they finish this final step. So, if you imagine the game might finish setting up the scene, and then right before it's sent to the screen or the monitor, you can warp the color on it a little bit by making the green and blue stronger while dimming the red. If you do that, you'll end up with something like Blighttown. Personally, I wish they had tried harder to avoid this, as I kind of consider it cheating when it comes to creating an atmosphere. That said, the more you learn about games development, the more you see how they're just a massive bundle of cheats precariously cobbled together. Games use all kinds of shortcuts and optimizations which can be hard to wrap your head around. For example, from a mathematical point of view, the camera position never changes. It's always located at 0, 0, 0 in the game world, and other objects are placed relative to it using a matrix transformation. They use matrices for these because they can be combined into a single calculation and done on the graphics card which has dedicated hardware for this kind of stuff. Really, what this means is the game has to be rendered from a certain perspective rather than from some kind of objective viewpoint. For example, if you're an artist, you might be familiar with the idea of a vanishing point, and the idea is very similar in games. The further away an object is from the camera, the smaller it has to be, so it has to be scaled relative to its distance. So if you're looking at something in a game, it's not this big thing which exists far away. Really, what you're doing is you're kind of just scaling an object down so that it looks like it's far away. That's the way we experience the world, though, so ultimately it makes no difference to us. Along similar lines, there's another common optimization called culling, which is used in every modern 3D game. For culling, what it means is there are certain things in a game that we just don't care about - for example, the things that are off camera. We're not gonna see them, so there's no point in worrying about those at the minute. That's a technique called frustum culling. It gets its name because the frustum is the name of the shape which is placed in front of the camera and helps the computer to decide which things are visible and which ones aren't. There's also back-face culling, which allow the computer to ignore polygons which are on the back-sides of objects. So in other words, if you have an enemy on screen, you only ever see the front of that enemy. You don't see the back. So, again, there's no reason to be worrying about the back of the enemy if we can't see it. That means, then, that the back of the enemy is completely ignored. Those polygons are culled, which means they may as well not exist. Occlusion culling is another form of culling which occurs when objects near the front of the scene block objects at the back of the scene. In other words, if you're looking at a wall, then we don't really care about what's behind the wall because you can't see it right now anyway, so all of those polygons are removed from the scene as well. All of this together means that the game only renders the front half of each object which you can actually see right now. Ultimately, this makes no difference to us because that's the way we see the world everyday, but it is a little confusing to think about at first. If we wanted to get even more pedantic, we could talk about the way physics engines use classical mechanics instead of relativistic mechanics. In the real world, relativistic mechanics are a more accurate and complete model, but in our everyday lives, the results are indistinguishable from classical mechanics. Classical mechanics can't account for some things. For example, it doesn't account for the time dilation that occurs as an object starts to move towards the speed of light. Ultimately, we don't really care about that stuff, though. For games development, classical mechanics are more than accurate enough. Since classical mechanics are much easier to compute, then of course it makes sense that those are the ones used in games. I have no problem with the physics used in games, even though you could kind of argue that this is also cheating. It would be incredibly naive and misguided to try to make a game like Dark Souls any other way. It does go to show, though, that games are still a very long way away from being accurate simulations of reality. I suppose the reason the color correction bothers me is because it's a more artistic part of the game's design. Some trickery is necessary to get the game to work, but creating a good atmosphere doesn't necessarily require color correction. In Blighttown in particular, it's kind of conspicuous, so it ends up harming my immersion a little bit. Anyway, I went on a bit of a tangent there and ended up missing my opportunity to talk about the first toxin enemy. I like the position of the first toxin enemy because it's quite close to the entrance. On a first pass through the area, there's a pretty high likelihood that the player is gonna be hit with toxin, which is quite often fatal. Since there's a decent chance that the player is gonna die, they might as well introduce that threat sooner rather than later. At least it means if the player does die, then they only have a short walk back down from the Depths to get back to where they were. It's a pretty harsh ambush, but it's not like the blow darts can hit you instantly. You still have time to see them coming and get out of the way. There's also a lot of armor sets that have enough resistance to get hit at least once without getting toxic. The first toxin enemy is also pretty easy to find, so you don't have to go out of your way to kill him. With that simple encounter, they can then ramp up the difficulty later on with toxin enemies which are placed in trickier locations. One thing you might notice as I make my way through this area is the framerate. There were some pretty severe framerate drops in Demon's Souls, but the locations that they happened in weren't really that important. It was mostly in Stonefang where the enemies were pretty easy. Blighttown has a lot of severe framerate drops, and it makes the area a lot less enjoyable than it should be. In fact, playing the PC version, I would say that this is one of the best areas in the game. The atmosphere here is even more bleak than the rest of the game, the blow dart enemies make for a unique and interesting challenge, and the level geometry is so convoluted that I still haven't memorized it. I think the Estus system really shines here, too, because the distance between the two bonfires is quite large. I can understand why the development team chose 30 frames a second as their target. The areas in Dark Souls have this really nice, handcrafted feel to them. If you just look at Blighttown, for example, all the planks, all the scaffolding, all the pots, all the torches, all the tree roots, they all had to be put there by some level designer. There's a lot of attention to detail to the way objects are placed to make them look like they're in a natural position. To be fair, a lot of the time this has no bearing on the gameplay, but I still think the game would lose a lot if that stuff was cut. A lot of games these days try to be cinematic. In other words, they try to make their visuals resemble something out of a film. For Dark Souls, I don't think that's what they were going for, and that's not the impression I get of the game. I don't really know what the term is, or if there even is one, so in my brilliance, I've come up with a new one to describe Dark Souls more accurately. Dark Souls is... 'paintematic.' You can't really say that Dark Souls is cinematic, if only because the camera behaves in such a bland way. I don't mean that as a slight against the game. I kind of praised it in my Demon's Souls video, and I still feel the same way about it. I sort of like the fact that it doesn't really do anything by itself. Dark Souls isn't cinematic, but there's still a lot of aesthetic appeal in the game, nonetheless. Another reason why they would have chosen 30 frames a second is because Dark Souls just isn't as reaction-heavy as a lot of other action games out there. I know it sounds like I'm making excuses, so I do want to be clear that I think higher framerates are always better. There is a mod to play the PC version at 60 frames a second, but, unfortunately, it can cause some issues of its own. I also found, when using that mod, the animations looked a little bit worse 'cause they were probably never meant to be seen at that sort of framerate. Overall, it does make the game more responsive, though, and it's just a smoother play experience. I see both sides of the argument. I think any development team out there would love to have their game running at a higher framerate, but the question is always what will they need to sacrifice in order to get there. Anyway, my point is 30 frames a second for Dark Souls feels okay for me. You might disagree, but I would say that going any lower than that is unacceptable. I don't think that Blighttown should have been shipped in the state that it was. I think the development team should have been granted more time to figure out what the issues were here. It doesn't ruin the game for me, but I do think that anybody who plays it with a stable framerate will see what a detrimental effect it's had on this area. One of the interesting things about Blighttown is that there's two main entrances for the player to arrive into it. As you can see, using the Master Key, the player can move directly into Blighttown from the other side, which is considerably shorter and easier to make your way down. On the way down, there's a tunnel here with some blow dart enemies, and it's really hard to avoid getting toxic from them. One thing you can do here is you can use the Dung Pies that the larger enemies in this area drop. Dung Pies also inflict toxin, but they inflict a less serious form of it. If you throw several Dung Pies on the ground, you'll be inflicted with that version of the toxin, and since only one version of toxin can be active at a time, then you don't really have to worry as much about the enemies here. You still do suffer a good bit of health loss, but it's much better than the alternative. The reward for dealing with all these awkward enemies is a Fire Keeper Soul. In this instance, the Fire Keeper corpse is locked away much like Anastacia. It makes me think of something interesting and a little bit cruel that they could have done to players in Blighttown. Even though the Fire Keeper corpse is there, there isn't any bonfire to accompany her. On the other character here, I've been making my way through Blighttown for quite a while, and the distance between the two bonfires is very large. On a first playthrough, by the time the player arrives at the second bonfire, they're probably really desperate to get somewhere safe. I think it would've been interesting if they had tricked players a little bit by having a bonfire come in to view, but then, when the player goes up to it, it's inactive. They could also, then, have put the Fire Keeper corpse nearby to explain why the bonfire wasn't active. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a second bonfire in this area. I do think it is large enough to warrant two bonfires. I just think it's a little bit of a missed opportunity to scare players that little bit more. It also would have driven home just what happens when a Bonfire Keeper dies and how devastating that would be. This would be an especially good time to show that because Lautrec kills Anastacia after the player kills the Gaping Dragon, so there's a decent chance they haven't even been back to Firelink in the meantime. I suppose they could've created some anxiety about Anastacia's safety. At least it might make some sense for the bonfire to be gone once the Fire Keeper dies, because it seems like Homeward Bones are made out of the remains of old bonfires. Moving a bit further down, there's the Cragspiders, and the most interesting thing about these to me, anyway, is the sound effect that they make when they die. Their death roar is the same as the Man Centipedes from Demon's Souls. Now in and of itself, it's not that interesting. I mean, it is an unsettling noise, and that's good for such a strange enemy, but really what's interesting to me is the fact that they brought it back from Demon's Souls. It always makes me wonder what a legal headache it must have been to get this game made, considering they had to change publisher. I don't know where this sound file came from, whether it was something that FromSoft made themselves, or was it just something that they just purchased from some kind of library. Whatever the case, you can imagine that for every single thing in Dark Souls, they probably had to ask themselves: "Are we allowed to use this?" considering how similar the game is to Demon's Souls. If they did happen to use something questionable, then Sony could have potentially sued them. Of course, if they had done so, it would've caused a backlash from the community, so it would've been unwise, but you can't always count on other companies to be wise. So, I imagine Namco or FromSoft probably had to think about this from time to time to try and minimize their risk. There's always those unglamorous parts of development which are wrapped up in red tape. As I said before, the distance between the two bonfires here is quite considerable, so I remember hitting the second bonfire on my first character being a pretty big relief. I think a lot of players end up feeling the same way, and I would say that this is one of the strongest arguments against warping in Dark Souls. If you could easily warp out of this area from any bonfire like you can in Demon's Souls and Bloodborne, then all the tension of this area would vanish. There's a really unique feeling of relief when you get to the bonfire, but then, also, another feeling that comes after that. Because you begin to realize that you've made progress, but now you're stuck in an unfamiliar place. That feeling just can't be replicated if you can easily warp out, so this is one of my favorite things about Dark Souls in comparison to the other games so far. Moving back over to the other side, there's still a couple of interesting things to talk about here. First of all, there's a corpse with the Sealer clothes from New Londo. This is one of Ingward's companions who gave up her duty guarding the Seal to go down to Blighttown and try to heal them. Apparently, it didn't go very well. I get the impression that she died not long after arriving here. There's a lot of ladders on this side of the map. So, one of the nice consideration you might notice is the level designer has placed torches next to each one of the ladders. This is actually a fairly common technique where the level designer will draw the player's attention using a light source, 'cause it's quite eye-catching. You might not even consciously notice it, but considering how dark Blighttown is, you'll be drawn to the lights regardless. Another nice, little touch in this area is an explanation for how the elevator is powered. If you look down inside the elevator, you can actually see that there's a dog running around in a wheel powering the thing. Unfortunately, if you try to shoot the dog, nothing happens. I can see why they probably wanted to block players from deactivating the lift, but I still think it would've been a nice touch to be able to kill the dog and just see what happens. Right down at the bottom, we also have another NPC invasion, which is Maneater Mildred. Mildred wears the butcher's clothes, but it's not entirely clear if she's associated with the butchers from earlier or not. While the other butchers were just enemies, Mildred can actually be summoned for the next boss, so it doesn't seem like she's gone hollow. She doesn't really put up as much of a fight as some of the other NPCs, so you can see that she goes down pretty easily here. More importantly, though, there's a very well-dressed phantom that's just appeared there next to the bonfire. This is one of those nice, little changes in Dark Souls where the phantoms next to a bonfire are more detailed. It gives you a better sense of camaraderie when you're sitting down next to the bonfire with something that really resembles another player. Since we've both arrived in the same area, then I think it's about time that we finally did some co-op. As you can see by the color of my phantom, I've joined the Sunlight Warriors. This is one of the better covenants in the game because the reward system is quite nice. You can get several different miracles depending on how much you rank up the covenant. There's not that much to see in the swamp, but it's definitely worth exploring because the slugs drop some good weapon upgrade materials. They can hit pretty hard, but overall, they're not very threatening, and I kind of think of these as your reward for making it to the bottom of Blighttown. Having a ranged character around can be quite handy to deal with the mosquito enemies that appear here which can be quite a nuisance if you only have close-range weapons. It seems like a lot of games have enemies like the mosquitos, where they exist solely to annoy you. I'm not really sure why enemy designers resort to that kind of style when, really, the game is probably just better off without them. I mean, they can cause poison buildup, but you're already in the swamp anyway, so it just seems pretty redundant. Overall, there's not much to see here, so, usually, when players do co-op here, they just go directly to the boss. This is kind of an unfortunate side effect of the open-world design that Dark Souls has. In Demon's Souls, the start and end point of every level was very, very clearly defined. That meant if you wanted to do co-op, then you could easily just summon someone at the start of the stage and go through the whole stage with them. In Dark Souls, since many areas have several entrances, then the best place to leave your sign tends to be near the closest bonfire to the boss. In this case, if you do co-op in Blighttown, you're very likely to just be summoned and then go directly to the boss fight, which is a bit less interesting than how it was before. Of course, players can put their summon signs in other locations, but it just ends up taking a bit longer to get summoned. I think the way the Estus system works in co-op also kind of discourages people from doing entire levels together. The person being summoned can't heal themselves, so they have to rely on the host to use their Estus at an appropriate time. I think, mainly, they wanted summoning help to be a little less powerful than it was before, but, unfortunately, it's also disincentivized people from playing together for longer sessions. Before we do move on to the boss, I just want to point out that doing co-op in this area kind of gives away the secret of the Great Hollow. The area behind this is hidden behind two illusory walls, but if you see a fog gate here, that must make you quite suspicious. The boss of this area is Chaos Witch Quelaag, which, similar to the Gaping Dragon, is another popular boss for co-op. Again, I think one of the main reasons for this is she has quite a lot of health, so the fight isn't quite as anti-climatic as some fights are when you do them on co-op. I also think that the lava attacks that she has work well with multiple players. Usually, when a boss focuses on another player, you don't have to worry about them too much, but if there's lava spewing all around the place, you still have to be kind of cautious. She also has an explosion attack which will catch a lot of players out as well. One reason I wanted to show this boss co-op is because there's an interesting strategy you can use that works best with multiple people. If you manage to land an arrow on the human portion of Quelaag, then she gets stunned. The length of the stun gives you just enough time to stun her again, so if you're good with your aim, you can effectively immobilize her. She wiggles around a little bit when there's multiple players, but once you get into a good rhythm, you can end up taking off massive chunks of her health without her even fighting back. The soul that you get from Quelaag can be used to make the Chaos Blade, which has quite an interesting weapon model. The weapon itself doesn't look too remarkable, but if you take a close look at the texture on it, it looks quite a lot like Damascus steel. Weapons made with Damascus steel are known for their incredible toughness. It's said that they can even slice through other steel. Unfortunately, nobody can say for sure how weapons with Damascus steel were actually made. Scientists ended up examining the weapons and found that, inside the steel itself, there were nanotubes. It's a remarkable property for that metal to have and probably the reason why those weapons are so strong. Of course, I can't say for sure that the Chaos Blade is made with Damascus steel, but it certainly looks like it. The armors and weapons in these games are truly impressive, and I get the impression that the people working on them really took pride in their work. They look like they're practical, full of history, and, obviously, they're pretty well researched. With that lengthy trip through Blighttown finished, that's the second Bell of Awakening rung. I hope you're comfortable, though, because we're still only about one third of the way through the game. Normally, after defeating most bosses, you get a Homeward Bone to go back to your previous bonfire. It wasn't in the game initially, but it was patched in to help players move around the world a bit more smoothly, I suppose. I don't really care for it myself because the world of Dark Souls is compact enough that I don't really mind walking around, but one nice, little consideration here is they don't give you the Homeward Bone until you pull the lever. I suppose it's just a little way of stopping players from warping back out as soon as they kill Quelaag. They realize, then, that they have to move forward. Interestingly enough, although the vast majority of players will kill the Bell Gargoyles, then kill Quelaag, you can actually do it the other way around. If you do so, then the cutscene for this bell is slightly altered. Hidden behind an illusory wall after this, there's Qualaag's sister and her servant. For now, though, I'm just gonna be resting at this bonfire and moving on, so I think I'll talk about them a bit later on. After a short trip up the elevator, it's on to the Valley of Drakes, where I'll be picking up a sword. Here, there's an undead dragon, which is another example of them including a dragon but not really doing it justice. It tends to just use the same two attacks over and over again, so it's easy to just run in and out of range and just hack away at it slowly. If you have ranged attacks, it's even easier. You don't even have to expose yourself to any sort of risk. This area can be quite tedious, but I get the impression it was only really placed here so they could link Darkroot Garden, Blighttown, and New Londo together in a way that would make sense. After hacking away at this dragon for a while, I can pick up Astora's Straight Sword, which is quite similar to the weapon I have now. It's just another sword, but this one has a divine element to it. It's not really better or worse than what I have at the moment, but the divine element is useful in the Catacombs as we saw earlier, and it's always good just to have another option. That's all I'll be getting out of the Valley of Drakes for now, though, so it's time to finally head back to Firelink Shrine. There's no perfect time to talk about all the different NPCs in this game because they tend to enter and leave Firelink Shrine at different times. That's actually one of my favorite things about the NPCs, though - the fact that they don't treat you special by sticking around in Firelink Shrine just for your benefit. This is about the best chance we're gonna get to talk about some of the NPCs, though, so I'm just gonna go through some of their more interesting traits. First up is Griggs of Vinheim. The most interesting thing about Griggs is that he wears the Black Sorcerer Set. The Black Sorcerers are said to be secret sorcerers at Vinheim's Dragon School. The description on the Black Sorcerer Set says: "Worn by the secret sorcerers at Vinheim Dragon School. They secretly work with sound-based spells and never reveal themselves." One of the spells he sells is Fall Control, and the description on that says: "This sorcery, along with Hush, explains the extravagent cost of hiring Vinheim spooks." - spooks, in this case, meaning spies. This all might lead you to believe that Griggs is some sort of spy who is following Logan around to keep him under observation. While that is a possibility, I think it's very, very unlikely. The reason I think it's unlikely is because of the situation you find Griggs in in the first place. When you first meet him, he's stuck in a room with a corpse that's wearing the basic Sorcerer Set. To me, it makes sense that if he was trying to spy on Logan, he would have taken the opportunity to steal the Sorcerer Set from the corpse while he was in there. I mean, it doesn't make much sense to be wearing your spy uniform if you're trying to get close to your target. As with many things in Dark Souls, it's hard to say for sure, but to me, it looks like he was presented the perfect opportunity to pretend to be a regular sorcerer, and he didn't take it. So in all likelihood, it looks like he's a follower of Logan just because he wants to be. Representing the pyromancers in Firelink Shrine is Laurentius. Laurentius is one of the nicest NPCs in the game. His words towards the player are always very kind. If you don't start as a pyromancer, he shares his Pyromancy Flame with you, which is a surprisingly intimate act, and he also never gets drawn into any kind of drama with any of the other NPCs. Most of the other NPCs get into some kind of situation or, at least, talk about some of the other NPCS that appear in Firelink Shrine, but Laurentius sort of sits apart from all of the others. One of the interesting things that he says is he never got along with anybody back at the Great Swamp, which is kind of hard to imagine given his personality in the game. Since pyromancers are looked down upon in the real world, it could be that, when he was alive, he was much more frustrated and less easy-going. He seems to be pretty happy about his arrival in Lordran. It's because he's so nice to the player that the situation where he hollows is one of the more cruel ones. Basically, he'll ask the player about their Chaos Pyromancy, and if the player tries to repay his kindness by sharing the details with him, then he goes hollow down in Blighttown. This especially puts you in a bad situation on repeat playthroughs because neither answer you can give him is good. Either you tell him where to go and he goes hollow, or you keep it to yourself and he ends up sounding disappointed, which is sad in and of itself. While Laurentius seems to be a genuinely kind person, the same can't be said for Petrus, even though it might seem like it at first. Petrus, Reah, and her bodyguards all go down to the Catacombs to seek the Rite of Kindling, and things don't go very well. Petrus is the only one to return, and he feigns as though he got separated from the group. If you leave Lautrec alive, he'll offer you a tip in exchange for some Souls, which casts some suspicion on Petrus. Speaking to Petrus after getting the tip, he reveals his true nature. It's not clear whether or not he intended to abandon Reah from the start, but either way he seems to want her dead afterwards. In the best case scenario, he fled out of cowardice and wants Reah killed to cover it up. Once you rescue Reah, she returns to the Undead Parish and doesn't seem to hold a grudge against Petrus, which is pretty naive of her. If you allow Petrus to live, then eventually she ends up killed by him. Unfortunately, even if you kill Petrus, there's no good outcome for Reah. Even if you kill Petrus to protect her, she will eventually go hollow once you buy all her spells. Interestingly, she ends up hollow in the Duke's Archives, which is very far away from the Undead Parish. It seems unlikely that she could have gotten there by herself. As we'll see later, Seath has been kidnapping maidens across Lordran, so it's likely she was kidnapped and ends up going hollow as a result. Another NPC with no good outcome is the Crestfallen Warrior. There's really not much known about him, but he goes hollow once he leaves Firelink Shrine. It's never explicitly said what causes hollowing, but it seems to be when somebody loses their purpose. This kind of leads me to believe that maybe he enjoys helping people more than he lets on. Tucked away in a corner, we also have Domhnall of Zena. You might not even notice that he returns to Firelink Shrine since the place that he appears in is so awkward to get to. This makes absolutely no sense to me since he's a merchant and just seems like a case of the development team being awkward for the sake of being awkward. Anyway, that aside, one thing I find interesting about him is his use of the phrase "Aye, siwmae." This, to me, indicates a certain amount of freedom for the translation team and maybe even for the voice actors themselves. This phrase is an informal Welsh greeting, and it seems like something that Miyazaki is very unlikely to be aware of. I mean, I live right next to Wales. I've even been there, and I can't remember hearing that phrase before, although, granted, I don't get out much. Whatever script is handed to the recording team is likely altered a little bit to give them these natural-sounding phrases. I think it's a good thing, too, because it just makes the characters feel that little bit more grounded. Overall, the NPCs are one of Dark Souls' strong suits. There's a really diverse cast of characters that appear in Firelink over the course of the story, and each seems to have their own interesting backstory. Firelink Shrine is definitely your safe haven, but the fact that many NPCs will come and go and eventually go hollow lends it a sort of melancholy atmosphere that reveals itself more the further you get into the game. Last but not least for the NPCs is Kingseeker Frampt. The Bell of Awakening is used to literally wake him up from his slumber. If you visit this little place after ringing the first bell but before ringing the second one, you can hear a sort of snarling noise which is him, the idea being that the first bell has sort of disturbed his sleep but not fully woken him up yet. Anyway, now that he's here, he tells us that our fate is to succeed Lord Gwyn. He wants us to go through Sen's Fortresss and on to Anor Londo, but for now, I have a different idea. There is one hidden area in Firelink Shrine I haven't shown yet, and that's the path to the Undead Asylum. There's actually a hidden developer message that points you in this direction, but I think you're supposed to just find this place by exploring for yourself. This allows us to go back to the start of the game, and while it's not directly connected, this is yet another area that Firelink Shrine is connected to. It's really impressive how many different places you can get to so early in the game. You do have to have activated the lift to get here, but if you like, you can use the Master Key to do this in only a couple of minutes. The Undead Asylum itself is much the same way it was last time we were here. I suppose the interesting thing here is that you go backwards through the area this time. Unfortunately, the enemies are pretty similar to what they were last time. I'll be showing off a few things here, but there's not really that much more to justify its inclusion. The nice thing, however, is, of course, because the area was already built, the development team probably didn't have to do too much work on it. So, it's far from being the most interesting area in the game, but it makes for a nice, little, hidden inclusion. I suppose this shows how the internal consistency of the Souls games can work against them a little bit at times. If the world building wasn't so good in this game, then the development team would've been free to make some more drastic changes to the Undead Asylum. For example, they could have gone with some drastically different enemy types, or maybe even change the environment around a little bit. I'm glad they didn't, though, because certain games have different strengths and weaknesses. If I wanted to play something purely for gameplay, it wouldn't be Dark Souls. I play Dark Souls for something greater than the sum of its parts. Part of it is, of course, the gameplay, but there's also the visuals, the world, anything that can be used to draw you into the experience. Now in my Demon's Souls commentary, I made it a point to talk about all the various ways that the game tried to be fair to the player. For the most part, Dark Souls is much the same, but, unfortunately, there are a couple of missteps in this area. In this case, the floor collapsing before the Stray Demon boss fight is not something that I would consider to be particularly fair to the player. It does make sense in the game world since this is the area where the Asylum Demon fell down earlier and was smashing its hammer around the place, but there's a difference between something making sense in the game and being fairly telegraphed for the player. There's just no warning here that the floor will give out underneath you, and, unfortunately, when you fall down, you tend to take a large amount of damage. Now, if the player is on full health, the drop is unlikely to kill them, but I wouldn't say that's a good enough excuse for allowing this sort of thing to happen. A significant number of players will probably just fall down and die straight away here, which isn't a good experience. I think it's a shame that it works out this way, and I'd like to believe, if the development team had more time, they would've found a different way to make this happen. I could be wrong, though, because there is another collapsing floor later in the game which works much the same way. The boss here is more or less a repeat of the Asylum Demon fight from earlier, although it does have a few extra moves. People tend to point to these bosses as one of the weakness of Dark Souls, which is kind of understandable since this one will be repeated yet again later on with a fire version. That said, it does make me wonder how much simple things can change our perspective on the game. For example, if everything about this boss was exactly the same way it is now except they've removed the health bar down the bottom, I think that would make people a lot more accepting about this fight. We kind of, rightfully so, tend to get this idea in our heads when we see a boss health bar that we're in for something special. If this fight didn't have those sort of expectations to go along with it, then people probably wouldn't care too much about this. I could be wrong, but I know personally when I fight the reused Taurus and Capra Demons later on that I don't mind that at all. In fact, I actually kind of like it because it shows how much my character has progressed. It's also quite unlikely that this boss fight has robbed us of another, better boss fight that we would've gotten instead. The reason the development team would do something like this is because they just don't have time to implement another boss instead. So in all likelihood, it was either the Stray Demon or nothing at all. All that said, I don't want to defend this boss too much because I don't even like it myself. If it was gone, I wouldn't miss it. The only thing I do really like about it is that it drops a Titanite Slab on death. This is one of those cases where Dark Souls is properly incentivizing players to go out and do something which is optional. This boss is already in a hidden area, and even if you do want to explore this area, you don't have to drop down and kill him. You can access everywhere else just by walking around. So that means, once you know he's there at least, that there's very little incentive to go down and kill him. The Titanite Slab goes some way towards rectifying that since it's such a rare item. After beating the boss, we get to find one of the most mysterious objects in the game, the Peculiar Doll. This raises the question of what's been going on in your cell while you were away. If this was Demon's Souls, I would be almost positive that the development team would have some kind of explanation for why the doll is here, even if players don't figure it out. If this was Bloodborne, I'd be almost certain that the development team couldn't explain why the doll was there at all. With Dark Souls, you just can't say for sure. It's possible they had some reason for the doll to be here and they just never got a chance to show it, or it's possible it was always supposed to be a mystery that you could never really solve. It's tempting to leave this as something that can't be explained, but I have a theory which I think makes some sense. The Peculiar Doll description says: "There once was an abomination who had no place in this world. She clutched this doll tightly and eventually was drawn into a cold and lonely painted world." The person this refers to is almost certainly Priscilla, but the key word for me here is "eventually." If you think about it, the player is also "eventually" drawn into the Painted World. The big question about the doll is how it managed to get to your cell, and there's not many satisfying explanations for that. If it's Priscilla's doll, there's nothing to explain why it's in someone else's possession. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing that a Black Knight would have in their possession either. It just doesn't really make much sense for it to be in the Asylum. The way it makes sense to me is if the doll has a will of its own and tries to draw people into the Painted World. If that's the case, then it could be that the doll is trying to seek your character out since it senses that you'll eventually be capable of making it to the Painted World. It's a strange explanation, of course, but it's a strange item, and I don't think there's any way of ever knowing for sure what the correct answer is. That said, what my theory is reminiscent of is the One Ring from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and as we'll see later, there's at least some minor cause to believe that Miyazaki is familiar with that story. The last major thing in this area is Oscar, who's now gone completely hollow. This makes for a sad sight, and one thing I like about this is that it's quite understated. There's no swelling violins or dramatic cutscene to lead in to this. It just happens, and because of that, it feels all the more real. As well, the NPCs all equip things that you can equip. They do things that you, the player character, can do, and when they die, they have the same death animation that you have. This just makes them feel more like genuine characters on par with your own. The shield that Oscar drops is particularly good against magic. With this and the sword that I recently got from the Valley of the Drakes, I now have all of Oscar's equipment. I'll be using the Crest Shield from now on to take up Oscar's mantle. This is one of the interesting things about the way that players and NPCs equip the same gear. You see this online quite a lot where players will equip an entire set from a certain NPC to effectively role-play as them. It's not so much of a problem with Oscar because Oscar goes hollow, but this is a bit of a strange issue when it comes to other NPCs. For example, one of the more common outfits online is Solaire's armor. In order to get Solaire's armor, you have to kill him, and Solaire won't turn against the player until right towards the end of the game. It makes for a bit of a strange situation, then, when people want to role-play as that character. Obviously, they like that NPC if they want to assume their role in the world, but making that happen as quickly as possible requires killing the NPC before they go hollow. It's because of this that I wish there was an alternate way you could find many of the armor sets. If you summon someone for the Bell Gargoyles and they show up in the Solaire costume, it's a bit strange to think that they've killed Solaire in their world in order to do so. It's interesting that Oscar is in his full armor set from the very first moment that you see him. That and the fact that he was on the roof seems to imply that he wasn't locked up in the Undead Asylum like the player was. I think his speech at the start gives a big clue as to what was going on there and to the nature of the Undead Asylum itself. The prophecy that he recites mentions a pilgrimage from the Undead Asylum. If you think about it, this doesn't really make much sense because the undead are locked up in the Asylum. It doesn't really make much sense to go on a pilgrimage if you're locked in a cell. When you think about the Undead Asylum, it's easy to compare it to an insane asylum. However, that's not necessarily what it was originally built for. I think, based on the prophecy, that, at some point in the past, the Undead Asylum was a safe haven for undead. They probably arrived there and would make their pilgrimage to Lordran not long afterwards. If you think about the structure of the Undead Asylum, it's structured more like a church than it is a prison. There's also the graveyard out the back, which is obviously some kind of relic of the Asylum's original purpose. If you think about it, the Asylum would actually make for the perfect place to lock the undead up, because those who had heard about the prophecy would be drawn there anyway. It's possible that the Asylum Demon was outside the building to capture or kill undead who were trying to make their way to the Asylum. There's all sorts of other theories you can come up with to explain the Undead Asylum, but I think this one is the most simple explanation. In all likelihood, as it's stated at the start, your character was probably supposed to just hollow out in their cell. The only reason they managed to escape is because Oscar rescues them by chance. The only thing about the Undead Asylum that doesn't really make sense is that it's not overflowing with undead, but I suppose it's possible that the undead who hollow out here are used as fuel for the bonfires. Right before I leave, I'm gonna make a few trades with Snuggly the Crow to get some extra upgrade materials. Unfortunately, this still works exactly the same way it did in Demon's Souls where the fastest way to trade with Snuggly is to quit out to the menu. It's probably best not to bore you with the details and just move on to Sen's Fortress. As we saw in that cutscene earlier on, ringing the two bells prompted a giant to open up the gate here that was previously closed. Straight away in Sen's Fortress, the first thing that I like here is the arrow trap placed right at the start. This is basically your warning shot where, even if you get killed, you'll only have a couple of seconds to walk back to the entrance, and basically what this does is this alerts you to the nature of Sen's Fortress before you go any further. It's a house of traps. Since Sen's Fortress is the bottleneck which separates the first half of the game from the second half, the basic enemies here are quite a bit stronger than the basic enemies elsewhere. Up to this point, we've definitely fought some enemies that are stronger than these ones, but in Sen's Fortress, these are the most basic enemy type that you're gonna come across. While the plethora of traps coming up can be quite intimidating, you can also use these to your advantage against the snake men. It's good that it works out this way because, as we've seen already, sometimes the game is willing to cheat a little bit in the AI's favor. For example, the way that the enemy weapons don't bounce off walls whereas yours do. Of course, it would be kind of stupid if the traps worked any other way, but games have taken much worse liberties in the past. The smartest thing about Sen's Fortress is how it works in the overall context of Dark Souls, not just as a level in and of itself, but as a smaller piece of a larger whole. Since Dark Souls is much bigger than Demon's Souls, they probably didn't want to lay traps over the whole game, which would be much more likely to catch people off guard. There is a few traps placed outside Sen's Fortress, so you still have to be on your toes, but for the most part, most of the traps are localized in this single area. Even if these traps were placed outside of Sen's Fortress, I'm sure most of them would've been implemented in such a way that they would've been fair, but even so, it's easy to imagine with the sheer size of Dark Souls how it might've been frustrating to have these spread out over the whole experience. Players are probably much less likely to blame the game for death by a trap if they're in an area explicitly filled with traps. So, I think this was a really smart decision by the development team, and, of course, it gives Sen's Fortress its own character which is distinct from the other areas as well. Within Sen's Fortress itself, my favorite part has to be the sort of scripted sequence where a serpent warrior pops out from around a corner and then gets hit by a boulder. This simultaneously makes for a very memorable and funny moment, but it also keeps the player safe from that first boulder. You can hear the boulders rolling around, but, otherwise, this would be a very harsh introduction to the boulder trap itself. Boulders and pressure plates aren't exactly new material for the Souls games. There was similar stuff in Demon's Souls, but there's also a lot of new things this time around as well. The biggest new addition in terms of traps here is probably the swinging blades which are placed across narrow walkways. These are great because they continue the tradition of being totally fair but feel different to the other traps. Combined with enemies, they put you under pressure to get past them as quickly as possible, which isn't the kind of pressure you normally feel in these games. It is a little bit of a shame that the inherently 2D nature of the image on the screen doesn't give you a perfect idea of where the blades are in relation to your character, though. There's some chips taken out of the floor underneath them, which can help you judge their position a little bit, though, and even if it doesn't help, it's a nice touch regardless. There's all sorts of other traps we'll see, too, and this is another major benefit of having a dedicated gauntlet area built into the game. They were able to get a bit more imaginative this time around. There's tar underneath the walkways which inhibits your movement if you happen to survive the fall, an elevator that can kill you if you're not careful, and a giant that chucks bombs at you. There's also these silver knight statues dotted around the area, which you might think are a strange inclusion for this place, but, actually, these are another form of trap as well. The Chameleon spell allows a player to disguise themselves as an object, and in Sen's Fortress, it turns you into a knight statue. Thanks to the sheer number of knight statues in Sen's Fortress, this helps an invading player to blend in and surprise you. Perhaps the most memorable and devious of all these traps, though, is the Mimic. The Mimic here in Sen's Fortress is one of those things about the game which is debatably fair. It'll almost certainly catch new players off guard, but there are a couple of hints towards its true nature. First of all, its position in the room is quite strange. Chests are almost always placed at the back of a room parallel to a wall. This one is placed right in the center at a very strange angle. Secondly, if you stop and look at it closely, you can see it breathing. Thirdly, there are no Mimics lower than this one - by which I mean, this is the first Mimic that the player is going to come across. There aren't any Mimics placed earlier on in the game or even in any areas which are lower than Sen's Fortress. This means, then, that the effort they went to to make this Mimic a little more obvious isn't wasted because the player hasn't encountered a Mimic up to this point. And lastly, Sen's Fortress has been clearly established by this point to be a place of traps, so when you come across something like this, you should probably be suspicious. There's clearly some clues here, but whether or not this counts as enough to make this a completely fair scenario is really a matter of opinion. Myself: I'm kind of torn on it. I think it's right on the borderline. I get where people are coming from who think this is an unfair moment because there's not that much to go on, and you do have to look at the Mimic quite carefully and for quite a long time sometimes in order to see it moving. On the other hand, I find it hard to think of ways that the development team could've done this better without giving away the surprise completely. About the best suggestion I've been able to come up with is putting a Mimic corpse somewhere in Sen's Fortress before you come across this chest. You can imagine, though, if the player saw something like that, it would be a very big giveaway that something might be wrong with the chests in this area. I see both sides of the argument, but I suppose, ultimately, I'm okay with the way the Mimic is in the game at the moment, so I suppose that I lean a little bit towards the side that says that this is okay. I think after this moment, of course, all the Mimics are clearly very fair because you've already been introduced to this threat. One nice thing about Mimics is that they always have good items inside them. This makes sense in the world since Mimics are born of greed, but it's also just a smart design decision generally. It means that good loot is locked behind a fairly tough enemy, and it also means you don't feel cheated out of a chest when you discover it's a Mimic. Mimics are bad enough as is, so it would create a lot of resentment in the player if they also didn't contain anything useful. If you don't like fighting Mimics, you can use a Lloyd's Talisman to put them to sleep and safely grab the item inside. There's a nice, unique animation to go along with this. I think this a really nice touch, and in general, the design of the Mimics is really good because, even though they're some of the most brutal enemies in the game, it's kind of hard to hate them at the same time. Their design walks a really fine line between being sort of gruesome and frightening and, also, being absurd to the point of kind of being laughable sometimes. It's almost like waking up one day and your toaster tries to bite your hand off. Even though a trap might be totally fair to the player from a gameplay perspective, it can still be frustrating if it's not properly implemented. A good example of this is the boulder trap placed right in the middle of Sen's Fortress. At first, these are okay because, as I explained, the first boulder is introduced in a very obvious way, and the boulders themselves are something the player can easily overcome. The problem happens when the player arrives at the contraption itself and sees how it operates. Up above, a giant drops a boulder down onto this platform, and then the platform sends the boulder in one of four directions. The direction that the boulder is sent changes as the player moves around the environment, so the natural assumption, then, is that somebody is watching the player and adjusting the boulder trap accordingly. Unfortunately, when you get here, it turns out that there's nobody operating the lever, and it's way too far down for the giant to be adjusting it. Even after the player moves the lever themselves, if they move away from the trap, it will then start moving itself back to track the player again. If you do co-op in Sen's Fortress, you can even see this happen, and as you can see here, nothing adjusts the lever. It just turns itself. Now, I suppose you could argue that there's just some other way that this lever is moving, but, really, it just shouldn't work this way. Once the player gets up here and adjusts the lever themselves, it moving by itself afterwards is really just an annoyance. As I mentioned earlier, even though the trap itself is totally fair, once you get up here and realize that there's nobody operating it, it's easy to feel that the computer is somehow cheating. And, of course, nobody likes a cheater. I think they probably just didn't have time to animate some other explanation for this, but just placing a snake man near it would have given players enough to suspend their disbelief, sort of like how the invisible phantom in the Tower of Latria gave a reasonable explanation for the arrow trap turning on in Demon's Souls. It's kind of a shame that it works out this way, but I'm not saying I'd want it removed. It's a very core part of Sen's Fortress itself, and, really, it's only just a little niggle that I have with it. I like the contraption itself. The lever underneath it is very easy to see and understand, and it's nice that the player is rewarded for messing around with it a little bit. By using this, you can find Big Hat Logan, and it's funny how the designers bait you into finding Logan by placing a snake man in front of the wall. Basically, players who are cheeky and try to kill this snake man in an interesting way are rewarded for their effort. The most interesting thing to me about Logan's appearance in Sen's Fortress is the way that he thanks you after you rescue him. It could just be poor line delivery, but Logan almost sounds patronizing here. I think this could indicate that he actually intended to get caught in order to be brought to the Duke's Archives. He is known as one of the greatest sorcerers in the world, so it seems a little bit off that he managed to get captured here. Despite being a very famous sorcerer, his robes are actually apprentice robes that he never changed out of. Logan's Catalyst is also the most basic catalyst and the one that you start with as a sorcerer. It's just been strengthened greatly by his own abilities. People who are good at what they do don't have to try too hard to keep up appearances, or maybe that's just my excuse for wearing Hawaiian shirts to work. Moving further up, the saw blades continue to get more difficult the further up you go, and, ultimately, you're expected to get past them while a serpent wizard shoots at you from the side. A lot of players will just kill that mage with some kind of ranged attack, but, thankfully, it's possible to get across the bridge even without doing so, and you can circle around and kill him afterwards. I really like that you can make your way through this game using nothing but a sword, and I feel like there was some considerations made for that playstyle along the way. Interestingly, this is the first area of the game where the player spends the majority of their time going upwards rather than downwards. There's a sense of accomplishment in making it out onto the roof even though there is a little bit further left to go. The main obstacle here is the giant which throws the bombs, but he's pretty easy to deal with, especially since he doesn't respawn. If you're looking for some extra challenge, you can leave him alive, and he'll throw bombs into the boss arena, which makes it significantly more difficult. You have to be willing to make a little jump here in order to get the key for the shortcut. The jumping controls in Dark Souls are a little bit strange in that you have to tap the run button again while you're running. It feels a little bit imprecise, but the more I play the game, the less I mind it, and I can see how the controller was already packed full of more important actions. In here, we find the Crestfallen Merchant, who isn't particularly interesting in and of himself. He is one of the better NPCs to show one of the more amusing shortcuts that FromSoftware took during development. You might notice that this guy is taller than your character, but his model is actually the same size. He just floats off the ground to give you the impression that he's taller than you. They must have wanted the NPCs to be of different heights to vary them a little bit, and this is a lazy, although admittedly effective, solution to that problem. All of the NPC characters are actually the same height. It could be that FromSoftware actually uses the same tool that the player uses when they create their NPCs. One of the only things you can't change about your character is their height, and the reason for that being it would change the position of your hitboxes. So if you were playing online, and you had a small character, you might have an advantage over somebody who had a bigger character and, thus, had bigger hitboxes. I presume, then, when they're creating a character or an enemy or something like that, if it's a different size to the player, then they probably have to create custom hitboxes for them. Obviously, they weren't willing to do that, so you end up with hovering NPCs instead. I doubt most people are gonna notice this, and it seems like a pretty cost-effective solution to the problem. There is one more NPC here, although he's hostile, and that's Ricard. Ricard is one of the more dangerous NPCs because of his rapier, which can do a lot of damage in a very short span of time if he catches you with it. Once you kill him, he drops it, and the description lets you know that he was actually a prince at some point. It seems possible or even likely to me that Ricard is the son of the Knight King Rendal. Rendal was the king of Balder, and there are a couple of his knights stationed at the top of Sen's Fortress. The Crestfallen Merchant says that Rendal came to Sen's Fortress and failed to make it all the way through. Since Ricard is a knight, uses a rapier like the other Balder Knights, and is a prince, then it seems like a fairly reasonable conclusion that he's Rendal's son. He possibly came to Sen's Fortress to find out what happened to his father and got stuck as well. It's kind of grim that two generations of the same family would face the same fate, but I suppose that's what separates dark fantasy from high fantasy. The boss of this area is the Iron Golem, but I don't really have that much to say about him, so instead, I'm just gonna show you this one from a different angle than usual. On death, the Iron Golem drops the Core of an Iron Golem. It's nice that this is called a core instead of a soul, and the description says it was originally a bone of an everlasting dragon. This kind of raises more questions than it answers, but at least it explains why it can be used to create a dragon weapon later on. After the Iron Golem, the player makes their way on to Anor Londo, but rather than going there themselves, they're taken there by some gargoyles. Directly after the boss, there's a blocked-up archway, which looks kind of conspicuous to me. It makes me wonder if the player was originally supposed to make their way up to Anor Londo themselves. The placement of the archway is about the same height as the street level of Anor Londo, where the player never goes. So, it does make me suspicious that there was originally grander designs for Anor Londo, especially after the release of Bloodborne. It's easy to imagine that Yharnam is what Anor Londo was originally intended to be, but they couldn't manage to do it at the time. Whatever the case, I'm not particularly fond of the cutscene that leads into Anor Londo, myself. This is kind of similar to what I was saying about the drake earlier on in the Undead Burg, where it's more impactful if you come across something yourself while the game is still in motion. Even if they just had the archway lead towards an elevator, and then the elevator took you up to Anor Londo, I think that would make for a more powerful moment than placing it in a cutscene. Even the cutscene itself is a bit too grandiose for my tastes. It seems to sort of rub Anor Londo in your face and expect you to be impressed by it whereas, if you came across it yourself, you'd probably just be impressed anyway. So, yeah, I get a sneaking suspicion that the gargoyles weren't always part of the plan, but even if they were, I don't think it was the right call. I would've preferred to discover Anor Londo myself than have it shown to me in a cutscene. Anor Londo is, ultimately, a lot more empty than it first appears. You don't get to explore that much of it, and there's not even that many enemies or NPCs around the place. It's a good thing that the game is otherwise so large, or this might've been more disappointing. As it is now, it's not really a problem because there's lots of other areas anyway. In the world of the Lord of the Rings, "Anor" is the Elvish word for "sun." Given the aesthetics of Anor Londo and the various references to the sun within it, then I think it's safe to say that this is where it got its name from. In the same way that there's New Londo, there's Anor Londo, so you kinda think of this as 'Sun Londo.' In this first section, there's not that much to find, but we do find one of the Fire Keepers here. The item description on her armor gives us her entire backstory. It says: "After becoming undead she visited the Dark Sun Gwyndolin at the Mausoleum of the Spiral Depths, became a Blade of the Darkmoon, and assumed the flame keeping duty. She received this helm which hides her hideous form and helps her hunt the guilty." She has a hideous form since she's a Fire Keeper. The Humanity are drawn to her and squirm around underneath her skin. She seems to feel quite indebted to Gwyndolin for giving her some purpose in life or, maybe I should say, un-life. Anyway, moving on, one tiny, little touch that I like here at the start is the way this elevator works the first time you come across it. Normally, this elevator goes up and down by itself, but the first time you come across it, it's deactivated. I'm guessing the reason for this is because the elevator can be out of sight for quite a while. A player might've wandered over while the elevator was gone and not realized that they could make their way down there. So, they just made this elevator activate the first time you stepped on it. That way, you would know the next time you came along here that you could wait for an elevator to arrive. It's kind of interesting, but I suppose what's more interesting to me is that the team wanted to make all of the elevators distinct from one another. Dark Souls has a very vertical design, so it relies on elevators to get the player up and down quickly, but they're all very different depending on which area you're in. In Anor Londo, they move by themselves. In Sen's Fortress, they're a cage. And in the Undead Parish, there was two side by side. Elsewhere in the game, they tend to be activated by magic, but even so, they end up looking quite different from one another. I suppose, in the same way that Dark Souls deserves credit for its variety of enemies, it genuinely deserves some credit for its variety of elevators as well. They wanted each area to be tonally consistent, so they had to use several different elevators to accomplish that. Of course, the same is true for all the aesthetics. Every area needs its own textures. Every area needs its own models, but for some reason, it really sticks out with the elevators for me. Coming up, we have my least favorite part of Anor Londo. It could just be because I've played lots of games in the past, but I find one thing that I run into quite often is this notion of what I'm supposed to do as a player. I'm sure we've all had that feeling from time to time where you don't really know where you're supposed to go or what you're supposed to be doing, and eventually you realize, "Oh, this is the way I'm supposed to go!" or "This is what I'm supposed to do," and the reason you've realized it is because you're guessing the designer's intentions. In other words, if you're in a sort of empty area and then you come across some enemies, you might think, "Okay, this is the way I'm supposed to go, because there's enemies here," when, if anything, you're character would probably prefer to do the exact opposite of what you're doing. If there's more enemies, then that's more risk to them, so, surely, they should be exploring their other options first. It seems like this kind of thing is unavoidable with games to some extent, but some examples are worse than others. I think the path into the painting building here is a particularly bad example for Dark Souls. You come out into the area where there should be a bridge, and then you have to explore alternative routes since the bridge isn't in place. After looking around for a bit, you might notice that one of the windows on this building is broken, and there's a little path leading up to it. At that point, it's hard to avoid thinking, "Oh! This is where I'm supposed to go." I think it's the kind of thing that you get used to the more games you play, although, unfortunately, the more games you play, the more often you tend to see it because you get used to all the little developer tricks. In this case, the developer's trick is to just have this one broken window on this building so that it sticks out. You're intrigued by it. It's the kind of thing that you get used to, but there's no denying it's this kind of micro-interruption in your suspension of disbelief. The reason I bring it up, though, is because Dark Souls is usually very good at avoiding these sorts of 'supposed to' moments. For example, when you get to the Parish earlier in the game, you can go up and fight the Bell Gargoyles, you can get to Andre, or you can get back to Firelink Shrine, but it's not clear which way you're supposed to go at the start. You just have to explore for yourself and take the risk and find out where each path ultimately leads. Basically, my problem with this kind of stuff is that you do it because you're somebody who's playing a game rather than some kind of in-world motivation for you to do so. My character, for example, is wearing some very heavy armor, so he would think very hard about crossing a little gap to get up to a window without knowing what's inside. As the player, though, I know that this is the way I'm intended to go since the other route has been blocked off for me. Overall, it's just a very conspicuous moment where the hand of the designer is showing very clearly pointing you where you need to go. While I wish the entrance to the building itself was handled a little differently, I do like what goes on inside. Fighting the enemies on the rafters is quite a tense and unique setup, which is a really worthwhile inclusion, I think. I particularly like the last enemy on the right, here, because he distracts you from the amazing chest on the left. Inside, there's a Divine Blessing, which, of course, is a very useful and rare item. Our target here is the painting itself on the lower floor. This is the most interesting level transition in Dark Souls, but I do think it could've been done even better. Personally, I think it would be ideal if you could walk directly into the painting itself, maybe if there was a little staircase placed in front of it. I think this would've been possible because Anor Londo isn't visible from the back of the room here, so I'm pretty sure the Painted World is already being loaded by the time you approach the painting itself. One of my favorite things about Dark Souls is the sheer amount of completely uninterrupted playtime you can have if you don't die. For example, from Firelink Shrine, if you skip the Bell Gargoyles, then you can play all the way to the Gaping Dragon without a single interruption. No cutscenes, no dialogue boxes you're forced to skip through, absolutely nothing but you and the game. In fact, if the boss introductions were completely removed, there'd only be a couple cutscenes in the entire thing. I think this is one of Dark Souls' most understated strengths, and it's shockingly uncommon. Next time you're playing a game, especially something with the kind of budget Dark Souls had, you should see how long you can go before your gameplay is interrupted. It's very unlikely that that will match the amount of time you can play Dark Souls for in a single chunk. If you go at a reasonable pace and cover some stuff like Darkroot Garden, then getting from Firelink Shrine down to the Gaping Dragon can take a couple of hours. Whether people recognize it or not, this is one of the real strengths of Dark Souls. It makes perfect sense as well, because if a player is enjoying the game, then the more uninterrupted playtime you can give them, the more likely they are to keep playing. Any time the player runs into a long cutscene or a story-heavy segment in a game, that gives them a good opportunity to turn the game off. And when they turn it off, they might never turn it back on again. So, perhaps one of the reasons people become so fond of these games is because they offer really long, uninterrupted play sessions, and the longer that session is, the more likely the player is to enjoy themselves. The more likely they are to enjoy themselves, the more likely they are to keep playing, the more likely they are to recommend it to their friends, and the more likely they are to buy a sequel. That's why it's so baffling to me that so many games get in the way of the gameplay at regular intervals. Anyway, the cutscene leading in to the Painted World is only a very small one, so I suppose I'll just reiterate my point about the introduction to Anor Londo and say that this probably would've been more satisfying to experience it for myself. Although, obviously, I sympathize with the development team if they ran into some trouble making that happen. I have a bit of a bias for snow levels, but I do genuinely believe that the level design here is at its absolute peak. This area very much capitalizes on what I was talking about earlier in the Undead Burg. There's lots of little secret areas and paths you can take, but rather than ending in dead ends, most of them loop around to another location or back down to where you were previously. Even right at the start, here, there's a part where you can come up on top of a building, drop down to pick up a Dried Finger, and then drop into the building that you were just next to rather than having to go back to where you were a second ago. The Painted World is filled with this kind of stuff. When you go up, there's usually somewhere you can drop down, you might find a new area, or it might smoothly loop back around to where you were before. Basically, there's very few dead ends. It always gives you the impression that you're moving forward. You're always exploring, and it helps that there's so many different little places that you can go in this one. Even when you go underground later on, you don't have to go down and come up the same way. There's two different entrances, so whichever entrance you come down, you go back up the other one. There's lots of things to find, and it's just a very, very smooth area to explore. As much as I absolutely love the interconnectivity of Dark Souls, I think one of the reasons the Painted World is so good at this kind of stuff is because it's not connected to the rest of the game. There's a clear start and end point to the Painted World, and outside of that, the level designers didn't have to worry about the player moving off to some other area entirely. So, they were able to give you lots of different routes and not really worry about which one you would go down because you're stuck in this area anyway. You're probably gonna explore it all regardless. I don't think this kind of level design would've been impossible connected to the rest of the game, but I do see why they probably didn't want to do it that way. I think, generally, when you arrive in an area, they want you to complete that entire area in one go. So, when you arrive in an area like, say, Blighttown, then for the next half an hour or so, Blighttown is what you're going to be playing. It makes the game feel more consistent in that regard. You get used to the areas there. You make your way in further, and it feels like you're progressing. If the Painted World connected to a few different areas, then the player might come into the Painted World and then wander out after only a couple of minutes. You can imagine, then, that probably doesn't feel quite as much like progress. The player's only arrived in the Painted World, and they've moved on even though there's still more left to discover there. Personally, I'd love to see an entire game woven together as tightly as the Painted World, but I can see how that would be fatiguing and would leave the player very, very directionless. As a single area, though, it's easily a standout, and I think this is some of the strongest 3D level design I've ever seen anywhere. Exploration and discovery are my favorite parts of these games, and I would say that this area really captures those aspects the best. At the top of this stairway, the player picks up the Red Soapstone and gets a nice vantage point of the entire Painted World. This is one of the areas where you can see the depth of field effect quite well. Depth of field is the reason that the scenery in the distance is blurred. Normally, I dislike these sorts of camera effects, but this one isn't so bad because the human eye works in a similar fashion. You can think of it like how your peripheral vision works. You're only ever really looking at one thing at a time, and the rest is a little bit out of focus. Depth of field is most commonly used in first-person games to highlight what the player is looking at relative to the rest of the scene. However, in Dark Souls, it's a little atypical. Basically, it works on distance from the camera, which effectively means that the player character is always the thing that's in focus. This shouldn't really be how it works, but it's a clever effect anyway because, ultimately, this masks the low level of detail on faraway objects. Another one of those optimizations games will do is they'll have a low-detail version of a building or a structure which is used when that structure is far away. It makes perfect sense, of course, because there's no point in using a really detailed version of the building if the player isn't gonna be able to see the details from that distance anyway. If you stop and look carefully or use the Binoculars, you might see that it doesn't look quite right, though, so the depth of field helps to hide that. It's a pretty common technique these days, but I think the way it's used in Dark Souls is especially effective. It just means that they can show more scenery and objects in the distance without them looking fake, and it gives you a better impression of the world overall. After looping back around to the bonfire, we come face to face with Phalanx. This is clearly a case of them reusing the boss from Demon's Souls, but I think this reinforces my point earlier about expectations. Nobody says that this is a disappointing boss fight because it isn't one. You can imagine, though, if they just stuck a health bar at the bottom of the screen, how much people would complain about this scenario. And, perhaps, rightly so. It would make for a disappointing boss. But as it is now, is it disappointing? Not really. It's not exactly the most interesting enemy encounter in Dark Souls, but it does make for a change of pace, and it's a clever way for the development team to reuse something from Demon's Souls. In the area just next to this, there's an invasion by Xanthous King, Jeremiah. The yellow hood is obviously very similar to the Old Monk, and it's notable that both of these characters are of a very high status. I think this is because, in the past, yellow dye used to be very expensive to make. Yellow cloth needed yellow dye from saffron flowers and also needed a very clean, white sheet for it to show up correctly. Thus, in the past, in Asia at least, only dignitaries were permitted to wear yellow. Since the boss of this area doesn't have to be killed, and the Red Soapstone is found here, it seems likely that this area was intended for players to fight one another. As you can see, we've decided to do that ourselves using the Red Soapstone. The first thing she does here when she arrives is use Hidden Weapon, which is a very good spell for the weapon she has on hand. It makes the weapon model invisible, and since she's using a Great Scythe, this can be quite a devastating combination. The Great Scythe has a very, very long reach which is easy to underestimate even if you know that's what they have equipped. If they did intend for this area to be an area of duels and invasions, then it's a good thing that they put Jeremiah here, because it baits the player into going into human mode. Unfortunately, apart from the visuals, the difference between human form and undead form is basically negligible. Offering Humanity to the bonfire and turning human is basically just a way of opting in to the online features. It opens you up for co-op, but it also opens you up for invasion. This means, then, that players are unlikely to go into human form unless they need that benefit. In other words, unless they need to do some co-op, they are pretty happy to stay in undead form. In turn, then, that means, as an invader, you're more likely to invade somebody who's doing co-op then you are in Demon's Souls. This is one of the changes to the formula that I really dislike in Dark Souls. The differences between soul form and human form in Demon's Souls made a lot of sense and had their own pros and cons. In Dark Souls, there's little reason to be in human form. Humanity is more common than Stones of Ephemeral Eyes, and there's no punishment for dying or 'suiciding.' All in all, it means that players essentially get to decide when they're playing online and when they aren't. Giving the player more choice like that might seem like a good thing, but, really, they already had that choice anyway. There was nothing in Demon's Souls to stop you from going into human form and then just disconnecting from the online. So, really, the player doesn't get any additional choices. They're just robbed of the interesting health-reduction mechanic. Without King Jeremiah here, I have no incentive to go into human form, and even then, I only know to go into human form because I know about that NPC invasion. I know a lot of people don't like the health-reduction mechanic in Demon's Souls, but I really think it's one of the few ways they could properly incentivize players to go into human form, so I think it was a good inclusion. Anyway, there's no surprises who the victor is in this battle. And with that out of the way, there's only a couple more things I want to show in the Painted World. As in the Valley of Drakes, there's an undead dragon here with an attack pattern which is very much the same. The more interesting thing is its invulnerable, giant ass placed on the bridge behind it. I assume this is some kind of last-minute barricade to block the player from dropping down onto the bridge, the reason being this would put them behind the door that they have to open underground first. I suppose that might lock the player in there, but they could always use the Darksign to return to the previous bonfire, although it does rob them of all their Souls, which might be a bit unfair. It's probably easier to put an invulnerable enemy in the way than it is to start messing around with the bridge geometry. At the end of the bridge, we have Priscilla, the boss of this area. Since she doesn't attack me or harm me in any way herself, I'm not going to kill her, and that's one of the interesting things about this boss, is you can just walk around her. I realize that might be a little bit anticlimactic for you, though, so we're gonna swap over to the Pyromancer who's going to kill Priscilla for her tail. You can see, after you attack Priscilla, that the thing that sets her apart from the other bosses is the fact that she turns invisible. It's a lucky thing that the Painted World is covered in snow, because the snow helps the player to determine where Priscilla is based on her footprints. It's an interesting mechanic and sets apart what otherwise might've been a boring boss. Her soul description gives you an idea of how the outside world saw her. It calls her a "crossbreed bastard child and antithesis to all life." The gods were afraid of her, so they locked her up in a painting. It seems likely that she's Seath's daughter or at least his creation, so perhaps that's why she was left alive. She's the only boss in the game that is considered a sin to attack because she's both an NPC and a boss. You can even request absolution from Oswald for this, but the conditions for this are pretty convoluted. Once you anger Priscilla, you normally can't leave the Painted World until you kill her. However, if you wait until after acquiring the Lordvessel, don't touch the Painted World bonfire, attack her, then 'Homeward Bone' out of the Painted World, you can request absolution. It's amazing that this even works at all, and you have to wonder whether the development team accounted for this possibility, or it's just a happy accident that the absolution system still works. I know I complained about the cutscene that triggers when you enter the Painted World, but I actually feel the opposite way about the cutscene that triggers when you leave. I think it was a smart decision for them to have a cutscene at the end. On my original playthrough, after speaking with Priscilla, I decided that I didn't want to kill her, so I went towards the ledge to investigate it. That said, I know, if the cutscene hadn't triggered before I walked off the ledge, there's no way I would've walked off it myself. I would've considered it a trick. So, even though I wanted to leave Priscilla alive, I probably would've ended up killing her. I don't think many players would've taken that plunge by their own accord, so I can see why it's reasonable to have a cutscene there. Although, you could certainly argue, as I would, I suppose, in most cases, that if I wouldn't have done something, then my character probably shouldn't do it without my permission either. I've kind of talked myself out of this cutscene now. I don't think it should've been there. I suppose, ideally, they probably should've just had you leave the Painted World in a different way. Maybe you could've gone to cross a bridge and it would fall out underneath you. Anyway, this leads us back out to Anor Londo, where we still have the majority of the area to finish. As I said earlier, Anor Londo is, unfortunately, a very empty area, but there are some nice visual touches and considerations scattered around it which I'll be pointing out as we go. The first example are the stairs, here, at the start. You have to keep in mind that Anor Londo existed before humans became as prolific as they are at the start of the game. The stairs in the middle here are massive because they're made for larger beings, like the gods that used to live here. It makes perfect sense when you think about it, but it's one of those things that would be very easy to overlook in development, when all you're thinking about is the player going up some steps. So, either the level designers had a lot of foresight about the area they were building, or they were willing to go back and make changes like this purely to reinforce the history of the world. Either way, it's admirable of them because making a change to the level geometry isn't necessarily easy, and it's certainly not something to be done lightly. Let's just say, for sake of argument, that the game was mostly complete when someone decided to put these larger steps here. Now, I'm not saying that's definitely the case because, if they planned carefully ahead, it's certainly possible that they could've put these steps here in the first place, but it makes for a good example. Changing something like these stairs means that they have to be tested again very, very thoroughly. Every part of every area in the entire game needs to be checked to make sure that the player can't clip through it. This isn't the kind of thing where you can just boot up the game, run into a wall, and then tick a box to say that the wall works correctly. All sorts of various, little things have to be checked because even if there's a very, very small chance of it happening, once a million or more players buy the game, even the most remote possibilities will happen just because of the sheer number of people playing. That's why you have quality assurance testers. Their job would be to take the latest build of the game, see that there's been a change - in this case, maybe the stairs have been changed - and they would then need to run a barrage of tests against that part of the level. So for example, they might have to roll along the entire staircase and roll along it at all the different weight limits. Then, they would equip a bow and go into the first-person mode and try and walk up and down the entire things to see if that makes any difference. Then, they might try equipping various different rings like the Fog Ring or something that might change how the player and the world interact with each other. So you can see, then, that these kinds of details do take a certain amount of effort because, unless you've planned them out from the start, if you try to add them in later in development, then they need to go through a lot of testing, and that's a lot of man-hours. It's not necessarily what happened here, but it is something to keep in mind when you play the game or any game, really, that the quality assurance has to go over all of this stuff very carefully, and it's a very tedious and thankless job. In fact, not only is it a thankless job, but they'll often unfairly catch the blame for a lot of issues which do slip into the game. If you run across a bug when playing a game, it's tempting to think, "How did they miss that? How did they not notice this problem when they were making the game?" In a lot of cases, maybe even the majority of cases, the testers will have found that bug and logged it for the development team to fix. The problem is, once it comes back to the development team, they have to decide whether or not trying to fix the bug is worth it. In some cases, an issue which seems very simple on the surface can be tied in very deeply to some very nasty stuff that nobody wants to go messing around with, especially when it's close to the deadline. As well as that, any time that something is fixed, they have to do what's called regression testing, where the tester goes back and checks it to make sure it actually has been fixed and that nothing else has been broken instead. It often is the case that squashing down one bug can introduce new ones or reveal ones which were hiding elsewhere. So the development team can be made aware of bugs, and in an ideal world, they might wanna fix them, but they have the option to mark them as "Will Not Fix," and it's an option which is used surprisingly often. So I suppose that's another thing to keep in mind if you do happen to run into a bug which annoys you. You might be getting angry at the wrong people. The testers might have done their job perfectly. It's a shame that things have to work out that way, but, honestly, it is kind of amazing that games even function at all, and, of course, the main reason that this stuff happens is because of publisher deadlines and stuff like that. Thankfully, we won't be clipping through the ground at any point, but coming up next, we have the infamous Anor Londo archers. First of all, I want to show that the approach to these guys does give you a lot of warning for it. The left archer will often shoot at you as you make your way down to the gargoyles here, so his shot is likely to hit the railing to your left and be blocked. Even if it's not blocked, and you get hit by it, the railing on your right will stop you from being pushed off the ledge. Since their arrows are very, very dangerous, it's nice that it does give you that extra bit of warning, and even when you move a bit further on, there's quite a clear approach to them, so they're unlikely to really catch you off guard. There's a couple of ways you can deal with them. You can see, here, she is going to use a bow with some poison arrows to carefully and slowly pick them off. Without a bow, these require a very different strategy. You have to rush them down. I think this is why they end up being a difficulty spike for a lot of characters, because you're not normally encouraged to play Dark Souls this way. Normally, you're supposed to play very slowly and cautiously, but if you don't have any ranged weapons, your best choice here is, really, just to run directly to them. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. If anything, it's good to subvert the player's expectations sometimes to keep the gameplay interesting. The core combat of the Souls games is quite satisfying, but it's not exactly very deep. So, really, the best way that they have to introduce a bit of variety and force the player to play a little bit differently is to vary the enemy types and put them into interesting situations like this. It can be one of those things that's kind of frustrating on a first playthrough, but there's always a sense of accomplishment with it, and I think it gets better the more you play the game. It really stands out from the other encounters. There's always that sense of risk and danger when you get to this part, and there's always that sense of achievement once it's over. Inside, we have another encounter with Solaire, who is continuing his own journey to become grossly incandescent. It's kind of interesting to me how Solaire is the only other NPC you find who sits down at bonfires the same way you do. You run into a lot of other NPCs in this game, and you can see other players sitting at bonfires as well, but you don't really see NPCs do that. I find it kind of strange because it makes perfect sense for them to want to use the bonfires in the same way you do, and sitting down next to them makes you feel that much closer to them, I think. The main castle itself is an interesting environment. I like that they embrace the difference it brings to the level design by having a bunch of rooms to explore. That said, it's not quite as open as I personally would like, though. Dark Souls, as a whole, is very woven together, interconnected. It doesn't really tell you where to go, so you're allowed to explore it at your own pace. Inside the individual areas, though, that's not really the case. They tend to lead you towards a certain path or restrict certain places until later on. I don't necessarily think that Anor Londo should've been set up this way, especially because the enemy designs don't progress in an interesting fashion. Most of the area is just filled with Black Knights, so even though it ends up being kind of linear, there's not really that much sense of progress anyway. So, I think it would've been better to just open this area up a bit and allow the player to explore it at their own pace since they're gonna be going into every room anyway. The enemy layouts in general here are a bit questionable because they're quite sparse and repetitive. I think the knights work best as a 'once in a while' challenge. When you're fighting them all the time, they become too easy to read and too easy to deal with because you're used to their attacks. Just like the outside, the area ends up feeling too empty, and that might've been what they were going for atmospherically, but it doesn't necessarily make it interesting from a gameplay perspective. As I said, though, there are some nice touches here, and one that I like is the little window here which hints towards the secret area with Havel's gear. This is the kind of illusory wall I like because there's a clear hint towards its existence. You're not just guessing based on its appearance or based on a gut feeling about the game design itself. Inside, you find Havel's gear with an Occult Club, which is very curious. I'm not sure if this has an intentional meaning, but it doesn't seem like the type of weapon that Havel would use. Occult weapons are the kind that the gods, like Gwyn, fear because it's especially effective against them. We know that Havel hated Seath, but, otherwise, I think it sounds like he was pretty loyal to Gwyn and, by extension, the gods. It's possible he was secretly plotting something behind their backs, but that's not the impression I get of him. Since the club is inside a Mimic, I think it's more likely that the Mimic was sent here specifically to sit with Havel's gear in a plot to frame him. If you use a Lloyd's Talisman on a Mimic, all of its Mimic features disappear, so I definitely think it's possible for it to just completely become a passive chest if that's what Seath wants. Seath could have sent the Mimic here and had someone discover the Occult Club, which would give him plenty of reason to lock Havel away. Personally, I think this is much more likely than Havel being a traitor, but it is hard to say whether the team actually had the time or the foresight to come up with a story like this. There are a few unique assets here in the castle like the four poster beds, but, otherwise, it kind of feels like this area had to be cobbled together with whatever they had. A good example is this room here with all the dragon heads on the wall. To get this set up, they just needed to slice the head off the drake model and reuse it several times on the wall. Another way that they would've saved some time was by repurposing the concept art for the paintings on the walls. There are some portraits on the walls which seems to have been created mostly for use in Anor Londo, but there are others which were likely created much earlier. The painting of Gwynevere is a good example, but the most blatant one is in this room with the three Silver Knights. On this painting, you can see a little person in the bottom left-hand corner, which is common trait in concept art. This is designed to show the scale of the player in comparison to the enemy. It's a clever idea and kind of reminiscent of the way Demon's Souls reused concept art at the start. If you have the assets, you might as well use them for something, and Anor Londo is a good example of that despite how empty it feels. It could certainly have used a few more decorations, but they certainly got a lot out of what they had. Just next to this painting, we have Siegmeyer, who is actually the most similar NPC to the player in a lot of ways. He seems happy enough to just roam the world and explore, which is likely what the player is doing for the majority of their play time. I suppose Siegmeyer is the Ostrava of Dark Souls, in that he keeps getting into trouble, and it's up to you to rescue him. Since he's so easygoing and has such a strange set of armor on, he's kind of like a bit of comedic relief. I really appreciate the bleak, dreary sort of feeling that Dark Souls has, but it is nice to have a little break from it from time to time by interacting with an NPC like this. Even if, ultimately, Siegmeyer doesn't actually do all that much, I'd say he's a worthwhile inclusion just for that reason alone. Earlier on, I killed Lautrec, but the Pyromancer here let him live. After a while, he then killed Anastacia and left Firelink. It's only now that you can finally get revenge on him for taking away your most crucial bonfire. The nice thing about this is that it gives you a way to experience being a Blade of the Dark Moon. Eventually, once the servers go down, this will be the only time that players will be able to do this, but being able to do it once is better than never being able to do it at all. You can see, since she's technically acting as one of the Blades, she appears as a blue phantom in Lautrec's world. Even though letting Anastacia die might temporarily be a bad thing, ultimately this way of doing things is more rewarding. It's the only way you can get Anastacia's clothes and Lautrec's armor. You can also choose to restore Anastacia, after which she get her tongue back, although she doesn't want to speak anyway. I'd say this fight with Lautrec is especially effective because he's actually done something mechanically which has made your life hard as the player. It's satisfying to take revenge on him, but if he had only done something story-related, it wouldn't feel quite the same way, no matter how hard they try to make you care about it. It's the way it directly affects you which makes it more powerful. Towards the end of this area, another NPC here is the Giant Blacksmith. There's not that much to say about him because he's not very talkative. He seems to just want to focus on his work, but there is one nice, little detail about him. As with Andre, if you kill this blacksmith, he'll drop his hammer, and the description is equally interesting. It says: "The giant blacksmith forges with this wooden hammer as it would be hazardous to handle lightning weapons with metals." It's a nice, little detail that he uses this wooden hammer to avoid shocking himself. I don't know how realistic it is to craft weapons with a wooden hammer, but, nonetheless, it kind of makes sense for what he's making. It's also nice of them to put a blacksmith here since making your way down to Andre from Anor Londo is a little bit awkward, and the next boss fight is one that you definitely want to upgrade your weapon for. I'm not even sure this next fight needs any introduction because of how infamous it is, but, of course, I'm talking about Ornstein & Smough. Unlike the Bell Gargoyles where one of them came in at half health, this is a proper fight against two bosses at the same time. It is definitely one of the biggest difficulty jumps in the game, but as with a lot of things in Dark Souls, once you've played the game a lot, they're actually not that bad. When you're fighting two large enemies like this, the only way to consistently avoid damage is to wait for both of them to whiff an attack and then punish them. You can end up waiting on that for quite a while, though, so if you want to make it through this fight properly, you need to try and be as patient as possible. It makes for a good highlight, but it certainly wouldn't be a highlight if every battle was like this. It's one of these things that needs to be done in moderation. Even so, this fight isn't perfect as it is, and at the launch of Dark Souls, it was actually in a much worse state. A while after Dark Souls launched, it got a patch to fix and change several things. One of those fixes was to make the lock-on a bit more loose because, in the past, it wouldn't move easily from target to target. A lot of the time with Ornstein & Smough, this feels a lot better now. It's a lot easier these days to swap between the two of them than it used to be. I still think it could've very easily been improved, though. No matter where you are in this fight, moving the lock-on should work easily. As soon as you walk through the fog gate, Ornstein & Smough are the only viable targets in the entire game, so no matter where you are in this fight, moving the right analogue stick at all while locked on should swap the target to the other one. Basically, if you're fighting Ornstein & Smough, and you're locked on, and you move the right analogue stick, then there isn't anything else you want to do than just move to the other target. The problem is they didn't bother putting any custom code in here just for this boss. The camera system works the same way it does in the rest of the game. As I've said, it is much improved from what it was before, but it could still be better. It bothers me in particular since my character is slow and relies on a shield. Now, I could improve my build and exploit the game more, but I just want to play as a knight character, which I think is reasonable considering that that's the main sort of character they used to advertise the game. The problem is, without the lock-on, there's no way for me to move in one direction while simultaneously blocking in another direction. That becomes a problem, then, when you're facing two big enemies, where you might wanna move in one direction but block an attack coming in from the other side. Those issues certainly don't affect all characters, but it just bugs me how they weren't willing to put that extra little bit of work into the camera system for the boss fights. Even just pressing the lock-on button can be frustrating because you never know if the boss is the right distance to be locked on to when, really, it's the only thing you want to look at in this room anyway. As you can see here, unfortunately, the first attempt at Ornstein & Smough didn't go too well, but this is a good opportunity to talk about another bad thing about the boss. The route from the nearby bonfires to Ornstein & Smough are some of the worst in the entire game. If you start inside the castle, you still have a fairly long way to go, and you just have some Silver Knights to get past to get there. Silver Knights aren't particularly fast or dangerous, and since you've been fighting them this entire time, you're probably more likely to just run past them. Alternatively, if you start out at the main bonfire, you have a very long and very empty trek back to the boss room. Most of the time when I die in these games, I tend to fight the enemies on my way back to the boss. I know a lot of people just run past them, but for me, it's more satisfying to make my way to the boss properly again. However, this is one of the instances where I just run through, because it's just not satisfying to fight these giant, boring knight enemies over and over again if you want to take another crack at the boss. It's just not interesting, and it's way too time consuming, especially on a first playthrough when there's a decent chance that Ornstein & Smough will kill you more than anything else in the game. Anyway, if we take another stab at the boss, here, there's still a bit more to say about them. Ornstein in particular has a pretty interesting and rough backstory. He was part of Gwyn's elite knights alongside Artorias, Ciaran, and Gough, and he was actually their leader. As we'll see later, though, he's the only one of them still alive in the present day, so he has to work with Smough these days, who nobody seems to like. Smough will often let out a creepy laugh when he's fighting, and he's implied to be a cannibal. If you kill Ornstein first, then Smough will smash Ornstein's corpse without a second thought to absorb his power. Just to drive home how repulsive Smough is to everyone, if you offer to feed Frampt his soul, he only gives you one Soul back in exchange for it. Ornstein's only job now is to wait with Smough and test people who want the Lordvessel. If you kill Smough first, when Ornstein absorbs his power, he's a lot more respectful about it, so this gives me the impression that Ornstein is someone who's very professional about his work. I think it's kind of a shame we never get to talk to Ornstein ourselves or get to learn anything more about his history. I think he has one of the more quietly depressing stories in the game. He almost certainly used to be this larger-than-life legend leading some of the most elite fighters in the whole world, and now he's just stuck here with Smough. It's kind of sad. After killing these guys, another one of the brilliant, little visual touches here are the lifts placed after them. One lift is relatively small, and the other one is very large, because one of them is for Ornstein and the other one is for Smough. I don't know about you, but I think that's a brilliant, little attention to detail right there, and it's those little touches like that that make Lordran feel more and more like a real place. Once we go and talk to Gwynevere, we'll get the Lordvessel, and the Lordvessel acts as a bottleneck, splitting the game in two. I think I've made it clear at this point that I really love the openness of the Souls games, and I'd love for them to be as open as possible, but I still like the fact that Dark Souls is essentially split in two. The reason being that it's just so long and there's just so much stuff in it that, if everything was available right from the start, it would be almost impossible to balance things correctly. I mean, you can see, even as the game is now, this character is geared up very, very well. The Great Scythe hits very hard, and she has some very nice equipment outside of that too. After Ornstein & Smough, the designers know that they can throw more difficult things at you, so as a result, you're less likely to be as overpowered for the second half of the game. There is a lot of things you can still do to make the game easier for yourself and a lot of great equipment that you can get, but I do think that, overall, this makes the game a lot more tightly balanced than it would be otherwise. In fact, I kind of think that this might be close to the ideal sort of setup for future games of this type: two halves of the game which are kind of distinct from one another and allow the designers a chance to reset the difficulty curve. We've reached the end of this area, but we're not quite done here yet because Gwynevere is an illusion, and we're gonna be killing her to show you the true nature of Anor Londo. The sun itself is also an illusion set up by Dark Sun Gwyndolin to trick people into thinking that Anor Londo is still a city of splendor and all that kind of stuff. In reality, this area is surprisingly dark. In fact, it's one of the darkest areas in the entire game. Personally, I kind of prefer this version to the daylight version of Anor Londo, although that might just be because I'm a night owl. Of course, it's since been eclipsed by Bloodborne, where most of the game takes place at night, and the visuals are sort of built around that, but as it is, it looks pretty nice anyway. It's certainly a pretty drastic change since most players probably aren't going to find this for themselves. Along with the sun, the enemies that were here vanish as well and are replaced by a couple of Blades of the Dark Moon, which are Gwyndolin's agents. The darkness here makes me think of a line in the opening sequence which I reckon most people overlook. Towards the end of the introduction video, the narrator says, "and man sees not light, but only endless nights." If you look at the entire introduction video, almost every line of the narration seems important in some way. A good example is the Furtive Pygmy. When the game initially launched, the Pygmy wasn't really integrated into the story that much. There were certainly theories about what it was, but when the Artorias of the Abyss expansion came out, it became clear that the Pygmy was probably Manus. I get the impression that the Pygmy and Manus was planned from the start, but maybe they just didn't have to accomplish it back then. So I think this goes to show that almost everything in the introduction has a lot more significance than it seems to at the start. Now, you can take the line in a sort of metaphorical way: "man sees not light, but only endless nights." In other words, things are getting bad for mankind. But, I don't really think that's the case. If you read the rest of the introduction, everything else in it can be taken at face value. So basically what I'm proposing, even though it's quite out there, is that, in the world of Dark Souls, the sun has actually gone out. This would explain why killing Gwynevere makes Anor Londo go dark and why the sun there is an illusion, but it also explains a couple of other things as well. For example, if you think of it this way, Solaire's fascination with the sun suddenly makes a lot more sense. If we imagine that the sun in Lordran is a fake set up by Gwyndolin, then Solaire might never have seen the sun before he arrived in Lordran. This might also explain why it looks like nighttime in Darkroot Garden when it's daytime in the areas around it. The illusion just might not extend that far. There's also one thing which I find particularly funny with this theory in mind, and it's a line by Andre. At one point, he says, "You won't make it through the night without employing my services," and then laughs. Now, of course, a lot of NPCs in the Souls games just sort of randomly laugh after every other sentence, but this can kind of be taken as a wry joke about the state of the world because the night is never gonna come to an end. I realize that I'm stretching here with this theory, and I don't think that this was entirely implemented in the game anyway since, when you kill Gwynevere, the sun doesn't go out everywhere. I suppose the biggest hole in the theory is it also doesn't explain why the sun is present in the Undead Asylum. That line in the introduction really, really sticks out for me, though, and I think it's possible that killing Gwynevere was originally supposed to have much more serious ramifications on the rest of the game. As it is, the effects of the sun going out are limited to Anor Londo, and, really, what this does is it just gives us a good excuse to fight Dark Sun Gwyndolin. This fight is one of the more unique fights in the game, if only because of the endless corridor that it's set in. I say it's endless, but it's actually not. If you're a slow character like myself, you can chase Gwyndolin all the way to the end to catch up to him. This isn't an especially challenging fight, especially compared to the other boss fight in the area, but I really like it nonetheless. It's very different from any other boss that appears in Demon's Souls or Dark Souls just because Gwyndolin keeps moving back the entire time. I think I'm in the minority on this, but, personally, I wish that they would use gimmicks like these in bosses more often. I will admit, though, that traditional boss fights probably hold up better under multiple, repeat playthroughs, especially in a short period of time. Ultimately, though, the core of the Souls games is really the overall experience, the feeling that you get when you're playing it. And I think boss fights like this evoke a different and interesting feeling. I think it's just the case that, when I like a game personally, I don't tend to replay all that much. I kind of save it and replay it every once in a while rather than jumping straight back in straight away, so stuff like this tends to come off a little bit better for me. As with many of the other bosses and characters, Gwyndolin also seems to have a pretty rough past. Thanks to his meek appearance, Gwyn decided to raise Gwyndolin as a girl rather than a boy. Basically, it gives the overall impression that, no matter what Gwyndolin did, Gwyn probably didn't think too highly of him. Considering that he's guarding Gwyn's ceremonial tomb, I think it's safe to say that Gwyndolin probably still wanted the approval and the respect of his father, but I'm not sure that he ever got that from him. When you make it all the way to the back, there are fresh flowers on top of the tomb, so it seems likely that Gwyndolin brings flowers to the tomb every once in a while. There's also a chair here, so I get the impression that this is where Gwyndolin spends the majority of his time. This is an optional boss, though, and he's kind of tucked away, so you might not even find him, and even if you do, there's not that much incentive to kill him. You can leave Gwyndolin alive and even join his covenant to invade people elsewhere in the world who have sinned. Overall, he seems like one of the more honorable characters in the game, but that doesn't necessarily mean his views align with that of the player character. Gwyndolin definitely wants to preserve the Age of Fire, the honor of the gods, and the memory of his father, but that isn't necessarily what the player wants as well. Now that we have the Lordvessel, it's time to pay another visit to Frampt. The more I play this game, the more I think Frampt might be my favorite NPC of them all. I like the way his voice walks a line between being very serious but also sort of absurd at the same time. Seeing such an important character fall asleep in the middle of Firelink Shrine is almost insulting, and listening to him get excited after bringing back the Lordvessel is something I find funnier every time I hear it. He's gonna bring me down to Firelink Altar so I can unlock the remaining areas. Not much to say about this, but it's a necessary step before we can move on. Thankfully, they made this a little entertaining with Frampt's brilliantly simple character design. Having him hang upside down somehow makes him more menacing, but thanks to his whiskers, he's also even more comedic than before. He's just a head without a body or any clothes, but everything about him is well-considered nonetheless. Quality doesn't necessarily come from complexity. There's five major routes available now, and the first one that we'll be visiting is the Duke's Archives. The first thing I want to point out here is that the entrance is another one of those obvious load times. You might notice that this corridor isn't in a totally straight line and has a couple of bends in it. That's handy because it means Anor Londo is completely lost from view, which frees up the memory for the Duke's Archives instead. The boars here are tougher than the one earlier on since they don't have a weak point, but once you kill these two, that's the end of them. You'll see, when I kill this first one, the Boar Helm will randomly drop for me here. I have a personal vendetta against random numbers in game design. I think they're often used as a crutch where a more interesting mechanic could be used instead, but I suppose that's a rant for another day. Anyway, I'm pointing it out here because Dark Souls actually has a rather subtle compromise with regards to item drops. Drops are randomly decided for most of the game, but killing the last of any non-respawning enemy type will always grant its unique drop. In other words, if the Boar Helm hadn't just dropped for me, then killing the last of these boars would guarantee that the helm would drop. It's the same with the Skull Lantern from the Necromancers and the Symbol of Avarice from the Mimics. It's a nice way of mitigating the worst aspects of random drops. As long as you kill them all, you're guaranteed to eventually get the item if you want it. If you want the Boar Helm really badly, then the earliest point you're guaranteed to get it is here. That said, it is much better than not being guaranteed the item at all. This area sort of continues the visual theme from Anor Londo but goes even further. It's by far the most ornate place in the game. It makes for a nice change of pace from the ruins that make up most of the other locations. I find that a lot of games are set in ruined environments, probably because it makes things easier from a design standpoint. It helps to explain a lack of friendly characters, and rubble makes for an easy way of railroading the player without it feeling too forced. It basically means, if there's a door that they don't want the player to go through, they can just drop some stones in front of it, or if there's a floor they don't want the player to cross, they can just cave it in. You get the idea. It's nice that the Duke's Archives doesn't rely on this, but it does railroad players a little bit in other ways with some needlessly convoluted staircases showing up later on. This is where we get some palette-swapped enemies, which is just one of those unfortunate realities of games development you have to accept. It's much easier to just change the color of the texture on an enemy than it is to build one from scratch, so if you're stuck for a new enemy, it's a very tempting option. Thankfully, they went a little bit further than usual here by sticking some outcrops on the enemy's back to give them a more crystalline appearance. This goes some way towards explaining why these hollows hit so much harder than the ones in the Undead Burg. Of course, ideally, they would have some brand-new enemies here, but there's otherwise such a huge amount of enemy variety that you can't really fault them for it. It especially makes some sense to have some basic undead-types here because they wanted to include the Channelers here as well. If they had bigger or stronger enemies alongside the Channelers, then their attacks would probably be a one-hit kill if they were enchanted. I think, generally, they wanted to balance the experience so that players who put a decent amount of points into vitality aren't at risk of being killed in one shot, as long as they're on full health, even if they're wearing relatively weak armor. Dying to a single attack can be pretty frustrating, so I think they wanted to avoid that, which makes a lot of sense. Before your first encounter with Seath, it's a good idea to equip a Ring of Sacrifice since this is guaranteed to kill you. I can see why this would annoy some people, but I actually don't really mind it myself. It's one of those things that sets the Duke's Archives apart from other areas, and if you play the next area perfectly, you can get your Souls back anyway. If you're really panicked, you can even actually walk back out of the fog door here as well. The smart thing about this setup is, after a little while, Seath will start spamming an attack with no cooldown, which eventually kills the player regardless of their health. The idea here was to make players feel powerless about their fight with Seath, but if Seath couldn't instantly kill the player, then that would be pretty bad design choice. This stops players from wasting all of their resources fruitlessly trying to kill him. You can imagine someone might use up all of their Humanity healing themselves if they got desperate enough, so the idea is to stop that from happening. Essentially, this ends up with the player being imprisoned, but of course, you can still fight your way back out. I think it's great that they use this as an excuse to keep the player stuck in one area even though they can warp at this point. It manages to preserve some of that dread you get in other areas before the Lordvessel where you can feel trapped in your current location. Since you respawn at the bonfire, the guards don't have time to disarm you, and, thankfully, one of them is just resting here with the key. In this area, we have some music being played on something that resembles a phonograph. It seem to be what makes the Pisacas aggressive, but it's easy to imagine it also being used for psychological torture or manipulation or something along those lines. There's another contraption in the center of this tower, but it's completely broken down. It took me a while to work out what this was for, but I'm pretty sure this was used as a way of rotating the staircase. There's a small gap between the steps and the wall, which is definitely intentional. There's even a little grating placed under each door so that people don't fall down. The way the books are laid out on the walls would make many of them very difficult to get to. Some of them are even placed directly behind the stairs themselves. If the staircase could move, then this explains both of those things. It's actually quite clever because, even though this entire room is filled with volumes, you could rotate the staircase so that it lines up with any particular book. I have a hunch that this was initially intended to be a little gameplay element that the player could use to open up different areas, but, ultimately, it was dropped. Rather than remove it completely, the team just left a broken version of the device down the bottom. I don't really have any proof to back any of this up, but I'm almost certain of it anyway because it all makes perfect sense. The Pisacas here are what become of the maidens that Seath has kidnapped. It's not entirely clear whether there was something specific he wanted to do to them all, or they were just used for a different range of experiments. It is interesting that they've all ended up as the same type of creature, but that might just be what he does when he's finished with them. Whatever the case, it's a pretty horrifying fate, even more so since a couple of them seem to be aware of what's happened to them. At the end of this area, two of them will remain passive and even try to avoid you. If you listen carefully, you can also hear them crying. This is the kind of little thing which sets the atmosphere in Dark Souls apart from Demon's Souls and Bloodborne. The Pisacas are the Dark Souls equivalent of the Mind Flayers and Brainsuckers, but they're a lot less overtly disturbing than either of those. Instead, they have a more tragic backstory behind them, which makes it more sad than horrifying. This is also where you can rescue Logan again. The serpent men probably recognized him as a special guest, considering the cell he's in. Despite the danger, Logan doesn't leave the Duke's Archives once he's rescued. There's too much magic here for him to pass up the opportunity. There's a nice contrast here between Logan and the Fire Keeper corpse in his cell. The description for the Archive Giant Cell Key says: "The giant cell once imprisoned countless maidens but is now empty save for a few key persons. They struggle to uphold their sanity, as the horde of "mistakes" writhe at a fearfully close proximity." The corpse here is placed all the way at the back of this massive cell because the Fire Keeper was afraid of the Pisacas and wanted to stay as far away from them as possible. Logan, on the other hand, is just sitting there right in front of them. He probably finds them more fascinating than repulsive. He could have just called to you from the back of the room like Griggs or Laurentius, but he doesn't, so this positioning seems like a deliberate choice and says a lot about his personality. Whereas most people would condemn Seath's actions, Logan admires him for his research. It's also worth noting that you don't get a special cell, so you're not considered as important a guest as Logan. Your character in Dark Souls is very rarely given any sort of special significance. Personally, I think it's kind of cheap that they put the key to get out of here so close to Logan. This means, if you want to rescue Logan and get the Fire Keeper Soul, there is no way to avoid going all the way down to the bottom of this room, then all the way back out, then all the way back down again. To be fair, though, this is probably the only really poor example of back-tracking in this game. Back-tracking done well is a good way for developers to maximize the amount of value they get out of their work, and I would say that Dark Souls is a good example of this overall. Usually, if you need to retread your steps, it's because you want to see a blacksmith or talk to an NPC or something reasonable like that. Most of the time, it's something that you could entirely avoid if you wanted to or if you knew where you should be going. Of course, on a first playthrough, you won't know where you're going, and you will end up back-tracking at least somewhat, but it rarely feels like it's the game's fault. This might be the key to doing back-tracking well: making the player feel like it's their fault, even if that isn't always the case. Earlier on, when the music came on, the snake men fled to the top of the room, and if you look at this door when you're leaving, you can actually see scratch marks on it, which is a really nice touch. After this, we're back in the Archives proper, and the next step is to open up a passage behind the bookcase. There's a couple of Channelers here, and if you follow the direction they teleport, it actually leads you on the path you need to go. The first one here leads you to the first staircase and then teleports to the opposite side to encourage you to spin the stairs around. Once you get behind the bookcases, it's the last area that you can speak to Logan. After you buy all of the magic from him here, he'll go hollow. I find it a bit strange that he goes hollow here since his goal has been to get to the Archives. The other NPCs give the impression that going hollow is a sign of giving up on life, but Logan has enough books here to keep him occupied for many years. His dialogue implies that he starts losing track of time once he gets access to all these books, but I like to imagine that he has some trouble with the stuff that he's found. It could be a case that Seath's magic is too advanced for him, or maybe it's written in a form that he can't understand. Whatever it is that causes him to go hollow, his hollowing is by far the strangest in the game. He ends up in the room where you initially met Seath, and he's stripped off all of his clothes. His obsession with Seath seems to have caught up with him. At one point, Miyazaki said that Logan strips off his clothes to become more like a dragon. So, yeah, not a particularly dignified end for one of the most famous sorcerers in the world, but some might say he deserves it. Outside here, the area is littered with golems. Sieglinde is imprisoned here inside one of the golems, and, actually, you can see her inside the big crystal on its shoulder before you kill it. The same is true for the golem that imprisons Dusk. You have to look quite carefully to see it, but you can actually see their character models trapped inside, and that's the place where they spawn from once the enemy is killed. It was probably a bit of a hassle to get that model in there, so I think it's nice that they went to the effort to do that. Just beyond these enemies is the Crystal Cave. Right at the start of this section, we have a developer message which ensures that players will find the invisible walkways. You often find player messages here anyway, but it's important that they put a developer message here for people who are playing offline. The invisible pathways are an interesting hazard. Like most things in Dark Souls, they have a 'tell' which makes them fair: the little falling flakes. A lot of the time when something is supposed to be invisible in a game, they tend to just make it faint and difficult to see properly or put a distortion effect around it. So, I like that they actually follow through on this and made the platforms completely transparent. What I don't like about this area are actually the visible walkways instead of the invisible ones. If you happen to stand in the wrong location on these, you can end up just sliding right off the slanted areas with very little warning or recourse. I've probably made it pretty clear by now that I think the level design in this game is really commendable, but there are a few slopes which could've been done better. Crystal Cave and the Great Hollow are the best examples, but there are a few others scattered around the game. Basically, it can be hard to tell just by looking whether or not your character can actually walk up certain ramps. Ideally, the distinction will be more clear. One way they could've fixed this is by being more strict about the slopes that are present. For example, if the maximum slope your character can walk up is 50 degrees, then any slope greater than 50 degrees should've been rounded up to at least 70 degrees. That way, there is a very noticeable difference between slopes you can navigate and those you can't. In practice, I'm sure that kind of rule is very hard to enforce, especially if you want the world to look natural, but at the very least, the way the character behaves on a steep slope could've been improved a little. There's really no excuse for your character to just slide off with no warning. Off to the side in this area, there's a ledge with a Blue Titanite Slab, but it's quite tedious to get to. Apart from this section, all of the other invisible pathways are in a straight line, so, usually, once you find where it is, you can walk directly to the next area. This one, however, has a couple of bends, which means you really need to rely on the Prism Stones to get you across if you haven't memorized it already. This is about the best excuse you're ever gonna get to use the Prism Stones, and you can actually find 20 of them just outside the cave itself, but even so, actually using them is quite time-consuming. The Souls games are known for rewarding patience, and there is a lot to be said about that, but I think this is taking it to an unreasonable level. At the end of this area, we come across the clam enemies, but the sheer number of them placed here is a bit stupid. It gives me the impression that the team probably didn't get a chance to flesh out Crystal Cave as much as they wanted to and ended up dumping a bunch of enemies here at the end to stretch out the time of it. I think they're a pretty tough enemy with a good move set and an interesting design, so I like them all individually, but I really dislike the way they're all stacked here at the end. It probably would've improved the area if they had just been scattered around Crystal Cave, as, otherwise, the place is quite sparse on enemies. There are some Moonlight Butterflies, but they remain passive unless you attack them first, so a couple of clams placed around the place would've kept things interesting. Seath is the first of the final bosses that I'll be fighting, but he's actually one of the easiest bosses in the game. If you just follow one of his front tendrils as he moves around, he has a pretty difficult time hitting you, so it's just a case of chipping him down over the course of a minute or two. There is, also, the immortality crystal that you have to break, but they place you right in front of it at the start of the fight, so, to be honest, it might as well not even be there. Even if you don't break it straight away, it's pretty easy to just run back and smash it after you realize your mistake. Seath's tail is another one that can be cut to grant a special weapon. If you're looking to do this, you can try using sound magic to mask yourself. It doesn't work quite as well as it probably should considering he's blind, but it does seem to make him turn a little bit more slowly. Seath himself is the odd one out of the Lords in the introduction video. He's never really fit in with any group, and that's probably why he doesn't seem to have any loyalty to the gods. In fact, he's probably been conspiring against them for a very long time. This is reflected by the fact that Seath's minions are often found outside the Duke's Archives and Crystal Cave. The Moonlight Butterfly, the golems, the Channelers, the Mimics, and the snake men are all his creations or, at the very least, his minions. With his lack of loyalty, the kidnapped maidens, and all the experiments, Seath has probably done the most nasty stuff in the game. Even so, one of the great things about this game is that it's never really black and white. Seath has clearly done a lot of horrible stuff, but he hasn't done it for no reason. To him, his motivation is experimentation. He's also blind and crippled, and as the only one of his kind, he probably felt like he could never trust anybody. This doesn't excuse his actions, of course, but it does make him a surprisingly interesting villain, especially considering we don't hear any dialogue from him himself. Speaking of 'gray areas,' the situation in the Demon Ruins is one of the most ambiguous of all. The Fair Lady looks like an abomination, but, apparently, it's because she was trying to heal the people of Blighttown. In the past, she sucked some poison out of Eingyi, her servant, which is why he's so loyal to her. The eggs are very disconcerting, though, particularly the ones which grow from the egg-bearers, which are larger than their entire bodies. The way they're prostrated on the ground looks very uncomfortable, and there's something very unsettling about it, I think. Despite how horrifying this all is, the description on the Fair Lady's Fire Keeper Soul paints it in a slightly different light. It says: "To her, the countless eggs which appeared were cradles for each tiny humanity." It's possible or even likely that she's bringing more demons into the world, but she doesn't necessarily seem like a bad person herself. It think it's commendable how they're able to craft such morally ambiguous situations like this with little to no dialogue when other games struggle to do the same thing using so many more resources. If you like, you can ease her suffering by giving her more Humanity to level up her covenant. Each time her covenant levels up, her limbs will move around a little more energetically to show that she's getting better. The book you can buy from Eingyi is a list of people who have donated the most Humanity to her. Unfortunately, these sorts of things are always rendered useless by cheaters because, as we all know, using exploits to get yourself to the top of a meaningless leaderboard is the definition of fun. The egg-bearers here can infect you with their own eggs, which makes you more susceptible to fire and halves the amount of Souls you receive. Basically, you're sharing half of your Souls with the creature in the egg. If it absorbs a lot of Souls, it grows, and, eventually, it changes your kick attack to a biting attack instead. Sadly, this doesn't infect other players if you do it online, which I think is a bit strange, especially since it would be so hard to land. I suppose it's possible they wanted to avoid some sort of situation where players who are always dueling would be infected by eggs all the time. There's a lot of bosses to get through in this area, and first up, it's Ceaseless Discharge. As far as we know, the Witches of Izalith were all women except for Ceaseless Discharge. The description on the Orange Charred Ring, which we'll find later, gives us his backstory. It says: "Since his sores were inflamed with lava from birth, his witch sisters gave him this special ring." From the sounds of it, he's been in pain since the moment he was born, so they made this ring to try and counteract that. At some point, he dropped the ring, possibly when he was transformed into a demon, so his pain now must be quite severe. He's watching over the clothes of Quelana, possibly because he misses her, but she's actually still alive and can be found in Blighttown if you have a highly-ascended Pyromancy Flame. Some of her dialogue lets us know that the mishap which caused the demons to be created happened at least a thousand years ago. In other words, Ceaseless Discharge has probably been like this for a thousand years or more. In all of Dark Souls, he may have suffered more than anyone else, which is really saying something. The Demon Ruins onward unfortunately houses some of the worst bosses on offer, and Ceaseless Discharge is no exception. He's just too large to make for a satisfying fight since you're just awkwardly trying to dodge his massive limbs and wail away on them. Instead of doing any of that, I'll be using a little trick to kill him instantly. If you lure him back to the fog door, he'll jump towards the ledge you're on, and you can knock him off it to finish the fight straight away. This, in turn, lowers the lava, so we can proceed to the next section. It's here that we have the return of the Taurus and Capra Demons from the start as regular enemies. Out in the open like this, the Capra Demons aren't so bad. You just have to be careful to fight them one at a time. On this approach, here, down to the series of Capras, you can see the Centipede Demon hanging on the wall. You can actually see several bosses before you go into their arenas. The Moonlight Butterfly and the Iron Golem are two other examples. This one is especially interesting, though, because it's kind of camouflaged against the wall. You can get right up to it, and it isn't even the next boss that you fight anyway. I didn't notice it on my first playthrough, and I find little things like this make repeat playthroughs that much more rewarding. The centipedes in the walls here are very similar in shape to the larvae inside the eggs, so I think that's probably what they grow into. I suppose it is possible they could mature into something else entirely, though. These guys have some corrosive attacks which degrades your equipment. I'm kind of surprised we don't see corrosive stuff more often in these games. The durability mechanic takes so long for it to take effect that it's really just a very long-term punishment for forgetting to keep your equipment in shape. It's just one of those things that's used to pull you into the game world a little bit more. It's not really meant to be a particularly satisfying gameplay mechanic in and of itself. That said, I do think a few more corrosive enemies in the game could've incentivized players to have a few more weapons on hand or otherwise just made the durability system that little bit more interesting. I suppose if there's any game where they're justified in shying away from corrosive attacks, it would be Dark souls, though, because of the interconnected world and the lack of warping. It would be pretty harsh if it was easy for the player to run out of useful equipment before they can get themselves out of the area. If you want to get the Chaos Ember placed here, your have to make your way past a lot these worm things. It can be pretty tedious to kill them all, and it's just an optional area, so normally I just ignore them since I don't need the item. However, I am dedicated to the task at hand, so this time I suffered through just to grab it. I don't actually have anything to say about it. I just wanted to let you all know how much I suffer on your behalf. The next area is where you can open a shortcut to Lost Izalith if you're a Chaos Servant. Along the walls, there are little, Humanity-shaped slots here with flames carved around them. This just goes to show that fire and humanity have always been linked together. I'm only speculating here, but I find these holes to be quite ominous. I mean, they could've easily depicted the same thing without having to actually carve a hole in the wall. So, I wouldn't be surprised if people have actually been put inside these and burned for whatever reason. Perhaps, it was part of whatever ritual the Witch of Izalith tried to perform when she wanted to copy the First Flame. Chaos Pyromancy scales with Humanity, so there's some basis for this even in the gameplay mechanics. Next up, we have the Demon Firesage. This is the third time we've fought this boss, so I'm not even gonna pretend I have anything interesting to say about it. It's a repeat. It's pretty boring, and we're just gonna acknowledge that and move on. We have a lot of bad bosses to get through, here. Right after this boss, there's an elevator which leads back up to the Fair Lady. They cheat a little bit with this elevator since it's down here even though it was up earlier on. They could've used a similar system to the magic lifts in the Royal Wood with the two activation buttons instead. I think the reason they did it this way is because they wanted to avoid having a hole in the floor after the Quelaag fight. First of all, since it would be a potential hazard right after ringing the second Bell, but also because it ruins the surprise that there's an area below here. I know the Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith are some of the weaker areas, but I still think it's impressive that there's so many places to visit and that you keep just going further and further down past the point where you think you should be able to go. The later areas of the game tend to be less interconnected than the earlier ones, but Izalith actually has a couple of shortcuts, so at least that's something going for it. The Centipede Demon can be skipped if you have the shortcut open, but unfortunately, I don't. This one is immune to fire damage, and that's probably why it's placed here. Pyromancers are the ones with the most to gain by being a Chaos Servant, so they're the most likely people to have the shortcut open. This gives them an easy way to circumvent a boss they might otherwise struggle with quite a lot. Personally, this is one of my least favorite bosses. It has very random and 'flaily' attack animations which I don't think make for a particularly satisfying fight. I also think it has some of the worst hitboxes on offer, so that certainly doesn't help matters either. Killing this boss grants the Orange Charred Ring I mentioned a few minutes ago, which allows you to walk across lava fields. It's easy to see how the interconnected worlds of Dark Souls might take its inspiration from the likes of Metroid. In fact, there's even a powerup in Super Metroid which allows you to cross through hot rooms, very much like the Orange Charred Ring. The traversal in the Souls games isn't as complex, though. You don't really jump around much or anything like that. You basically just walk or run from one location to another. That's why it mostly has to rely on gates and lifts to accomplish what other games might do with powerups instead. This gives the Souls games a very grounded tone which I really enjoy, but I think this Orange Charred Ring was a great opportunity to branch out into different forms of exploration. They don't really take advantage of it, though. There's an area just before this where you can use the ring to collect another Ember, but that's about it. They probably wanted to avoid too much backtracking, but I think it could've been rewarding to have a couple of other small areas with some lava that the player could return to and use the ring to find something new. They wouldn't have to sacrifice the world design to accomplish this or anything. They just needed a small amount of lava to block the player from getting into another area. One nice, little bit of trivia about this ring is, if you kick something while you have it equipped, it burns the enemy. I only found this out recently, myself, when I accidentally kicked a skeleton, and it makes me wonder how many other little things there are like that that I might not have found yet. It's not a particularly useful effect, but I love little things like that nonetheless. Anyway, we're through most of the boring bosses, but we still need to do Izalith itself. Watching Lost Izalith come into view was one of the moments that really made me fall in love with this game. Ultimately, though, this area falls into the trap of many open-world-style games, where it just has a relatively flat and boring plane you can walk around and pick up items. The enemy types and the lava certainly don't help, but I think it's the flatness of this place which sticks out to me the most. In a way, though, it's almost good to have this here, at least just for comparison's sake, because it does go to show how on-point the level design in Dark Souls normally is. It may not make for satisfying gameplay, but even as one of the most bland sections to play through, it's still has that handcrafted feel, which I find tends to be missing from a lot of large RPGs. A large part of this is the architecture, which is very strikingly different from the other areas. Much of Dark Souls has a sort of Medieval Europe influence to it, but this seems to be more like an ancient, Asian temple. It gives you the immediate impression that this is a very different culture from the one above. You also need a special ring to talk to the Fair Lady, so it seems likely that they had their own language in Izalith as well. Out on this lava field, there's a way up to the second level of one of the structures here. You only get a small amount of Souls for it, but if you're a ranged character, you can pull the Bounding Demons together. They're some of the only enemies in the game that can damage each other, which is kind of a concession to how hard they are to kill normally. Before the first major patch, these ones also respawned, which made it much worse than it is now. That said, even with some improvements here, it's still not really worth killing them all, so I'm not even going to bother. Since this lava field is so wide, the player might not realize that there's a way upwards from here, because there's a lot of surface area to explore. That's why, across from this secret bonfire, there's some debris which draws your attention. In all likelihood, you'll probably think that there's an item hidden inside, so you head over that way and end up finding the way that you're supposed to go. It's a nice way of leading the player in the right direction by just trusting the fact that the player is going to want to explore things that stick out a little bit in the environment. Inside the first are of Izalith proper, there's not that much to talk about. The enemies here are just some slow-moving, demonic statues that look quite similar to the Asylum Demons. Since they float, they don't make any noise until they attack, so they can sneak up on you, but apart from that, they're not very interesting. There's also a couple of enemy NPCs here as well: a Daughter of Chaos, and the final invasion by Kirk. Quelana seems to think that she's the only one who made it out of the catastrophe completely unscathed. If that's true, then the Daughter of Chaos here is probably demonic in some way under her robes. It fits because she's basically protecting the Bed of Chaos, and she use Chaos Pyromancy, so I think there's a good chance she's been transformed in some way, too. We just don't get to see it. It's kind of disturbing to think about what she might look like. She drops the Izalith Catalyst, which is massive, and you can see them using it in the intro video. This mentions that fire wasn't always a separate school of magic. This is, of course, an important piece of history. The disaster that happened here is responsible for creating Pyromancy. But, I wonder if this is also meant as a subtle nod towards Demon's Souls, since the mechanics behind fire magic is a bit different this time. After killing Kirk, his corpse can be found in the Fair Lady's chamber, which is another example of Dark Souls doing gray areas well. He's been invading you since the Depths, and his thorny armor looks quite evil, but in reality, he was just attempting to get Humanity for her. This might even be the same covenant the player is in, so I'm sure, for some people, there's some very mixed feelings when they discover Kirk's corpse. The other enemies here are much more interesting visually, but also still pretty easy to kill. I remember being hung up on how disgusting these things look, but after playing Bloodborne, they look downright cartoony in comparison. These guys highlight a fairly obscure mechanic which seems to be new in Dark Souls. Basically, during grab attacks, if you hammer the buttons, you can mitigate some of the damage that would normally be done to you. In most cases, it ends up looking a bit strange, though, since the full grab animation continues to play out anyway. So, it can look like your character should be taking a lot of damage when they aren't, particularly if you do this with the Mimic grab. With these Chaos Eaters, it's a bit different. There's actually a special animation of your character climbing out from inside them if you do it. Mechanically, it's not very special. You're just rewarded for pressing buttons as fast as you can, but I think there's something to be said for the way it makes you feel that little bit closer to your character. This area is where we get to see the downfall of Solaire. I suppose, since he's so likable and seems more capable than most NPCs, that I expected a bigger, better ending for him, but that was likely the entire point of this moment. His death is just as anticlimactic and pointless as the others. Despite what it might seem like from this video, I don't normally read item descriptions myself, but I took a moment to inspect Solaire's armor after killing him, which made it a double gut-punch. For whatever reason, reading that Solaire's armor had no special properties was probably the most effecting moment I had on my first playthrough. In a time when so many games rely on ham-fisted dialogue, cutscenes, and barely interactive set pieces, the way these games execute their stories is really praiseworthy. That said, as much as I enjoyed it at the time, on further reflection, it didn't really make all that much sense, which cheapens it a little bit. The description on Solaire's shield, for example, says: "Decorated with a holy symbol, but Solaire illustrated it himself, and it has no divine powers of its own." The problem here is that the player character would have no way of knowing that Solaire drew the emblem himself. The only person that would know that is Solaire. This is something that Demon's Souls set up better because it was implied at the start that the player character was an adventurer of some sort. The character was willingly setting out into Boletaria despite the danger and may have even come from there in the first place. I think that goes a long way towards explaining why they might have some familiarity with the stuff they come across. In Dark souls, despite all their similarities, the situation for the character is very different. Your character just sort of arrives in Lordran through happenstance, and there's no reason to think that they would know much about the area. You can understand how they might know about Big Hat Logan and the Ancient Lords, but Solaire is comparatively a nobody. The whole reason his story connects with people is because he's this weird, likable character who's just trying to help people and make his way through the world. This just isn't the kind of information that the player character would have access to, and I think, as the player, I probably shouldn't have access to that information either. This whole area has had some pretty poor bosses, so what better way to close it out than the worst boss of them all. Bed of Chaos gets a point from me for at least trying something different, bringing its total score to one point. Sometimes in games development, an idea just doesn't work out, but nonetheless it survives into the final product anyway. In this case, no boss at all probably would've been better than what we got. I don't normally advocate any sort of cheating, but if you like, you can quit out the game after each phase of this boss to make it easier. Once you load back up, you'll be teleported back to the start of this area, but any damage you've done to the boss will remain. You might not make the connection, but this is almost certainly the Witch of Izalith from the openning introduction. She attempted to duplicate the First Flame, and it didn't go so well. You might technically say she didn't fail, though, as she did create new forms of life. They just happened to be demons. It's not entirely clear whether she's the malevolent spirit that comes out of the tree branches or the bug that you have to kill afterwards. Since she was trying to duplicate the First Flame, she might even be both of them. Alternatively, she might be neither of them. This is Dark Souls, after all. You can't really say that much for sure. Whatever the case, there are many references, both directly and indirect, to the Bed of Chaos in item descriptions and dialogue. Ultimately, that may be the reason why such a bad boss managed to slip into the final release. It was probably too tied into the lore to be removed at the last minute. The most interesting thing, to me, about this is the way the bug at the end quite strongly resembles the Sunlight Maggots. The name of the Sunlight Maggots also implies that they have some way to grow, so this could be what they grow into. We see so many Sunlight Maggots and only one which is a potentially mature version of them. It could be a very literal way of showing what happened to the 'Daughters' of Chaos: the fact that they are the children and she is the mother. But I suppose there's probably a million other ways you can interpret this as well. Are you still awake? I wouldn't blame you if you've drifted off. I know not many people are fond of Lost Izalith, and I do have a very soothing voice, but you should know that we're finished with it now. Thankfully, we're going to be moving on now to the much more interesting Artorias of the Abyss expansion stuff. There's several requirements to getting into this, and first of all, you have to rescue Dusk. Of course, Dusk herself has always been there, and on my first playthrough, I rescued her as usual. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, when I went to summon her one time, I hadn't killed all the golems in the area. I suppose I didn't realize how easily they become hostile. This was the end result. I remember being pretty annoyed at the time, but I don't use magic, and Dusk wasn't quite as important back then, so I suppose in retrospect it wasn't a big deal. It's just a little embarrassing watching one of your NPCs be punched out of existence against your own will. With her rescued and a pendant from the Duke's Archives, we can access the new area. I've talked a little in the past about how the challenge of these games can be raised and lowered at will. Since I enjoy the bosses of Oolacile, I've decided to challenge myself a bit more than usual and show these boss fights at their best. I'm just going to be using my broadsword against them. No Estus, and no shield. Well, I will have the shield equipped, but if anything, it's a handicap since I won't actually be using it. The Sanctuary Guardian is up first, and it's not an easily-classified enemy. It's not flora, not a humanoid, not a dragon, and not a demon. I get the impression from its design and its name it was most likely made by the residents of Oolacile using magic. Visually, it's based on the mythical manticore, but it's not entirely clear where it fits into the world of Dark Souls. That said, it is a perfect fit for this game because it looks very noble despite obviously being very scary as well, which is exactly the kind of enemy types that Dark Souls needs. It's a shame this boss kind of gets overshadowed by the other ones here, because it's a really fantastic fight which manages to be very challenging without relying on any tired, old moves. In particular, the move where it flies through the air and shoots electricity is very unique. Even the projectiles themselves are quite novel in the way they affect the water underneath them, meaning the player still needs to keep moving even after they've landed. This is also probably one of the best uses of tail attacks. It doesn't have many unique tail moves, and they're unlikely to kill the player themselves, but they do have a toxin element which strongly discourages you from staying behind it for too long. It's not easy to get behind it in the first place, but even if you can, you have to be very careful. The step up in difficulty here is noticeable even without the handicaps that I just placed on myself. As with every boss, the ones in the expansion all have movesets with strengths and weaknesses, but the AI that controls them seems to be holding back less than before. With the other bosses, you can feel that they're hesitating to kill you or not even really paying attention to what you're doing. All of the bosses here are that much more aggressive and more intelligent, which, of course, makes for a more intense fight. I like the attack animations on this boss as well, particularly the two and four-hit combo that it has. The different-length combos are quite similar, but there is a way you can tell them apart. If the first two attacks are both swipes or both headbutts, then he'll stop after two hits. Conversely, if the first two attacks are a swipe and a headbutt, then he'll continue to do the entire four-hit combo. If you react fast enough, you can tell the two combos apart and either stay safe or punish this boss accordingly. The attack animations are equally great on the other bosses here: very aggressive movesets which hit hard but have some clear opportunities for the player to strike back. That said, there is a case to be made that these bosses don't necessarily represent the best parts of these games. As I've said before, I strongly think that the true strength of these games is an experience which is greater than the sum of its parts. When it comes to the combat and the boss fights, by action RPG standards, the mechanics are very enjoyable, but they lack depth. The weapons are the perfect example of what I'm talking about. Each weapon by itself only has a few moves, but finding them, improving them, and customizing them adds a good bit to the experience. What it means is, when you're playing moment to moment, there isn't that much depth to your moveset, but you have many other choices outside of that which help to pull you into the experience. There are other games which are totally focused on combat, which, naturally, will have more interesting moment-to-moment gameplay mechanics and better bosses than these games. Learning and exploiting attack patterns can be very satisfying, but it definitely takes me out of the experience, especially since it's not uncommon to die a couple of times while learning all of the boss's moves. That's why my favorite bosses in these games tend to be the ones which focus on the experience as much or more than the actual fight itself. I'm talking about the likes of Maiden Astraea, Storm King, Old Monk, Sif, Artorias, and Gwyn. Those fights all caught me off guard in some way, making me simultaneously think about other things as I tried to survive. It's the kind of thing these games excel at compared to others, and I would like to see them play to that strength more often. Basically, I think the best bosses for these games are the ones that linger in your memory long after you've finished. As much as I really like fighting against this boss, it's not something that I remember afterwards because there's no story behind it. It's just a beast that you end up fighting. There are lots of other games where I can go and fight monsters like this, but it's only these games which can pull me in in a way those games can't when it comes to the experience. After this boss, we have the Sanctuary itself, which is where we meet Elizabeth. There's little to no concrete information about her, but since she seems so concerned for Dusk, I like to imagine she was created as some kind of caregiver. Dusk is a princess after all, so it wouldn't be strange to think that she was raised by someone other than her mother. Although, it is a little bit strange to think she was raised by something with no arms. It's clever that Elizabeth sells the same things Dusk sells, since Dusk's Soap Sign is temporarily out of service. The Cast Light spell is particularly useful. If someone got stuck in this area and wanted to try Tomb of the Giants, then they might need to have access to this spell, so it's good that they can still buy this from Elizabeth. In the Royal Wood, we have my favorite example of environmental story telling in Dark Souls. It's really smooth how they reveal the backstory for the plant creatures just by their visual design. Nobody ever comments on it or tells you what they do. You just see it and implicitly understand that they were brought to life as gardeners by the residents of Oolacile. This is where the time-travel element becomes abundantly clear. Now, it is my humble opinion that this game actually has better time travel than many other more story-heavy games. The events of Dark Souls are a closed time loop. When you travel between the past and the future, nothing changes in the future, as the events of the past have already occurred. This is called the self-consistency conjecture, a theory which states that events in the past and future will always be consistent with each other even if there is such a thing as time travel. In other words, if you go back in time to try to cause a time paradox, then something will prevent you from doing it, because those events have already been determined. Unless you want to get deep into multiverse theory, then this seems like the most satisfying way to handle time travel from a narrative perspective. It's often the case that time-travel stories rewrite history, causing previously established events to become irrelevant. In most cases, I just don't think that overwriting things that have already happened makes for satisfying story telling. They do cheat a little, though, with the Sif cutscene, which depends on whether you rescue him in the past. Really, the new cutscene that they added if you rescue him in the past should always be triggered, because even if you kill him in the future, you can still rescue him in the past afterwards, anyway. As it is now, you can kill Sif in the future and then rescue him in the past, and he doesn't recognize you in the future. It's not exactly a time paradox or anything, but it is a little bit of an inconsistency. That said, you can only really notice this inconsistency if you do multiple playthroughs because, with the basic cutscene, there's not really any way of telling whether or not Sif recognizes you just based on that alone. We only know that he doesn't recognize you in that cutscene because he does recognize you in the other cutscene. Anyway, all in all, I think the time travel here is really, really solid. You get to learn more about the world without destroying the timeline which already existed. It seems like the best-case scenario. This isn't necessarily intentional. It could just be, because it was DLC, they didn't have time to do any fancy time-travel shenanigans, but if you ask me, it works in the game's favor. Along with some good boss fights, this area also has a noticeable improvement in the sound design. In the background here, you can occasionally hear Dusk screaming and Sif howling alongside more generic noises like chirping birds and running water. Later on, you can hear a breathing noise before Artorias, and the Bloat Head enemies in Oolacile Township also make various roaring noises while they're standing around. It's not much, really, but it's noticeably more than many of the other locations. There are some other instances of good environmental sound effects in the rest of the game, but they were, perhaps, too subtle for their own good. In the Painted World, near all the pikes, there's a sort of whispery chanting effect in the background, but you can only hear it if you have the volume up and listen carefully. I think maybe the reason there's not a more diverse soundscape in other areas is because of memory limitations. Sound takes up a surprisingly large amount of storage, and with the seamless nature of the world, they may have had to conserve memory for more important things. That's just a guess, though, and it might be completely off-base. There's plenty of reason to suspect that the team were already thinking about or working on Bloodborne in some capacity at this point, so the more noticeable sound effects might just be a side effect of that. Also similar to Bloodborne, there's at least one patrolling sentry golem here, which makes the area that little bit more dangerous. There have been some patrolling enemies before this, mainly in the Tower of Latria and Painted World, but the path those enemies could take were so small that they didn't make much difference. Here, the sentry golem can catch you off-guard since the area is so open and you're probably not expecting an enemy to be roaming around. Apparently, Miyazaki initially wanted the Black Knights to patrol large areas and make each playthrough feel that little bit different, but they weren't able to accomplish this. I get the feeling this might also come back to memory or at least performance concerns. It's possible they had to tightly control how many enemies a player could fight in each area in order to avoid performance drops. This area obviously reuses a lot of geometry from Darkroot Garden since it's the same area in the past. I can't really blame them for this, though, since the best way of reinforcing the time-travel aspect is showing the player an area they're familiar with in another time frame. It's just one of those catch-22 situations. It looks kind of lazy to reuse an area like this, but I know, as a player, if we went time travelling, and I didn't get to see at least one area I had already seen in a different time frame, I'd probably be pretty annoyed by that. The whole novelty of time travel is getting to see familiar things in a different way, so, of course, they would want to reuse at least one area from the base game. Even irrespective of the time travel, you can tell they made some effort to change it up so it wouldn't feel too stale. You go through it backwards, starting where the grave of Artorias will eventually be, and, of course, the time of day has changed to daytime, giving it a different appearance. This goes a fair way towards making the area feel less like a retread, and the further in you go, the more it changes from what you already know. I think this area lends a tiny bit more credibility to my theory about the sun from earlier on. In the past, this is called the Royal Wood, but in the future, it's called Darkroot Garden, possibly because it's always dark there. This just makes it seem more like they were aware it was weird for it to be nighttime only in Darkroot Garden. Crossing this bridge, we run into Kalameet, which, just like the drake encounter earlier, is done without a cutscene. This is obviously just something they like doing, so I imagine they just repeated it because they could, but it's also a little bit of a contrast from the one earlier. The drake at the start lands with its back turned to you and doesn't acknowledge you whereas Kalameet looks in your direction. This makes Kalameet appear more intelligent and thus more intimidating than the drake. I get the impression that, even though they don't say anything, dragons were at least as intelligent as humans, if not more so. Kalameet does what looks like a psychic attack on the player, and Seath learned the most advanced magics of anyone. It's common for dragons in fiction to appear intelligent, and Dark Souls is no exception. I like that they accomplish this without resorting to dialogue, though. It would probably just feel cheesy coming from a dragon. Further in, we have Marvelous Chester, who I think is one of the most interesting NPCs. His clothes are all described as being "exquisitely sewn." As I said earlier, some of the item descriptions seem like they're written by an omniscient narrator, but this one feels as though it's from the character's perspective. With their limited knowledge, they would have no way of knowing that Chester's clothes might be made with more modern manufacturing techniques. His little carrier bag is quite a bit more contemporary than most things, and his crossbow is also rather advanced, so this suggests to me that he's from a future beyond the one the player comes from. Even though Chester wasn't added until about a year later, he actually appears in the concept art book that came with the special edition of the initial release. Fat Officials are also in the art book but probably couldn't appear because they're from Demon's Souls. I think this goes to show that someone on the development team has been wanting to do something like Bloodborne for quite a while. By the time they had a chance to include Chester, they probably knew what their next project would be, so I'm sure they put him in here as a sort of teaser as well. The next boss is Knight Artorias, probably my favorite boss battle in Dark Souls. I don't think there's any better way to fight him than knight vs. knight, so I'm not gonna talk over this one. I'm just gonna let it play out. Enjoy. Can you feel my pain? Well, I suppose this gives my an opportunity to talk about it while I show my second attempt. This is just an overall solid fight, but one thing I really like is how Artorias's animations mimic Sif's animations. The two of them fight in a very similar style or, at least, as similar as can be given their different body types. Of course, given the timeline, it's actually Sif who is copying Artorias. Ultimately, this makes both of them that little bit more endearing, as you can imagine Sif learning how to fight by watching Artorias in battle. Again, this is an example of story telling done without relying on cutscenes or dialogue to get the point across. Some players might not notice it, but that's okay because there's always more to discover. I suppose my point is, rather than trying to force you to be interested in the world, these games trust that if you're playing, you're already interested, and go from there. As a result, they end up being much more engaging anyway. Chester mentions Artorias just beforehand and says, "He's a colourless sort," which didn't really give me the impression he's turned into a mindless monster like he has. Even so, I figured if Artorias would be a boss, he'd be at the end of the expansion, not here, so I found it a bit shocking when he appeared here. I think this is another great example of what sets the atmosphere of Dark Souls apart from the other games. Seeing Arotrias for the first time is more sad than horrifying or disturbing. It's just disappointing seeing a once-great hero reduced to this sorry state. He was corrupted by the Abyss after joining a covenant with them to attempt to destroy them from the inside out. This is reminiscent of the Nietzsche quote from Beyond Good and Evil, which says: "He who fights monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." Nietzsche just meant this in a philosophical sense, of course, but I suppose it could indicate that there's a psychological element to the Abyss in Dark Souls which drives people mad. Either that, or it's just another thing taken from Berserk. One thing that might have helped me survive the first fight with Artorias is upgraded armor, so I finally bothered to go and do that after this battle. I can't say that this is an addition I'm particularly fond of myself, but it does have its upsides. It does encourage you to pick a set of armor and stick with it for better or worse. Seeing your character consistently in the same clothes gives them a stronger sense of identity, I think. It also ostensibly gives you a decision between offense and defense, but, really, this is a false dichotomy. Overall, the benefits between weapons and armor might even be equal, but weapon upgrades only require a quarter of the materials, which makes the choice a no-brainer. As with most things in Dark Souls, armor upgrades are optional, which is good, but it loosens the balance, particularly when it comes to bosses. Now, on top of several different weight classes, there's also several varying levels of upgrades within those classes as well. Since players don't even need to upgrade armor to get through the game, it really just means that upgrading armor is just another way to make the game that little bit easier for yourself. Oolacile Township is, of course, where the residents of Oolacile used to live, but now they're all Bloat Heads. You should keep in mind, though, that they were never human to begin with, and neither is Dusk. Elizabeth mentions how human your scent is, but if Dusk were human as well, Elizabeth probably wouldn't have a reason to comment on it. It's never made entirely clear what the difference is between human-sized people like this and actual humans, but apparently there is one. I'm guessing what sets them apart is that humans have a portion of the Dark Soul. As if Chester wasn't already reminiscent enough of Bloodborne, he uses a sidestep instead of a roll. Gwyn's knights and a lot of bosses do this as well, but as far as I'm aware, he's the only NPC which has this move. Of course, I can't say for sure that they did this intentionally as some kind of foreshadowing of Bloodborne, but it really seems that way to me. I'm not attacking him much here because I'm trying to get as much footage of the sidestep as I can, and I think he get's bored because he decides to head back to the big dream in the sky. Oolacile Township is quite linear, but it can be a refreshing change of pace in the second half, since the other areas after Anor Londo tend to have some pretty extreme gimmicks to them. There's not much to explore, but what extra areas there are loop back around smoothly like the best areas of Undead Burg or Painted World. There's a nice area off to the side here where we can find the Silver Pendant, which I suppose counts as the gimmick for this area. It's useful for the fight with Manus, and it's just an all-around interesting item. To me, this highlights the problem with the quick slots, though. Since Estus and items are mapped to the same button, you need to swap between them, which would be all right if not for the way new consumables get placed in the rotation automatically, which is a pain. Even though I just want to have the pendant and Estus equipped, anything else I pick up is gonna be slotted in there as well, which means I'll have to cycle through extra stuff that I don't want. You would think that they would have an option to toggle this since it was also an issue in Demon's Souls. The pendant here raises a lot of questions, particularly the fact that it's hidden behind an illusory wall. We can't say whether or not Artorias hid it here himself. From the sounds of it, he was presented this by Gwyn himself, so I'd doubt he'd part with it lightly. I get the impression Artorias volunteered for the job since everyone seems to think he was a noble man. He may have hid it here himself so he could join a covenant with the Abyss, or it could be the case that it was stolen or even that he accidentally lost it. Oolacile sorcerers would be able to make a hidden wall that you open with light like this, so I do think it's possible that somebody other than him placed it here. These are, I think, the only other opened chests apart from the one in Firelink Shrine. The opened chest in Firelink has a special purpose, though. If you drop a critical item, it'll reappear inside that chest, allowing you to finish your playthrough. I don't know why they didn't just block you from dropping critical items in the first place, but at least it shows that chest has a reason to exist. These ones, on the other hand, just sit here as decoration. Now, it makes sense to me that not every chest should be closed and have an item inside, but I think it sticks out since these are the only ones like this. There is an empty chest after Gwyndolin as well, but at least that one is closed. If I still thought there were secrets to be discovered, these chests would be somewhere I would concentrate on because of how strange it is in the grand scheme of things. I can see why they wanted to use these as decoration: just as a little bit of realism. But without other chests scattered around the game that are similar, these ones stick out more than anything else. They probably accomplish the opposite of what they set out to do here because they look so conspicuous. Another item found nearby is the I'm Sorry Carving, dropped by one of the Bloat Head sorceresses. This is the last of these non-hostile enemies that we'll be seeing. The casters of Oolacile were likely involved in the disaster here, so this one is probably holding the carving because she regrets what she's done. I think this hearkens back to what I was talking about a few minutes ago about the strength of these games being the experience itself. In terms of gameplay, there's nothing interesting about an enemy which doesn't fight back, but as long as it's only done every once in a while, as an experience, it's significantly more interesting than fighting basic enemies. You're given a glimpse into the sorrow of this situation and reminded that these were once people, not unlike your own character. It's a boring battle, of course, but it's worth the trade-off because of how much it enhances the overall tone of the game. Once you make it inside this building, the Bloat Heads start to have glowing eyes, which indicates that they hit hit harder than the ones earlier. I didn't realize this myself even though, in retrospect, it should've been pretty obvious. The UI of Dark Souls is not its strongest element. I think even from a visual perspective, it just looks quite a bit worse than the one in Demon's Souls. The sketchy sort of look that it has doesn't really seem to suit the game world, but there is a nice side benefit of it with the health bars and stamina bars. The added measuring lines on it can be surprisingly useful. It can help you figure out when to use your Estus and give you a better idea of just how much stamina you might have left. If I had been paying attention, I would see, when I got hit by an attack by these Bloat Heads, that they do more damage than the other ones because more of the segments would be depleted. Regardless of whether you notice it or not, this will cause an increase in the difficulty as you push further into the area. In retrospect, I'm surprised that stuff like this doesn't happen more often, but I suppose for most of the game, they had enough enemy types not to rely on this sort of trick. Normally, they build the difficulty by rearranging enemies into different layouts, which is a more dynamic and interesting way to challenge the player. This area is where we find the Crest Key, which we can use to get to Gough. This raises the question of why we even need a key to visit him in the first place. It seems like he's imprisoned but also doesn't seem to bear any ill will towards anyone. He just says he's in retirement. He also says he's blind, but that may not be the case. The description on his helm says: "A helm crafted especially for the honorable Hawkeye Gough, only the eyeholes were packed with tree resin by those who dismissed Gough as a brutish giant." I think it's possible he's locked here for his own good to keep him safe from people who think of him as a brute. He could easily break himself out, so it seems like he's here willingly. To me, Gough really highlights one of the nice things about the way Miyazaki crafts these worlds and characters. The stories and character arcs are so bleak that when you come across someone who is genuinely benevolent and likable, it comes as a shock and is just more impactful. Before this stuff came out, I don't think anybody really expected Gough to be the most likable of Gwyn's elite knights, but he definitely is. The last of those knights is Ciaran, whom we only get to meet once. She gives up her weapons in exchange for Artorias's soul, which I think indicates that she's going to give up being a Lord's Blade and retire like Gough. She probably regrets not retiring earlier now that Artorias is dead. When attacked, it shows that she has an issue with humans, which also means she isn't human even though her size might make her seem so. Since she's found at a makeshift grave, she obviously has a lot of respect for Artorias. I think there's also a bit of a romantic undertone there as well, but given their size difference, I'm not really sure how that's supposed to work out. This raise the question of why she didn't help Artorias take on the Abyss, though. Gough is blind, or at least thinks he is, and we know from some of his dialogue that the dragons have already been taken care of. He says, "What good is a dog with no hares to hunt?" It's possible, as the leader, Ornstein was stuck doing some political or boring work as he's seen doing in the future. They also couldn't include him as an NPC in the expansion even if they wanted to because it would open up potential for a time paradox if the player killed him. None of these issues apply to Ciaran, though, so it's not clear why she wasn't helping Artorias. I think the only viable explanation is that she had some sort of job to do at the time which kept her from helping until it was too late. I've scoured as hard as I can for more information on what she was doing, but as far as I can tell, we don't know of even a single assassination that takes place in the world of Dark Souls, despite the fact that Ciaran is quite clearly an assassin. This probably just means she was good at her job, though. If anything, it would be strange if we did know anything about her assassinations. Ciaran is a name that sticks out to me because it's something that people are actually called here in Ireland, and it's a boy's name. So, I looked it up, and apparently, it means "little dark one," which is quite a suitable name for her. There's a little bit more of Oolacile Township still to go. I think by far the most difficult part of this area is this: two sorceresses and three brawlers placed in a small area with a mini-boss right afterwards. This is strategically placed just after the player is given an opportunity to open the shortcut, yet more proof that these games aren't for masochists despite what some people might have you believe. The mini-boss after this is by far the strangest one and the only one that isn't used more than once. I believe it's a chained prisoner, which means it probably comes from the short, little prison area just right after this. I find it a bit strange that they would put so much work into this enemy when, otherwise, the expansion is kind of lacking for new enemies. There's just the Bloat Heads, the Forest Gardeners, the golems, and one more enemy type that we'll see now in a second. You would think that the time they spent making this enemy would be better put to use making an enemy that they could reuse, since this one would just be annoying to fight more than once. It's definitely interesting for what it is. Its attack animations are quite different, and you do have to approach it very cautiously, but I just think that the effort would've been better spent elsewhere. The last enemy type here is found in the Chasm of the Abyss. Seeing the Humanities for the first time is probably the most memorable experience I've had with these games so far. I'm not a fan of paid-for DLC because I like my games to be a complete package, but I have to admit that this was actually enhanced by being part of the expansion. This stuff came out a year after the main game released, so players were very, very familiar with the concept of consuming Humanity. The description on Humanity refers to it as a "sprite," so you can kind of get the impression it might be a living thing, but over time, the act of using Humanity seems harmless because it has no negative effects. After discovering this, it casts a shadow over everything Humanity-related in the game, and it's just a creepy moment even outside of that as well. The description on the Pursuers spell implies that they attempt to touch you out of either envy or love, in case you didn't already feel bad enough killing them. They also make this odd sort of humming noise, which is initially a little bit disconcerting but almost sounds sort of comforting once you get used to it. As much as I loved seeing these things for the first time, I have to admit that this is the kind of thing that should've been in the game when it released. In fact, the entire Artorias of the Abyss Expansion seems so tightly tied into the game that it all should've been there on day one. Now, maybe not all of this was planned, and if it wasn't, then I think that's just a testament to how well they did with this content, but I'm sure at least some of this was planned much earlier on. Dark Souls is one of my favorite games, but it's definitely been a victim of deadlines and, I would argue, greedy publishing. Publishers don't really care about games in the same way players or developers do, so they don't really mind if the game gets cut up and sold as DLC. There's a mentality that things can always be finished later, and of course, they'll make more money off it that way as well. Even without this extra stuff, Dark Souls is a pretty long game for what it is. I would certainly say it's value for money. It keeps you going for quite a while. That doesn't change the fact this stuff should've been here when the game released, though. It's great that we now get to experience this stuff, but the problem is it doesn't tie into the main game as well as it should. If you do the Artorias of the Abyss expansion early, then it'll be quite difficult, but the amount of Souls and equipment that you'll get here will make the rest of the game much easier. Alternatively, if you do it towards the end, it doesn't throw the balancing out too much, but it does destroy the pacing. It doesn't really make much sense to go into the past, do a bunch of random stuff, and then go and fight Gwyn. The two aren't very connected to each other. If this stuff had been here when the game came out, they might've been able to solve these issues. For example, instead of splitting the game in two at Anor Londo, they might've been able to split it into three segments to balance this area better compared to the others. The only way to stop this, of course, is to demand better out of the games by not buying them until you're happy with them. I just think it's sad that since we all bought into this, myself included, then future games of this type are all going to have the same problem. They're all going to launch and then have extra areas and bosses added later on. No matter how well that stuff is going to be implemented, I just don't see it slotting in as well as the stuff that's in the base game, so I really wish that this wasn't the case. I also personally just really like buying a game on the first day and knowing that I'm getting a complete package out of it, something I can put on a shelf and come back and play years later, almost like it's a work of art instead of just an excuse to nickel and dime people. So yeah, I would say I have some pretty conflicting feelings on this. This is one of the few DLCs that I've bought, and I certainly enjoyed my time with it, but I also don't like feeling like I'm part of the problem. I do think that deadlines are a necessary evil to focus the development team who would probably otherwise just take all the time in the world. But for a game with the scale of Dark Souls, the deadline was quite aggressive, and the end product shows that. Just next to the Humanities, there's a drop off here which I really like. The floor disappears as though it's an illusion, and you end up dropping down quite far. I assume this is because Alvina is trying to lead you to Sif, but that's not really the interesting part. Mechanically, this is almost identical to the crumbling floors I complained about earlier. The player walks somewhere and has no way of knowing that the floor will give out underneath them. Unlike before, though, this one protects you from the fall damage with some magical mist. I think it's an indication that the developers learned their lesson about the crumbling floors being unfair. It doesn't fix the problem in the base game, but it does show some improvement, which I'm quite happy to see. I'm sure, like most jobs, games development is an ongoing learning process. Nobody starts out perfect, but what they've shown here is a willingness to improve and learn from past missteps. It is just one instance, but there aren't any collapsing floors in Bloodborne either, at least not outside the Chalice Dungeons, and even the ones I've encountered there weren't high enough to cause fall damage. My point is: I'm fairly confident they reversed their thinking on those kinds of traps around the time that they were putting this area together. It's here where we can rescue Sif, and if we do so, we can summon him for the boss fight coming up. The barrier surrounding him is created by Artorias's shield, which is why Artorias doesn't have a shield when you fight him. I'm not really sure why they put Sif behind an illusory wall here. Alvina tries to lead you towards it, but it can still be quite difficult to find just by yourself. Personally, I think they should've just placed a developer message in front of it, especially since they could've changed the picture on the developer messages. If they changed the picture on the developer notes to Artorias, then you would be following in his footsteps, which would be especially interesting since you've just killed him. There are some Prism Stones scattered around here which are just to ensure that the player can find their way since the area is quite dark, but I like to imagine that they were left by Artorias, and I think it would've been nice to have some confirmation of this. Another thing we can find here is a pyromancy called Black Flame. Its description says that a Pyromancer was wandering Oolacile, which is a significant clue about the time frame we've ended up in. As I said earlier, Quelana mentions that her mother has suffered for about a thousand years. The fall of Izalith was also the birth of Pyromancy, so this spell here indicates that Izalith has already been ruined. This means we're less than a thousand years in the past, which is a lot more recent than I would've guessed. Up next, we have Manus, who is most likely the Pygmy seen in the introduction since it's the only Lord Soul left unaccounted for. Gwyn and the others seem to fear Manus, and with good reason. It's a bit strange, then, that Oolacile seems to have been built right on top of where he was buried. It seems like his Lord Soul is the opposite of theirs, but there's nothing to say that they were always on bad terms. At the start, he's described as the "Furtive Pygmy," and being furtive just means being shy, wanting to go unnoticed or avoid confrontation. So, from the sounds of this, Manus just wanted to be left alone, and maybe they didn't pay much attention to him. I also get the impression that this may have been where they found their Lord Souls in the first place. In the introduction video, the Flame is found in some kind of cavern not dissimilar from this one. There's also some ancient, crumbled pillars and grave markings around Manus which show that this place is much older even than Oolacile itself. Gough seems to think that Manus was driven mad by the residents of Oolacile, probably when they took his pendant. He seems like a fairly reliable source of information, so I'd say that's exactly what happened. Manus is, of course, quite scary and monstrous, but he's also probably just as tragic as everything else in the game. Keep in mind, he doesn't harm Dusk, and his soul is described as a "lukewarm lump of gentle humanity." Afterwards, Dusk says she detected feelings of longing and nostalgia and wonders whether Manus really was a beast after all. If you think about it, you can see how, from the perspective of the gods and the people of Oolacile, the humans would come across as bad guys. They seem to just be slowly taking over the world like an unstoppable force, which will bring about the Age of Dark. None of this is really Manus's fault, though. Before they disturbed his body, it seems like he was just happy enough to be left alone. It's the same way with the player character. They can't really be blamed for what they are either. I suppose all the bosses in Oolacile are optional, but Kalameet is the most optional of them all. The Dragon King Greataxe describes the Gaping Dragon as "a distant, deformed descendant of the everlasting dragons." Seath is obviously deformed too, so this makes Kalameet the only proper dragon fight in the entire game. The semi-forced death when you first encounter Kalameet might come across as grating, especially since they pull a similar trick with Seath, but mechanically, it's almost identical to every other boss. Once you walk through some boss fog, you're locked in there anyway, which means your Souls are locked in there too. Losing them in the boss arena once doesn't really change that. The only way you'll be punished for it is if you die on the way back to Kalameet, but the route towards him is intentionally quite easy. Since he takes a moment to fly back into the arena, you also have plenty of time to pick your Souls back up and continue on as normal. To keep your Souls safe, you need to beat the boss, but that's just as true anywhere else in the game, too. I'm still not a big fan of being forced to die here anyway, but I can see why they thought the cutscene where Gough shoots down Kalameet made it a worthwhile trade-off. You don't fight Kalameet at full strength, and it seems like it would've been impossible to take him on at full capacity. That isn't actually the case, though. If you have a bow and the patience of a saint, you can take down Kalameet on your first encounter with him, Demon's Souls style. Gough even has some very slightly altered dialogue if you decide to do it that way. If you actually want to have fun, though, you'll probably fight him properly, in which case he's already been massively damaged for you. This is a common theme with bosses in this game. Artorias has a broken arm and is corrupted by the Abyss. Other bosses are fought long after their heyday. Setting it up that way means they get to preserve their legendary status even though they're ultimately killed by a loser like you. This certainly deserves some points for being the only proper dragon fight, but for me, it has one big problem. There are essentially two different kinds of hitboxes when you're fighting an enemy: those you can clip through using invincibility frames and those you can't. The body on most bosses would work that way. You don't want the player rolling right through the enemy, so they're only allowed to roll through certain parts, usually the weapon. This is especially noticeable on bigger bosses. You can roll through the tail of the Bell Gargoyles but not the one of the Gaping Dragon, because that one is so large it would look strange for you to clip through it. My problem with Kalameet is that he has head-swipe attacks which work the same way. Even though you might roll at the right time, you'll still collide with his head. The swipe will push you to one side, and by the time the attack is over, your invincibility frames will have worn off. You can see here, to avoid this, I have to roll through his neck instead, which is what I'm doing. You can definitely work around it, but I find it frustrating when it happens nonetheless. It feels a little cheap. In the grand scheme of things, this is a pretty small issue, though, and I certainly wouldn't complain about a few more bosses of this kind of quality. There's a good argument to be made that Kalameet is the most difficult boss in the game thanks to his aggressive attack animations and massive health pool. I particularly like the attack where he charges at you and then spins around and sprays his black flame everywhere. It's well animated, difficult to punish, and most importantly, it's something you can imagine an intelligent dragon would actually do to protect itself. He also has one of the most interesting drops in the game by far: the Calamity Ring. All it does is double the amount of damage you take, so I'm guessing the idea is if you're looking for a challenge, you take it with you into New Game Plus and will then die much more quickly to the enemies. It's a bit of a lazy way of boosting the difficulty, but I wouldn't mind seeing more items like this which change the way the game is played a little. They wouldn't necessarily have to beneficial or detrimental, just different. At the very least, it makes some sense to give players this ring now instead of some other reward, because if you've beaten Kalameet, there's no need for you to become any more powerful anyway. Overall, this is probably my least favorite of the bosses in Oolacile, but it's clear a lot of effort went into it regardless, and it's still one of the better bosses in the game. It seems like a lot of effort went into the bosses in particular in the extra content, which makes it a worthwhile addition for that much alone. Before we leave the past, there's one last, major thing here: the Battle of Stoicism. We're going to do a best of three against each other to show this thing off. I have a lot to talk about here, so I'm not going to give you a play-by-play of what's happening, but I'll tell you the key things to look out for. The first thing you should keep in mind is that the scythe is a fairly unique weapon, in that its animations swing so widely they can actually hit the opponent from behind. That as well as its good stat scaling have made it into a very popular weapon, although my opponent mainly just uses it because it looks cool. Since I'm relying on a shield, the hitbox is a real danger for me, and I don't handle it particularly well. You'll see I often try to get behind or away from her to stay safe, but it ends up backfiring. Really, what I should be doing is standing right in front and tanking the hit to my shield. It'll do no damage to me that way anyway. The problem is, even though I'm quite a defensive character, I tend to play aggressively anyway. Otherwise, I get bored. It's really less than ideal, but what can I say. I like what I like. The few times where I really do go on the defensive tend to be because of the bleed effect that you'll see build up on me over time. Even if the scythe bounces off my shield, it still builds this up, and if it maxes out, I'll suffer a huge amount of damage, so I can't let that happen. The bleed and stamina of our two characters is really where the strategy comes in to this fight. Depending on how we think the other player is doing, we'll be more aggressive or defensive. Another thing you might notice if you're paying attention is the overly large hitbox on the Black Flame spell. That's the short-range flame which bursts right in front of her hand. I'm guessing that some of the spell and weapon hitboxes are overly large because the game is primarily designed as a single-player experience. You can imagine, if the player ended up using an attack which looked like it should hit but ended up missing, then they'd become very frustrated. To avoid that problem, they would most likely skew the hitboxes a little bit in the player's favor. It's not a problem when you're just playing by yourself, but it can result in some unfortunate effects when playing online. Pyromancy like this is a relatively common aspect of online play because the Pyromancy Flame doesn't have stat requirements. It's upgraded separately from everything else. That means you can avail of Pyromancy without having to build your character in a specific way. If you're really into the online portion of the game, and some Pyromancy might compliment your character, then there's virtually no downside to having it. The best way to deal with Pyromancy is usually to back off, but the way this duel is set up, that's not always an option. In here, you have three minutes to kill your opponent more times than they kill you. If they have the lead, it's pretty easy to just run away for the rest of the match, but thankfully, neither of us use such cheap tactics. My playstyle isn't quite as interesting as hers, but you'll see I have an extra option when using my spear. Spears can be used from behind a shield, allowing you to deal damage while also staying safe. It consumes a huge amount of stamina to do so, and the reach isn't as good as usual, but it's a valid tactic against aggressive players. It's for that reason that I find spears to be one of the more interesting weapon types, because they combine well with another existing mechanic. Usually, weapons are just used for attacks and don't combine in any meaningful way with the dodging or blocking. With spears, there's a little bit of overlap, which makes them that little bit more tactical, even if they are ultimately very defensive and passive weapons. I like the odd competitive game myself, but I can't say I've ever been particularly interested in this aspect of these games. That said, I'm not against the idea of a coliseum, considering it probably didn't take too much work and possibly provided a lot of value to some people. Obviously, I enjoy the gameplay on offer here, but the mechanics don't have a particularly high skill ceiling. You can block, dodge, and attack, so the essentials are there, but in terms of inputs, it's pretty simplistic, and most attack animations are relatively lengthy compared to other games. Basically, I don't think there's that much room for better players to distinguish themselves from worse players. Learning parry timings does provide a layer of skill to this, but lag can often make a parry impossible to land even if you know exactly what to do. Building your character might take a lot of forethought and planning, but it's the kind of thing others can easily copy anyway. I've also never been big on the kind of min-maxing that's required to be truly competitive at this kind of stuff. Getting staggered is a major disadvantage when fighting against another player, so this result in players wearing heavy armor for poise but also boosting their equip load as much as possible for faster rolls. It ends up looking ridiculous and puts characters like that into a completely different tier than the ones most players will organically build over the course of the game. If you skew the stats and the equipment just right, it feels like there's no meaningful trade-offs being made. I just don't think that heavily-armored knights should be able to do back flips, no matter what way they distribute their stats. I can appreciate the effort that goes into finding the perfect build for the kind of character you want to make, but I don't think that necessarily makes the online play satisfying from moment to moment. For me at least, the battle we're having here is more interesting than completely decked-out characters. I would say, ultimately, her character is better than mine thanks to her gear, but she's no where near as optimized as she could be. Each character has extreme pros and cons. I'm heavy, don't maneuver well, but I can take a lot of punishment, don't stagger easily, and can block a lot if I like. She moves much faster, has better opportunities to deal damage, but can't handle damage as well as I can. Basically, she's higher risk, higher reward, and I'm playing something more safe. Whatever your thoughts on competitive play, I think one thing most of us can agree on is that lag is a severe problem for the online, probably the biggest issue of them all. This is, first and foremost, because play isn't done through servers, just the matchmaking. This is a common setup for a lot of games. There's a master server that lists available players and is responsible for pairing them up. Once that's done, it's a peer-to-peer connection. Ideally, the game would use a server for all online interactions, as the server acts as an impartial observer. It basically runs its own simulation of the events to check whether the player's movements and actions are allowed. In other words, it verifies that what the players are doing is actually possible within the limits of the game world. Thankfully, it doesn't have to render the entire game to make that happen. It mostly just validates the positions and movements of the players, but nonetheless, it has to be maintained by the developers, which costs money. By comparison, peer-to-peer matchmaking costs virtually nothing. The downside is, without that impartial observer, clients can just lie to each other about what they're doing. Peer-to-peer is more vulnerable to hacking because there's no server to validate the information sent between clients. Not only that, it doesn't deal as well when one player lags. I mentioned earlier that hard drives are relatively slow, but internet connections are even slower and much less reliable. If a game is running at thirty frames a second, it updates the screen every 33 milliseconds, but new information might only arrive from the enemy player every 100 milliseconds or more. This means the game has to perform lag compensation to fill in the gaps. While it's waiting for the latest information from the enemy player, your machine will take the last known movements of the enemy and continue to apply them as a guess of where the enemy will move next. In other words, if the enemy is moving left, and we haven't heard from them yet, we just assume that they're still moving left. If this guess turns out to be wrong, then once an update is received from the other player, they might snap into a new position. You see this a lot in these games because players are often in close-quarters combat, poking and prodding at each other, which means a lot of back and forth movements. You might move forward just for half a second and then pull back, but if the connection lags after you move forward, then you'll continue to move forward from your enemy's perspective. If the enemy then back-stabs you, it seems valid, because from their point of view, it looked like that's what you were doing. This is why your back-stabs always look fine whereas getting back-stabbed sometimes means the enemy instantly teleports behind you. One way this can be exploited is with a lag switch, a device which temporarily blocks the traffic between the two players. If you're standing still and I press the lag switch, then I can just walk up behind your character and back-stab you because you're not moving on my screen. When I turn off the lag switch, my game will tell your game that I back-stabbed you, and then you'll die. And yes, that is something that players have made to exploit certain games. It actually works, at least to some degree anyway. We're just wrapping this up now, and I wish we had a more exciting finale for you, but in the final round, I stumble quite a lot and just end up flat-out losing. Believe me, I did consider using a different set of duels to make this last match a bit more interesting and give myself a second chance, but that would clearly be dishonest. Sometimes, a match just goes one way or another, and I suppose I should at least be happy I managed to take one round. Also, I won to duel earlier in the Painted World, so really, we're even. Since the Artorias of the Abyss stuff is pretty action packed, I think it would be nice to visit somewhere more relaxing next, unless you have a fear of heights, in which case you might wanna close your eyes for this one. The way the Great Hollow is hidden is one of the cheapest tricks they've done so far. After going through one illusory wall, you then have to find another one hidden behind a chest. I didn't find this on my first playthrough, and I can't imagine many others did. As much as I wish the way they hid it was a little more interesting, I do love how well-hidden it is. This kind of thing is especially rare in modern games because of how much work they take to make. Developers are afraid to put so much effort into something if the player isn't going to see it. It's a pretty reasonable concern for them all things considered, but I love that Dark Souls stands in contrast to this trend. The return to the Undead Asylum, the Painted World, Great Hollow, and Ash Lake are all pretty well-hidden areas. When you think about it, that's a considerable amount of effort spent on things the player may never find. It's a sad reality that for any given game, the majority of players are unlikely to play it all the way to the end, so I think hiding content well like this might be less irrational than it first appears. A player is either enjoying a game, or they aren't, and it seems like a better choice to me to tailor the experience towards those who are into it more than those who still need convincing. If the lukewarm players aren't going to play all the way to the end, you have to question whether it really matters if a few things are hidden from them. On the flip side, the ones who are really into the game will feel rewarded when they realize there was something significant they missed out on the first time. It means that, for them, the game now has more content than they originally thought it had. At least that's how I felt anyway. Nowadays, this kind of hidden content can easily be found by anyone through the internet, which I think makes it a less risky inclusion than it was in the past. It's now very easy for players to discover everything if they really want to, no matter how well hidden it is. Lots of other games could hide substantial secrets like this, but I think it works particularly well in Dark Souls because the note system acts as a middle ground. If you see a note on the ground leading you to the second invisible wall, there's probably going to be a moment of doubt or hesitation about what you're reading. Notes are never an official source of information, so it's a lot more like talking to a friend or discovering something through hearsay. You don't know whether to believe it, and because of that, it still manages to maintain some of its surprise. There are some valuable items here. Even right at the start, you can find the Cloranthy Ring, one of the better rings, I think, although if you're willing to wear the Crest Shield, you don't need it. This is a nice example of internal consistency since the ring itself looks similar to the Green Blossoms, which are the consumable items that boost stamina. The Grass Crest Shield also has a sort of plant on the front of it, which may be what the Green Blossoms are supposed to grow from. The design on the Grass Crest Shield actually comes from a contest which was held before the release of Dark Souls where people submitted their own shield designs. It could be that the team already wanted a stamina-regenerating shield, and then this design came along which was a nice fit, and perhaps that's the reason why it was selected. Whatever the case, it takes effort and coordination from the art team to think about these things, and the end result is a nice, little sense of history. Much like how people in reality will associate certain plants with certain effects, this occurs in Dark Souls as well. It's a very minor detail, but that's how good world building is done: lots of little details that work together in unison. This area has a bunch of Crystal Lizards and two of each type of Titanite Chunk. Since the Great Hollow is optional, this was smart of them because it makes this area a worthwhile visit for any character. I actually think this is one of the best balanced areas in the entire game as a result. Not necessarily the most challenging. Far from it. But just well balanced. Since the challenge primarily comes from navigating the environment safely, it affects all character types equally. Every character should have a similar amount of difficulty here, and thanks to the variety of Titanite Chunks, every character also has a similar amount to gain. The Great Hollow also exemplifies the vertical nature of Dark Souls in general, which is really impressive. It's true that they often use elevators as shortcuts, but you also can't ignore all the staircases, ladders, and slopes which get you from point A to point B in the first place. And of course, all of that is especially impressive given the interconnectivity of most of the world. I think this is one of those points that's really hard to get across, but there's a reason why people, myself included, harp on about the verticality of this game. If you ever try to open up a level editor yourself and make something, you might be surprised how tempting it is to just sprawl outwards horizontally. Even then, overcoming that compulsion is really just the first step. You also need to craft the environment in a way which adequately guides the player, leads to interesting enemy encounters, accommodates any special events that need to occur there, and also looks like an area that might reasonably exist. Dark Souls manages to do all of that while also imbuing the level design with a certain aesthetic charm you don't see very often. It's especially impressive here since you can enter the Great Hollow before getting the Lordvessel, which means it has to be traversable both ways. Since you sometimes have to drop from one branch to another to move down, it's confusing and a little surprising that you can also make your way upwards. I know it might sound like a hassle, but if you've only ever gone down the Great Hollow, I think you should try going up it as well. There's not much point in doing so if you can warp, but it really shows the strength of the level design here. I also like the choice of enemies here. Since these areas are so well hidden, they didn't receive priority when it came to making new enemies, which is understandable. Despite that, the ones that appear here all make sense anyway. They're all fauna of some sort, which makes it believable that they would appear in several different locations. This is the worst possible place that Crystal Lizards could be, so of course, up to ten of them can appear here. I'm sure they killed a lot of greedy players here, which is exactly what they wanted. There's a subtle change to the mechanics behind Crystal Lizards in Dark Souls. This time around, they'll respawn as many times as needed until the player kills them. In Demon's Souls, you had a limited number of chances to kill a Crystal Lizard before it disappeared for the rest of the playthrough. As far as I can see, the respawn system for the lizards in Demon's Souls was superior, and I think it's pretty easy to justify why. First of all, you just need to think about what Crystal Lizards accomplish. They're not designed to test a player's combat prowess since they just run away without fighting back. What they do is test your situational awareness or apply a sudden shock to you in order to see how well you'll respond. So, if the point of Crystal Lizards is to put the player under pressure, then, really, they should be designed in a way which maximizes the amount of pressure the player feels. Demon's Souls does that with limited respawns whereas Dark Souls doesn't. This isn't a tragedy by any means. It's a very small change, and most people who played Demon's Souls first will probably assume that the lizards work the same way anyway, but to me, it feels like a concession that Dark Souls didn't need to make. The resources from Crystal Lizards are purely a bonus. You don't need them to beat the game, so I see no issue with players being deprived of them permanently . Basilisks are also a well-chosen enemy for this place, as curse results in a permanent health reduction, which makes the drops a lot more dangerous. It's not entirely cruel, though, because if you press on and make it to the end, there's a good chance you can get a Purging Stone from one of the clams in Ash Lake. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that this area is called the "Great Hollow" given how important hollowing is to the story. It makes me wonder if perhaps the reason the world of Dark Souls is in so much trouble is because this tree is hollow. As we emerge into Ash Lake, we can see lots of other trees, but we don't know whether they're the same on the inside as the Great Hollow. I like to imagine that they're healthier, but I can't say for sure. If you managed to save Siegmeyer earlier, this is the end of his story line, and it turns out he has kind of a complicated backstory. For some reason, when he was back in Catarina, his daughter killed him, but neither of them seem to dislike each other because of it. She comes to Lordran to pass on the last words of her mother, which presumably causes Siegmeyer to hollow, after which she kills him again. This is another good example of events happening in Dark Souls without the presence of the player. Nobody informs you where the two of these are going next or what's happened between them. You just find them after Siegmeyer's already been killed. In my opinion, this very effectively reinforces Siegmeyer and Sieglinde as their own characters, maybe more than any other way they could've presented this scene. I think the conventional wisdom would say that for the player to care about something that's happened, they need to feel involved in it in some way, but for me at least, this scene shows that that's not necessarily true. Shoehorning the player into their pivotal moment probably would've just cheapened it. In a lot of other games, it's hard not feel sometimes like the entire world is scripted solely around you, because, of course, it is. But something simple like this can really help to alleviate that feeling. This particular sub-story was never really about you, so its conclusion doesn't need to include you either. I like this moment, but I do wonder if it would've been done differently had they more time and resources. NPCs in Dark Souls simply don't interact with each other at all. I'm guessing the team probably felt they couldn't make it look convincing or had some other sort of trouble with it and crafted the game with this limitation in mind. It may just be that Siegmeyer's story line ends the way it does because they couldn't execute some more elaborate plans for it. While it might've been interesting to see some more NPC interactions, I think overall it works in the game's favor. It wouldn't suit every game, but it's a good fit for Dark Souls considering the isolated feeling they were going for. I didn't bother mentioning the Hydra in Darkroot earlier on because it's kind of a boring enemy. It's very intimidating, seeing it in the distance for the first time, but ultimately it's a rather simple mini-boss, which is more of a hassle than anything else. I like the one here in Ash Lake a bit more because it plays with your expectations a little. The first hydra is stuck in a comparatively small pond, so it can't move around. I figured this one would be more or less the same, but it turns out if you try to run away, it leaps to the other side of the lake to follow you. It can be a bit of a shock and impressive to see it make such an agile maneuver. You can still run away if you're persistent, but I think you're better off killing it since it doesn't respawn. Afterwards, you can then enjoy the relaxing view of Ash Lake a little better. There's absolutely no rational way to explain the kind of scenery that we see here, so you just need to put logic aside and speculate. The more I think on it, the more I consider it to be the opposite of the area beneath the Nexus in Demon's Souls. You might remember I said that the area in Demon's Souls looked very dreamlike, but when you think about it, it's entirely possible for it to be a real place which is simply underneath the Nexus. In Dark Souls, since the rest of the world is linked together logically, you innately feel that the same should be true for Ash Lake, but really, that doesn't seem possible. It's more likely to be some other plane of existence entirely. I think this gives us a fair bit of insight into the world of Dark Souls in general. It clearly doesn't operate by the same rules as our own world even on a fundamental level. The idea that all of Lordran and maybe the rest of the world is situated above this tree is borrowed from the World Tree myth found in several mythologies. This along with the pantheon of gods gives me the impression that the world functions as though those myths were real. In other words, if you try to dial your mind back to a medieval or pre-medieval sort of time frame and imagine how they might have thought the world worked, that's the way it actually does work in Dark Souls. Fortunately, the core theme of the Age of Fire is a very timeless one. At the moment, research suggests that the most likely outcome for our own universe isn't dissimilar from that of Dark Souls, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of the considerations when crafting the story. The first two laws of thermodynamics are particularly applicable here. These have been phrased in many different ways over the years, but the simple versions are as follows. The first law states: "Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed from one form to another." The second law states: "Heat cannot spontaneously flow from a colder location to a hotter location." These might seem like simple facts, but according to all established science, they are very, very fundamental rules to our universe, and combined, they have a large number of implications. Unfortunately, they paint a rather bleak future for the cosmos, where stars burn out, and the amount of useful energy slowly depletes. Most of the heat from the sun is being jettisoned out into space, where it'll probably never do anything useful again. Eventually, after a very long time, all that's left is an incredibly vast, empty, and cold universe. If this all sounds very abstract to you, that's normal, but therein lies the beauty of Dark Souls. The same rules, more or less, apply to stars as they do to a simple bonfire. You burn something, it heats up for a while, and then it's gone. It makes for a simple but powerful metaphor for the state of our own world. You can think of life and death the same way. Everything that lives eventually dies, and of course, this is something we see a lot in Dark Souls as well. There's nothing we can do about any of this. Even if we had some way of becoming immortal, we'd eventually run out of resources, which is the kind of role the gods play in this game. Gwyn and the Witch of Izalith attempted to stop it in their own ways, but ultimately all they could do was delay the inevitable. Most of the other characters seem resigned to their fate, which makes a lot of sense. If there's nothing you can do to stop it, then the only thing left is to come to terms with it. I don't think Dark Souls is a particularly deep story, but its themes are so simplistic that they become engaging anyway. The main story uses these pieces as a backdrop, and the game has little reminders like bonfires and Estus which reinforce it and keep it in the forefront of your mind. The inevitability of death is something that affects us all, so no matter who you are, you can take something away from the story. Even in Ash Lake, these kinds of themes are reinforced by the sand you walk on. Since the Everlasting Dragons had stone scales, it seems likely that this is all that remains of them. One member of the Everlasting Dragons remains, which turns out to be another covenant. A curious thing about this is that you can cut off his tail, and he won't even turn hostile. Considering how every other NPC works, this seems strange and gives me the impression that they just didn't have time to animate him as an enemy. This covenant is set up for duels, but there's already two other ways to do that which we've shown off, so it's a little redundant, although to be fair, this one came along before the coliseum. Anyway, my point is we're not going to bother showing this one off since we've fought enough for one video. Also, things got pretty existential there a minute ago, so to take your mind off the soul-crushing, inevitable heat death of the universe, we're going to frolic around as dragon friends. We've gone on quite a diversion since I killed the Bed of Chaos earlier, but it's finally time to get back to the main objective. There's two Lord Souls still to get. The next one will be Nito. Tomb of the Giants is an area I really like conceptually, but I think the execution probably could've used some more work. It feels like it never quite lives up to its potential even though it's hard to point out any specific thing that went wrong. Still, I'm really happy and impressed that they actually followed through on the idea for a completely pitch-black area. You almost never see realistically dark areas in games, and of course, there's a good reason for that. When it's too dark to see, we primarily rely on our sense of touch to get around, which of course isn't replicated properly in games, at least not yet. Without it, there's a good chance a player will just run into a wall for ten minutes without realizing. I see the extremely limited light ring you get around your character as a way of simulating that sense of touch, but really, you'll want a light source. There are only three of them, and each one has different pros and cons. The Sunlight Maggot is probably the best since you just have to give up your helm for perpetual light. Cast Light also leaves your hands free but costs you a spell slot and times out after a few minutes. It's the Skull Lantern which is the most interesting one. It costs your left hand, which is very punishing. It's the one you're most likely to find, but you're probably only going to use it if you have no better options. To make up for this a little bit, it lights up the edges of the cave, which can point you in the right direction. For a game as big as Dark Souls, I think it's great that there's only three options to light up this area which are scattered across the entirety of Lordran. It's a great example of how much the designers trust you as the player. They trust you to explore the world, to take an interest in the items you're finding, and basically just to use your brain rather than charging in blindly. The glowing eyes on the skeletons are the one concession they make here, meaning you at least get some warning about an impending threat. It also makes for an unnerving moment the first time you move forward and see some eyes peering back at you in the dark, not being sure what they belong to. Later on, you might experience a similarly unnerving moment if you get the attention of the Black Knight in this area. You'll be able to hear the clunking of his armor but not be able to see him. It's also surprisingly difficult to memorize the layout of this place and find some of the hidden areas. All of these are some of the nice benefits of having a place shrouded in darkness like this. Being the Tomb of the Giants, it makes sense that the skeletons here would be giant, and I have no problem with these by themselves, but there is an extremely dangerous ambush room later on which is a bit over the top. If you're a ranged character, this isn't too bad, but good luck getting through here otherwise. You're gonna need it. It's not exactly unfair, because if you're careful, you can see it coming, but it feels like you're almost forced to use ranged attacks or items to make your way through this. A lot of people don't mind that, and I can certainly see the benefits of trying to push the player outside their comfort zone, but to me, that feels like homogenization. As I was saying earlier, I prefer playing characters with specific strengths and weaknesses, but I feel this moment punishes certain playstyles a little too harshly compared to others. The skeletons here guard the Large Divine Ember. I can see why they would want to give you something valuable for clearing this room, but I'm not sure this was the best placement for this item. Most of the other Embers are placed very differently to this one. Take the Crystal Ember for example. You'll find it in the Duke's Archives where the enemies are made of crystal. That makes perfect sense, but it also means the area you find it in is probably the worst area in the game to actually use it. There's not much point fighting crystal enemies with crystal weapons. You get the ember there so you can use it elsewhere, and the same is true for most others too. As we showed much earlier on, you get the original Divine Ember in the forest and can then use that to make the Catacombs easier for yourself. With the Large Divine Ember, its placement is just kind of boring and unnecessary by comparison. If you can manage to surmount all the skeletons in this room, then you've basically proved that you don't need the Large Divine Ember anyway, and by the time you've finished the rest of this area, its worth will be significantly diminished since this is where it's the most useful. I only mention it here because it's easier to explain by using a bad example. This Ember is the exception rather than the rule. I actually think the Embers are some of the best-placed items in the game by and large. Embers weren't necessary in Demon's Souls because that game was much smaller, so they didn't need to put so many locks on the upgrades, but it still had that sort of rock, paper, scissors design. There was lots of items in one area that would be useful elsewhere, so I think the placement of the Embers in Dark Souls is one of the most 'Demon's Souls' things about its design. Speaking of Demon's Souls, it's shortly after this we run into Patches for the second time. One curious thing about him is that he doesn't appear in Firelink Shrine until after you kill Nito, which has to come after acquiring the Lordvessel. Despite that, when he returns to Firelink, he has dialogue warning you about Lautrec, whose story line should be well-finished at this point. I'm not sure whether this was an oversight or maybe a little touch of realism since Patches doesn't know that you've already met Lautrec. At least, since he warns you about you Lautrec, and you should know by now that Lautrec really was unpleasant, it might make you take his warning about Petrus more seriously. It's an interesting, little quirk, and I'd really like to know whether it was intentional or not. As I said earlier, he's pretty much the same as he was last time around, so I'm not going to dwell on him. Even if he doesn't kick you down the hole, you're probably gonna want to go down there anyway to rescue Reah and collect a few items. It's kind of funny how ultimately ineffectual he is. It makes it a little harder to hate him despite him obviously being horrible. The fact that Reah is still lucid while her bodyguards have gone hollow just goes to show again that hollowing has more to do with mental fortitude than physical fitness. To save her, we have to kill Vince and Nico, and if you talk to Petrus while they're all at Firelink earlier, he says they were her schoolmates. It's not clear what percentage of the population turn undead after they die, but regardless, it seems pretty coincidental that they would all end up as undead. Interestingly, there's an item available later in this area that provides an alternate explanation, which removes chance from the equation. Killing Paladin Leeroy who invades later on in this area unlocks the Paladin set, which says: "Long ago, the Way of the White produced its first undead, a paladin in golden armor." The word "produced" stands out here, as though they found some way to artificially induce undeath in people. If that's the case, then it's entirely possible the Way of the White had Vince and Nico intentionally turned undead so they could continue to guard Reah. And it may have even been done to Reah herself. Coming up after this, we have my most hated enemy in Dark Souls, the crawling skeletons. They are in a late-game area, so they should be somewhat difficult, but I find them to be considerably more punishing than any other enemy when taken on 1v1. Since they seem to obey the same rules as the other enemies, I wouldn't say they're broken or unfair or anything. I just don't find them fun to fight against. They do have a clear amount of vulnerability after they do their most dangerous attack, but otherwise they have an incredible amount of stamina, especially considering they're just a skeleton. I think they go to show what a delicate balancing act the enemy design is. If the enemy is too easy, then the player won't be satisfied after they kill them, and if they're too hard, then the frustration might outweigh that satisfaction. It could just be I find these particularly difficult because I play a close-range character. You'll notice, it's not that bad for the Pyromancer here, but there are other areas which are a bit more difficult for her. Personally, I find the Duke's Archives to be a relatively easy place, but apparently she doesn't. Another major item we can find here is the Silver Serpent Ring, but I'd say this suffers from the same issue as the Large Divine Ember. It boosts the number of Souls dropped by enemies, but if you can get down here and find this thing, you probably don't need it anymore, anyway. At least that's one benefit to having a New Game Plus mode. Things you pick up on your first playthrough might be a little more useful the second time around. If you want to get more use out of it, there's a little trick you can do with this one without having to have it equipped all the time. After you kill a boss, there's a delay before you gain their Souls, and it turns out if you equip this ring in that short interval, then you get the boosted amount of Souls anyway. I'm guessing this is unintentional, so I don't use it myself, but it's an interesting, little exploit. It just goes to show how many little edge cases and considerations need to be factored in when designing. I think it's one thing that might've slipped past a quality assurance team because it doesn't actually cause any real problems. A bit further in, around the area where Leeroy invades, you can see Ash Lake in the distance, which might act as a clue that there's another area if you missed it. You can also see Izalith earlier on, but you can't get to either of those places from here. Each of the branches that opens up after Ornstein & Smough results in a dead end, which you'll probably warp back from, which is a bit disappointing after the intricate level design of the first half. In fact, the boss rooms for the Four Kings, Bed of Chaos, and Nito are all set up in such a way that you have to warp out of them once you walk into them. I love walking from one place to another to avoid interruptions to my experience, but it's just not enjoyable or possible to do at this point thanks to the level design. Obviously, I would prefer if the entire game was more tightly woven together, but it is hard to blame them too much for this. It's just a simple fact that the larger the game world becomes, the harder it is to tie it all together cohesivley like that. Still, I can't help but feel, if Tomb of the Giants had somehow connected to Lost Izalith and Ash Lake, that it would go a long way towards solving the problem. New Londo is fine the way it is since it links directly from Firelink Shrine and Valley of the Drakes, which would just leave the Duke's Archives as the only dead end, then. There would be lots of different difficulties to contend with, though, to make Tomb of the Giants connect to those other areas. They would have to make the areas line up somewhat so that it actually makes sense, accommodate the load times that would be a factor as well, and make the art transition smoothly from drastically different environments. I'm sure there's a relatively simple reason why they didn't do that, even if it was just time constraints, but it's nice to daydream nonetheless. Just along here, there's an interesting moment with two skeletons. Their placement is set up in such a way that the one with the bow draws your attention, giving the other one a chance to kick you off the cliff, like so. I've done this bit a bunch of times now, so I'm pretty sure the skeleton on the left has some unique scripting which makes it much more likely to use the kick attack when it first sees you. There are a few other instances of somewhat similar scripting, like the hollows in the Undead Burg which will only lob firebombs until you get close, but this is definitely something I'd like to see more of. It's just a case of the enemy being more intelligent about which attacks they decide to use. I find it satisfying to play against, and it makes the enemies that little bit less repetitive, even if they're of the exact same type. It also feels innately fair because, even if you rush forward, you should still have time to see the attack animation coming if you're paying attention. Right before Nito, this room with the bowing skeletons makes for a great visual set piece. This gives me the impression of a creepy ritual long ago where everybody died at exactly the same time as they were praying. However, my assistant has a different view. She imagines that skeletons come here to bow down to Nito after they die. Both of these are equally valid and interesting theories, and I think this goes to show how you can easily interpret things differently. This is one of the many advantages of ambiguous story telling. I saw this as a disturbing ritual because that was the explanation which resonated most strongly with me. This is the last time I'll point this out, but I think the skeleton babies are another good example of what makes the art direction of Dark Souls a little bit different. Obviously, being attacked by the skeletons of long-since dead children is a pretty disturbing idea, but they don't look particularly horrifying. In fact, they look kind of cute with their big heads and the way they waddle as they walk. It's a dark concept but not anywhere near as overtly grotesque as the similar stuff you'll see in Demon's Souls or Bloodborne. This doesn't make Dark Souls better or worse. It's just different. For my part, I really enjoy the atmosphere in this game and don't feel it gets quite enough credit in that regard. Coming up, we have Nito, described as the "First of the Dead" in the introduction. This one was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I have a soft spot for necromancers, but I don't like things which force you to take damage, and dealing with the giant skeletons can be very frustrating. I've warmed to it a lot recently, though, since I've realized, even though it uses some gameplay mechanics I'm not fond of, it does them in a pretty unique and clever way. This boss fight is a glorified trap. When you enter this fight, a specific set of things happens which is designed solely to induce panic. First, you're forced to drop from a great height, taking a huge amount of damage. Your instincts will probably tell you to heal immediately, but you'll likely be hit from underneath, negating the use of your Estus. Still on low health, you look around, trying to discern where you're being attacked from, but the boss arena is built in a unique way. The cave is set up in such a way that it obscures the boss from your vision, and it's the only boss arena that does this. Nito himself has an extremely slow movement speed compared to other bosses, so he doesn't appear in front of you right away. Not knowing where the boss is and faced with the prospect of getting skewered from underneath again, your first instinct is probably to run, either to escape or to find the enemy. Unfortunately for you, running is the absolute worst thing you can do during this fight. The further you get into the boss arena, the more skeletons you'll wake up, and the harder the battle will become. Over and over, this game will punish you for rushing in blindly or not thinking things through, and here, it's no different. This is the ultimate test of your ability to be calm under pressure, your nerves. It's only when you finally hold out, decide to wait here, and assess the situation, that you'll be rewarded. Nito will slowly wander over to you, and the boss fight will be significantly easier. I don't have access to any statistics or playtesting data, so I can't say exactly how many players panic at this point, but if you ask me, this accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. This room is the one we showed earlier by entering the sarcophagus, and funnily enough, if you die here, you can actually still go back there and re-enter this room from there. Nito will be back in the coffin. You can still offer things to him, and you can even pick up your bloodstain. If you die to this boss and you're worried about getting your Souls back, that's always an option. Unfortunately, we do ultimately have to kill Nito to progress, though. Personally, I think of him as one of the most neutral characters in the story. Having a god of death is a common thing in polytheism, and they're rarely portrayed as outright evil. Presumably, someone has to fulfill this role in the world of Dark Souls, and as far as I can see, Nito isn't being especially malicious towards anybody in particular. With Nito even more dead than before, the only remaining Lord Soul we need is from the Four Kings. We haven't fulfilled all the requirements to get to them, though. First of all, we need to head back to Darkroot. There's a lot of AI-controlled Forest Hunters here, which is another one of those things that allows you to get a little taste of the covenants even if you can't get online. When the game was first released, you couldn't lock on to the Forest Phantoms here, which made this area much more difficult but not really in a good way. It was really just meaningless frustration. I do tend to ramble on sometimes about how the proliferation of the internet has allowed developers to get lazier or milk post-release content for more money, but of course, there are upsides. I get the impression, even if the team had another year of development time, these enemies probably still would've been untargetable when the game launched. It's the kind of thing that got changed thanks to the feedback they were able to gather once the public got their hands on it. Sometimes, that feedback can be dangerous because people don't always know what they want or don't have the best interests of other players in mind, but as long as the development team are willing to stick to their vision, it probably does more good than harm. As with any advancement in technology, it's never really the technology that's the problem, just the matter of how it's used. The Forest Hunters are one of the more popular covenants, at least partially because they're the only covenant with a consistent reward system. Any time a Forest Defender kills an intruder, they're randomly rewarded with one of a few potential items, mainly Titanite Shards and Chunks. It's nice to see the online interactions be incentivized with in-game rewards, but, if anything, they have this reward system backwards. Invaders already have an incentive to invade: the sheer fun of it. They risk little or nothing and gain the opportunity to kill another player. The people who really need to be incentivized to participate in online interactions are the potential victims. You can gain some Souls by killing an invader, sometimes too many Souls, but that isn't an especially interesting or tempting reward. For every person that loves invading, there's someone else who will go to the trouble of disconnecting their console from the internet to avoid that kind of thing. I appreciate how much more ambitious they were with the online this time around, but it has its pros and cons. With the unexpected level of success Demon's Souls had, they knew there would be a substantial amount of players for Dark Souls, but even so, I feel like they pushed their luck when it came to the covenants. For each online covenant, the online player base is splintered. Despite that, there are, or at least were, enough active players for this not to be a problem. As it is now, there are six main ways for players to fight one another in this game: the Forest Hunters, the Path of the Dragon, the Blades of the Dark Moon, the Darkwraiths, the Battle of Stoicism, and the Red Soapstone. Keep in mind, that doesn't include battling a Gravelord, coming across an invader while you're trying to do co-op, or even just keeping yourself in human form, which is basically an invite to invasion. The six main methods all have their little quirks of course, but more or less, they're all the same core experience. You go head to head against an enemy player. I can't say that any of them are particularly bad or unnecessary, and some players will prefer one method to another, but you have to admit there's some redundancy there. As the player base starts to dwindle, this becomes a bigger problem. Even if two players want to battle, they might be attempting to do so via different methods, which means they won't be able to. In other words, if I'm using the Red Soapstone, and you're at the Battle of Stoicism, we can't be paired up even though we essentially want to do the same thing. This wasn't an issue last time around, especially since Shrine of Storms became the designated battle zone. If you wanted to do a duel, you knew exactly where to go and what method to use. It's nice that covenants give players more options, but they just don't feel particularly meaningful to me. I think it could've benefit from some more restraint. A few really good covenants would be much better than a large number of simplistic ones. It's mainly thanks to the runaway success of Dark Souls that this didn't become a bigger issue, so I think in that sense the team were lucky that the game caught on as much as it did. My biggest problem with the Forest Hunters is the way the level matching works. If you're in the covenant, there's no upper limit on the level of people who you can end up fighting against. Gear makes the biggest difference, but levels do make a big difference too, especially when you're talking about several hundred. Even the basic level matching can feel unfair sometimes when the other player has much better gear than you, so it boggles my mind that they decided such extreme differences would be okay here. It throws all sense of fairness out the window. Even thought the player essentially has to opt-in to it by being in the Forest Hunter covenant, it's just not the kind of thing I would expect or hope to see in this game. I know what I would change to make this more balanced, myself. I think every weapon should have a Soul cost associated with it so that the game can keep track of the cost of all your equipment you have on you at the moment. It would then tally up the cost of your equipment, your upgrades, and your levels, and only pit you against players in a similar range. That would stop players from decking out low-level characters and destroying new players and, overall, make it a more balanced experience. That is, assuming the Soul numbers attached to the weapons and armor are reasonable enough. If this number was viewable from the menu, then players could even manipulate themselves to move up or down in value as they see fit, making it a bit more flexible than it is now with the level matching. I think all that sounds good, but the downside is players would need to be blocked from changing equipment, or none of it would work. Since players can be invaded at any time, the only way to do that would be to limit inventory management to the bonfires. Personally, I would really like that, as it would be a nice, little touch of realism, but I get the feeling most people would be against it because it would be seen as a hassle. I like to think of it another way. I think it would bring some interesting decision making into the equation if there was only so much you could take with you until the next bonfire. You might disagree, but one thing I would hope everyone could agree on is that matchmaking should be as fair as possible. I absolutely respect anyone who can get late-game equipment on low-level characters, but I don't think that gives you the right to automatically destroy other low-level players. The winner should always be the better player. Up next, we have Sif. Since I saved him in the past, I get a slightly extended cutscene where he recognizes me, but I still have to fight him anyway. For whatever reason, he has his mission to guard this grave and will stick to it no matter what, even if he knows you're a friend. If another team had made this game, they might have given you some secret way to avoid this fight, but I'm really glad they didn't. It's not something you're supposed to enjoy doing, but for a game about the inevitable death of everyone and everything, it would be a bit of a cop-out to give you a way around killing Sif just because it makes you feel bad. The animations on this boss are especially worthy of praise, first of all, because animators spend most of their time on bipedal creatures. Most of them don't have nearly as much experience with quadrupeds. It's obvious Sif's animations couldn't be motion-captured either since no real dog could do the things he does, so this all must have been done by hand. The sheer size of him poses another problem as well. The bigger an enemy is, the more obvious any problems with its animations are. If you're paying attention, you can certainly notice when Sif snaps sometimes from one animation into the next, but it's no worse than it is for any other enemy or boss, which is pretty impressive given the challenges they had here. It was pretty ambitious of them to attempt this in the first place, and not only that, but to rely on Sif's animations to sell an emotional gut punch at the end when he starts limping. I think this fight is a good example of Dark Souls being greater than the sum of its parts. Everything about this boss is good in and of itself. It's visually unique and eye catching, it moves differently to other bosses, and the music is one of the better compositions which really fits the mood. Since Sif just attacks using the sword, there's a massive dead zone underneath him where you'll probably be safe, but occasionally he'll jump away and force you to reposition yourself. From a gameplay perspective, it could be better, but it could be a lot worse too. It's really the way all these elements come together that turn this into a very memorable fight. Take away any of them, and it just wouldn't be as special. The only thing I'd change here is the threshold at which Sif begins to limp. I think it should've been raised so that players would be more likely to see it. As it is now, it's entirely possible to kill him too quickly and miss this. Making that sort of change would reduce the challenge, of course, but they could have even just boosted his HP to accommodate that. Anyway, the thing I like about this fight is it goes to show you don't necessarily have to sacrifice gameplay to pull at a player's heart strings. Even without any of the emotional baggage that goes along with this fight, it would still be pretty enjoyable regardless. They definitely deserve credit for not letting story elements get in the way of making a good game first and foremost. After this fight, we can find the Hornet Ring on a corpse behind Arotrias's gravestone. The ring belonged to Ciaran, and the corpse is female, so I think we can assume it's her. This does raise some questions if you killed her in the past, but I suppose it's not unreasonable to imagine her corpse ended up here somehow, regardless. I think we can also assume that Gough is dead in this time frame as well, so with that, it brings a close to the story of Gwyn's elite knights, one of the more interesting and well-executed pieces of lore in Dark Souls, I think. Thanks to the time travel, we get a better sense of their personality and closure on all of their stories. After making my way through the first half of New Londo as the Pyromancer did earlier, talking with Ingward will now allow me to progress further. I remember, the first time I played, I had an inkling that something was up with all the water here, but turning the wheel and exposing more of New Londo was still enjoyable nonetheless. This is an area which doesn't hold up quite as well on repeat playthroughs because the layout isn't particularly complex, but it's worth it for the satisfaction of discovering the second half. New Londo looks sort of mysterious and elegant above the water, but once you get down lower, you see the true horror and start to view the place differently. After you open the gate, some of the bodies get strewn into the Valley of Drakes, which is a nice, little touch. Most of the corpses seem to be concentrated in this area, but it's hard to say why. Of all the things to get heated about, discussing the placement of these corpses is actually the biggest argument the two of us had when making this video. After realizing how absurd it was to fight over the placement of a few corpses in a computer game, I eventually decided that my theory was objectively superior in every single way. I think the corpses must have mostly settled here by the time you open the gate, and that their placement is meant to imply the people were all crowded here before the end for whatever reason. An alternative way of looking at it, if you really want to, is that the corpses were all carried here when the water drained out, but there's a big mound of them which is difficult to explain with that theory. I'm not convinced the flooding of New Londo was as well thought out as some of the other stuff in the game, so it's hard to say for sure and probably not really worth arguing about. The Darkwraiths were originally the knights of New Londo, and while they might look evil now, you can't really take that for granted. As we'll see shortly, the story of Dark Souls is a little more complicated than it might appear on the surface. If you want to become a Darkwraith yourself, you have to complete this area, which means killing the Four Kings. Overall, it's pretty hard to become an invader in this game early on since the boss here is one of the more difficult ones. As I said earlier, I think balancing should always be a concern, even for invasions, but I still really like invasions as a concept, even though I only occasionally do them myself. With how easy it is for people to avoid them, I really don't think this also needed the roadblock of being one of the most difficult covenants to get to. The entrance to the Four Kings is another one of those areas where Dark Souls places a lot of faith in the player. The ring you need to walk through the Abyss is very far away from here, but you're still expected to discover it and use it here with only a few hints. The only catch is the fog gate which traps you here before you've had a chance to realize there's a problem, meaning, even if you realize you'll need an item from somewhere else, you have no way of obtaining it. I can see how they got themselves into this bind, though. They could've just set this area up like Seath, where the fog door only appears after you first fight the boss, but that would have its own problems. The fog door provides a crucial hint that something important is supposed to happen here. Without it, many of us probably would've just ignored this drop and gotten stuck as a result. Ultimately, despite its problems, the fog door ends up being the better choice since it forces the player off the ledge. I really like the way the Abyss itself was executed. There really isn't a better representation of the concept than just a vast void of black nothingness. It also has the bonus effect of depriving you of your sense of perspective, too. You have no way of knowing how close you are to the first of the Four Kings until you get right up in front of him. It's a bit of a surreal moment, and I'm surprised I haven't seen any other game do this until now, considering what a simple trick it is, although it's not like I've played every other game ever made, so who knows? The battle against the Four Kings is a race against time since they can all be active at once, and if it gets to that point, it's incredibly difficult to come back from it. This is an especially difficult feat for me since I'm not particularly damage-orientated, which is why I've left them until last. The bosses aren't quite as novel as the ones in Demon's Souls, but I still appreciate the time that went into differentiating them from one another, particularly the ones in the second half. The Four Kings, Nito, and Ornstein & Smough are all multi-enemy bosses, but you'll need totally different strategies for each one. Even outside of those, the way you'll approach a boss like Priscilla needs to be very different to how you'll fight Gwyndolin. The core combat of these games is pretty repetitive given how limited the player's moveset is, but the boss fights compensate for this by forcing you to approach things in a different way. The way the Four Kings have been programmed means you can actually end up fighting five of them, depending on what kind of damage you're doing. This seems like a strange oversight, and it's a good example of what I was saying at the start about it being difficult to discern what is and isn't intentional in games. I highly, highly doubt they intended for there to be a possible five Kings in this fight, and if something that big can slip through the cracks, it makes you wonder what else might be unintentional as well. The soul that they drop has an interesting description. It says: "Lord Gwyn recognised the foresight of these four great leaders of New Londo, and granted them their ranks and the fragments of a great soul." "Foresight" is a bit of a strange word, there. It seems like the Four Kings understood something which nobody else did. This must've been before the creation of the Darkwraiths, though, so it's hard to say what exactly this refers to. Really, I think they just wanted an excuse for one of the Lord Souls to be in possession of someone who has sided with the dark, but it's an interesting thing to mull over, anyway. Because I did the Four Kings last, nothing particular happens once I've beaten them. However, if you're more daring and do them much earlier on, then you get to meet Kaathe. Kaathe is probably the most vital NPC when it comes to understanding the overall story of this game. The best way to explain it is just to let his dialogue speak for itself. The first time you play the game, you're not likely to come across Kaathe, and this seems intentional to me. You take Frampt at face value and most likely complete the mission that's been handed to you from the start. Darkness is usually associated with evil in most things, and Dark Souls uses this preconception to trick you. In Dark Souls, the dark isn't any more good or evil than the alternative. While the Fire Ending might not necessarily be bad in and of itself, the way Frampt leads you towards it is somewhat manipulative. You're not really told what will happen, so your character ends up burning themselves alive. You could argue, though, that this is a release for your character since it probably destroys them completely, which is arguably a better fate than going hollow. Kaathe seems more serious and also more open about things. He acknowledges Frampt and seems to give you more insight into what's going on, although we can't ignore the possibility that he could be lying about things. Since Kaathe represents the Dark Lord Ending, it may be that he's trying to gather up as much Humanity as possible to recreate the Dark Soul. You can offer Humanity to him, and in reward, the Dark Hand allows you to suck more Humanity from your victims, up to a maximum of ten at a time. If you choose his ending, you'll become the Dark Lord, but it's not entirely clear what that entails: possibly the death of the gods and the rise of man, but it's hard to envision it with all the fires gone out. The Fire Ending seems like the worst ending at a glance, but it's important to note that Kaathe is most likely the one responsible for the disaster in Oolacile, so it's not entirely clear cut which answer is the right one. It was never intended to be that simplistic, anyway. Whatever the case, I think it worked out well to present the story like this. If they had made Kaathe and his side of the story more obvious, then they would be under more pressure to pit the two snakes against one another and pull the player in two directions. For a first playthrough, it's probably best just to keep things simple given how sparse the presentation is. I also just like seeing hidden content like this. It takes advantage of games as a medium by presenting things in a format which is impossible elsewhere. Whoever you decide to go with in the end, and whichever ending you think is the best-case scenario, what's clear is that your character is caught up in something much, much larger than themselves. The Primordial Serpents are the puppet masters of Dark Souls. You can choose to trust one of them or think for yourself instead, but either way, you have to make the choice in the end. With all of the Lord Souls acquired, all that's left now is to place the souls and do the final boss. There are lots of really nice scenes, visually, in Dark Souls, but this one has to be one of my favorites despite how simple it is: just a white area where the souls of Gwyn's knights are left wandering. I think this is quite impactful because the knights are used as recurring enemies throughout the entire game, so you're well-used to seeing them at this point. Now that you're nearly finished, you get to see them in a different light, which might make you think about them a little differently. What I really like here, though, is how organically this is done. It's just an area, not a cutscene, and even the way the area itself is presented is nothing special, really. A lot of games these days will try to go for environmental story telling or scripted sequences which are supposed to feel more natural, but, really, they never stop holding your hand. I think many lesser developers would have forced the player to go through this area at a walking pace, or something obnoxious like that. Putting arbitrary restrictions like that on the player feels a little bit like treating them like a child. You're telling them that this place is too important to run around. Thankfully, there's no such restrictions here. If you like, you can just run right through here and ignore everything around you. I think one of the main reasons I pay more attention and get more engaged in the story of Dark Souls compared to many other games is because it treats me like an adult. When I'm treated with respect, I'm happy to return the favor. It's not hard to see why so many people get so attached to these games when you take that mutual respect into account. At the Kiln itself, I think the ash is supposed to imply that Gwyn burned his knights to prolong the Flame, and as you can see by the sheer volume, quite a lot of stuff has been incinerated to keep the Age of Fire going. It looks like the spirits of those knights haven't wandered very far from what used to be their bodies. There's only a few living knights here, which makes this one of the easiest areas in the game. I can see why they wouldn't want people to get frustrated by the walk back to Gwyn, but they still probably could've crammed a final, climactic area in here, then added a second bonfire. The latter half of the game tends to get easier and easier for you since the areas are roughly similar in difficulty, whereas your character keeps growing in ability. This would've been a nice opportunity to put the player's skills even further to the test with a more difficult area. Bloodborne manages to do this a little bit better, so maybe they've since realized that this was a bit of a wasted opportunity. I don't really mind it myself because I'm not too hung up on the difficulty, but I know a lot of players will be expecting a harder area here and be let down. Still, the art direction here is fantastic, and you get the unmistakable sense that this will be the final area, regardless of the challenge. Given its theme, I can't think of a better way to end Dark Souls than in a huge mountain of ash. It's a perfect setting for the finale. The last boss is, of course, Gwyn himself. He never says a word to us, just attacking on sight, which I think has led a lot of people to believe he's gone hollow, but I don't see it that way, myself. The game seems to go out of its way to maintain the fact that hollowing is a specifically human thing. We never see any non-humans in a hollow state. Even if you think back to Oolacile, the people there were obviously inflicted with something else entirely. Artorias has gone mad, but doesn't seem to be hollow exactly, and despite the fact that many, many NPC story lines end in hollowing, Dusk, Ciaran, and Gough are never shown to hollow either. The other possibility, which I think is much more compelling, is that Gwyn is just tired or uninterested in talking to the player. He has too much pride to let go of his hold on the world, even though his time has clearly come and gone. There's nothing more to say about it, and it's entirely possible you're not the first person to wander down here and try your luck against him, anyway. People like to talk about how easy Gwyn, which I wouldn't entirely disagree with. He's not as challenging as anything in Oolacile or some of the other bosses, but I don't think he's a pushover either. Funnily enough, he's actually the only boss that killed me more than once on this playthrough. I had a fair bit of trouble with him on my first playthrough too, but of course, once I realized I could parry him, he became a lot easier. I'm sure many people had a similar experience. I love the soundtrack to this battle, which evokes just the right atmosphere. You know things are serious when the composer busts out the piano track. I'd say the strength of the piece that plays here is the reason why they never had to write any dialogue for Gwyn. It says everything that needs to be said: just a battle against a tired man who needs to be put out of his misery. With Gwyn dead, there's just the matter of the ending. You can either relight the Fire or walk away. We'll be showing both endings here. I'm going to reignite the Fire, and she's going to let it die out. I'm assuming they intended for most players to get the Fire Ending first, since your instinct after beating a boss is to light the bonfire, but I don't think that makes the other ending any less valid. There's certainly an argument to be made that it's ultimately better for everyone to stop prolonging the inevitable. Both ending sequences are a little abrupt, but it's probably better they close it out quickly rather than try to explain too much and ruin the mystery. It's the kind of thing that leaves you wondering, which is a pretty good fit for this game. Naturally, I made a lot of comparisons to Demon's Souls throughout this video, and a lot of those comparisons weren't especially favorable for Dark souls. I think Demon's Souls had a better online system, more novel bosses, and a better sense of polish and completeness when it came to its world. Comparing the two for this video has given me more respect for Demon's Souls than I already had. However, that said, I still prefer Dark Souls, myself. It's a somewhat messier game, but as far as I'm concerned, it has enough ambition to make up for it. It's clear they didn't want to just churn out a carbon-copy sequel to Demon's Souls. They genuinely tried to make some significant improvements and changes along the way. Some of those, like the interconnected level design, were a success. Others, like the covenants, were more of a mixed bag. It has more rough edges, but I also think the bright spots shine more brilliantly, too. Well, there you have it. It was a long journey, but it's all over now. If you managed to stick it out all this way without going hollow, give yourself a pat on the back. I'm truly grateful for all your time, and I hope you manage to get something out of it in return. Even though it's been such a long video, I'm having a bit of a hard time signing off. I just can't actually believe that this is the end. I don't really have anything else to say, but I'm not really sure what way to finish this after it's been such a long time. I think I'll just have to take my cue from the game and stop delaying the inevitable. It's not like I have anything else to say anyway, so I'm just gonna do my usual send off. I hope I'll see you next time, and thanks for watching.

Channel: Matthewmatosis

Views: 1,620,679

Rating: 4.8983068 out of 5

Keywords: review, analysis, critique, commentary, retrospective, dark souls, demon's souls, bloodborne, fromsoft, from software, souls

Id: EV16ROaHVfo

Length: 383min 15sec (22995 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Sigbru]

Wow he's still alive? I wonder what took this so long.

looks at video length

Oh that's why.

[u/Skrams]

Rickert

God, I'm a fucking idiot for not knowing about that.

Either way this seems great as expected. 6 Hours of mostly game design talk and reasoning for how things are placed. Good shit.

[u/mypalkevin]

Posting it cause Pat loves Matthewmatosis

[u/Human_Sack]

Can't wait to see Matthew's thoughts on MGSV.

[u/dazdndcunfusd]

I've been waiting for this for soooooo long. I watched his livestreams and he would always talk about the frustrations of it there.

[u/Slack_Attack]

Fucking hell, 6 hours? I'm gonna have to break this down into some more manageable chunks.

[u/Sllypper]

SIX HOURS of commentary and analysis of Dark Souls!

Plague will freaking love this! :D