Dark Souls Was Right All Along

hey thanks for watching today's video today's video is sponsored by humble games if you haven't heard the hummer bundle is offering some really great games for march the games are xcom chimera squad elix and control which i actually covered on the show not that long ago for this month you can lock in a special price of 12 bucks a month for 12 months for new members on top of getting a aaa title you're getting a wide range of 11 other games to play and keep on your pc forever so if you want to sign up for march's humble choices and lock in that price for 12 months you can do so by clicking the link in the box down below signing up supports the show again a big thank you to humble games for sponsoring today's video now on with the show everyone who plays games has experienced that feeling of hitting a wall that makes you step away from the game in anger only to come back later and find that you've learned and grown or at least that you've just calmed down enough to get over the hump and push your way through to the next super hard boss just in time to repeat that process over again with demon souls and the follow-up dark souls from software turned that feeling into not just a series but an entire genre and while i found dark souls to originally be frustrating the first time around my journey with this game has mirrored the exact feeling that the game creates where i've had to push past those initial negative feelings to grow and change and maybe just maybe to admit that dark souls has been right all along hey everyone and welcome back to a brand new episode of the completionist new game plus the show where i am re-completing the original 120 games i ever featured here on the channel more on that the box down below before we start today's episode a quick shout out next week please come to twitch.tv completionist we are having our charity event preserved play to raise money for the game history foundation it's on 27th and 28th of march we have some awesome game devs and youtubers showing up we're gonna be playing games there's gonna be challenges there's gonna be good times come on by i'll see you there today i'm revisiting dark souls which i originally completed for the channel's 100 000 subscribers special in which i got pulled into an evil xbox as you can see that's not the case this time around i'm just in a regular old non-evil office but that's the only thing that's changed this time around i have a decade of additional experiences from soft games now and i am way better at them plus i've spent ages talking to people like montevideo or tobg's own pact who both have a level of knowledge and enthusiasm about this game and it's a world that it's infectious so i figure the least i can do is return to this game with an open mind and see if my appreciation for it has grown and changed in the way these games have asked their players to grow and change and spoiler alert it has let's begin [Music] when dark souls was released in 2011 i had no idea how influential it would end up being or how ubiquitous the term souls like and its associated genre would become hell even the word soul no longer has meaning because i've said and heard it so many times released as a spiritual successor to from's demon souls due to the rights being held by different companies dark souls is one of those games that shouts i'm not a sequel while winking at you and wearing a shirt that says i'm basically a sequel but even though it was the second souls game it was this installment right here that the souls games began to take over the gaming world and never really slowed down when i first completed dark souls and had the universal experience of initially being absolutely terrible at it it was just a game i gave it one of my combined ratings of complete it or finish it and then moved on with my life or so i thought but by now it's a whole vibe that has spread to consume the past decade of gaming and that vibe is the feeling of throwing your controller against a wall only to feel really cool a few hours later when you finally beat the impossible boss and this isn't the feeling that the souls game necessarily invented but they weaponized it in a way that i wasn't used to at the time and was pretty thrown off by it not just in terms of the punishing gameplay but also from soft's similarly unforgiving approach to building a story in a world in a world once ruled by dragons humanity now reigns supreme in the age of fire the age of fire is dimming in spite of the sacrifice of gwyn the lord of sunlight an undead curse has begun to take hold and the forces of darkness are creeping their way into the world as one of those wretched undead individuals it's up to the player to collect enemy souls fulfill the prophecy and determine whether the age of fire will carry on or be consumed by darkness but rather than with the traditional narrative most of this is communicated through little bursts of backstory delivered by the npcs or implied through design and flavor text in practice the story is mostly expressed the central gameplay mechanics several which have become second nature by now gameplay mostly involves exploring the world and collecting souls while trying not to be killed and then when you inevitably are killed trying to get back to that spot so you can collect your souls before they're gone forever resting at bonfires acts as a checkpoint that restores your health and spells but also responds all the enemies you work so hard to kill this concept felt really new and novel 10 years ago but now this is an idea that's so widespread it even showed up in a star wars game which is mostly a testament to how solid it is and how fine-tuned the risk-reward balance is in these games but i'm in a different place than i was a decade ago and so are these games in a practical sense i am much better at them than i was but fromsoft also has been steadily tweaking and refining the formula ever since demon's souls while keeping the core experience the same so normally i wouldn't be that excited to revisit the game that i had a kind of muted reaction to my relationship to this entire vibe and style of game has altered drastically which means it may be a whole new experience and at the very least i'm probably going to die a lot less so that doesn't hurt either so when i first played dark souls i admit that i didn't fully get the appeal gradually getting better felt good and the monsters in world were cool and all but it was the first one of these games i'd ever played and i didn't really care enough to fully throw myself into the lore or to get creative with how i approached the bosses just a quick shout out to chaz and ryan from a long time ago who helped me some of my earliest community friends helped me through playing through this game and i'm very grateful for what they showed me the gameplay in the story is all very open and feelings based and while i was able to put in the time necessary to get good and complete the game i wasn't sure that it was all that worth it but now that i've spent 10 whole years continuing down that path seeping the style of gameplay into my bones and talking to dark souls obsessives i can finally admit that i was wrong about this game in several ways there's no one forcing you to become obsessed with the vague nebulous world building that's on display here or to do what i've done and get good enough to push yourself through multiple playthroughs but the game is there if you're willing to meet it where it's at and that requires a level of investment that is immediately going to put some people off just like i did with me the first time i played it the story is an open world of decay and sadness and i wasn't willing to dive into it the first time around the surface level iconography was still kind of neat like a oh look a dog with a sword in its mouth but as a player my personal preference is for a story and narrative that's a little more guided and specific but now i realize that i can get more from this game by just throwing myself down the rabbit hole because if there is one thing that my life as a completionist has taught me it's that throwing yourself down a rabbit hole actually pays off sometimes and that's clearly true for many of my friends who love the mythology and story of these weird ass games the story here is the world and on this playthrough i was much more able to tap into that maybe it's because fromsoft has now branched into other worlds like bloodborne and secuto that i was more able to vibe with or maybe it goes hand in hand with the gameplay which has fully broken me down and rebuilt me multiple times by this point in my soul's born life cycle because that's still the thing that i love most about this game and others like it it forces players to change and grow and makes the process as satisfying as it is infuriating the trial and error scales up in a way that i was constantly challenged by when i first played this game even by the time of my third or fourth run i had learned this game's specific style of combat sure but i was still making mistakes because it's an rpg dark souls puts less emphasis on leveling up your character than on leveling up as a player which is cool but also means pushing through some not so great feelings but now i realize that those bad and gross feelings are a healthy part of the process because now with the benefit of a decade of experience i didn't have a particularly difficult time with any of the bosses years ago i threw myself at the wall that is these games until i broke through the other side and now that all my bones have healed i'm just still there on the other side of those gross boss fights it was also helpful knowing this time that i had to complete exactly two and a half playthroughs since last time i just kept doing new game plus as it got harder and harder all the way up to new game plus seven without realizing that the rabbit hole had no end and would go as deep as i was willing to travel but this time i did one playthrough for the good ending one for the bad ending and then half a playthrough to get the remaining required boss souls which i needed in order to finish all the trophies which required me to get all the various weapons and spells and like almost everything with these games that's asking a lot but it's ultimately fair if it weren't for so many of the trophies requiring more copies of certain boss souls then two playthroughs would have been more than enough but it's fine it's half a playthrough it wouldn't be dark souls if it wasn't making things like just slightly more difficult than they needed to be and i get that now even some of the glitches and bugs are now folded into what i enjoyed about the game i mean bugs are obviously still bad but this time i learned how to do a bunch of out of bounds glitches that helped me skip several hours on my last playthrough so i'm not complaining in general the open and undirected feeling of this game has become something that i love about it instead of dreading it like i used to the player is given all sorts of freedom and not just how they grow and improve but in how they explore the game in its world the openness that felt vague and non-committal my first time around now feels like a big gross sandbox for me to play in and players are much more inclined to grow and improve when they have a say in exactly how they're gonna do that although the multiplayer in my eyes is still a mess i get why it's cool in theory it's the idea of risk reward where being in human form allows you to summon other players but also lets people show up and murder you just for fun so i spent most of my time in undead form but again it's okay because later games either refined de-emphasized or completely removed these kinds of elements so it's easy now to kind of just look past them before i was really frustrated at how difficult the game made it to actually play with a friend but now i've come to a place of acceptance and don't really care because yes there are things about the game and souls born games in general that still don't completely vibe with me 100 but now that i have some distance perspective and a whole lot more experience i can see how fully formed the appeal of these games was from the very beginning because in the end dark souls is gonna do what it does and it's the player that needs to change and get on the game's level because what these games are going for has always been dope and it's worth the frustration if you're willing to get on the game's level and do what it's asking of you and if you're not if the thought of pushing past that moment where you hate the game and yourself and the boss like you're playing then don't it's okay at the very least you have my permission but if you get in this game's zone like i was finally able to you'll be handsomely rewarded for it [Music] so when i say you'll be rewarded for it i obviously mean that on a personal metaphorical level rather than an actual sort of tangible reward because that is not something this game has and personal growth is cool and all but it's even cooler when it also comes alongside a super dope weapon or suit of armor and sure there are the boss weapons which are very dope but they don't really count and since there's no real bonus stopping halfway through my third playthrough when i got my last achievement felt sort of anticlimactic like okay i'm done now i guess i'll i'll go outside and yeah look i get it the real reward here is the frustrating breakthroughs we made along the way and that's fine really it is but i never complained about an extra super dope sword just saying especially on this play through since these games are now second nature enough that i'm no longer unlocking new levels of gameplay so something to unlock in a more literal sense would have been cool but overall even without a completion bonus i am way more on board of this game than i used to be i get what these games are going for now and they were right all along it was never up to the game to change but for me to change which is only fitting because it's true that while i wasn't really still leveling up as a player it was cool to fire up this game and realize how much more accepting and capable i had become when i re-completed dark souls remastered on the ps4 there were 22 deaths now this was way fewer than last time and not just because i did way fewer playthroughs i definitely did have a much stronger sense of how to survive but this is still dark souls so obviously deaths are going to happen 72 spells acquired including 24 miracles 20 pyromancies and 28 sorceries plus 17 boso's weapons crafted all of this was the same as last time because it's necessary for the trophies and speaking of which 41 trophies unlocked this time i was able to do these much more efficiently getting the last ones halfway through my third playthrough as the absolute last thing i did 30 hours of total playtime which once again is way less than last time because i unnecessarily did seven playthroughs before shaving off 70 hours please leave me alone and zero controller shaped holes in my wall as a result of replaying this game which is how i know personally i've grown as a person you know i can admit when i'm wrong and while i still think it's fine if these games don't necessarily click for everyone i can see now that most of my issues with it have been worn away with time and familiarity because in the end dark souls was right these games rule the world now and i'm totally on board thanks to the insight and enthusiasm of the awesome community that has sprung up around these games so now that i know it only takes two and a half playthroughs to fully complete this thing i have no informations about my final thoughts the very least though i will add that i'm not the biggest fan of how the story is told through the architecture that's just a me thing i personally love when stories present themselves exactly as they see linear storytelling is my jam i'm down to get weird but not all the time so with that in mind guys i give this game my completionist rating of finish it finish it [Music] oh

Channel: The Completionist

Views: 387,287

Keywords: dark souls, dark souls review, dark souls gameplay, dark souls remastered, dark souls remastered review, dark souls remastered gameplay, review, gameplay, remastered, dark souls switch, completionist, super beard bros, game review, game reviews, dark souls ps4, playstation, ps4, demon souls, dark souls 2, dark souls 3, dark souls 4, bloodborne, playstation 5, ps5, digital foundry, from software, bluepoint games, bloodborne review, sekiro, sekiro shadows die twice, ign, game grumps

Id: UUhtoeSBPeI

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ColtonMyolton]

We're so close to 120! Which games are left?