RogueyWon's Journal: Dark Souls: Addendum

Since I made my previous post here, I've gone on to complete Dark Souls. More or less as I thought at the time, I was around one third of the way through the game. However, a couple of roadblocks I hit during the remainder ensured that my final play-time reached 79 hours.

My previous post offered a mostly positive assessment, albeit with a couple of caveats. Now that I've completed the game I can say with confidence; this is an amazingly good game. The kind of game that comes along once every few years and redefines genres. It's not perfect, but the flaws are but tiny surface blemishes on an otherwise-immaculate whole.

Let me return to the flaws highlighted in the previous post. The framerate issues become much less frequent as you get into the game's later stages. It's only Blight Town that really suffers from them; probably because of the large number of flaming torches. I suspect that From Software were aware that they had some framerate problems; all of the boss encounters are carefully designed so as to be completely devoid of them.

The curse status effect is, I still feel, a bit harsh. However, the further you get into the game, the more trivial the price of removing it becomes. I also found some gear that greatly increased my curse-resistance, after which my curse-bar filled up so slowly that I was never really in danger of contracting the ailment from that point onwards. There is a boss that can use curse, which sounds extremely harsh in principle. However, the boss is a pretty easy one; after many deaths running the rather formidable gauntlet to reach him, I managed to kill him on the first attempt.

As for the control issues... you get used to them in the end. The camera occasionally misbehaves a bit, getting stuck on scenery and twisting around unexpectedly, changing the direction your character is moving. That's annoying, and it nearly killed me a couple of times, but I was always able to compensate just about in time. There were no more occurences of the clipping problems I encountered early in the game (though those instances remain present and repeatable).

And Blight Town? I still maintain that the poison-infested swamp that makes up its lower level is bad design. However, I see now that some changes to my combat style (and using a different weapon) would have made the upper levels much more tolerable.

There's one further problem I picked up on; humanity. Reverting to human form allows you to call in allies for some of the game's bosses, rendering them substantially easier. However, the process of farming up humanity is a bit slow and grindy (basically, run around killing rats). It's pretty much the only reminder in the entire game that you're playing a Japanese RPG and I would have appreciated something to at least take the grind out of it.

Anyway, enough of the criticisms. This game works, and works brilliantly. The melee combat system is, as discussed in my earlier post, amazingly good. I really started to understand this as I got further into the game and found that I needed to be switching my weapons around more; each weapon has its own distinctive pace and feel, which the game communicates brilliantly.

The area design is also fantastic. Yes, some areas of the game are deeply sadistic; the New Londo Ruins in particular took me a long time to work through. But there's always a logic and a flow to the areas. Shortcuts to other areas open up organically. Previously inaccessible areas are opened up in intruiging ways. And death can lurk around every corner; pushing into a new area always carries a feel of palpable dread.

Then there's the bosses. Some of these are surprisingly easy; basically footnotes at the end of ridiculously hard dungeons. Others are more easily accessed, but are nightmarishly hard to defeat. And a couple are a challenge both to reach and defeat.

No two bosses ever feel alike. Sure, there are a few common techniques around blocking, evading and countering that you'll use on many bosses, but every fight brings something unique to the mix. There's even a boss which basically appears three times, with the same set of skills and abilities - but because of the different environments you fight him in, each of which poses unique challenges, it feels like a new and fresh fight each time.There is, perhaps, a slight difficulty-curve issue around the bosses, however. The hardest boss in the game (by quite some way) is actually about half-way through the game, while the last boss isn't much trickier than the average.

Again, this isn't a review - but if it were, I would now be tending much closer to 10/10 than 9/10. This is a game that sets a new standard for action/adventure games. Any game which tries to implement melee combat without learning lessons from Dark Souls in the immediate future is going to fall flat. After running behind the curve for most of the current console cycle, Japan has finally produced a game that shifts the boundaries forward.