Note: This review contains spoilers. However, if you are generally turned off by difficult games, maybe read this anyway as I think spoilers may help you better appreciate it, and maybe even motivate you to get into the series.
It is no secret that the original Dark Souls is debatably my favorite game of all time. As nauseating as it has become listening to the zealots of Dark Souls' rabid congregation (of which I consider myself a part of), there is a reason people have gone so bonkers over the series: it is just that damn good. I don't want to dwell on this misconception that "difficulty makes it good", since a lot of people have already written up great reasons why this isn't the case, but I'll reiterate the basics: this game is difficult, but rarely as difficult as it seems. It isn't that Dark Souls is punishingly hard to keep completion rates low and thus give it some kind of exclusivity club for those who "get it", but rather it forces you into a corner to either get with its mechanics and gameplay or get stomped on. It realizes that truly challenging yourself to understand the mechanics of games can often be the most fulfilling part. But difficulty is simply the method toward a much better philosophy: what makes a game fun?
Dark Souls could have done one or two of its various aspects right and it would still have been a good game, but it did nearly all of them well. The game is far, far from perfect (I've heard the term "messterpiece" thrown around a lot), but what works gives you more than enough to overlook its glaring flaws. Controls feel good, the environments (usually) ooze personality and lore bits, and the gameplay -- a tug of war between the stat management and gear swapping/improving of RPGs and the minute-to-minute moveset strategizing of fighting games -- absolutely nails an engaging, fun, and rewarding style of challenge. Draped over this core of a great game, however, is an abstract and often philosophical story that takes elements from Greek mythology and existentialism. There are arguments to be made that perhaps there is too much ambiguity when it comes to the plot, but simultaneously that is one of its most compelling features: it gives you the people, places, and pieces of events that historically happened and are happening in the world of Lordran, but give you the opportunity to speculate as to how all of it ties together. Story bits are trickled out to the player through item descriptions (have you ever played a game where you were looking forward to reading an item description? --well, welcome to Dark Souls), snippets muttered by NPCs, and environmental tells such as dilapidated buildings or sunken ruins of a once great city. The game requires total engagement to get everything, but even if you make a brisk pass through the game you will find enough to be intrigued, and it will get you wondering who these gods where and why they did the few things you've picked up on along the way. The inherent existentialism of the series has always fascinated me: the gods consider the undead plague unbecoming, the human populace stricken by this plague consider it a curse, yet is immortality not the counter to fear of death? Dark Souls argues that death and finality are something special, something to be coveted, and something worth fighting for. Never have I played a game where what I was struggling so hard to accomplish was the right for my character to die.
While the Soulsborne series is at five entries now (does Sekiro count as a sixth Soulsborne?), I've only ever played to completion the three titles under Dark Souls. Dark Souls III does something weird within the universe: it is a sequel to a previous entry. Whereas Dark Souls II debatably took place in another land far away, Dark Souls III repeatedly pushes toward one conclusion: we are back in Lordran, now under the name of Lothric. The allusions are countless, and without spending the rest of the year playing the game I could never account for them all. But in being a sequel, the game allows us to reflect on the story that came before us, and reflect on why we play these games in the first place.
Dark Souls III starts with the ringing of a bell, an interesting play on the bells you are required to ring in the first third of the original game. The bell wakes you, the Ashen One, a chosen undead to gather the Lords of Cinder, also awoken by the bell, and bring them to Firelink Shrine to relight the first flame and thus end the undead curse and bring back the life throughout the land. The basics of Dark Souls lore is this: there is something called the First Flame, a mystical flame that allows for human prosperity (or debatably hinders it, giving prosperity to the gods). It goes out after a long time of burning (although never explicitly said, there is evidence it burns for centuries), and must be relit. A long time ago, before the first game, the Zeus-like figure Gwen sacrificed himself and his Lord Soul to relight the flame, but it was only a temporary solution, and it brought with it the undead curse. As the First Flame's light faded, so too did the undead curse rise. In Dark Souls III, the Prince Lothric was supposed to relight the flame, like many Lords of Cinder did before him, but he refused (there are multiple opinions in game whether or not relighting the flame is a good idea or not, with different endings depending on your choice). The light is so dim now that it requires three of the previous Lords of Cinder as well as Prince Lothric in order to relight it, and so your quest is to find them all, undead, kill them, and take their cinders to Firelink Shrine in order to relight the fire.
To be fair, I wouldn't blame you if all of that was just a bit too much for you. The story isn't particularly complex outright (darkness is here, and defeat darkness by beating baddies), but its execution is. Each of the Lords of Cinder have their own lore to them, each a story that can be incredibly difficult to fully pick up on through your playthrough. Dark Souls III deals with its plot as good, if not better, than any of the previous Dark Souls games. There is a depth to what you can learn about each boss, why they are there, what their affect on their area of the map is, and why they have the significance enough to be a boss. It's grimdark stuff, which may not be to your taste, but it plays out very much like a tragedy of man. It is hard to follow the plot and not feel as though perhaps the gods are something closer to ideological, that the flame is a type of optimism, the undead curse a type of existentialist cynicism. Philosophically, all of these games can be taken apart and studied (and they have), and Dark Souls III does extremely well in its engagement with this type of storytelling. The story may not feel as succinct as the original, but it feels told to you a little more straight. It adds not only to the original game's plot, but also allows for its own lore and its own smaller-scale complexity as you meet NPCs and follow their questlines (questlines are done differently in these games, where rather than having markers on a minimap, you have to find them in the world and talk to them in order to progress their story, and it is very easy to screw up, giving you different outcomes as you play). Despite it being built almost entirely on top of the original's foundations plotwise, I'd have to recommend Dark Souls III as probably the best starting point in the series, with the caveat that it should really be played again after beating the first.
Dark Souls has a major problem with pacing. In that first game, it had a tightly knotted map with interconnecting pathways and multiple directions to go. It is a common complaint that the original game was poor at telling you which direction to go first was. In the opening area, the catacombs where right there with skeleton enemies and gravestones -- a go-to for early levels in most RPGs. However, in Dark Souls this is one of the end game areas, and so any new player trying to make their way down there will be met with a stiff brick wall of difficulty. Even learning where you need to go, the game's difficulty can sometimes spike and drop at will, with a vague semblance of a difficulty curve. There is an underlying curve, but it isn't so smooth. Dark Souls III fixes this with not only the best difficutly curve in the series, but one of the best I've ever played in a game. For veteran players, the first half of the game can be a steady but somewhat easy playthrough until roughly halfway through the game, where the game starts to resemble what a majority of the other games feel like, before finally ramping up in its later quarter. Although never as hard as the hardest parts of the original Dark Souls, Dark Souls III manages to be incredibly difficult to even veteran players but placing that difficulty at the end of a smooth difficulty ramp up. Early players won't be so punished for experimenting with paths and mechanics, with even bosses for the first half of the game requiring only minimal attention to reaction time. It allows you to truly experiment with gameplay, and since there is the new weapon arts mechanic, you can truly find your play style without feeling like you are being punished for it.
Weapon arts are special moves attatched to types of weapons that can be used in exchange for a little mana or a lot of stamina (depending on if you have any mana). They add another element to Dark Souls' gameplay that gives you more ways to build your play style. In Dark Souls more than most other RPGs, it is more about how you want to play than how you should play. If you are bad at dodging, investing in vitality will allow you to equip heavy armor while still allowing you a quick enough dodge so you can have some leeway by soaking up more hits. If you like to do quick attacks, then lighter or even dual weilding weapons are for you. If you would rather play by striking hard during a brief opening, than heavier weapons will be more your style. You find the category of weapons or armor you enjoy playing with, and you upgrade those to whatever you are content with. There is no getting stuck with something, and thus there are few mistakes you can make that will truly fuck you over (you'd pretty well have to try). As far as the Souls series is concerned, Dark Souls III feels very much a successor of Dark Souls I and II. Weapons feel good for the most part, although I never quite found that one weapon that truly fit what I wanted to do as I did in the other two, as mid-weight swords felt too weak and heavy swords felt too slow. I opted for heavy swords except for special occasions.
One such occasion was the Twin Princes, one of the final and most rewarding bosses in the game. While a majority of the time through Dark Souls games harder bosses are generally the best, there has never been one where it felt like all of the hard bosses where the best. Twin Princes is roughly the part of the game where I felt truly challenged. Learning their moves and how to read their various swings became an art in and of itself for me. What was remarkable was how quickly my brain was able to register what I was supposed to do because of how clear most of the telegraphs where (with one or two exceptions). It was translating that recognition to my reaction time that became the true test. Pontiff SulyVahn was another like this, who was around the halfway point. There is a graceful dance to playing these bosses, of finding the shifting rhythms of their attacks and playing counterpoint to them. It is engaging and involving. While the earlier bosses get you around AOEs or dodging telegraphs, it is Pontiff Sulyvahn that begins the half of the game where it becomes a complex dance of moves, learning your strengths and taking effort in blacksmithing your gear up to snuff. Dark Souls III has several of my favorite bosses of the entire series, and no, none of them are as difficult as O and S from Dark Souls I.
There are only a couple of criticisms I can lay at Dark Souls III with any confidence. The environments, while cool, are often the gothic churches found in Dark Souls or something very akin to Bloodborne, whose Lovecraftian style can feel at odds with Dark Souls D&D-cum-horror style. That said, Dark Souls III's environments feel sprawling, with multiple paths and shortcuts to be found in any given area. And while these shortcuts are an awesome echoing of Dark Souls' knotted singular world, it can't ever match up to how unbelievably interconnected the original game felt. It is a popular sore spot with Souls fans that the original Dark Souls felt so incredible that first time you found out that the far off location you thought you where at was actually just above the first place you visited. Dark Souls' map felt complex yet accessible, something you learn as you go but also giving you reason to map out in your head different routes to different locations, or to scan the skyline looking for a previous location once you get your bearings (and being able to actually see those other locations, and others you've yet to visit but would). Dark Souls III takes more after Dark Souls II, although replacing that games' octopus styled map branching out from the hub into a straight path with multiple diversions that eventually folds back on itself. It's extremely fun to explore, but still feels like it is missing that magical aspect to the original that is beginning to feel more and more like it may have been somewhat an accident. Likewise, Dark Souls III may be the most liberal with bonfires, the games' take on checkpoints. They appear at an extremely frequent rate until later in the game where they opt for more shortcuts and less bonfires. Understandably, this is partially what gives the early game such a leniency on newer players, and it is at least partially done away with by the latter half of the game. The Estus Flask, your means to healing, has many more charges than in any previous Souls game (early on, at least), making several sections easier to just power through instead of learning mechanics. This can be useful for later boss fights, and you can still tailor the game away from giving you so much leniency, but it is an easy trapping no one would willingly give up (the idea, I suspect, was to rope you in to spells, which the Estus Flask charges can be dumped into refilling through the Ashen Flask, but I don't think that this was the optimal solution).
Dark Souls is still my favorite game in the series, but that is partially due to an inherent magic in its design, layout, and gameplay that would be next to impossible to replicate anywhere else. Dark Souls III is definitely the most fun of the series to play, a game that rewards returning players with complex lore and tightened gameplay, but allows for new players to have a much more forgiving entry into the dark world of fallen gods and ever rising undead. Perhaps this game deserves the only higher rating than what I'm giving it, and my bias towards the original holds it down. Whatever the case, Dark Souls III is unforgettable, and a completely absorbing and fun time.
9.5
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