Dark Souls 3-p.II of III

I have been slightly burned out by everything and have played a lot of shows this month with my band Shrift. Thus, this essay appears on the last day of the month. I do think I am going to write about some non-Fromsoftware stuff for a bit and come back to this so as to remain motivated to keep up this Substack. I’m hoping to write several shorter pieces in April on various topics. That being said, enjoy the second part of three in my series on “Dark Souls 3”.

“Dark Souls 3”-p.II of III: the confused consensus around “Dark Souls 3”

Upon release, “Dark Souls 3” had a high rating among critics and fans. But I feel its current reputation is more mixed. The consensus on the game seems torn between the low opinion of lore-obsessives and its championing by speed-runners. The loresters, who I was more aware of in my first playthrough of the game. regard the game as a failure because its lack of lore coherence. The speed-runners instead note the rock-solid boss rush of the endgame and declare it Fromsoftware’s masterpiece.

The actual worth of the game is somewhere between the dislike by the former and the love of the latter.

I will say my initial impressions were formed through the opinions of lore-obsessives.

In the first part of the essay, I talked about how my opinion of the game came from listening to the podcast “Bonfireside Chat”. The hosts of the podcast were coming into the season covering “Dark Souls 3” with some baggage. They had been critical of Fromsoftware’s stripping away of RPG mechanics in “Bloodborne” as well as the general tendency towards faster, more aggressive combat. It seemed on my recent relistening to the podcast that they had received a lot of backlash for this. In certain sections of the fandom, being marked as someone who disliked “Bloodborne” could be used to dismiss all further opinions from that person.

So, the beginning of the season on “Dark Souls 3” almost begins with exaggerated praise of the new Fromsoft title. However, by the mid-point of the season, “Bonfireside Chat” attitude shifted into outright negativity and frustration about the game’s story which seemed to make very little sense.

Part of this was that “Bonfireside Chat” is part of the Souls lore community. And this attitude is a good representation of how the lore community saw “Dark Souls 3”, as an incoherent sellout with a ton of meaningless retconning of ideas from the original “Dark Souls”. I have come to see this opinion as reductive. While some of the fan service in the game doesn’t amount to much, I think in other ways the game works as a commentary on how Fromsoft views the series as a whole.

In my first essay about “Bloodborne”, I commented on how the acceptable way to discuss Fromsoft games intellectually was to center such discussions around the game’s lore. I often find this a fascinating way to learn more about story beats I didn’t get. But the problem is that it’s often done without discussing the making and history of the games themselves. This isolation can be ultimately harmful to a greater understanding of their games. This clearly happened in “Dark Souls 3” where there was no discussion of it being a troubled production and the way the game itself comments on that.

This is because lore discussions while being intellectual belong to a certain stripe of intellectual fandom. This group can often be behind the times when discussions of art include artistic agency. There’s no thought given to what the game was attempting to say and there’s no room for Fromsoft to comment on their own legacy within “Dark Souls 3”. Instead, clear references to characters from the original “Dark Souls” are seen merely as lazy fan service.

At its worst, lore theory can be closer to fanfiction than a critical consideration of the game at hand. Discussing a game as how it relates thematically to the series is less interesting to lore experts than figuring out the backstory of certain NPCS. This is not to attack lore theory or fanfiction which are both important in their own respective lanes, but “Dark Souls 3” is more interesting than its incoherent lore videos.

The “Bonfireside Chat” hosts seemed outraged in “Dark Souls 3” the character Gwynn’s son is revealed to be the Nameless King rather than Solaire. Many fans had grown attached to the idea that Solaire was the son of Gwynn and were outraged when a new character was introduced. This also plays into fan dynamics where one’s personal head canon is more important than what the creator wants to do with the series. Having a head canon is great, but it shouldn’t have equal weight to what happens in the game.

Another problem for a lore-based understanding of “Dark Souls 3” is that Lore experts ignore how Fromsoft is conversant with their back catalogue. For instance, a recent debate about “Elden Ring: Nightreign” claimed that “Nightreign” was throwing “Elden Ring” lore into chaos as it acknowledged the other famous boss fights that Fromsoftware had done. But if fans are constantly contrasting and drawing parallels between different Fromsoftware games, why shouldn’t Fromsoftware do the same? While “Elden Ring” takes place in different world than the “Dark Souls” series, it is constantly referring to the characters and tropes of that series.

In this case, the lore expert wants to raise himself over the creator in being the only one who can analyze different works in different universes, A fairer positioning would be to allow Fromsoft to also acknowledge the other games they have worked on.

That being said, “Dark Souls 3” is fairly confused as a narrative and a lot of the plot is intriguingly set up rather than given any conclusion. But if we talk about “Dark Souls 3” as more of a game exploring the studio’s state of mind, we can see that what the game is talking about is meaningful in that sense. It’s not one that would interest lore types but its still worth talking about.

Listening to “Bonfireside Chat” helped me learn about the poise controversy that was also part of the release of the game. “Dark Souls” was an action/RPG series and the fanbase has always had such a split. The RPG fans on their side of the coin fixated on the loss of Poise as a symbol of the loss of some of the systems and complexity of the first two games.

“Dark Souls 3” used an engine much more like “Bloodborne”. This meant that Poise; the system that had helped people tank their way through “Dark Souls” had been entirely discarded. (Bloodborne being a game with negligible armor and no poise.)

In the original “Dark Souls” by wearing a heavy armor set and having a lot of health, you could make the choice to ignore a lot of the damage bosses were doing and keep attacking, winning a war of attrition.

It was initially believed Poise values were switched off, which fit with the much faster dodge focused combat system. In truth, Poise had been made into a much more complicated and specific mechanic relating to “Hyper Armor” of certain weapons. As well, this issue was patched by Fromsoft making the lack of poise less extreme. Whether this was done to ameliorate fan complaints or was a genuine mistake is impossible to say.

Some people prefer the low-poise combat of DS3 over Elden Ring where poise was mostly brought back but not to the levels of Darks Souls 1. However I would argue just like weapon arts being less successful version of ashes of war, the overly complicated poise system was a trial run for the more understandable poise-breaking system of Elden Ring.

Poise breaks occasionally and very randomly happen, but these were really in their infancy. It would take Sekiro to systematize them and Elden Ring which kept them mostly behind the scenes makes them something you can rely on more with heavy weaponry.

But this change towards the bloodborne-style combat system was also an overall move away from the varied builds of the earlier games. Having little poise means you can’t expect to shrug off enemy attacks and destroy everything in your path. This is partially because Fromsoft wants you play actively, to roll and time your blocks precisely but the franticness of the pace of the encounters means that often using strategy goes by the wayside.

In the bigger picture, RPG-focused fans were frustrated as well by the lack of build variety. Especially compared to the extremely niche builds of “Dark Souls 2”, “Dark Souls 3” was not as different from the stripped down combat options available in “Bloodborne”.

Builds are still possible, but I have found in my 230 + hours that usually when I try to make a sorcerer, I end up giving up the character because they end up being so much less powerful than a strength or a dexterity build. It can take forever, up to late game or NG + for more unusual builds to become not just an ultra-hard mode.

I tried, in my renewed obsession with the game, to make a pyromancy character and found it so much harder and more frustrating than playing melee.

In general, Fromsoftware has been slow to make magic work in their games, even though earlier games had more overpowered options, they tended to flatten out gameplay as enemy ai would often not notice that you were shooting them with magic from across the room. It also seems that Fromsoftware hasn’t tried as hard to add more variety to magic gameplay. Even “Elden Ring” with its robust magic system is still stuck with the terrible interface of cycling through spells with the directional pad. Even the indie “Salt and Sacrifice” allowed you to assign spells to specific keys. As much as I dislike “Lords of the Fallen” they did a great job with assigning ranged and magic controls to a trigger press in combination with different face buttons.

“Dark Souls 3” with its quick poise-heavy enemies are a nightmare for a mage character, unless you have fantastic timing, as your character’s casts take forever and will often miss or barely phase bigger enemies. And except when using specific spells, you have no access to the kind of critical attacks such as backstabs that can even out an encounter with a much tougher opponent.

At the same time, the flattening of the combat has a beneficial effect if you’re playing a melee character. The combat feels more fluid, responsive and refined than it had been in any other game.

Similarly to “Sekiro”, the simplification of Fromsoftware’s combat along with improvements in enemy ai allowed them to craft more deadly and interesting encounters with enemies. While it ultimately makes “Dark Souls 3” a much less diverse game in terms of builds, it makes it a superior action game to the games that came before it. Now whether Fromsoftware ultimately lost something in moving away from the slow deliberate pace of “Dark Souls Remastered” and “Dark Souls 2” is something to debate, but perhaps not in this essay.

With this renewed emphasis on action, we can talk about the biggest champions of the game. The game has become increasingly beloved by a younger group of challenge runners who pay little attention to lore and a lot of attention to boss movesets. They aren’t really bothered by some of the areas with less creative level design as they generally treat levels as the first part of a triathlon.

What was interesting for me is that certain fans who were burned out on the excessive difficulty of “Elden Ring” started claiming “Dark Souls 3” as the last time Fromsoft designed bosses who were “tough but fair”. This backlash lead a lot of challenge runners to see the game as Fromsoftware’s last masterpiece before the perceived excesses of the more mainstream and more difficult “Elden Ring”.

This rediscovery is interesting but deeply frustrating for someone who wants a serious consideration of Fromsoftware’s work apart from toxic Reddit-style debates. But while not wanting to get into the weirdness of the whole Elden Ring backlash, it’s important to state that this kind of backlash comes from not looking at the games through a historical lens. Instead, we are imagining a purely nostalgic view removed from controversies such as the changes in Poise mechanics.

Nostalgia is definitely talking to not see the clear technical and artistic leaps Fromsoft made from “Dark souls 3” to “Elden Ring”. Pontiff Sullyvahn is a great boss but now looks like a trial run for Rellana Twin Moon Knight who uses most of his moveset. When I beat him recently, the first time I was able to beat him solo I realized that he has some notable tracking glitches where he would abruptly lose his lock-on of me and start attacking scenery. This is refreshing compared to certain newer Fromsoft bosses that relentessly track you with their attacks, but it is clearly for reasons of jank rather than an intention.

Similarly, the Nameless King has an amazing second phase. He truly began late-period Fromsoft’s style of leaning into delayed and misleadingly telegraphed attacks. But he is saddled with an annoying first phase where you have to run around swinging at the head of a giant Oni that he is riding upon. The Oni has a skinny and birdlike head which has a really fussy hitbox, so during my many attempts I would doing a charged heavy into its head only to see it pass harmlessly through about half the time.

Jank aside, it’s also sadly not possible for us to go back to a pre-Elden Ring combat mentality, bosses such as Pontiff and Namelesss King were thought of by some as impossible bullshit but current fans encountering these bosses are more likely to be dissapointed by their relative ease. The difficulty of these games has been tuned up to such an extent that the harder bosses can now seem downright quaint the way Artorias seems after taking on Malenia.

I have been replaying “Dark Souls 1” because I never beat the “Artrorias of the Abyss” DLC and it fascinated me how Manus, Father of the Abyss really felt like a boss from “Elden Ring”. He has the weird attack timings and a protruding weapon that can extend much father than it looks. But whereas a comparable boss such as Mohg, Lord of Blood feels satisfying to fight because of the crispness and precision of everything happening in the fight, Manus feels more like a curiosity not fitting in the more slow-paced world of the first “Dark Souls”.

While the technical leap between “Dark Souls 3” and “Elden Ring” is not as great. There’s a level of assurance in Fromsoftware’s craft that makes a lot of “Dark Souls 3” bosses feel like a trial run for “Elden Ring”. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t appreciate how good bosses such as Dragonslayer armor or Twin Princes are but there’s elements that are less refined that they ultinately became.

Another pervasive criticism of “Dark Souls 3” that doesn’t fit with either of these two schools is the dislike of the washed-out grey aesthetic detracting from the games presentation. This is the main culprit for me as the game feeling a bit goth and self-consciously edgy rather than actually grim the way the first two games did.

However I do miss how Fromsoft used to be more aesthetically daring than their current embrace of painterly beauty has become. “Dark Souls” and “Dark Souls 2” were deliberately drab and plain looking games that challenged aesthetic norms in video games. As pretty as “Elden Ring” is, its mastery also can lead it to look far more similar to other games on the market.

Even though “Bloodborne” and “Dark Souls 3” are graphical improvements on the first two games, they still avoid a clean naturalistic aesthetic. “Bloodborne” has a blue murky tone which seems to go with the theme of gothic horror. And “Dark Souls 3”, because it is set in the age where the fire is dying out, has everything look a bit grey and sepia toned.

This mostly is fine but there’s many points where it becomes clear that the grey look is a detriment to a lot of the aesthetics of the game. Many armor sets that looked great in the more colorful Dark Souls 2 now look terrible (such as the brigands set). The blood splatter that coated your character in Bloodborne, now instead turns your character coal colored which looks problematic.

Even in character creation, blonde hair looks greyish brown because of how desaturated everything is. I have grown to love the choices of the game but this is a major flaw that still bothers me. But this flaw also adds to my appreciation of Fromsoftware as a studio that takes aesthetic risks even when they end up lowering the overall quality of the product.

It did take me a ridiculous amount of time to finish this essay, so I am going to take a short break before writing the third and final part. But in the third part, we will get away from these more academic debates and try to talk about what I think Dark Souls 3 is about.