I am what most hardcore fans of Dark Souls would call a "casul." I've been playing video games since 1981--when I was eight years old--and I've owned a console from every era since then (Atari 2600, NES, Sega, PS1, PS2, PS31), but if I were to create a pie chart of the relative amount of my free time that I spend reading, writing, watching TV shows, watching movies, and gaming, then gaming would fill the smallest slice of that pie. Fifteen years ago, when I was still in my twenties and not married, gaming took up more of my time (don't even get me started on Vice City, Champions of Norrath, or every Tomb Raider since 1996 or I'll never shut up). But now, it's just not feasible to spend several uninterrupted hours with a game controller in my hands.
So, at this point in my gaming life, it's not uncommon for me to start a game, spend several hours playing it over the course of weeks or even months, and then just drop it, never to be finished--let alone played again. By most accounts, Dark Souls should be the kind of game I'd drop after a while, and, in fact, it was a game that I dropped. After spending five hours on the game and seemingly getting nowhere, I gave up.
The problem with my first, aborted play-through was that I really couldn't figure out what I was supposed to be doing. I escaped from the Undead Asylum with relative ease, but the Firelink Shrine baffled me. I spent a few hours (yes, a few) battling skeletons in the graveyard, only to die and find that they had all respawned. Even if I killed most of them without dying, I couldn't figure out what the point of fighting them was because their area seemed to be a dead end. So then I took the elevator down to New Londo Ruins, only to discover that I couldn't fight the ghosts at all. My mace went right through them, but their swords or scythes or whatever they are could tear me up pretty easily. So I wailed on some hollow undeads for a while to make myself feel better--but that became tiresome quickly because the number of souls they surrendered upon dying didn't get me anywhere in terms of leveling up, and their deaths didn't seem to be leading me to any sort of goal. I talked to the Crestfallen Warrior, but he didn't give me much to go on. Something about ringing some bells in the Undead Church and Blighttown, but I had no idea where those places were. Petrus of Thorolund sold me some miracles, but I couldn't use them because my faith wasn't high enough. Rickert of Vinheim sold me some sorcery, but I couldn't use them either. So I fought the skeletons a few more times, died a few more times, then quit. In short, I gave up not because the game was too hard, but because I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing.
Hardcore gamers would no doubt say that giving up because the game is confusing is the same as giving up because it's too hard. Either way, they would argue, I didn't spend enough time studying the game's mechanics to determine what I was supposed to be doing. Then there's the fact that I obviously hadn't explored the area thoroughly enough, because the stairs leading up to the Undead Burg are in plain fucking sight.2
OK, fine. So I gave up too easily. But many months later, I returned to Dark Souls. I don't know why. A few days before picking it back up, I'd literally just bought the DLC for Skyrim, a game I'd been playing on and off for, well, years now. It's a fun game, and one that I continued to enjoy playing even though I'd completed all the main story lines ages ago. So I started all the DLC quests, but for some reason I wasn't feeling it. Skyrim's great, but I wanted a new fantasy RPG experience. Then, while goofing around on YouTube I found a video called "Dark Souls: Overpowered in Fifteen Minutes." Intrigued, I watched the video, wrote down all the steps Kowalskischance outlined, and gave it a try.
It didn't work.
Not on the first try, anyway. But the amazing thing about this video is that even a "casul" like me could really go through all the necessary steps in about fifteen minutes. So when it didn't work the first time, I started over and tried it again. And again. And again. On the fourth try, it worked--and I became "overpowered" in an hour. Not bad, considering I'd floundered around for five hours during my first play-through, getting absolutely nowhere.
Note that I put "overpowered" in scare quotes. That's because even with the Black Knight Halberd I still got my ass handed to me countless times during the first several hours. But the reason I didn't give up this second time around is because Kowalskischance's video had revealed the game's possibilities to me.3
I finally found my way to the Undead Burg and killed the Taurus Demon in one shot. I made it past the Hellkite Dragon, killed the Armored Tusk, then died at least ten times before I succeeded in killing the Bell Gargoyles. The Capra Demon was also a pain in my ass. But things got ever so slightly easier when I confronted the Gaping Dragon. And the Chaos Witch Quelaag was downright easy. Seriously. I killed her on my first try. Even I still can't quite believe it. Sif and the Hydra each took only a few tries, as did the Iron Golem. Ornstein and Smough required me to summon some jolly cooperation, which went poorly on my first try because someone invaded my world before I had a chance, and I accidentally whacked Solaire of Astora who was sitting by the bonfire, which caused him to attack me too. I had to run all the way back to the Undead Parish to request absolution from Oswald of Carim before I could continue. Seath the Scaleless proved difficult until I figured out how to increase my immunity to his curse attack; then he was a breeze to kill. Now, nearly sixty hours in, I'm exploring New Londo Ruins, ably dispatching ghosts (thanks to Seath's curse) and wondering what fresh hell awaits me around the next corner.
In short, I am a fan. Dark Souls has won me over completely. If I were to rank my top ten favorite PS3 games, Dark Souls would be on that list. I like it so much I'm probably even going to finish it (unheard of!)--unless the final boss is impossible. (Hello, Resident Evil 5.) But I'm confident, because I've found that it's the "regular" monsters who have done most of the damage to my poor, suffering character. The majority of the souls and humanity I've lost irrevocably in this play-through have been to black knights, undead assassins, basilisks, giant stone knights, infested barbarians, serpent soldiers, man-eater shells, and those fucking silver knights with greatbows. (Thank goodness for "hidden body" and the Slumbering Dragoncrest Ring or I'd still be dying in Anor Londo.)
Besides, as hard as the game can be, I don't know whether it's truly the hardest game I've played. It is perhaps the most consistently difficult game, but I had my fair share of seemingly endless problems with certain tasks or missions in games like Oblivion, GTAIV, GT5, and Uncharted 2--not to mention games like GTA: San Andreas (that stupid remote-controlled plane!) or Tomb Raider: Anniversary (the timed grapple-ring swing jumps--with flying demons!). At least with Dark Souls, everything is pretty evenly difficult, which is a lot more palatable than a mostly easy game that has one or two borderline-impossible elements.
Whether it's the hardest game ever made or not, Dark Souls is also friendly enough to provide some ways to "cheat" if you really need some help. Granted, there are no truly easy cheats in this game, but if you need to reliably collect a lot of souls or humanity in a (relatively) short amount of time with little chance of losing them, it's possible. After my fifteen-minute "overpowering" session, I was OK for quite a while, but later on I found I needed some extra help leveling up if I wanted to survive. So I went to the Hellkite Dragon bridge in the Undead Burg and baited the dragon into breathing fire several dozen times, thus roasting the undead soldiers on the bridge and providing me, eventually, with the twenty thousand souls needed to buy the Crest of Artorias from Andre, at which point I could bait the three nearest members of the Clan of Forest Protectors on the other side of the door in the Darkroot Garden, resulting in six thousand souls each time around. Loading up on humanity is a little more time-consuming, but as long as you're wearing the Covetous Gold Serpent Ring you can usually obtain one to three humanities every time you kill the ten undead rats near the bonfire in the Depths. So the game isn't entirely punishing and there are ways to exploit the system.
With all this in mind, Dark Souls is a game I fully intend to stick with to the very end.4 This, despite my penchant for leaving many of the games I start, even ones I enjoy playing, unfinished. What's the difference?
First, I believe the level of difficulty has had the opposite effect on me that it's had on other, less-invested players: by not being easy, Dark Souls maintains the challenge of its gameplay, which makes it a game I want to continue to play. Games that are too easy often start to feel repetitive. If you're not dying often (which usually indicates that you need to rethink your tactics) then the missions and tasks become rote and, eventually, boring. Some of the easier games I've played are good at masking easiness by providing significant variety (e.g., the most recent Grand Theft Auto games), but too many of them rely on the "find this thing" or "kill this thing" repetitiveness that leads to a dull playing experience if the thing to find doesn't enrich the gameplay and the thing to kill is no match for your weapon.
Second, this game is beautiful, both visually and conceptually. Comparing it to Skyrim is like comparing a Lexus to a Toyota. They're both reliable cars, but there's an elegance in one that the other can't hope to match. Everything in Dark Souls is visually stunning, from the landscape and the buildings to the monsters and the weapons. Skyrim isn't an ugly game by any stretch of the imagination, but it clearly sacrificed style for scope. Dark Souls is a much smaller game in terms of real estate, but we're talking about some pretty high-end real estate here. More than that, Dark Souls is set in a place (called Lordran) that's geographically coherent. At first, the various locations you travel through seem disconnected, but as time goes on and you backtrack or find new connections between them, you realize that Lordran fits together in an entirely logical way. This is pretty impressive when you consider that it is laid out not only horizontally but vertically as well. Thus Firelink Shrine connects to New Londo Ruins, which connects to the Valley of the Drakes, which connects to Blighttown, which connects to the Depths, which connects to the Lower Undead Burg, which connects to the Undead Parish, which connects to the Darkroot Garden, which connects to the Darkroot Basin, which connects back to the Valley of the Drakes, and so on. I get lost in Grand Theft Auto's versions of New York and Los Angeles all the time, but I could never get lost in Lordran. It's a world that makes complete sense to me, despite being an extremely complex place (with no in-game area map available, I might add).
Third, the NPCs. Solaire, Laurentius, the Giant Blacksmith, heck, even Snuggly the Crow. They're memorable, dynamic, and, in most cases, heartbreaking. These characters are filled with sadness and despair, and not in some ridiculous, melodramatic way. With just a few exceptions I care about their fates--and in Dark Souls one's fate is rarely pleasant, which makes for some awfully sad moments. That's rare in a game these days.
Fourth and finally, its endpoint seems, somehow, more easily within reach than some of the more sprawling games I start but can't seem to finish (such as Mass Effect 2 or Red Dead Redemption). One could argue that those games are somewhat bloated, and saddled with open worlds that are perhaps a bit too open. More gameplay is better than less gameplay I suppose, but Dark Souls is free of any filler. There are areas you can visit that aren't really necessary to your quest (the Great Hollow and Ash Lake, for example), but overall the game is well structured. It's avoided inhabiting a too-vast "sandbox"-style game environment without seeming like it's always pushing you in a specific direction, either. Furthermore, the locations through which you have already traveled and killed the resident bosses retain their playability. I find myself returning to the Darkroot Garden quite often, even though I vanquished Sif long ago.
I like to think that Dark Souls will stand the test of time for me. I still replay Champions of Norrath with my wife on a regular basis. Perhaps in ten years I'll still be replaying Dark Souls. In the meantime, don't you dare go Hollow, friend.
Pointless Footnotes
1 Yes, I'm one console-era behind, but a PS4 is in my future--as soon as I finish playing all the PS3 games I've bought but haven't played yet.
2 Oh, believe me. Even I called myself a noob when I finally discovered those GD stairs.
3 He also taught me to pick the Master Key as my gift, which really opened up the game's possibilities.
3 In fact, I fully intend to play through it a second time, using the NG+ option, à la Champions of Norrath.
