‘Dark Souls’ story worth ‘rage-inducing’ gameplay

The darkness of the asylum’s walls was the only thing in sight when the unnamed person awakened. With a rusty sword next to the prisoner, he slowly shambled toward it and picked it up, sneaking himself behind the guard within the cell, taking that blade and running it through the undead’s back. The prisoner reached down and grabbed a keyring, putting it to the cell door and unlocked it, now walking out with confidence. He was an unnamed soul, but he would make himself something, and the one sentence ringing in his head beckoned. “Rekindle the First Flame, chosen undead.”

Dark Souls is a game developed by FromSoftware, released on Oct. 4, 2011. It’s priced at $19.99, which includes the downloadable content (DLC), which comes free with the game. Throughout the Dark Souls series, there isn’t too much information about the player character. The character is just a nameless person, put in the asylum at the beginning of the game by the living to keep the undead from coming into the kingdom of Lordran. The game takes place in a fictional world called Lordran, where the undead rose and began to take over. As a result, the asylum of the undead was made to contain them, although many escape and make pilgrimage to Lordran, just like the player character, which goes to link the First Flame.

I would go on to explain the story further, although it’s so hopelessly complicated and up for speculation within the Dark Souls community that it’s nearly impossible to explain with such a small amount of paper and space. The story is one of the strongest points of the Soulsborne (Demon Souls-Dark Souls 3, including Bloodborne) that most players can easily engross themselves within the interesting and vague lore of the land. Items can reveal some hidden facts about lore, which lead up to the Dark Souls community’s speculations and theories about certain characters and lore events.

The biggest part about the Soulsborne series is what the series is known for, which is its extreme difficulty. Dark Souls is an immensely unforgiving game, unhesitant to kill the player over and over and test determination. To many players, this game is known as a rage game, which is designed to enrage and anger the player. To some, it’s a nice challenge, a change of pace from easy and childish games.

Although to some others, they get mad at the game because they haven’t learned enough about it or the enemies. Typically these angry people will go onto forums and ask how something is done, to which the Dark Souls community will respond “git gud.” It’s not meant to be mean or to not help the character. I was asking the same questions and getting the same answers, until I realized that I just needed to get better at the game in order to achieve victory.

Another major part about Dark Souls is the player vs. player. Players can invade and be invaded by other players by using a certain item, which puts a player within the other’s world. Their objective is to kill the host of the world, and victory awards items to the invaders. The objective of the host is to successfully evade the invader or kill them. On the other side, the player can also summon friendly phantoms into his/her game, but with the cost of bosses getting higher health to prevent abuse of the mechanic. It also puts players at higher chance of being invaded, which balances out the teaming up mechanic.

Dark Souls has easy mechanics, but yet the way the game is balanced, it requires good timing, and learning enemy patterns is difficult. The seven letters, “YOU DIED” will appear a lot on the screen, but it requires determination to get past those letters to see the credits at the end of this beautifully made game.

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.