Dark Souls Review

When it was announced earlier this year, after I even started this blog, Dark Souls became one of my most anticipated games of this year. Demon's Souls was a magnificent title for the PS3 that came out of nowhere for me. Seriously, I hadn't even heard of it until the day it came out, the very same day I picked it up. Probably not the best move in hindsight but it worked out alright. It was a difficult but incredibly enjoyable and satisfying dungeon crawler with a great deal of customization.

With Dark Souls, From Software switched publishers from Atlus to Namco Bandai, made it multiplatform and promised both higher difficulty and a more open-world. From what I said in my first impressions of the game, it appears that they delivered but did those impressions hold up until the end? Well, let's find out in the review.

STORY

Like Demon's Souls, the story in Dark Souls is extremely minimal. It's used as a bit of setup and nothing more and while certain story elements are brought up, they're never looked at in much detail. There is a good amount of lore if you know where to look, such as your inventory, but even then much of it is kind of glossed over. In lore it still definitely lacks compared to games like Mass Effect or The Elder Scrolls.

You start as an undead who escapes from an undead asylum and is told to go ring a couple of bells in order to reveal your destiny. This is connected to old legends about dragons and four lords who brought about an end to the dragons.

There aren't many memorable characters and the story is so lacking that when something that is supposed to be important comes along, you probably won't remember why it's important in the first place.

This would be damning if Dark Souls tried to be a story-focused game or was a game that people went into with a good story in mind. Thankfully, this is not the case as anyone who played Demon's Souls probably didn't expect much with this. Dark Souls story isn't much of a story but it was never meant to be and it doesn't hurt the game all that much because of it.
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GAMEPLAY AND DESIGN

The gameplay and design is what makes Dark Souls one of the finest games of the year. The gameplay is very similar to Demon's Souls. The forumla is also basically the same: you go through incredibly difficult and grueling areas that test you until you figure out the patterns and weaknesses of enemies, farming for souls, equipment, and forging material, until you eventually come across a boss or miniboss to fight who may sometimes drop a special soul that you can use to forge a special piece of equipment.

That's all there. The big difference is that the world in Dark Souls is far more open than the world in Demon's Souls. There's kind of a hub like the Nexus called Firelink Shrine but it just connects to all of the worlds without any loading or transitions beyond, at most, a simple elevator ride. To even further replace the hub are bonfires throughout the world which act as checkpoints and give you healing materials everytime you use them. However, these do NOT make the game easier than Demon's Souls in any regard whatsoever. The world is bigger and those bonfires are very spread out. And everytime you use one, it respawns all enemies outside of bosses or very specific non-bosses.

Bonfires replace the Nexus as checkpoints that give your healing items and magic back. They also respawn enemies.

The bosses themselves are fun and each of them have specific weaknesses that can be exploited. What are they? Why the hell would I say and ruin the experience. Some bosses also have tails that you can cut off to get new weapons or shields.

Some have said that the bosses in Dark Souls are easier than in Demon's Souls while the stages themselves are more difficult and I will agree with this. Only a few of the bosses came quite to the same level for me as the Flamelurker or the Maneater. That said, I wouldn't necessarily classify any of them as easy. They just have more weakness than those did and most of them still remain extremely difficult.

Even if some are not necessarily difficult, the bosses will still challenge you and also quite intimidating. But the stages definitely got boosted in difficulty.

This game is absolutely UNFORGIVING and it will make you pay for every mistake you make. Enemies will attempt to overwhelm and god help you if they bring negative status affects like poison and break through your defenses. The basilisks' attack is easy to dodge but if they take you by surprise, you die and can say goodbye to half of your health until you get the poison cured (and that stacks).

Don't EVER let one of these poisonous bastards sneak up on you. You will regret it.

The game calls you to be careful and kicks your ass constantly until you figure out a better course of action. This is why the game succeeds, it's frustrating but gives you a sense of success everytime you level up, purchase a new item, upgrade a weapon, defeat a boss, etc.

The magic has also changed. There are classes of magic in Dark Souls: sorceries, miracles and pyromancies. Sorceries are dark magic with spells that either cause damage or inflict harmful status effects, or both. Miracles or light magic that are focused on healing and defenses, boosting your own status effects, sometimes in ways that also damage enemies. And pyromancies are...well fire spells.

Magic's gotten an overhaul.

You can still only have access to few spells at time, depending on how high your attunement attribute is. The way magic is different this time is that the mana bar is gone. This time it's replaced with "charges" (for lack of a better word) that you have a certain amount of uses of. Use up the charges and you can no longer use that spell. The only way to replenish the charges are to go to a bonfire. This was apparently done to bring more balance and make people hesitate to just spam spells. I'm personally mixed on it, as I also feel that some times it actually can make the game unfair in a few select spots but it's a minor nitpick.

Customization is the name of the game in Dark Souls and this where the game's true depth can be seen. As I said in my first impressions, the class that you choose at the beginning is nothing more than a beginning template. From there you can upgrade any of your attributes however you want. Personally, I still recommend the Pyromancer for two reasons:

1. Because they start at the lowest level which allows for the greatest opening opportunity for customization and their stats are well balanced.
2. Because they start out with a pyromancy spell and those take a while to get. You can get access to miracles and sorceries quite early but the pyromancy spells take much longer.

But it's all up to you. However, going extreme in just one area is a ticket to suicide. A flexible character with lots of possible attacks/defenses is going to have a much easier time.

Lots of ways to level up, and it's all up to you. Also not my character :)

Weapon and armor upgrading is also part of the great amount of depth that Dark Souls provides. There are tons of ways to upgrade each kind of weapon. You start by doing basic upgrades but from there you can branch off to give your weapon a very specific damage type. For example, after doing basic upgrades you may want to give your lighting-damage or fire-damage. From there you branch off and start giving the weapon that damage type with different kinds of upgrade material.

These are all of the different ways you can upgrade your weapons.

It's a great and rewarding system and having multiple weapons that each give different damage types is a good way to always be prepared for the unexpected. In addition, some of the bosses drop special souls which can be used to perform special upgrades on weapons that have all of the basic upgrades. With that, you craft a weapon that you can't get anywhere else in the game.

Another new system are the covenants. There are nine different factions in the game and you can take oaths and join different covenants (though joining one breaks any that you had before). Covenants also have different ranks and going up in ranks usually give nice rewards, such as exclusive spells, weapons or armor. Betraying covenants bears a penalty that can be removed by visiting a priest.

The covenant system suffers from the game's lack of hand-holding. Don't get me wrong, I love that about the game and it really sets it apart from most games out there today, it really took a while for me to fully get an understanding of the system. Someone tells me to join a covenant for miracles the first time, and I do it not realizing how it really works. There's a balance between guiding the player and letting the player figure things out. In this regard, I don't feel they achieved the balance.

Another addition is the "humanity" system. In this game you can be hollow (the state you go into after death) or human. You use humanity points to bring back your humanity and also to further kindle bonfires. Also, the more humanity points you have the better your drop rate will be. It sort of suffers the way the covenant does, but not to the same degree.

Co-op is also still available and allows you to either help or call for help from fellow players. There is no way of open communication unfortunately which is something I had hoped they would fix. You can also invade other players' games as a Phantom (or vice versa). Invading will get you placed into the Book of the Guilty, making you a target for other players. If you're hollow, you can't be invaded.

As for replay value, New Game+ brings your character with all of his/her stats and equipment in for another round or three, etc. The difficulty scales on how high-leveled your character is at the beginning of the playthrough, meaning until you max out all your attributes, the game is escalating difficulty with each new game. It will take multiple playthroughs to obtain every special weapon through the various special souls from bosses, which can often be used to make different weapons.

What you get with Dark Souls is an incredibly challenging experience but also an incredibly rewarding experience that pushes you to play through the gauntlet and then do it over and over until you have the ultimate character. It's easily one of the most gratifying games this year.
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GRAPHICS AND SOUND

Environmentally, Dark Souls can look great, though at times the environments can feel a little repetitive but it's definitely not bad in that regard at all. Character models are weak and it's practically impossible to make a good-looking character for yourself.

On the plus side, the art design for many of the original enemies, particularly the bosses, are just awesome and can be incredibly creepy. Like I said above, even if a boss isn't necessarily difficult (and most of them are), they still probably look intimidating. Yeah, you can chalk that up to their great designs and huge sizes.

The Gaping Dragon may not be the hardest boss, but he's intimidating as hell.

On the music front, I personally didn't like Demon's Souls music too much. I don't know why, it just didn't register with me. This game, for some reason, did register with me. Just like the first, music only plays during boss fights, with a few exceptions. It was moody and fit the atmosphere which I never quite got from the first.
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CONCLUSION

When you play Dark Souls you get exactly what you payed for: a challenging yet mostly fair RPG hack-n-slash with a heavy emphasis on in-depth character customization and building. The game doesn't hold your hand on your journey and this makes it a very unique experience for this console generation.

Unfortunately, the lack of hand-holding sometimes goes to the point where it becomes annoying where you can't understand how a system works such as with the covenants, but once you get past that little problem, it's still a breath of fresh air.

If you haven't picked it up yet and love difficult dungeon crawlers and deep customization, Dark Souls is a definite purchase.

Oh and you get to fight a giant wolf with a giant sword. How frakking awesome is that?