Dark Souls is Kind of Metroid

I've gotten significantly farther into Dark Souls than I had the last time I wrote about the game. After defeating the Bell Gargoyles, I've vanquished the Capra Demon and the Gaping Dragon, and the Moonlight Butterfly. I've made a few attempts at the Stray Demon (which is actually the first enemy you see in the game, and is a bonus boss that you can find when you return to the Undead Asylum - the whole area kind of being a hidden secret area as far as I know.)

What's kind of fascinating about Dark Souls is that it's one massive inter-connected world. With the exception of the Undead Asylum, every part of the world is all within one massive area - you could essentially tie a string off in one place and, if it were long enough, pull it to any other part of the game (as far as I know. I have heard about this "painted world" that I believe you get to later on.)

it's a game with very distinct environments, but it folds back on itself in ways that are actually quite brilliant. Though I believe you do get a teleportation device later on, most of the world is connected via shortcuts. If you play through to the end of an area, you can usually unlock a door or kick down a ladder to allow you to get back there far more easily. For example, almost immediately after getting to Lordran after beating the tutorial section, you'll head up through an aqueduct, only to find a locked gate. Far later (and I honestly don't really remember how I got to some of these places, like the lower Undead Burgh, the first time around, without the shortcut) you'll find yourself at the other end of that tunnel and be able to open up that gate. After a fairly long and difficult journey to get there, you'll now be able to get back and forth from the Lower Burgh and Firelink Shrine (the kind of main hub/home area) with ease (though you will have to go through a small group of undead many times over.)

Finding one of these shortcuts is perhaps the most relieving moment in the game. You'll often find yourself fighting through an unfamiliar area, expending most of your Estus Flasks and desperately trying to make it through without dying. Finding that shortcut that then takes you practically right back to Firelink Shrine suddenly makes you feel safe - you pop into the Shrine, rest at that bonfire, and you know that when you go back in, you'll be able to get back out without too much trouble. It lets you decide whether you want to keep pushing forward or maybe turn back and try something else.

In a lot of ways, this gating system feels similar to Metroid, albeit a bit simpler (which is fine, because Dark Souls does not need to be more complex.) Rather than getting special weapons and tools that work in certain ways, you're usually just activating elevators or opening locked gates. But there is still this sense that you're gradually unlocking the whole game world.

There are some places, though, that aren't blocked off so much by locked gates and such, and more just really hard enemies. As far as I can tell, there's nothing stopping you from wandering into the New Londo Ruins when you first get to Lordran. But the enemies there are so strong (and I think require you to either be cursed or have a cursed weapon or an item that makes it seem as if you're cursed) that you'd be a fool to try to make it through there.

This system does require you to remember a lot about the structure of the map, or at least the paths through it. Still, I've found myself seriously shocked by some of these revelations - I was wandering through a dark, forested area and found a door that opened to a key I had, only to discover that I was at the bottom of a tower I had previously climbed up in order to fight the very first official boss in Lordran, the Taurus Demon - which I had thought was far, far away. I'm beginning to suspect that the layout of the game world is far more vertical than I had previously thought. It's amazing how well it all fits together.

The Bushido and My Initial Take on Dark Souls Lore

The bushido, which I believe translates literally (or close to it) as the "way of the warrior" is the code of the Samurai. There's an aspect of that code that I think I just kind of picked up somewhere (so it could totally be invented) which is that the code includes the idea that "you are already dead." Essentially, it is meant to encourage bravery - if you already assume you're going to die on the battlefield, you can set aside the fear of death and focus on executing your orders and maneuvers with calm detachment.

I don't mean to invoke this simply because the game is from a Japanese company (indeed, the game is built more around "Western" RPG principles,) but I think taking this attitude has improved my play and made the game more enjoyable and less stressful. Essentially, you just accept that sometimes, you're going to die, and sometimes that means losing Souls and Humanity you've collected. It encourages you to spend that stuff quick before you lose it, but also allows you to get used to reacting calmly to things in effective ways. While I haven't beaten them yet, I made some very nice progress on the twin Gargoyles fight (the first really major boss fight, as I understand) thanks to a kind of calm way of playing the game. In Dark Souls, if you're the inexperienced novice player like me, you're going to die lots of times, which can be frustrating at first, but soon you'll recognize these moments as times when the game is simply teaching you the layout of each room, which enemies to look out for and how to approach them.

The thing is, the player character is literally dead - well, undead. Let's get into the lore here. I'm only going from what I have so far in-game, and this is in pretty broad strokes.

The opening cinematic shows us that the world used to be ruled over by the Everlasting Dragons and was filled with Grey Trees. Deep below the world, however, there was fire, and the beings within the fiery underworld found Lord Souls, which gave them the power or animation to affect the world above.

What I find really interesting about this is that the dichotomy of good and evil or life and death doesn't seem to be the central conflict here. Nito, first of the dead, is pretty terrifying-looking, and definitely seems to skew more toward the evil side of the spectrum. The Witch of Izulath might have started out good, but birthed demons. But among them is also Lord Gwyn, who is your classic patriarchal deity, associated with order and sunlight, and someone who would typically be considered good.

They bring war to the dragons - Gwyn uses his lightning bolts to blast off their scales (the protective armor that keeps the dragons immortal) while Nito descends upon the with pestilence to kill them and the Witch burns the trees.

What the Lords do by defeating the Dragons seems less of a triumph of good over evil, but one of transformation and change over stasis. The dragons are "everlasting" and don't really seem to be doing anything except existing perpetually, but the people associated with fire are all part of a continuum of change. It's not life over death, but life and death over neither.

Skipping ahead to some spoilers, I know that Lord Gwyn is the final boss of the game - not that he's really a bad guy, but because he has "gone hollow" after fueling the flames of the world with his own soul for so long. I believe there are two endings - either you take his place or you allow the flames to die down and bring about an age of darkness.

What I see here is a kind of conundrum - were the Lords right to defeat the dragons? On one hand, by introducing the transitions of time, you introduce the inevitability of greater entropy. It's a physical fact that entropy increases over time - simply by doing things, we are hastening the Heat Death of the Universe, when all matter basically breaks down into a kind of even, disordered energy. That gradually burning out - consuming the fuel of the universe - is the consequence of the Lords' actions. But on the other hand, if they had not done what they did, the universe would be still and unchanging - just Everlasting Dragons forever and ever, locked into that state. Neither is really that appealing, to be honest, but this game doesn't seem like a very optimistic one.

The fourth Lord is called the Furtive Pygmy, and seems to be the progenitor of all humanity. There are some aspects of this part of the lore that I don't even have a theory about, including the way that Souls differ from Humanity, and how Humanity might be fragments of the eponymous Dark Soul.

But what I can speculate on is the Darksign. The Darksign is key to the game, as it's the thing that brings about your adventure and also, conveniently, provides a mechanical basis for why you keep coming back to life after you die.

Every character in Dark Souls, as far as I know, is Undead. People marked by the Darksign simply start coming back to life after they die. For a time, they retain their personality and intellect - their "humanity" (though I don't know how I should read into that.) But eventually, Undead go "Hollow," becoming the kind of mindless zombies you usually think of when you think about the Undead. The majority of enemies you face in the game (at least so far for me) are Hollows.

My take on this is that the Darksign seems to be putting humans into a state where they are reverting to the time of the Everlasting Dragons and the Grey Trees (skipping way ahead, there's some stuff in the upcoming Dark Souls III where there are Hollow bodies put into trees - which seems to back up this idea.) Without the light and dark of Souls and Humanity (that's a reach, but stay with me,) the Hollows revert to the kind of grey stasis that the Dragons presided over.

In a sense, because we're at this stage in the Dark Souls universe where the world's animating flame is burning down to embers, the transformation wrought by the Lords in that earliest age is now being undone, with the Undead being a symptom of this blurring between life and death. The Heat Death is happening, with the fires consuming their fuels, and the perhaps-ironic result is that it's all kind of becoming what it once was.

So that's what I've got so far. I know this is a game (series) with a rabid fandom, and that it's designed specifically to be open to interpretation. And I'm having a ton of fun speculating on the lore while my ass gets handed to me by all manner of just mean, mean enemies.

YOU DIED - More Dark Souls

Well, my proud record of always recovering my Souls/Humanity ended pretty quickly.

This game is seriously not messing around. It will make you question your skill as a gamer, though I think that the game it keeps making me think of is Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts - something that two friends of mine independently started playing again. For those of you unfamiliar, SG'n'G is one of the most infamously difficult games of the SNES era. It was an arcade game, and of course arcade games made more money the more difficult they were, as you'd have to keep popping in quarters to keep playing if you ran out of lives. The SNES port of it didn't really change anything about it except obviously make the "quarters" a kind of virtual thing - I think you could earn more continues as you collected money bags. The point is, merely beating the first level was something I could not accomplish.

Fast forward about twenty years to Dark Souls, and you get a very similar feeling.

Now, I have managed to progress - I beat the Taurus Demon, which is essentially the first mini-boss after the Undead Asylum's intro-boss (that one took me a mere three tries.) That freaking demon took me... I lost count. Probably around ten times.

Part of the difficulty here is that every time you die, you restart way back at the last bonfire at which you rested. All the enemies reset, and the "trash" in this game can very easily kill you if you aren't giving each of them the kind of respect you'd pay to a boss in most games. And you won't be able to re-fill your Estus Flask collection without resetting these dudes, so you need to fight them carefully so you don't have to burn through them. The other real tricky part is that if you enter a boss' area, "Traversing the White Light" (these light-gates are not always the entrance to a boss lair, and in fact, the Taurus Demon's area, which is on the ramparts of a massive wall, doesn't actually look like a boss lair until you get about halfway along it and the guy jumps at you,) you can't go back through it until the boss is dead. That means that if you want to recover your souls and such after dying to the thing, you have to go back into the boss lair - meaning you can't recover and go back to the bonfire to level up and keep farming souls.

The boss himself is actually relatively simple, and there are ways to more or less cheese the fight. But I think the way this game works is that you HAVE to cheese the boss or he will kill you dead very quickly. It's about flawless execution.

I don't know if I'm going to write about every last fight in this game, as it seems pretty huge (though much like SG'n'G, the length might feel a whole lot more significant thanks to the difficulty - in truth, the stretch of enemies that I dealt with on each run back to the boss would be a quick hack-and-slash in any other game) but we'll talk about this dude.

He's on the ramparts of the enormous city walls of Lordran. The first thing you want to do before triggering the boss by walking halfway to the far tower is to first turn around and climb the tower that you're next to - there's a ladder to your right as you walk in. Two undead soldiers will fire crossbows at you from above, though one of them sometimes has his sword out already. You want to climb up, possibly rolling right as you reach the top so that you don't get slashed as you get to your feet. Kill these guys so they don't sabotage your efforts during the fight.

Then you trigger the boss by climbing back down and running forward. As soon as he appears, you run right back to that ladder, climb up and then go over to the broken ledge. You can't take your time up here, because he'll eventually jump up onto the tower, but you can probably get a firebomb off before you make a diving slash - jump and then hit your basic attack. This takes off a massive chunk of the demon's health.

The trick then is to get all up in his crotch. Some of his attacks won't hit you while you're up close with him, so just stay there and get some slash-combos. I'm playing a Knight who starts with a 100% physical-reduction shield, so I could actually take some of his melee swings. There's not a lot of time to heal here, so the best thing is to just make sure that you raise that shield when he's about to strike, and lower it to allow you to regain stamina when he isn't.

Once you beat him, you'll be able to find a ladder to kick down to the very same bonfire you've just been resurrecting at. That ladder stays down, so you no longer have to go through all that stuff again. And the demon, as a boss, does not respawn, praise the sun.

So yep, that's... the first mini-boss. Jeez.

The First Like Two Minutes of Dark Souls

Well, I've gone and done something ill-advised, getting Dark Souls, the progenitor... well, not really, because Demon Souls existed before it... the beginner of the main franchise-within-a-franchise that includes Demon Souls, Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2, Bloodborne, and the upcoming Dark Souls 3.

If you're not familiar, it's generally considered one of the hardest games out there, with a lot of obscure nuance to the stats and such, and some very punishing gameplay mechanics.

I got in about two or three minutes of actual play after the intro cutscene before I had to stop so my roommate could tutor in that room.

But here's what I've got so far:

Character creation involves picking a class, which I think really just determines starting stats/equipment (you can re-orient things in a different way if you want later on,) a trinket, some of which are consumables and some have more obscure functions, and your appearance, which I assume is just cosmetic.

Most interestingly, rather than a simple gender choice, there's a sliding bar of "masculinity and femininity," which I have to say is pretty damn cool to see. Obviously you can slide the bar all the way to dude or lady, but if you want something a little in between, there's a whole spectrum.

Once this is done, you pop in and begin.

I picked a Knight with a Small Being ring - the ring gives you a mild health regeneration effect, which I figure will be nice to have in a game that A: has no passive health regeneration and B: seems to allow you to stand still once you've cleared all the enemies that are an immediate threat to you.

In addition to just punishing combat, where a single hit will take a big chunk of your health, there are two other pretty punishing mechanics.

The first is that if you die, all the Souls you've collected (a kind of combination of XP and Gold, granted whenever you kill a thing or really just anything dies near you,) and any Humanity you have (which is a far more obscure thing that I'm still not totally clear on, and that's probably intended) will be left next to the bloodstain you've left behind. You'll start over near the last bonfire you rested at, and all enemies will reset, and if you want those Souls/Humanity, you'll need to survive the trip to retrieve them. You need to rest at a bonfire to spend your souls on leveling up various stats (or to replenish Estus Flasks, which are your healing potions) and so there's a constant tension between trying to progress a little farther through more enemies or going back to level up/replenish.

Also, any time you die or rest at a bonfire, the vast majority of enemies will respawn.

The other mechanic that is maybe less defensible is that there is no pause button. This certainly makes it a bit more hardcore, but is also perhaps not so nice to the player, who, you know, sometimes has other real-world things to do. (Granted, WoW doesn't have a pause button, but it's an MMO... actually...)

The other thing, and one that I'm not likely to experience, is that the game is actually multiplayer, despite seeming like a very single-player driven experience.

You can summon allies if you're online (actually, there are also some NPCs you can summon if you aren't,) but playing online also allows other players to "Invade" your game, potentially killing you and I believe taking the souls and humanity you've gathered.

No thank you!

So I've only fought one enemy so far, and while I managed to down him without much trouble, I'm definitely getting used to the controls.

The Knight has high health and a starting set of strong armor, but I'm very slow and my rolling dodge is pretty damn terrible at the moment, with an embarrassing "thud" as I slam to the ground and kind of shamble back up.

EDIT: I've now played for maybe an hour or two. I think I've died about ten times, though thankfully once I died right next to the main bonfire at Firelink Shrine, which I believe is kind of the main hub.

The intro "tutorial" area allows you to practice a bit at combat, but you can't level up. You can get a really satisfying attack if you manage to parry, but doing so can be very tough, timing-wise, and you'll often find yourself shield-bashing too early or too late to interrupt their attack and find yourself getting smacked. I'm playing this on a 360, and I'm pretty sure this was designed for a PS3 controller, because the regular attack button, which you need to use if you're going to get that nice, powerful finishing stab, is RB, whereas parry is LT, so there's a little bit of awkward muscle memory working against you. In fact, a lot of the combat involves using the shoulder buttons, which most Xbox games only use sparingly and assume you're going to be using the triggers more. LB is the button you hold to keep your shield up, which... yeah, is pretty important.

I haven't managed to die before retrieving my little patch of souls yet, which is nice, but I'm trying to maintain a pessimistic attitude toward the game. The "boss" of the intro level took me three tries to get him down (I think the key is nailing the mid-air attack, as you'll drop down on him to fight him, and you can get him down by about 50% in your first hit if you pull it off.)

There are definitely some nuances to the controls and combat that I'm going to have to get used to. Repeated attacks will do successively more damage, but you drain your stamina (used for dodging, attacking, and blocking) and leave yourself open to the enemy's attacks.

So my strategy for now is that I'm going to clear forward until I've run out of Estus Flasks (the healing potions that you get from bonfires) and then go back to the bonfire, spend as many souls as I can on leveling up my stats, then pushing forward through the same enemies until I've improved - in stats, skills, and understanding of enemy mechanics and placements - that I can make it to the next bonfire. I'm sure it will be slow going for a while.