So I guess Dark Souls really is my favorite game series because immediately after finishing the game I went back and rolled a new character which I never do for any games. Note that this is the main game only as I bought it a while back and haven’t bought the DLC yet. I’m sure to do so eventually of course but the thought of confronting even harder bosses feels rather intimidating right now as I found the bosses in this game significantly harder than the two previous games.
A lot has changed in terms of games mechanics, both good and bad. Now more than ever it’s a twitch game with rolling being favored over blocking which I don’t like as it was the slow, deliberative nature of the action in the first game that made it stand out for me. Weapon Arts and Focus Points are great however and I enjoy how the new attacks make melee combat richer than ever. Then again, it’s weird how the viability of different weapons seems to have gone down since the second game. For my first run in this game, I pretty much always used a claymore or the Hollowslayer Greatsword which has a similar moveset as I found no reason to use anything else. In the second game for example, I found it useful to switch to the Craftsman’s Hammer for certain enemies and I’ve even used a whip at times.
What is unambiguously good is that the graphics are fantastic and the levels much more interesting this time around. To be fair, this is a smaller game with fewer locations and bosses but everything here is tight, well designed and connected logically. Once again I loved unlocking shortcuts and finding little nooks and crannies. Irithyll for example is a truly stunning location. Of course no one who has played the first game can miss the fact that From Software has tried hard to rekindle its magic here. Personally I think that they went a little too far in replicating everything but I suppose the nostalgia factor works and the results are gorgeous.
Another big change is that the bosses now have much more complex movesets and there are always at least two phases in each boss fight. This makes them far more challenging to beat as you must learn many more behaviors, dying each time to discover more. You can of course overpower the bosses by levelling more as ordinary mobs once again respawn infinitely so you can grind on them but I have no doubt that these changes make the bosses much more difficult than either of two previous games. At the same time, this also makes each boss fight feel more unique, doing away with the complaint of Dark Souls 2 bosses being more variations of big, armored dudes. I also love how different players tend to find different bosses to be difficult. For example I found Dragon Slayer Armor to be very hard despite his well telegraphed attacks due to my slow weapon but I found the Dancer to be very easy even as many players complain about her unusual movements.
At the same time, I’d say that the levels themselves are quite forgiving. Bonfires and shortcuts are plentiful, perhaps a bit too generously so, and the game avoids setting up strong points in the level design that are difficult to pass. For example the archer sniper alley in here has nothing on what the first game forces you to do and the obligatory poison level is a joke compared to those of the two previous games. There are also no levels which have specific gimmicks which make them a pain, such as water in Shrine of Amana or the darkness in Tomb of Giants. The levels are beautiful to be sure but they just don’t inspire fear and dread. They do have some mini-bosses which are quite difficult, such as the Boreal Outrider Knights, but strangely the level design always provides a way to cheese them to death if you’re not up to confronting them directly, so again there’s no real fear.
Anyway, overall I still love this game series and it remains the best melee action game I’ve ever played. There’s nothing quite like dancing with an enemy, being in full command of your moveset and being able to predict your enemy’s actions and respond appropriately. Fighting the bosses is always very stressful but for the most part they are fair. My main complaint is with the caster bosses as it’s down to luck sometimes depending on which spell they choose to use. Generally speaking, when you die to a boss you always know what you did wrong and so you can try to do better. Getting it finally all perfect in the end therefore feels incredibly satisfying. I’ll give it a few months before I play the DLC because I can’t take this level of tension all the time and I want to play around my pyromancer run a bit more. But I will definitely buy and play it.
