Dark Souls 3: Atmospheric but flawed and a frustratingly tantalizing story

I’ve been playing DarkSouls 3 off and on for about a year now. It seems like a game I’d really like. The fantasy elements are nice, the graphics are freaking awesome, and the atmosphere has a nice creepy vibe like a mature version of Castlevania. However after fighting my way through it twice and trying to master it I’m force to conclude the game is very very flawed.

Let’s start with the good stuff. The graphics and atmosphere are great. Look at the way Anor Londo is presented. This is like a “city of Gondor” level of design.

The game is very challenging. Even after completing the entire game, leveling up, and getting epic weaponry and armor the first mob you encounter in the game can kill you without much effort. That’s a design decision which you’ll either love or hate but it works for me.

The camera is pretty shit. The game keeps an angle called “forced perspective” where you look at monsters towering over your tiny character. That’s awesome for atmosphere and tension but if you have poor vision like me, you’re going to be struggling to figure out if you’re safely out of the mob’s attack range.

The story is interesting if very confusing. The creators are clearly building up to something over the series but no one has any idea what it is. The writers tell a decent story by giving us the truth of what’s going on in pieces and drips, however this also gets frustrating because the authors don’t quite know when to cut their audience some slack and let them know what’s really going on.

Since this game is reputed to be the final game in the series (at least the last one created by series creator Hidetaka Miyazaki) it also appears likely that a large number of questions and plot holes will go unanswered.

One touch I like is the way Miyazaki borrows a number of items from other fantasy genres. Anor Londo, the fabled city of “Gwynn the Lord of Sunlight” for example, can be translated in Tolkien’s Sindarian language as “The Hidden Refuge of the Sun.” Irithyll, another location in the game with a heavy emphasis on the moon borrows from the Sindarin word Ithil meaning moon.

I actually downloaded and played through both DLCs and was infuriated by the way the game left this story arc. Some people have been faithfully following this series for coming up on 10 years and after all this, they're entitled to get some idea of what is really going on.

I didn't play the first two games but basically every game in the series is modeled after the mythological concept of 'fire theft.' The Fire, representing all light, heat and energy in the universe is going out so you as the main character must go to the source of all fire in the universe and sacrifice yourself to keep the universe going or refuse and usher in the Age of Dark.

This is all fine and good but it leaves you off feeling like the story stopped halfway through. Either you burn to death in the Kiln of the First Flame or you let the fire go out or you 'Usurp' the fire for your own needs. However the game never explains how any of this works or what the results will be. What's worse is that by the time of Dark Souls 3 the game leaves you with the suspicion that regardless of which choice you make it may not matter. The fire seems to be getting weaker in spite of sacrifices and the sacrifice may be pointless or even counter productive. This could be a fascinating opportunity to elaborate on the true nature of this world but the game never addresses it.

The two DLCs were horribly disappointing. In the first DLC we enter a magical painting. The fan community excited by this and hoping that we'd learn more about the first painting from Dark Souls 1 which has spurred a large amount of speculation over the years but this does not happen. We learn nothing note-able about existing characters. Instead new characters we've never heard of (and mainly don't care about) are introduced and broadly explained.

In order to explain why this is a problem I need to talk about a concept called "efficiency" as it applies to writing. Whether your writing a game, a movie, or a novel, you only have so much dialogue and exposition in which you can tell your story so you need to be disciplined enough to get your message across in that amount of space. What I'm trying to get at is that if Dark Souls 3 is the end of the series, the DLCs are not the proper time to introduce any major new concepts or characters. You just don't have time to develop them correctly. The DLCs should have been used to elaborate already existing concepts and tie up loose ends.

In the first DLC we enter a magical painting and after fighting our way through assorted characters and places we've never heard of before and don't really care about, we encounter the 'Painter', a young girl with some reptilian traits. She might be a half dragon as Priscilla was in the first game's painting but the story doesn't tell us that or even allude to it. She mentions a 'mother' but without any detail about who that was or how she wound up in the painting. The Painter is just 'here' and seems utterly unconnected to anything else in the world.

The final thing the Painter mentions which got fan boys' hearts racing is that her ally is seeking the "Dark Soul of Man" for her because she needs it to paint. This is one of the first times in the series we've ever heard the eponymous 'Dark Soul' even mentioned and it got everyone very excited that we were going on a quest in the final DLC to find the Dark Soul and finally understand how this whole universe was set up and how it worked.

However the last DLC was also a fantastic disappointment, although it initially sounded promising enough. The final DLC takes us to the edge of the world to find the Ringed City, which belongs to the pygmies who own the Dark Soul. The concept art reveals Angels which have been a regularly discussed but unseen and unexplained concept in Dark Souls 3 so we thought we might learn more about them. We saw the symbol of the Church of Londor in the promotional art, a sinister and mysterious organization so we assumed we'd probably learn more about them. And since the Painter was the one sending us here, it seemed reasonable we might learn more about her and the painting. Moreover since the pygmies were the original humans, it seemed like we were finally about to learn he source and the meaning of the mysterious curse of the undead.

The Ringed city is full of ancient dark corrupted creatures so it seems like if we want answers we are on the right track. We fight out way through the city and encounter the sleeping Princess Fillianore, a daughter of the Sun God Gwynn who has NEVER been mentioned or even alluded to before. This is more of that 'bad efficiency' I alluded to previously. This is the very end of the series and there's no time to properly explain who Fillianore is or what she is doing here. The game explains that Gwynn left her here as something of a hostage and promised to return for her but never did. However this doesn't explain what she is, why she is still here, or why she is holding an egg.

Fillianore appears to be sleeping holding an egg (probably a reference to the anime movie "Egg of the Angel"). However once the egg is disturbed it falls to pieces and the city collapses into dust and ruin leaving Fillianore a withered corpse. If you were hoping the game would ever explain what just happened or why, good for you but you'll be disappointed.

After the city crumbles you encounter a servant of the Painter whom you shared about ten lines of dialogue with in the first DLC. He's now a giant mutated monstrosity who has consumed all the residents of the city to acquire their dark souls for the Painter. After a brutal fight, you kill him and recover the 'Blood of the Dark Soul of Man' which happens to be the pigment the Painter needs. You bring it back to her and she thanks you because she can now finish her painting. That's it. Nothing else happens and nothing is explained.

Dark Souls is famous for its minimalist story telling style and if it hadn't been announced that this was the last game in the franchise, the fans might have been more understanding.

However because it is the last game, this means that the community has all the pieces of the puzzle it's ever going to get and must ponder out the meaning of things as is. The issue behind a minimalist story telling style is that there needs to be answer. We will devote time and energy to pondering the meaning of the question because the author strongly implies that there IS an answer. That we can figure it out. Otherwise there's no point to thinking about it.

These DLCs are so frustrating because the ways they don't even modify or challenge our original understanding suggests there really ISN'T any answers, that the writers didn't bother to come up with responses to these questions and were simply doing whatever felt cool at any given time. This makes anyone following the story feel like they've wasted tons of time for no good reason and it's infuriating.

The game is also very very flawed and most of those flaws deal with its core mechanics. The mechanics in Dark Souls are not explained AT ALL. You just get thrown in the deep end of the pool and sink or swim. In a standard hack and slash game you basically have 3 to 4 options on how to endure damage: Dodge the attack, parry the attack, block the attack with a shield, or endure the attack with heavy armor. Couple this with the already mentioned aspect that any enemy in Dark Souls can kill you in two to 3 swings for the most part. That’s not even especially tough enemies that’s just any trash mob. While this is good for increasing challenge it also affects how we play the game.

When I encountered the first mini boss I attempted to block his attacks with my shield. This didn’t work, at all. Each blow he made drained by stamina badly which is the resource used to attack, dodge or block. He had no trouble overpowering my blocking which then stuns me and gives him the opportunity to land a powerful counter attack which kills me in one hit. Start over.

Ok, this time I try parrying. Parrying is an attractive option in the game since a successful parry gives you the chance to land a counter attack stunning the enemy and dealing heavy damage. However parrying also requires very precise timing and is tricky to master so once again, the mini boss just feeds me his pole arm over and over again.

I start just rolling around every attack and ultimately manage to kill the boss.

Initially I thought I just sucked at the game or that my equipment quality was too poor to play using the other strategies but the reality is that is the way, the only way, you can play this game.

I got the best armor in the game, the armor of “Havel the Rock”, and respecced my character to become a tank. I’m now wearing the heaviest armor in the game, so heavy I can barely move. I have a massive shield and an enormous club called the Dragon Tooth. Now I feel bad-ass!

I’m a walking boulder, albeit an extremely slow one, and I’m ready to try playing the game by doing something other than rolling around like a rag doll. So I find a big slow armored trash mob called a Cathedral Knight and I prepare to go mano-a-mano with him. And he feeds me my own club.

Seriously, it doesn’t work! It doesn't work at all! I have the best heavy equipment in the game and my character has enormous amounts of strengths, vigor and poise but the Knight still effortlessly breaks through my guard and kills me in two to three hits. That’s roughly how many hits it takes to kill me if I’m not wearing any armor at all!

I’m not kidding despite including a large number of really bad-ass armor sets in the game, armor serves no purpose. Serves less than no purpose really, since in addition to providing little to no protection it also badly slows you down due to equipment load and can make it impossible to run or dodge.

This is an extreme kind of bullshit and really feels like a trap to the gamer. The game heavily implies you can play the game as a tank since you run into a lot of tanky mobs whose equipment you can collect but you can’t play that way! Any non trivial mob can simply break through your guard and land a special counter attack that’s likely to kill you in one shot.

Heavy weapons aren’t much better. They do a lot of damage but they also badly slow you down so you may not be able to swing without eating a strike in return and because a lot of your enemies DO carry heavy weapons and wear heavy armor, you’re likely to die before ever landing a stroke, not to mention that even massive weapons like the Ultra Fume Sword don’t do a whole lot more damage than a light katana with a bleed debuff on it.

I’m reluctant to say the game is cheating, but I’ve never seen a mob visibly run out of stamina. They can run and swing enormous weapons over and over again without taking a break. I don’t know if they just have amazing stats a player can’t match, their AI calculates swings so well that they don’t run out, or if they have no stamina bar and the game just cheats.

Ok, so if armor doesn’t work, and heavy weapons aren’t an option then what do you do? And parrying is a no-go if you thought that was an option. Initially I assumed parrying was a viable strategy and the reason I kept eating the enemy’s attacks was because I just sucked. However, the trash mobs and especially the bosses have a lot of attacks that CAN’T be parried. While this isn’t exactly unreasonable the game doesn’t tell you which attacks they are.

There’s no sign whether you can parry that attack or not, you have to figure it out through trial and error. However because the timing demands are so tight you’re never really sure if that attack can really not be parried or if your timing was just off, so you rapidly give up on parrying and just go back to dodging and rolling.

Basically there is only one strategy in this game: fast weapon, no armor, and dodge every attack. That sucks for the replay value and is also frustrating because of all the bad-ass armor and weapon sets I collected in the game which I have no reason to use outside of PVP. The game can be replayed many times with mobs and bosses getting more difficult and item drops gets better but why would you play through again? There’s no replay value. There’s no other approach or new way to try the game. It forces you into using the exact same formula every time and it doesn’t even have the decency to tell new players what that formula is. This by defintiion is broken design since you have tools and items which you funamentally can't use.

So would I recommend this game? Yeah it’s worth playing just for the great atmosphere and visuals. The Dancer of the Boreal Valley is one of my favorite boss fights ever: The music, the character design, the tension in the fight. When the game does certain things right, it can be pretty kick ass.

All in all Dark Souls is worth playing just for it’s amazing graphics and dark atmosphere but expect to be frustrated and expect to be underwhelmed by its extreme challenge and repetitive game-play. Also as stated don't bother being sucked in by its fascinating world building because the author will let you down.

Final Score: 7/10