Alrighty. For those who actually bother to read my posts about video games - you may have noticed I haven't mentioned games in a while and that is not because I stopped playing them. In fact, I have been steadily playing certain games - specifically, I've been attempting to get through the Soulsborne series (minus Demon Souls). Since I am not a great gamer, and I was very busy with school for a while (plus subbing 99.9 SII), this has taken me a lot longer than anticipated, but here I am, with Dark Souls 1, 2, 3 all finished for me to talk about. I will make a separate post about Bloodborne when I beat it :)
Warning: This is going to be a long post since it's pretty much three game reviews in one. Have fun!
Dark Souls 1
Okay, so just to recap I first played Dark Souls two (omg, two?!) years ago when I was still living in Tokyo. I made a post about it, but I never really talked about what I thought about it. Having played Dark Souls 2 and 3 though, I think I'm able to go back and think about what I really appreciated with this first game, and what I loved about it so much I decided to buy the next 2 games as well as Bloodborne despite being not that great of a gamer.
So, the first thing and one thing that many people mention is the world itself. I really loved how interconnected DS1 was and I really missed that aspect in both 2 and 3. I looove being able to circle back around to firelink shrine again and again. The whole "nexus" situation and leveling up only by speaking to someone really annoyed me. I don't like it in any of the games and I was disappointed that Fromsoft didn't seem to the stick to the ability to level up at bonfires at any time. I'm a fan of efficiency Dark Souls 1 was truly a game that mastered that quality.
The next thing I really appreciated was that I also found the difficulty curve of DS1 really good? You start off with the Asylum demon who you can semi-cheese by jump attacking him. Then you fight the Taurus demon who again, you can cheese with the right knowledge, but he's not a particularly hard boss. He kicked my ass, but I think if I went back to him now I would find him very easy. I just felt like a lot of the Dark Souls 1 bosses scaled nicely for a beginner. Not just the bosses though, the enemies as well. The undead burg was a great starting area in my opinion. It was nice, tight, and the enemies tracked really nicely so you never felt bombarded and you learned how to memorize placements and timing really well. This compared to the hard-ass knights in DS3's beginning area and DS2's massive crowd control issue and DS1 really wins this quite easily for me.
Unfortunately I haven't gotten my hands on the remaster yet so I can't really say how well the game holds up now that I would say I'm a more "experienced" player. Perhaps I'll find DS1 really easy now. Perhaps I'll find it just as hard. I'm curious to find out, but until then that's all I really had to say about Dark Souls 1. Overall? It's still going to be my favourite. I don't think anything is ever going to replace that first experience I had getting through the game. It was so great.
Dark Souls 2
So, the fact that there was about a year gap in between me playing Dark Souls 1 for the very first time, and me playing Dark Souls 2 at the beginning of this year meant that when I first started DS2, I was back to being a complete newbie at the game. Now, a lot of people state DS2 as being the "easiest" of the three, and in many ways, I would agree. In a lot of ways though, I would also like to heavily disagree. The thing about Dark Souls 2 is that a lot of the bosses (and oh my god, so many bosses) were a lot easier than I remember Dark Souls 1 bosses being, but actually getting to the bosses was an absolute nightmare for me 90% of the time. Seriously. A lot of the areas I only made it to the boss fog gate specifically because I had died so many times there were no enemies left.
My overall thoughts on the game? It's okay. At first I definitely fell into the trap of comparing it to DS1 and griping about continuations etc. etc. but then I realized, I didn't need to do that? Like yes, there is lore connecting the three Dark Souls games together, but I was thinking about it, and people who enjoy games like Final Fantasy and Zelda don't really get into as much heated debates about whether the "sequel" is better, mostly because there is no such thing as a true sequel. In fact, people who like FF and Zelda actively enjoy a lot of the later games than their predecessors specifically because people see each FF and Zelda game as entirely new entities that are only loosely connected by similar dynamics spanning across what is essentially a franchise title. So, I figured, why can't I do that with Dark Souls as well? Like, a lot of Zelda games take place in the same "world" (supposedly), but with giant timelines apart and Dark Souls is exactly the same - so... once I reached that state of mind, Dark Souls 2 actually didn't seem to so bad to me anymore if I saw it as it's own game, within a franchise that we can call "the Soulsborne series".
At the same time - you will notice I only said Dark Souls 2 was "okay". Do I see myself re-playing it anytime soon? I don't think so. The thing I really loved about DS1 was how memorable the areas and the entire world was, and how different all the bosses were, which made it really fun. In DS2.... I can't remember half the places I went to, so many of the bosses were just giant knights with big weapons that you could easily dodge through... or... other things... that I can't remember anymore. If anything, a lot of the time I remember finding DS2 super tedious. Especially in terms of speed. I will get more into this when I talk about DS3, but Oh. My. God. Dark Souls 2 is so slow. Like. SO SLOW. And also, it's such a long game when you play it through for the first time. And - as a first-timer, the game is so punishing when you first start out. I think the first part of the game - like literally the first couple of areas (all the areas you need to pass through to get to Lost Sinner and Old Iron King) - just getting past those areas took me half my playthrough time because starting out was so hard. You'd get punished for dying, human effigies were rare enough that I didn't want to use them unnecessarily, just to die repeatedly again.... it was a struggle. It got much easier later in the game - I feel like once I got past Iron Keep everything was a breeze, but up until that point it was a literal nightmare. Again, the irony is that the bosses themselves weren't hard, it was literally the areas, the amount of enemies and the ganking and just... omg, nightmare. And yes, I know "Dark Souls is hard, get gid" whatever, but there is Dark Souls 1 type of hard where it felt like slow but steady uphill challenge, and Dark Souls 2 hard, where it felt more like having a scale a vertical cliff side with your bare hands and minimal gear.
I've had friends tell me that the appeal of Dark Souls 2 isn't the first playthrough - it's the replay value and I can definitely see that. If you do NG+ you get a lot of benefits, and they make it WAY easier for you to get through the Shrine of Winter etc. etc. but like... I don't usually replay games. So for a game where I like to enjoy it in just one run, it's okay. It was a Souls game, but I don't think I enjoyed it as much as DS1. At the same time I still beat it so, it clearly wasn't a horrid experience, but I can't really pinpoint what I necessarily liked about the game (besides the fact that it's a Dark Souls game and I find the general style of an action RPG fun).
By the way - I should mention I have not beat any of the DLC. I made it to the Fume Knight in the Iron King DLC and that's all I've tried so far. The DLC is pretty enjoyable though, and I like the areas more in the DLC than the actual base game. Drangleic Castle and Heide's Tower of Flame were great areas, the rest of the places? They can go to hell.
Dark Souls 3
I remember my first thought after immediately jumping from 2 to 3 was "OMG THIS GAME IS SO FAST WTF???" On the flip side though, in many ways they made this game so much easier because you have room to be so much more aggressive compared to DS2, and that makes things so much easier for me. I'm getting better at being defensive (DS2 trained me well), but when the time comes I like to swing my sword like a mad-man as much as possible, and I feel like DS3 hits that balance really well for me. I still need to be defensive (I mean, that's par the course for this series right?), but I'm also not punished as heavily if I also act a bit more aggressively. I can name a number of bosses who I literally just ran at while swinging wildly while rolling around occasionally, and it worked. I'm trying to imagine doing the same thing to any DS2 boss, or any of the early bosses in DS1 and like... I'm just laughing at how terrible that experience would be.
With that being said... I made one of my friends try out Dark Souls 3, she had never played a Souls game before and I realized, the beginning of the game is actually so hard. Like, the interesting thing is that the beginning of all Souls game have been challenging in their own way. In DS1 there is that initial fake-out with the Asylum Demon, but you come back to him eventually. With DS1 though, you get the jump-attack to start off with which clears out half the demons health, and a lot of the early bosses have clear ways of cheesing them, whereas DS3, there is no clear way of cheesing the early bosses. You really just start out fighting Iudex Gundyr with nothing but your sword and the shoddy skills you picked up in the first 15-20min it took you to reach that first fog gate. Thinking back on it, if DS3 had been my first Souls game, I think it would have been a literal nightmare. As someone who has had experience though, I genuinely found the beginning super fun and exhilarating - mostly because I didn't die once despite a boss showing up right away. Go me!
So, overall for this game, I'd say I like it much more than DS2. But, I can see why people would find it a bit boring or lacklustre compared to previous Souls games depending on what you like. DS3 is very linear and pretty short. Even me, with my lacklustre gaming skills, was able to beat the base game in 50hrs. With that being said, it seriously is such a pretty game and I actually really liked the lore of DS3? I love how it wrapped around to DS1, but changed some things up. I loooove the atmosphere of Irithyll. Like. Love. I took so many screencaps. I wish you could've explored that city more because I honestly just wanted to walk around everywhere. Also, Pontiff Sulyvahn, although a real hard-ass boss was a really fun fight in my opinion. Frustrating but fun. And I adore his entire storyline mixed in with Aldrich's storyline. I wasn't really super attached to the base story of DS1 and the idea that the Gods all just ran away, so the fact that someone might have shown up and devoured them all and then created this ice town etc. etc. just seemed really cool and interesting to me.
Lothric Castle was a reaaaal struggle for me though. I usually don't try to run past enemies too often, but I found myself doing that a lot in Lothric because the Lothric Knights were literally just destroying me. Out of all the enemies, those knights I could never really figure out. I think I was just too impatient. I don't know, but man was it frustrating. I also made sure to do a quick run through Archdragon Peak (although I didn't fight the Nameless King) and those weird snake enemy things were also a huge pain in the butt. Not fun. Not cool. I also tried to explore the Ashes of Ariandal DLC, but that area also just... annoyed the hell out of me.
I think a lot of it was that I just didn't have the patience to slowly fight enemies one by one, especially if I couldn't beat them in one or two hits. Who knows, maybe I'll go back one day to play the DLC (*cough*and the DS2 DLC.... *cough*) but for now I like the way DS3 ended and I'm happy to step away from it for now. :)
Conclusion:
DS1 > DS3 > DS2
Things I liked best from each game: DS1's world and overall efficiency. DS3's prettiness and ability to be more aggressive. DS2 encouraging me to try out other weapons.
Sorry if this post is super choppy. I wrote each part at wildly different times and through out the span of a year and a half. LOL. #Life getting in my waaaay.
But, I am currently playing Bloodborne (finally!) and I am enjoying the heck out of it and I'm hoping I can make a post reviewing it eventually too.
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