Day Ten
- Game: FromSoftware's Dark Souls III.
- Release Month: March.
- Quick Look: Here. (Brad/Jason)
- Started: October. (Revisit: 10/12)
And so, inevitably, we reach the end of this year's Go! Go! GOTY! daily series. I've discovered a few significant additions to my GOTY list this December, which I'm happy to report now has ten games on it because tradition is paramount, and we now conclude with a few hours of everyone's favorite series to endlessly compare to everything else.
I'm picking up Dark Souls III some hours into the second run, or NG+, which I spent tracking down a few items and gestures I missed in the first playthrough due to narrative reasons. I'd just managed to earn the "all gestures" trophy, easily missed because it means throwing your lot in with the PvP covenant and there's another NPC that really doesn't like it when you side with the bad guys, and had put the game away just outside the Abyss Watchers fight. In a case of sheer serendipity, this meant that I would then fight, back-to-back, three of the best boss fights in the game: The Abyss Watchers, High Lord Wolnir and Pontiff Sulyvahn.
If you want a more thorough analysis of those three battles, I'd like to point you towards these two Bosswatchfeatures I penned a few months ago. In brief non-spoilerish terms, they represent three of the series's greatest strengths with regards to their boss fight design in particular: the Abyss Watchers represent the game's ability to surprise players with an eventful boss encounter that dramatically shifts and turns as the battle progresses; High Lord Wolnir is a case of the series fully embracing its gothic aesthetic with an imaginative and terrifying visual design and some wonderful subtextual lore beneath that will only be gleaned in more detail later by a lore-attentive player; and the Pontiff represents the always nervewracking "duel boss", which has the player face off with another (mostly) human opponent with a degree of intelligence that precludes an approach based on simple pattern memorization and/or brute force. The trick is having a balance between all three types: Event bosses lose their power to surprise if fought too often, gigantic showy bosses are frequently too easy because you can simply hide beneath them, and duel bosses can occasionally make you wish you were partaking in PvP battles instead. By mixing it up, no one boss fight type ever gets too old or feels too familiar, an issue Dark Souls 2 ran into frequently.
I'd be remiss to not mention the odd dynamic that New Game Plus presents, as it does modify the game's difficulty curve in an uncommon manner distinct to this series and a handful of others. The adjusted level of challenge makes sense when described, though it's still an unusual selling point for the series: you begin a new run by steamrolling everything until about the three-quarters point or later, at which point the game gets even harder than it was in the initial playthrough. This is due to upgrade atrophy: the enemies are uniformly boosted in health and damage (and I swear some areas have more enemies than they used to), but the player begins incredibly powerful but doesn't grow much at all, as it's likely they already have all the best equipment and the soul cost for new levels has become astronomical. As they face enemies they fought fifty soul levels ago, the uniform boost to those enemies' stats won't matter a jot. It's not like Diablo where everything suddenly jumps 30 levels higher; if anything the enemies just get a simple percentage boost instead, and that handful of extra HP won't protect the weak early-game opponents. However, as the player gets closer to the end of the game and starts facing off against opponents that were challenging relative to their current level - which won't have shifted much throughout this second run, nor will the player have found considerably better equipment - that uniform boost suddenly becomes a lot more insurmountable. I've jotted down this phenomenon in a handy line graph, because it's been a while since I busted out MS Paint:
My feelings about Dark Souls 3 haven't shifted too much with this revisit, largely because I'm treading familiar ground. Isolating a particularly good stretch - I was fortunate that I'd left the game after the swamp around Farron's Keep, otherwise this revisit might not have happened - doesn't really convince me of some hidden quality the game managed to conceal from me in my first playthrough but simply affirmed my prior appraisal. As a Souls game, it's probably the best of the bunch from a purely functional perspective; tempered with the right features and systems to draw from the two Dark Souls games, plus little morsels from Demon's and Bloodborne, it still only very rarely attempts anything novel for the sake of creating a distinction from its predecessors. Its only real innovation was to modify Demon's Souls "mana" system, in lieu of having a finite number of spell slots, and tie into special weapon arts - this presents the unfortunate scenario where you have to choose between health Estus and the mana-providing Ashen Estus, and no-one's going to go all in on a magic build or depend too much on spectacular charge moves if both means having to rely on half as many healing items. As the game's single major mechanical change, it's not a particularly astute one.
Yet, my take on the game will always be made more complicated by how much I enjoy the series and how much Dark Souls 3 gets right where Dark Souls 2 faltered. The bosses are imaginative and exciting, with the tense humanoid fights sparingly paced out with the more visually stunning if mechanically rigid melees against enormous bestial foes and other supernatural deities. The game has quality of life shortcuts aplenty, from the welcome bonfire teleportation system to how some areas are cleverly designed to feed back into a central bonfire "hub", and even the small but handy way that you can fill your item slots and hit down on the D-pad for a few seconds to be taken right back to the Estus flasks instead of having to hurriedly scroll your way back to them. The online is closed off to those who aren't playing for PS Plus, which sucks in any game that you've paid the retail price for, but then Bloodborne does the same unreasonable thing and I imagine many more PS4 games have or will assume this practice as online servers continue to be costly fellows to maintain.
The sentiment surrounding the game upon its completion and release was that Miyazaki and his team were eager to move on from all this fire-kindling business and medieval trappings and attempt a new theme with a similar Souls-ian template akin to what they did with Bloodborne. Whether they felt this way through DS3's development or only afterwards is anyone's guess, but I can emphasize with the feeling of being stuck in a rut.
Now watch me rank it as my second favorite game of the year in spite of all the above.
Log in to comment