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    Dark Souls III

    Game » consists of 10 releases. Released Mar 24, 2016

    This game melds elements from all previous Souls games and concludes the Dark Souls trilogy.

    milijango's Ashes of Ariandel (PlayStation 4) review

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    (Ashes of Ariandel) Enough good material for the fans, but hardly indispensable

    Downloadable content has long been a point of pride for Souls fans. That said, they've generally been something of a quiet affair: the journeys have been highly focused, quite unlike the sprawl of the core games. Still, they tied into the greater mythology of places that the series has always been so good at. Dark Souls' Artorias of the Abyss and Bloodborne's The Old Hunters filled in the history of those worlds' most enigmatic figures, moving them from lines of text in a few items to the domain of brilliant, horrific areas and bosses. In Dark Souls II, the crown trilogy sought to parallel the main story, reinforcing the idea of cycles, and destined failure.

    The intent of Ashes of Ariandel, the first DLC for Dark Souls III, is not so clear. The dialogue and text in it seems to mostly paint its pictures in the key motifs from Dark Souls III and Bloodborne: ash, ember, blood, rot, secrets, chastisement for going after said secrets. In traditional Dark Souls fashion, the story's there, but it's buried, and it's incomplete due to tying in to the second piece of DLC, the Ringed City. It then spins it all into a mishmash of snowy realms, superficially resembling the Painted World of Ariamis but boasting the sprawling geography of a Dark Souls 2 or 3 area. It doesn't feel like one big connected area, but five half-hour jaunts through above-average/good zones that don't feel disjointed, but are a little bit detached from one another, thematically. Each one is crawling with enemies - don't feel compelled to slay them all - and by virtue of enemy placement, Ariandel is among the most difficult areas of the game. I completed it just shy of level 60, but it feels tuned for characters 20-30 levels higher than that.

    Ariandel isn't a treasure trove for new equipment, particularly if you were hoping for a solid set of new spells, or to fill out your late medieval wardrobe. Still, the DLC does try to offer something new for every build, and supplies a handful of new weapons that serve to break up the homogeneity of Dark Souls III's existing weapons through unique weapon arts that are actually reasonably practical. They're pretty successful in that regard, and I could see myself using them in future playthroughs.

    Gauging the DLC's length is difficult, and your playtime will depend your level, equipment, skill, and completionist streak. The acreage here feels analogous to one of the Crown DLCs of Dark Souls II, though if you succumb to your desire to sprint though the onslaught of foes you'll get through it much more quickly. There's one small side area that's only required if you wish to access the DLC's multiplayer arena component, but as is usual for Souls DLC, there's no real question as to where you need to go next. Fortunately, Ariandel keeps things feeling open through the use of broad spaces that allow many angles of approach to any given encounter.

    That is smart design, but Dark Souls III has done this before, and it plays a lot like many of the game's earlier areas such as Road of Sacrifices and Farron Keep. Thus, while encounters are competently designed, they feel a little tired, which might well be compounded by the aforementioned difficulty. Unfortunately, the same can be said for much of the art direction as well. While Ariandel is clearly evoking areas from past Dark Souls games, at times it looks interchangeable with all those snowy castles that have been a series staple since the first Dark Souls.

    There's one spot, however, where Ariandel outshines the rest of the game: it's final encounter, a formidable boss that draws from a great many of Souls' most well-remembered fights, yet carves out an identity of its own through impressive presentation and surprisingly well-considered balancing. Its gruelling nature will not be to everyone's taste, but I myself found it exemplary.

    So that's Ashes of Ariandel. It's more Dark Souls, but a little bit dry much of the time with an absolute killer of an end boss. Nominally, I'd recommend it to fans of the series who still have an appetite for this kind of thing, but I'm guessing they - we - already know what we want. For everyone else, well… I don't know, does DLC go on sale?

    Other reviews for Ashes of Ariandel (PlayStation 4)

      Ashes of Ariandel: Rewarding, but rote 0

      Downloadable content has long been a point of pride for Souls fans. That said, they've generally been something of a quiet affair: the journeys have been highly focused, quite unlike the sprawl of the core games. Still, they tied into the greater mythology of places that the series has always been so good at. Dark Souls' Artorias of the Abyss and Bloodborne's The Old Hunters filled in the history of those worlds' most enigmatic figures, moving them from lines of text in a few items to the domai...

      1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

      Enough good material for the fans, but hardly indispensable 0

      Downloadable content has long been a point of pride for Souls fans. That said, they've generally been something of a quiet affair: the journeys have been highly focused, quite unlike the sprawl of the core games. Still, they tied into the greater mythology of places that the series has always been so good at. Dark Souls' Artorias of the Abyss and Bloodborne's The Old Hunters filled in the history of those worlds' most enigmatic figures, moving them from lines of text in a few items to the domai...

      1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

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