I like Elden Ring. A lot. There. I said it. I know it’s a outre thing to say and the voice of the minor–ok, I can’t keep this up with a straight face. Elden Ring was a huge hit and the talk of the town for at least a month after its release. FromSoft is this weird company in that while it’s definitely AAA by this point, there’s still a small company feel to them. I jokingly called them mercenaries for hire, which despcribed the industry quite nicely.
In my last post, I talked a bit about why I went from my umpteenth playthrough of SotFS back to Elden Ring. I had just fought the Old Iron King in my least-favorite area of the game thus far, the Iron Keep. Why is it my least-favorite area? For several reasons. One, it’s all aflame. As a Pyro, that is not good for me. Yes, I’m a Pyro again. I just can’t stop myself. In Elden Ring, funnily enough, I did not do Pyro much on my first playthrough. This one, I’m going to use all the Pyros.
Anyway, for whatever reason, you cannot start as a Pyro in DS II. I think it’s because it was yet another way they were trying to differentiate themselves from the original game. In the first Dark Souls, Pyro was the class chosen by people who wanted to do onebro runs. There were no stats to wield them so no need to level up. You have one attunement slot, and you start with a hand axe that does decent damage. The devs for the sequel probably thought it was a way to make the game harder, but it just made it less fun–for me, anyway.
Yes, you can get the Pyro Flame, but it’s not until you’ve beaten at least two bosses. The Dragonrider and the Flexile Sentry. That’s making a mad dash for the Pyro Flame, though, and missing all the optional content up to that point. It’s also funny that the area in which you must painfully traverse before you get the Pyro Flame has these enemies that are afraid of fire. Which, you know, I would have liked to be able to battle them with my flames.
I have to admit that I try every time to go in a different direction for the last dozen or so times I play any of the FromSoft games. It’s funn y because when I first started playing the games, all I heard was how easy it was if you were a caster, especially a Pyro. I felt bad that I was apparently taking the easy way out and was still getting my ass kicked on a regular basis.
Here’s the thing, though. All the dudes (and, yes, it was mostly dudes) who scoffed at people who used magic? Or who said it was so easy as a Pyro? They were dudes who never used magic. Or they used magic in Demon’s Souls where it really was OP (apparently). There’s a ring that regenerates mana so all you have to do is weight for your blue bar to refill before you go apeshit wild with the magicks again.
In addition, as several people have joked, there is no way to play Dark Souls to satisfy the purists. If you use the Zwei? You’re cheesing the game. If you use a shield? Pussy. Magicks is OP, but so is Haveling it up. I included a video above, starting at the point where Andy asks why everything is shameful to someone, no matter how you play the game.
It’s human nature, sadly–especially male human nature. There have been studies that show that men (and the more they hew to the ‘norm’, the more this is true) think they are the standard by which everything should be compared. They also think they are the experts in everything. This is a gross generalization, obviously, but I’ve seen it play out so many times.
Fifty women can say something and have people ignore them. Let one man say the same thing, though, and suddenly, it’s the most amazing idea since sliced bread. It’s frustrating as fuck, especially since it means in male-dominated domains (like video games), the women more often than not start behaving like the men in order to fit in. They may not think they are doing it and they may call it feminist, but it’s not really. It’s the ‘cool girl’ theory in effect, and it’s frustrating as fuck. Oh, but they stil have to look very feminine, of course. Meaning wearing makeup for no apparent reason.
When I finished Dark Souls for the first time, I hated it. I never wanted to think about it again, and I felt no pride in having finished it. But. There was a seed of something in the back of my brain, and when the second game was announced, I thought I should play the first again to prepare myself for it. This time, I had a better idea what I was doing, and I realized that I had played it all wrong. I had spread my stats instead of concentrating on two or three. I had not known the tropes of the From games so I was fighting against the game as much as I was fighting the enemies in the game.
One thing that From fans love to say is that the beginning of the game is so brilliant. Once you beat the Asylum Demon, you are taken to Firelink Shrine by a big crow. There are three paths, and two of them will kill you instantly. The third is the right way to go, but it’s also the one that is the least-intuiitve. From fans will say that it’s brilliant the way it’s laid out because the two ways you’re not supposed to go are so overtly difficult, you’ll turn away. This is retconning their first experience because it’s simply not true. Many people went the wrong way (to the cemetary or the ghost land), made no headway for hours, then gave up. As I’ve explained, the one thing most people know about Dark Souls is that it’s brutally difficult. If you’ve never played the game, then how are you supposed to have any kind of context for what is reasonable hard and what is the kind of hard you want no part of?
The PC edition I played is called the Prepare to Die edition. The one thing you hear over and over again is how you’re going to die. So ghosts you can’t hit and who can one-shot you? Sounds about right. Skellies who quickly overwhelm you and bleed you to death? Yeah, I can accept that. It’s not until you actually find the third route that you realize that hollows who take two hits to kill, but who can quickly swarm you in a mob, is the right level of difficult at this point of the game.
No idea how I got to this place because this wasn’t where I was going. I’m not unpleased that I ended up here, but I’m going to call it a die and pick up again tomorrow.