I got a decent amount of sleep last night, and it just feels so good. I have no idea why I’m such like a toddler when it comes to going to bed, but I wish it weren’t so difificult for me to go to bed. I know it’s in part a neurospicy thing, but that doesn’t make me feel any less silly/guilty/ashamed that I can’t make myself go to bed earlier.
In fact, it’s been inching back again. I put a hard stop to that, and I managed to make it to bed by 3:30 a.m. last night. I think part of the problem is that I’m giving myself a generous window in a case where a hard stop would be better. In some cases, I’m fine with giving myself a generous deadline. In other cases like this, I’m going to push it because I can. I know myself. This will just be what I do.
I can be sitting at my computer and literally watching the clock tick, tick, tick. My brain will be saying, “I should be going to bed” while I continue to sit there, motionless, for the next hour or three. Usually, playing a casual comfy game that I can just do without thinking.
And, oh what the hell. It’s 59F right now, which is right on track with what it should be around this time of year. It’s really green outside, though, which means thunderstorms. We had one last night, which made me happy. I like a good thunderstorm.
Back to FromSoft games. I have a character in Dark Souls in which I just finished Big Hat Logan’s quest–which meant I got his big hat. And it’s a very big hat. I rarely do his quest because it’s very intricate and laborious. Plus, you have to buy all his spells which costs a pretty penny. I did it on a recent run just for funsies. It’s supposedly an intelligence run, but it’s not. Oh, and here’s my post from yesterday in which I talked about the worst boss in all of FromSoft’s games.
My issue is that I am wedded to a certain build–and a certain weapon. I adore the Zwei, which takes 24 Strength and 10 Dex. Because I’m a caster, I don’t need that many points in Strength. I do like to put 12 into Dex so I can use a bow. The Battle Axe, which is a decent enough weapon for a Pyromancer, takes 12 Strength and 8 Dex.
I am firmly a strengthcaster. That means even when I focus on casting, I want to be able to wield the Zwei. You can wield it two-handed at somethnig like 16 strength (it takes 60% of the Strength stat to wield a weapon two-handed, I think), but I don’t like to two-hand weapons (yes, I know that’s ironic giving the weapon I’m talking about).
Here’s an interesting thing I learned in this playthrough. When I was doing Seath (you have to do him to finish BHL’s questline), I was throwing fire at him as is my wont with this boss. He’s immune to magic (or close to it) because he is magic, but he’s pretty damn weak to fire. At least, I thought he was. Because I was completing BHL’s questline, that meant that I didn’t pay any attention to my Pyro Glove. By the time I usually meet Seeth, its ordinary level up path is finished, and I would have already started the ascension path. In this case, I may have put a level or two into the glove, but I was mostly ignoring it.
When I got to Seath, I switched over to pyros because of Seath’s incredible resistance to magic. I had a few pyros, and I thought that would do it. Except. Some of my pyros were not doing ANY damage on Seath. At first I thought I just wasn’t hitting him (because hit boxes are janky in From games, especially the earlier ones). But when I got point-blank in his face and did not do damage with my most explosive pyro (though that’s because it does damage over time), it made me realize that I wasn’t actually doing damage.
I looked it up, and it turned out that Seath had a high resistance to pyros until you actually passed a certain threshhold, and then he’s less resistant to it (or something close to it). I bumped up my Pyro Glove several levels, and I was finally able to do damage with all my pyros.
It’s incredible to me that this many years later and this many playthroughs under my belt (remember, I have the plat for this game), and I still am seeing new things. It’s because I do things the same way most of the time.
I still have the worst boss in all of FromSoft’s game to do in this playthrough. Quite frankly (and this is heresy to say), I don’t often play the second half of the game any longer because the areas are so miserable and the bosses are not great.
The first half is class and though still hard for me, it’s a really good look at the thinking of Miyazaki. It really is the primer for all his games to come, and it set the bar for what third-person adventure action games could and should be. Now that soulslikes is its own genre, we can go back and thank Dark Souls* for being the progenitor of the genre.
I know I was going to talk about why I might be at my limit with From games, but I decided to reminisce about From games instead. Not really decided as much as just did it. I think it might be the last gasp before I have to say goodbye. I’m just getting that feeling. It started with the DLCs for the third Dark Souls game, and it’s only gotten worse since.
I think I’ve mentioned that as I was playing the second DLC for the third Dark Souls (The Ringed City), I knew that I was reaching the end of my ability to play From games. I’m not good at them in the first place, and I have to try really hard to make any headway in them. It takes me twice as long to play their games the first time through than it does for a normal person. I know this going into one of their games, so that part doesn’t frustrate me.
That’s all for now. I’ll return to the subject tomorrow. Probably.
*Yes, Demon’s Souls is the first of the games, but that really didn’t get much notice at the time.