Yesterday, I started ranking the From games that I have played. That means Demon’s Souls is not on the list because it is not yet on PC. Believe you me, I will play it if and when it is ported to the PC, but until then, it remains off the list. I have played 6 From games, and the ranking has remained pretty much the same until Elden Ring.
To recap, 6. Sekiro 5. Bloodborne.
4. Dark Souls II (Scholar of the First Sin). Now. I want to say that in terms of how much I play the games, I have played this more than the first game. But, I would say that the first half of the first game is better and more incredible to play than this game. Much more so. I put these two very close together, and I could flip-flop them easily.
Let’s talk about this game for now, though. It got a lot of shit when it came out, and I’m not saying there weren’t valid criticisms. There were. The mobs are ridiculous and very much feel like they wanted to prove they were harder than the first game. In the first game, there were mobs, yes. But you were able to carefully draw them out one by one and could deal with them patiently. In this game, they’re thrown at you and you have to deal with them as best as you possbily can. Especially in the DLCs. The amount of mobs (and the enemies don’t stagger) was ridiculous. I still don’t like the DLCs for this game–well, actually, I don’t like the DLCs as much for any of the From games BECAUSE they are deliberately hard. Yes, the games themselves are hard, but it rarely felt as if that was the main purpose of the games.
I appreciated the sequel for trying to be innovative. I didn’t always agree with how they did it, such as cutting your health every time you died and starting you with one Estus, and you had to find Estus Shards to get more sips. I wouldn’t have minded as much if they started you with, say, five and made you find more, but one was very skimpy. There was one in Majula (the hub world), but it wasn’t easy to find. And two was still very little.
They did add Lifegems in that game, which mitigated the pain somewhat. They were consumables that could be crunched to slowly (oh so goddamn slowly) regain health. I cheerfully abused the situation by loading up on 99 Lifegems (the limit) when I was able to afford them and crunched them throughout the level. There were two other versions of the Lifegems (better), but I rarely used them.
If I knew I wasn’t coming up to a boss, then I just used Estus Flasks during the level. This was during my consequent playthroughs, and that way I didn’t have to waste the Lifegems. The hag shopkeeper in Majula sold an endless supply of Lifegems, so I would stock up whenever I was low. Was that cheesing? Yeah. Did I care? No. If they weren’t going to give me my Estus Flasks, then why should I not use the Lifegems? Besides, they took an agonizingly long time to regen my health, so I still had to be strategic about when I used them.
I think there were some stunning environments in this game. I get that they weren’t as entwined as the first game and that they didn’t necessarily make logical sense in the placement. But, I also think that they got too much shit for it. There was a video pointing out that the poison swamp led to the tower of lava, and people derided it to the heavens. But how many actually noted that when they played the game? I didn’t. I mean, I noticed it went from one to the other, but not that it didn’t make sense.
I have always maintained that tihs game had an impossible task. It needed to keep the things that made the first game so successful, but iterate in ways that were surprising and interesting. This was not going to happen no matter what. I have maintained that if they had released this game without the Dark Souls label on it, it would have done much better.
That said, it has not aged well. I played it recently after finishing Elden Ring, and it did not hold up. I made it two-thirds into the game and lost interest. I just could not deal with it after having played Elden Ring, and I gave up. I may go back at some point, but I’m not eager to do so.
3. Dark Souls. Here’s the old-school, OG game that got me into the From games. It was such a love/hate relationship with a heavy emphasis on hate in the beginning. I had never experienced anything like this game, and I did not know what to do with it. I was miserable as I played, And yet, something in the back of my mind refused to stop. I gave up for a year, but returned before the second game was released.
I hated the game by the end. This is the way I’ve felt about every From game at the end. Why? Because I get obsessed with it and then I keep playing, even when I want to stop. It’s how I am, and I have just accepted it by now. When I was going for the hundo chievo in Elden Ring, I raced through my third playthrough because I was sick of the game at that point. Then, I went back to explore again at my leisure because I had that pressure off me.
Dark Souls will always hold a special place in my heart because it opened my eyes to a whole new genre of pop culture. It’s like the sword in Taiji–that was my first weapon, and it sparked my lifelong love of weaponry.
Dark Souls was so out of anything I had ever seen before. It blew my mind with how creative and grueling it was. But again, the difficulty never felt like the main point. I loved the game because of the exploration and discovery–the difficulty was tertiary, secondary at best.
Rory from RKG said when they were going down the Great Hollow (which is hidden behind two illusory walls), “Imagine if this was the first game you had ever playe.d It would blow your tiny little mind and you would never be able to play another game.” Which was pretty much what happened to me.
Plus, there are so many optional areas in the games that you might never even see. Imagine working on those areas, knowing that a quarter of the people playing the games will ever see them. In this game, there’s the Great Hollow that leads down to Ash lake. There’s the Painting of Aramis, and there’s Dark Sun Gwyndolin, who is a hidden boss. There’s the hidden boss, Priscilla in the Painting of Aramis, too. There’s going back to the Northern Undead Asylum and falling through the floor to fight the Stray Demon. Then there’s the fact that you can ‘kill’ Gwynevere, making Anor Londo go dark. Which makes the area different in an interesting way.
This is a game that can be played over and over again, finding little nuggets that you hadn’t seen before. By the time I played it, all the secrets had been found, but I tried to stay away from the wikis as much as possible. Except for tips on how to kill certain bosses.
This game changed my life. For that reason, I put it just slightly before Dark Souls II. Tomorrow, I’ll tackle the last two games and hopefully, I’ll actually be able to rank them by then.