Dark Souls III: My Final Thoughts (For Now)

It’s been two weeks since I beat Dark Souls III, and I still have feelings about it. In the meantime, I’ve started two new playthroughs, one as a cleric/pyromancer and one as a tank. A warrior to be specific. While the cleric/pyromancer is similar to my pyromancer, the warrior is completely different. I’m mostly pumping levels into vigor and strength, and it’s quite exhilarating to be able to kill enemies in one or two swipes of my Battle Axe. It’s funny that I’m mostly using the same weapon that I did as a pyromancer (and that I am as the cleric/pyromancer), but doing considerably more damage. I also have an ice sword that I use which is badass as well. Oh! I also put in enough levels into dexterity to use a long bow, which takes care of my range problems. The bow is good for drawing out a single enemy at a time, and it actually does noticeable damage in this game. It’s weird not having spells, but at least I have my basic Fireballs, though they don’t do nearly as much damage as they do when I’m a pyromancer. I’m digging playing as a tank, especially when I see how big my health bar is. I started my tank after killing three bosses as the cleric/pyromancer, and I already have more health as her than I do as the cleric/pyromancer. I find that as the warrior, I’m more brazen than I usually play. Normally, I hang back and take what I’m given. As a warrior, I go in and tank the hits. Crystal Sage, a boss that has given me some trouble as a caster, was cake as a tank. Granted, I used an ember and summoned Eygon of Carim, who wields Morne’s Great Hammer, but he refuses to attack the boss unless I do, too. Therefore, he wasn’t useful to me as a caster because he stayed glued to my side. When I rushed in as a tank and whaled on the boss, however, he was right there bamming along side me.

I’ve thought about uninstalling the Souls game from my computer because I can’t stop playing them. In addition, when I start playing, I can’t stop. I keep telling myself, “Just a bit longer,” and it’s three hours later before I know it. I’ve tried to play half a dozen games since I beat DS III, and none of the hardcore ones have really held my attention for very long. I’m not sure why, but it probably has something to do with what draws me to the Souls games in the first place. I’ve given a lot of thought to this, and while I’m not exactly sure, I’ve come up with a few good reasons. One, the combat. You *can* just approach an enemy and flail aimlessly at it, but the end result probably isn’t going to be beneficial to you. If you have good reflexes, you’ll probably have an easier time with the games, but even then, you have to react with precision. When you’re a scrub as I am, you have to plan your actions a bit more carefully. I can’t get away with just swinging away, even as a tank. In the aforementioned Crystal Sage fight, I got impatient near the end and took one too many swings. I lost nearly all of my health, and I had to back away so I could Estus up. Then, once I was back at full health, I finished the job.

Souls games are really good at making you get greedy. Even if I’m patient all the way through a fight, having the end in sight makes me lose my sense. Just one more hit! Just one more spell. I can surv–and dead. The thing is, I know this will happen when I become impatient and greedy. and I’m still driven to do it anyway. It comes from fighting the same enemy (boss, usually), time and time again, getting weary at the end of it. I just want it to be over, and it’s only one more hit–and dead again. You’d think I’d learn, but I fall for it more often than I care to admit. This game is a test of my patience, and I often wonder why I keep playing it. I’ve said on more than one occasion that I don’t enjoy playing Souls games, and, yet, I’m totally engrossed by them. They’re all I want to play, and I think about them when I’m not playing them. I watch Let’s Plays, although I have a hard time finding people who I want to watch. The problem is, I don’t like watching people who are so good that they don’t die to the bosses or are upset that they die one or two times. I also don’t watch guys who are rampantly sexist for obvious reasons, and that cuts down on a lot of YouTubers. I recently realized that I don’t mind as much about how good a YouTuber is if I’m watching a Bloodborne playthrough because I wasn’t able to play the game, so I don’t feel bad if the person playing is amazing at the game. I’m currently watching a Dark Souls III playthrough, and I’m getting mad at how easy he’s moving through the game. I’m not sure I can watch him much longer. He has a dex build, but he’s doing so much damage.

There are a lot of callbacks in Dark Souls III, and the community is torn as to whether that’s a good thing or not. Some see it as a homage to the older games and are geeked out by the references, but some think it’s lazy and too much pandering. I’m more in the former camp, but there were a couple instances in which I thought it was too much. I recently learned that one of my favorite NPC, the one I unintentionally made disappear from my first playthrough, has the same name as a character from Demon’s Souls. Yuria of Londor, she’s a Darkwraith, and she serves the primordial serpent, Darkstalker Kaathe from the original game. She sells you spells. The Yuria in DeS (as it’s called) is Yuria, the Witch. She also sold spells (from the wikis). In the video I’m currently watching, two of the enemies in an area have Pharis’s gear. Pharis was an archer from the original Dark Souls game. The gear lore for these items say that Pharis is now more a style than a name, which gets around the sticky question of how Pharis’s stuff got in this game. I didn’t know these were in the game because I didn’t bother taking on these enemies as a frail caster. Given that my tank character is the one who uses a bow and arrow, I’ll try to kill these enemies with her.

Some other similarities: there’s a Bloodborne guy just hanging out at Firelink Shrine, and the Abyss Watchers are straight out of Central Yharnam. The second phase is straight up Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower, who is my favorite boss in Bloodborne, but way too hard for my slow-ass reflexes to fight. There are tons of items from the other games, including Havel’s Ring, Lucatiel’s armor and greatsword (even though it’s not named), and several of the spells. There are areas that are reminiscent of other areas, and there are characters who are students of or descendants of earlier characters. Firelink Shrine is both a reminder of Firelink Shrine from the first game and a reminder of the Nexus, the hub world, from DeS. In the end, I mostly appreciated the homages to the past games. I feel as if DS III took what was best about the other games and brought them together in a messy, wonderful whole. I have my issues with many aspects of the Souls games, but I’ll leave that to another post.

Now I’m wondering if there’s an homage to Sif in this game. I didn’t see one, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. I’m sure I missed at least a good quarter of the secrets in the game, which was made amply clear to me when I stumbled across one I would never have found on my own. I was watching a lore video, and an NPC I had never heard of was mentioned. I looked up how to find her, and once I watched a video of it, I had to try it out for myself. It involved an invisible path (something they did in DS I as well), and I have no idea how the person who found it managed to stumble across it. There’s a ring I knew had to exist, but I hadn’t found it by the end of the game. I looked it up, and the way to get it is super-fucking hard, especially since I did a thing that has to be undone in order to do the thing to get the ring. FromSoft loves their esoteric hidey-holes and their elaborate hidden paths, and illusory walls. In one place, there’s an illusory wall behind an illusory wall. Layers upon layers, man. It’s amazing when I find a secret on my own, and other players are usually really helpful in leaving messages in front of illusory walls and hidden paths, but I’m not above looking it up, either.

That’s a change from the first game. When I played Dark Souls (the original), I really hated looking up stuff. I wanted to do it all on my own, and I felt as if I were cheating when I resorted to using the wikis. Since then, however, I’ve learned that the games are meant to be a community effort, and I don’t feel as bad about it now. Starting with the White Sign Soapstone with which a player can put down a summoning sign so she can help someone in their world. In addition, the messages themselves are helpful, though they can be trolly and/or juvenile, too. But, in general, I’ve gotten a lot from the messages, and I’m grateful to them for pointing out secrets I wouldn’t have found on my own. Another change is that I’m not as willing to bash my head against the wall against a boss. In the first game, I summoned for a few bosses, but only after dying several times. I wanted to do the whole game solo, and I’m still a bit peeved at myself for not doing it completely on my own. In this game, however, I wasn’t as willing to head bash against certain bosses, the ones who were too fast for me to fight or had multiple bosses in the fight. I reached the first of these bosses with my cleric/pyromancer and after two deaths, I summoned a badass tank who went ham on the boss(es). No, I didn’t know he’d be a tank, but I was glad to have someone who could hammer away at the boss(es) while I hurled flames and lightning from afar.

When I reached the final boss, I thought I nearly got him on the first try. Then, I helped another player in his fight against the final boss and discovered that it was only the first phase of the fight. After getting my ass kicked by the final boss several times, I went to do an optional area. The first boss is a gimmick boss, and the second boss, I summoned for. By the time I made it back to the final boss, I was battered, weary, and worn. I wanted the game to be over, and I was so tempted to summon for the final boss. My journey was long, and I was beginning to resent the game in the final act. It’s how I felt playing the first and second game as well, and I hadn’t even had a DLC to power through, with this one, either. I decided to try a few more times on my own, though, because it was the final boss of the final game*. He kicked my ass several more times, but I learned more about him each time. And, the fact that Gwyn, Lord of Cinder’s boss theme starts playing during the second phase of the fight is both fitting and haunting. I’m not ashamed to say I got chills when I heard it.

I was so tired, but I persevered. I really did not want to summon for the final fight, even though I didn’t think I could beat this boss. I’ve thought that in the past, and I’ve been mostly wrong, but this boss had everything. Lightning, magic, fire, and melee. He had incorporated all the moves of the previous Lords of Cinder, and he was beautiful in his terribleness. As much as he was destroying my will, I thought he was a great final boss. The final boss in the original Dark Souls was pretty easy for me (though some people found him really hard), and the final boss in DS II** was a joke.

Soul of Cinder is a great microcosm of the game in whole, at least for the ordinary Souls player. It’s like the five stages of grief. First, incredulity and fear. “Wait, I have to fight that thing? How the hell am I ever going to beat it? Oh, shit!” Second, resignation. “I guess there’s nothing to do but go for it. Here I go.” Third, rage. “This is fucking bullshit! I hate FromSoft for doing this! I hate this game! I’m never going to beat this asshole!” Fourth, a tiny sliver of hope. “Wait. Did I just block his hardest strike? Maybe I can do this!” Fast-forward through several more futile attempts. Fifth, triumph. “I fucking did it! I am a GOD!” For me, I spend a lot of time in the third stage. In the epic Biggie & Small fight in the first game, I fought them for a week, permanently stuck in stage three. With Soul of Cinder, it was a few days that I stayed stuck in anger and doubt. Oddly enough, I found his second phase slightly easier than his first. However, by the time I reached it, I was usually almost out of resources and concentration. One time, I had him down to one hit away from death, and he killed me. I was furious, but I also moved into stage four. I felt I had him beat–I just got greedy at the end. I believed I was embered at the time after helping another player, which really helps with the health bar boost.

I don’t like wasting embers, but I had plenty by this time. Probably over sixty. I could afford to spend a few fighting the Soul of Cinder. I’m pretty sure I popped one before walking through the white fog one more time. A calm fell over me as it often does right before the time I actually beat a boss. Time slowed down, and I was able to anticipate what the boss was doing. I can’t tell you how much it helped to have the extra health that being embered gave me in fighting a boss. You’re supposed to use them in the boss fights, but I don’t unless I’m summoning someone for the fight. I also like that if you help someone beat a boss, you get embered up, which is how I prefer to get my ember for a boss fight. I was pretty calm the final time I fought Soul of Cinder. I was tense, yes, but I wasn’t angry. I used one pyromancy for the whole fight and never even touched my Brigand Axe. When his last tick  of health was struck out of him, I let out a stream of jubilant curses to celebrate my triumph. After several minutes, though, as I was watching the credits roll, a bittersweet feeling crept into me. My journey through Souls was over,*** and I was having a hard time in dealing with it.

Still. The biggest feeling I had was one of gratitude for Hidetaka Miyazaki and FromSoft for providing me with an experience unlike any other. I will never forget it.

 

*Until the DLC, of course, but still. I consider this the final boss to the trilogy.

**Nashandra, in case you’re confused. I consider her the true final boss of the second game.

***Provisionally.