I’ve been rambling about FromSoft games for the past several posts, and I’m currently musing about what they mean to me. I’m also deciding whether or not I’m going to continue playing them after Elden Ring.
As to the latter, it’s not a question of whether I want to continue playing them or not, but of whether my abilities will allow me ta play them much longer. I already can’t play some of them, well, one of them for sure (Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon) and one I’m pretty sure I can only play with great difficulty (Sekiro). I may not be able to play it at all. I could list all my issues with it, but I’ve done plenty of posts about that. (And remember, I still rate it above a 9 if I had to give it a number.)
Here’s my latest post about my time with the original Dark Souls. I’m musing about it because I’m playing the remaster again for the first time in a while. I play it the same way every time, and I marvel at how much easier it is now. I can traipse through it fairly easily, and I get indignant if scrubs kill me (because it’s embarrassing when it used to be just normal).
You’ll never guess how much easier it is when you know the game like the back of your hand. Orders of magnitude easier. It’s funny to watch people play these games with people who don’t play these games because the people who don’t play the games are always amazed at how much the people who do play the games know said games. In the video I included below, Rosie (the one guiding) is the resident FromSoft expert. She is guiding Ash (under ridiculous circumstances) and Robert S. Pearson (the host of the series) is pompous, grandiose, and comes up with difficult tasks for the others to do in various video games.
The main gist of this challenge was for Ash to make it to the first boss, Phalanx, in a certain amount of time on a fresh save. If she saw an enemy, she had to fight them. If she ate a grass, she had to put on a jumper (sweater), and there were nine of them. If she died, a minute was taken off the time (which I think was 45 minutes).
She hadn’t played the game because she was told not to (probably for this challenge). It was going to be her Christmas game, so she found it especially painful that she had to play it for this challenge.
It was hilarious beacuse by the end, she was wearing all nine jumpers. She looked like she should have been rolled out of the studio because she was so round.
Back with more chatter about FromSoft games, difficulty, and me. In the last post, I wrote about whether or not I had imposter syndrome when it came to these games. A friend on the RKG Discord suggested this, and Ian has said something similar. Well, not exactly. He has argued that I am the exact target demo for the games. Miyazaki has said that he wants players to feel the struggle, but to ultimately overcome.
There is a debate that has raged in the FromSoft community (at large), which I doubt will ever be settled. One side believes that Miyazaki loves the player and wants them to do well. He is encouraging them to overcome the obstacles he’s placed in their way. Then, he’s happy and proud when they do.
In other words, he’s like a proud papa. That’s the one side of the argument.
The other side maintained that Miyazaki hated the palyer and wanted them to be miserable. To be honest, there was a lot of evidence on this side–mainly, everything in all of the games. Plus the fact thta the environments were grim and depressing. There was little joy to be found, and the NPC most people consider the best and most joyful lost his mind in the last third of the game.
Side note: I understand why people are so into Solaire (that NPC). I get why he inspires passion. In a world that is unrelentingly bleak, he is an almost literal ray of sunshine. He does the iconic ‘Praise the Sun’ emote, which I’ve shortened to ‘Praise it!’.
Here’s the thing, though. For me, he’s just….fine. But there is a tendency in these games to have the male NPCs that people care about be these bluff, useless dudes. To be fair, Solaire can hold his own in a fight–if you can actually get him in. But Siegmeyeris a total waste of space (as adorable as he may be)–not that you can summon him in a fight.
But even though Solaire is fine in a fight, he mostly runs arond looking for his sun and getting increasingly depressed when he can’t find it. I relate to that, but it just doesn’t hit me hard.
Anyway. My hot take is that Miyazaki is supremely indifferent to the player. He doesn’t love them; he doesn’t hate them. He doesn’t care about them one whit. He has created these exquisite worlds that are teeming with life.
One thing that caught people off-guard in the game was that the NPCs move. They don’t stay where you met them, and they have their own agendas. If you did not catch them when you saw them, well, you might not see them again for quite some time.
I have been talking about FromSoft games and whether they are for me or not. In yesterday’s post, I rambled about how I feel I’m reaching the top of my ability to play the games. I will not play a Sekiro sequel (though I highly doubt there will be one), and I’m worried about Elden Ring‘s DLC. I was saying to a friend from the RKG Discord that I feel demoralized by the guys in the Discord because they are so much better at the games than I am. She pointed out that from the outside, it seems that I have a similar ease playing the games. Her suggestion was that it was imposter’s syndrome. Which….maybe?
I like to think I have a good assessment of my abilities. I know what I’m good at (writing), what I’m decent at (Taiji and now Bagua, especially learning the forms), and what I’m shit at (doing chores and being an adult). Am I hard on myself? Probably a bit, but I don’t see any reason to sugarcoat things.If I’m not good at something, why pretend I am? The same is true of driving. I am a terrible driver. I was before my medical crisis, and I’m even more so now. It’s funny beaucse anywhere between 60-80% of people think they’re better-than-average drivers. Obviously, this is impossible, but it’s a fairly consistent statistic across most things.
Many people know about the Dunning-Kruger Effect in which people who are bad at things don’t know how bad they are.
Side note: the secondary phenomenon that Dunning and Kruger found was that people who are really good at something vastly underestimate how much better they are than their peers.
Both of them stem from the same base, by the way. The fact that we all live our own lives and can’t truly know what someone else thinks/feels/experiences. For those of us who are on the outside, empathy can be easier because we have to face the fact that we are different on the daily. That’s not always the case, but it’s not as much of a surprise when something we like or are good at is not embraced by the gen pop.
If you are raised as a cis het white man, then you are considered to be the norm. Everything is geared for you, ranging from games to music to movies. It’s amusing in a bleak way (if not also infuriating) how guys whine about representation in pop culture and ‘woke’ ‘PC’ culture gone mad. I don’t have the stats, but I would bet that at least three-quarters of pop culture has a white male protagonist–especially games.
I love the games, but am terrible at them. I prefer the Souls games/Elden Ring to BB and Sekiro because there is much more flexibilty in the former than in the latter. I tihnk the problem is that the one Discord I’m involved in sprung up around RKG–who started as Prepare To Try at IGNUK. They started it as a lark, really, wanting to see if a noob (Rory) could beat Dark Souls before the third game came out. That was the premise, and they were open that they were just doing it for fun. It wasn’t meant to be a thing, but it became a thing. It became hugely popular, and they were able to do a second series–on the third game.
After a few more years and series, they left IGN and started their own company, RKG (Rory Krupa Gav), because they felt they couldn’t give Prepare To Try the attention they (and the community) deserved. They rebranded that series to Retry, and they reserve it for the hard games they make Rory play. Their first series for Retry was Dark Souls II (Scholar of the First Sin), which is widely considered the least-best FromSoft game by many of the fans. There are some who think it’s the best of the trilogy, but they are few and far between. One person in the RKG Discord said that Elden Ring was the sequel to Dark Souls II, and I can kind of see it. I think, though, it’s more like an amalgamation of the best bits of the trilogy. Well, actually, all the games, but you would not be remiss to call it an open world Dark Souls IV. Soame people get upset with that and call it derogatory, but not at all! Dark Souls III is my favorite game in the world before Elden Ring came out. Why the hell would I not want more of it, new and improved?
Side note: When people were clamoring for a Dark Souls IV, one journalist said, “What Souls fan would not want another Souls game? Me. It was meant to be a trilogy, which was clear by the third game. I feel like if they had done a fourth Souls game, it would have been a money grab. Or just because fans pushed them to do it. Here’s the thing about Miyazaki: he does what he wants, and he doesn’t seem to want to do the same thing over and over again. Yes, there were three Dark Souls, but he did not direct the second one. And the third one is the way he wanted to do the first one if he had had the time. You can’t blame him for wanting a do-over when he was so pressed for time doing the first game.
In the last post, I was talking about my love/hate relationship with FromSoft games, heavy on the love and light on the hate. I think I would say it’s not even hate–it’s more frustration. Krupa from RKG has said several times taht he does not play the game for the difficluties; in fact, he’s quite forthright about not enjoying banging his head repeatedly against the wall with a hard boss. He’s also said immediately and openly that Rory has become better at the games than he is.
I feel the same. I have said that I’m not good at these games. I don’t play them for the difficulty; I play them for the exploration. That was the same thing that Krupa has said. He loves the worlds and delving into the lore. He does not care as much about the difficulty or the armors/weapons. In fact, when people ask him about builds, he would say that he didn’t know much about that. He likes a big sword paired with a shield and presumably whatever armor he can wear comfortably.
I am definitely more into armors than he is. I don’t min-max, but I do try to wear armor that is best for each situation. I have some go-tos–and there are a few that I love just because they look so cool. In Dark Souls III, for example, this is the progression of weapons/armor. I start as a Pyro as usual. I wear that outfit until I get Lucatiel’s armor or the Fallen Knight armor, depending on which stats I feel like leveling up first.
I always skimp on whatever stat governs equip load, especially since in this game, it has a separate stat of its own. Which is bullshit, by the way. In this game, I have to level up Attunement, Intelligence, and Faith as a caster. Even as a Pyro. The pyros in this game have requirements, unlike the previous game. But in return, you have as many casts as your blue bar/Ashen Estus Flasks will allow.
Side note: In the first game, pyros were stats-less, but you were limited on casts. Same in the second game, but you could get more casts from different wearables. In the third game, as I said, it’s as many casts as you can manage with your blue bar. Before Elden Ring, I did a 10/5 split with the Estus Flasks in DS III. In Elden Ring, however, I did a 7/7 split because you could get more flasks from defeating a whole group of enemies. Which, by the way, is a great QOL tweak that doesn’t get enough praise.
In the last post, I talked about whether or not I was actually good at FromSoft games. In doing so, I neglected to say that I was terrible at the first Dark Souls when I started playing it. You have to understand that I was fairly new to video games. The first ‘hardcore’ game I played (as opposed to casual games) was Torchlight (Runic Games), which I absolutely loved. Then I played Diablo III (Blizzard), and Borderlands and the sequel (Gearbox), which did not prepare me in the least for Dark Souls.
Ian’s brother mentioned this new game called Dark Souls to him, saying it was incredible, but hard as nails. By the time I got around to playing it, the Prepare to Die edition was out, which included the DLC, Artorias of the Abyss. It was the first time I played a game with a controller, which made it doubly difficult. I went in without reading anything about it because I wanted to go in pure–and because I heard that’s the best way to play the game. That means I did not know anything about builds or the best way to do things or, well, anything.
I started as a Pyro because I love fire. The Pyro has a Hand Axe as a starting weapon, so I’m partial to axes. I love a good axe in a game. I just started a new game as I’m writing this post. I’m past the Taurus Demon in a flash, but I always play the same way. It’s funny, actually. I didn’t realize this until now, but you can only have 10 characters at the same time. I had to override one character to create a new one. I always choose Pyro as a starting character with the Master Key as my starting gift.
I get the Drake Sword and the Zwei from the start. I use the Drake Sword until I have the stats to use the Zwei, and then that’s my weapon for the rest of the game. I get the staff and the early sorcery to get me through the beginning while I build up my pyro repertoire. Then, I grind a bit so I can use the Zwei soon after defeating the Gargs with the Drake Sword. Plus, I want to get all my pyros and upgrade the flame hand as quickly as possible. Not fully, though, as that takes so many souls. 340,500 souls to be precise. Which I did on my first playthrough.
I love FromSoft games, but they do not love me back. This is the story of my life, by the way. Because of how I was raised, I want those who do not want me. That’s not this post so I will not get into it. I’m just saying that I am most comfortable with being ignored or told that I’m wrong/worthless/only useful for very specific things (like listening endless to other people’s problems). None of this was explicitly stated, but it manifested in very negative ways. It didn’t help that it was echoed by society in general as I’m a minority in several different categories–and most of them are categories in which my designation is roundly (and soundly ignored). Asian, areligious, agender, bisexual, etc.
It’s interesting because in the first year or two after my death (twice), I had the most self-confidence/self-esteem I’ve had in all my life. I didn’tcare what anyone else thought and shrugged off being a weirdo. Caveat, I’ve always been fine with being a weirdo, but I was never as comfortable with it as I was during those two years. It’s slipped a bit since then. Or rather, my anxiety and depression has come back a bit. My depression had shrunk by roughly 90% and my anxiety by 60%. In other words, I had about 10% of the depression I used to have and approximately 40% of the anxiety. For someone who has had really bad and chronic depression and anxiety all my life, that was remarkable. Now, I would say my depression has risen by about 25% and my anxiety about 10%?
It’s hard to tell right now because I’m processing a personal tragedy, but I noticed the slide in my mental health before the crisis. I have a few things I want to do with my life, but my enjoyment for doing one of those things is almost gone. Writing fiction, I mean. Or rather, my enthusiasm for it is not gone, but I seem to have lost my ability to do it well.
Am I being too hard on myself? Maybe. I tend to be. But I feel like I’m wasting this second lease on life that I have.
Anyway. Back to From games. In the RKG Discord, I’m constantly talking down my abilities. Not consciously and not in a ‘woe is me’ kind of way, but because I think I’m truly terrible at this game. A friend of mine gently questioned me about it because as she pointed out, I’ve actually done them. Which is a good point, but–ok, look. This is how I’ve explained this to people. If you put me in the gen pop, then I’m aces at the games. If you’re talking about the FromSoft community, I would say that I’m mediocre at best. And I have always felt that I’ve been hitting my head against my own ceiling (of abilities). Putting Sekiro aside (because that’s beyond me now), I have found a way to beat all the games. And I’ve soloed all the bosses in all the Souls games (except the gank squad bosses in the DLCs for the second game) and all of them in the base game of Bloodborne.
Elden Ring is the first FromSoft game I’ve played since my medical trauma. When the trailer was dropped at GeoffCon in June of last year, I could barely contain my excitement. I had all these grand plans as to how I was going to play it. I would have one character who was fire-based and did all the bosses solo, like I played all the games. I would also have another character, a strengthcaster, who would be used in multi play.
All that went out of the window when I ended up unconscious for a week in the hospital–and another week conscious to boot. I woke up with a new attitude about life–and Elden Ring. In general, I’m more able to not sweat the small stuff and find peace with lifelong issues.
The biggest issue is my body (and my face). I have had body issues all my life. It started when I was seven and my mom put me on a diet. She has her own body issues and she sent a constant message that a woman’s worth was one, based on her weight. Two, her ability to spawn children. Three, her ability to please a man. And, yes, it’s definitely a man, not a woman. In other words, the trifecta of sexist beliefs from the 1950s.
I’ve been fat most of my life, with the exception of the two times I was anorectic. Let me amend. I was not fat as a kid. I was chunky, yes, but not fat like I am now. Did my mother’s hyper-concern about my weight ever help me? No. Did it make me want to eat everything in sight? Yes. Did it add to my self-loathing? You bet!
And, no, it wasn’t a concern for my health because she said not a word when I was severely underweight from starving myself and blacking out while walking. OK, the latter only happened once, but once is more than enough.
I struggled with it for decades until I reached the point before going into the hospital where I was mostly neutral about my body. I didn’t hate it any longer, but I certainly didn’t love it. For the most part, I just tried to ignore it existed because I preferred not to think about it. Taiji is what helped move me from hatred to dislike to mostly neutral, but that’s where I was stuck. It was an uneasy detente in which neither of us acknowledged each other.
As long as there have been FromSoftware games, there have been gatekeepers who are eager to tell you just exactly how you should play the games. There are also the fans who insist on bleating about how EASY the games are and you just need to GIT GUD. I had a running joke that any time you asked a question, any question, in a From forum, the first answer would be GIT GUD NEWB LOL and the second would be how that boss wasn’t hard, anyway, GAWD.
When I played the first Dark Souls game, it was years after it was first released. I got stuck on Kalameet and looked up how to beat him. Not only were those two answers prevalent in the forums, there was an added sprinkle of ‘just change your whole build into the one I prefer, and it’ll be easy’. I’ve done posts about this before, about how toxic the hardcore From fans are. I’m sure there is that subsection in any fandom, but From is the fandom I know best.
For the first several years in which I played the games, I never called myself a fan. I played the hell out of the games, but I never felt welcomed in the fandom for many reasons. One, it has a very bro-y culture. So much testosterone wafting around, you can nearly choke on it. All the ‘git gud’-ing and ‘LOL N00B’ and ‘summoning is for pussies’ really got on my nerves.
In addition, I sucked at the games; I still do. I can’t do a onebro or no-hit or anything like that. I can spend hours on one boss, which makes me a scrub. I’m OK with this in part because, well, it’s just me playing the games. I don’t co-op much, so it’s just me in my solitary journey. I hate the invasion mechanic and am relieved that if you don’t do co-op in Elden Ring, you can’t be invaded–at least not by other players. The NPC invaders can eat a bag of poisoned dirt, to be honest. They are way too hard for the areas they’re in and have infinite skills, stamina, and moves. I become incandescent with rage any time I have to fight them. To be fair, you don’t HAVE to engage with them, but my pride! Plus, they drop some really great loot.
I will say that some of the toxic masculinity that permeated the early From fandom has been mitigated to some degree. As the games have gotten more popular (meaning more kinds of people have been playing them), there isn’t one fandom any longer–not that there ever really was only one. But that whiny part of the fandom seems to be getting smaller and smaller.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! by David Galindo (chubigans) just got the last update (still in Early Access! I’m curious to see if there will be anything new added before it’s officially released), and it’s a corker. It’s a cooking competition called Iron Cook Speedway (how droll. It’s a common theme of the games), and it’s done in an arena? I think? But simulates the road? Or it’s really the road. Anyway, the cool thing is that Northerlion and his wife, Kate, are in the last update! They are the commentators of the cooking competition, and it was really cool to read that they were in it.
They play Chuck and Gretta, and it’s really delightful. Probably because I’ve watched NL on and off for years, and I love that his avatar looks so much like him with a goofy hat. Kate’s avatar is relly cute, too, and it incorporates that she normally colors her hair different colors (in the game it’s light blue). The repetition of their lines gets a bit samesy, but it’s a small niggle.
A bigger niggle, however, is that the difficulty is ramped up to a hundo in the final update. Look, I get it. It’s the culmination of the whole game, and the whole game is predicated on being difficult. Lots to do at a frantic pace, and you can’t really let up your concentration too much unless you’re doing old days again (as I’ve done for comfort).
One of the new things introduced in this sequel was the food truck attacks. I’ll be completely honest with you–I fucking hate them. As soon as I could buy the upgrades to stop the attacks, I turned them on and never looked back. I did try one day without them on after I finished the rest of the content, but I quickly turned them back on because it was harshing my mellow. I understand why they were included, and I think they were good in concept. I’m sure there are people who like them, and I did like working towards earning enough to get the upgrades one by one to block the attacks.
However. In practice, they drained much of my enjoyment because the way I play, I try to get into a groove with each day, and they didn’t allow me to do that. Yes, I know that’s the whole point, but it felt…like filler. I know it’s the second sequel and I know there’s pressure to keep it fresh.
Side note: I have always maintained that one of the reasons Dark Souls II (you didn’t really think I’d not mention Souls in this post, did you?) was reviled so much was because it was in a Catch-22 situation. Dark Souls was so original (if you hadn’t played Demon’s Souls), there was no way to make a sequel that could capture the same sense of discovery and surprise as the original, but if they deviated too far from the first game, well, then people would be pissed about that as well.
What I’m saying is that I don’t blame a developer for including something new. They have to do it, and one thing I loved about DS II was that it had fast travel from the start. It’s one reason I played it more than the original game. In Dark Souls III, they switched from having specific number of casts for magicks to having mana (Ashen Estus Flask). I was skeptical about it at first because it meant less of the regular Estus for me, but once I played enough, I was able to see the brilliance in it. There were 15 Estus Flasks total, and if you were a pure melee character, you could have 15 regular Estus*.
I fiddled with it throughout the game, and I discovered that the primo ratio for me was 2:1 regular estus to ashen estus. So, in the end, I had 10:5. I changed it up for the boss fights, but that served me well.
Back to CSD 3. Once I had the food truck attack gimmick under control, I enjoyed the game much more. And that’s exactly what it feels like to me–a gimmick. I mean, it makes sense in the game world, but it feels as if it was just tacked on. Or as if chubigans had the idea in his head first and was determined to shove it in no matter what.
Again, I get it. It’s new and fresh and different. It certainly makes a chaotic game even more chaotic. But I hated actually playing with it on. This brings me to the newest and last update. The food truck attacks can’t be blocked. It doesn’t matter how many upgrades you have–and I have them all–you have to deal with the food truck attacks during every. goddamn. day. Not just one, either. There are at least two (except for the days that had three stops) during each day and sometimes three. Maybe four? I don’t remember I haven’t done the endurance days yet (eight stops per day), but I would surmise there might be five or six.
I hate it. I really hate it.
Side note II: I have to comment about my way of playing these games. I only allow for gold days, which means no mistakes. Why? Because I know that I’ll want to do that in the end, anyway, so why not just do it the first time around? I have written more than once that I do not like that gold days are predicated on perfection. That is neither here nor there, however, as it’s been that way for all three games. I have managed to get all perfect days for the first two games, and I got all the achievements in the first game (before the massive update). I got almost all the achievements in the second game except for a few of the stress day ones. And, I’ve gotten all the achievements in the current game prior to this update.
As to the last point, though, I had many theoretical tears while trying to get the last few. These achievements were getting a gold on certain days with ridiculous requirements. There have been plenty others of these, but I was able to figure out how to get them done.
Here’s the thing. These achievements are not skills, really, they are about finding ways to cheese the achievement as best as possible. There are a few ways of doing this. One is having as few prep stations as possible. Seven is the lowest, and keeping a handle on that is the best way to deal with any day. The problem is that you get -1 on the required points list for every extra prep station. My personal M.O. is to only use auto-serve dishes (ones that don’t take more than one step) because then I can just push them out without thinking about it.
There are a few days where none of the dishes are auto-serve, and that’s frantic as fuck. I hate, hate, hate those days. I also hate random food days because I don’t get to choose. I will say that the random food days in this current update were easy-peasy because there were no points requirements, so I just used all 0-point dishes, which meant all were auto-serve. Did I feel guilty about it? Hell to the fuck no, but it underlines that it’s more about gaming the system than getting good at the game.
I’ve noticed before that the games I love are ones that tend to ramp up in difficulty the longer they’re around. I have a ceiling for my skills, and I can feel when I’m bumping up against the ceiling. I felt in the DLCs of DS II and the DLCs of DS III. I felt it hard in Sekiro. it’s the Keeper in Isaac (the MegaSatan fight), and it’s this update in CSD 3. Like I said, it started nudging me at the end of the last achievements, and now, it’s swirling around me completely. I’ve managed to finish half the stops (A-E, I think. Each letter represents an area, and there are different days within each letter), and I’m not looking forward to the other half.
This is for the hardcore fans, and while I understand why and appreciate it, it means that it pushes the game beyond me. Yes, I finished DS II, III, and Sekiro. I have not finished the Keeper (and this is beyond the True Platinum, which I have), and I’m not sure I’m going to finish this last part or the achievements related. Could I do it? Probably. Do I want to put in the incredible amount of work TOO do it? Not sure. We’ll have to see if I continue to play or not.
*Focus Points is the official name of the mana in the game, FP for short. In addition to being the marker of mana, it’s also what you need for your weapon arts.**
**Weapon arts is another new thing introduced in the third game, and it’s wonderful. Don’t want to talk about it in this post, however, so I’ll leave it at that. I’ll just leave this here.