In terms of its public approval and situating, and relative to the first and second entries, Dark Souls 3 seems to have ever been in a curious place. Just two month’s after its release, I authored a very small essay, “What to say about Dark Souls 3?”, the very title of which implies that there just might not be a whole lot to say. But, six years later, I can’t help feeling that it really is the most fascinating, the most imaginatively spurring, of the bunch. This is a feeling which must balance against my first few playthroughs of the game being neither particularly memorable nor surprising. It is also a feeling which I do not think would exist if I weren’t compelled, by a reorientation of interests, to re-view Dark Souls 3throughvarious psychological, spiritual, and mythological contexts – meaning, in part, that for those first few playthroughs I had not only differing expectations but also interpretative tools.
This has put my critical sensibilities here in an equally curious place. I understand what people mean when they coolly describe Dark Souls 3 as “more of the same”; but emphasizing mechanical noveltyasthe qualitative criterion simply isn’t how I approach this game anymore, even though I reject the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality pervading videogame culture and am similarly unmoved by worship of the almighty Polish. This fixation on novelty presents an interesting conundrum. It’s such a sensible and coherent expectation – we want a new thing to be new in ways exceeding its release date! – yet it is also so commonly in the service of industries which act as restless conveyor belts of “experiences” and tend to undermine conservational or traditional principles, or devalue subtlety. One might remember, for example, how many journalistic outlets began to cast 2D videogames as contemptibly passé once 3D was identified as the hot new thing.
Here’s another problem: interpretations of novelty vary; and, depending upon one’s frame of reference, novelty can seem over- or under-interpreted. People who have spent hundreds of hours with FromSoftware’s games are likely able to detail what mechanically separates BloodbornefromDark Souls 3; but, for most people who reside outside of this time-sink, the two will probably not appear to be that visibly different. Both of these viewpoints are what I would call experientially legitimate. One does not cancel out the other. Let us also not forget that Dark Souls 2 offered a number of tweaks, construable as novelties, and inspired a significant (but not majority) outcry. Novelty is not some dependably positive or negative attribute.
Let’s get a little more specific. Dark Souls has always had a remarkable enthusiasm on its side. It remains one of the most significant videogames of the 2010s (personally, I would go so far as to say it is one of the most significant artworks of this century). The constitution of this enthusiasm is such that, when people discuss the Soulsgames,Dark Souls is implicitly the central and even formative figure, almost as if it were a small-scale variant of the literary or musical sentiment that everything after some canonical high-water mark been “so much noise” or simply variations on a maximally archetypal work (of course, Dark Souls is itself a rearrangement of very old things). On the flip side, the responses to Dark Souls 2 have largely developed as self-aware reappraisals tending to take theformof“defenses.” In other words, much as it might sound counterintuitive, Dark Souls 2 has benefited precisely from its mixed responses (even though there continues to be basically no longform writing concerning its mythopoeic structure!). It has the ability to provoke discourse by its being designated as weird, incoherent, ugly – essentially as marginalized.
Dark Souls 3, then, is… well, it’s the third Dark Souls game. It is an obvious “return to form” after the sequel. It is post-Bloodborne, which had the upper hand by being FromSoftware’s first venture on newer technology (I cannot stress enough how stunningly, almost overwhelmingly, amazing Bloodborne looked to me when I first played it) and their shift to faster action. It does little to inspire controversy, besides being especially hard to narratively put together, which has only hardened the opinion (one that I once held!) that its returning figures and iconography are merely chintzy fan-service. In some ways, the whole situation conforms to the trend of a series having somerelativelyexperimentalsequel and then “correcting course” by bringing the third entry closer to the first, or just appearing to take less creative risks. Given all this, it’s unsurprising that Dark Souls 3 may not inspire much more than a sort of dulled appreciation of craft, refinement, technical solidity.
Not that it somehow has to, as if we were all beholden to a sort of critical imperative, but it’s hard to imagine how this situation might change. Dark Souls 3 is simply too conspicuously well-made, too asset-endowed, for it to be treated as an underdog without the effort looking pathetic. Moreover, its world design has been dragged into the persistent dichotomy of linearity vs. non-linearity. Although Dark Souls 3′s type of linearity is a contextual virtue, further concretizing the game’s eschatological emphases, it is often slighted – I cannot count how many times I have seen it written that the game is fine in spite of the linearity –, as if the game were lacking something from the first without which it is crippled. Interestingly, the relative linearity of Dark Souls3is a kind of novelty for the trilogy – and it would, by association, condemn Demon’s Souls too! –, but the dichotomy’s prescriptivism insists on an inherent difference of value, presumably in part because non-linearity extends play-time and thereby offers more “content.” The other issue with this either/or insistence, as there tends to be with assessments of Dark Souls 2′s in-flux manner, is that it excludes surprising and fecund alternate analyses, such as one by Mike Stenbæk which discerns a tripartite and suggestively rich assembly of Lothric’s domains.
This isn’t all I want to say on the matter, but it’ll do for now. I’d like to conclude this brief exploration by sharing some words from a friend expressing his viewpoint:
DS3 was actually my favorite of the trilogy. DS1’s combat didn’t play well with my sense of timing, and I found the lag between input and move execution off-putting. Nevertheless I did eventually beat it. I have no idea where the hell I’m going in DS2, so I’ve never finished it. Most FROM games do a good job of letting you do whatever at the start, and you can pick your threads back up when you exhaust one direction. DS2 was just — where am i and where am i going and I don’t remember why I care except to progress.
Bloodborne was a revelation because it took the DS combat and aligned input and output better. By which I mean, you press a button and you get a move rather than press a button and anticipate. BB was my “Ah ha, now I get it” moment. I didn’t dislike that DS1 was hard. I disliked the way that it was hard. Which brings us to DS3, which takes some of the mechanical learnings of BB and marries them to DS. And its environments were crafted in such a way that I could move through without getting super duper lost.
I think that having a starting point to understand the spirit of the games makes the others intelligible too. If it takes a linear/action experience like BB/DS3 to show me what the Soulsborne games do best, I’m more likely to seek that aesthetic in experiences that I enjoy less naturally. Well, “more linear,” I should say. All of them give you different ways to approach exploration.
Happy new year, everyone. A piece of mine was published on No Escape, and looks at six specific spots from Dark Souls’ environments which interest me. Included are photographs I took of the game as part of my “CRT Souls” series.
“Heavens, she was already dead… Thank you. I-I’m not surprised, though. Hmm, almost a relief, really. You can keep the ring. As, well, a little trinket of thanks, I suppose.”
How The Public Sees Soulsborne Fans: “GIT GUD YOU FILTHY CASUALS!!!”
Most Soulsborne Fans I’ve Run Across: “I just finished my latest ELDEN RING fan art! It’s of Rykard and Tanith taking Zorayas to a water park! Look! She’s wearing floaties!”
If you’ve followed me since forever you know exactly what this is, but if not, it’s a super cool fanmade comic anthology about Dark Souls, Demon Souls and Bloodborne, drawn by different guest artists, coming back after a mega funded 1st edition.
2ND EDITION HAS:
✨110 pages of soulsborne comic&illustration content by cool artists (including me)!
✨cool merch! -enamel pins, wallpapers, stickers
✨cool merch that’s sold out! - my Djura whiteboard standees
✨commissions! -by me and baruyon
✨free cool merch at stretch goals! (so tell your friends)
This edition collects 6 comics, including two of my own, “Sunlight Medal”, a short comic about the hidden mini adventure of Solaire and Lautrec and “Millwood Knight”, a look into the slowly disappearing life inside a rotting painting. (There might also be a secret remake of one of my Bloodborne comics in the works, if the stretch goals are made!)
Elden Ring brainrot Koschei as The Third Wheel Wizard, my boyfriend’s Orest as The Orest and my brother’s Sibilla aka The Son as their foster granddaughter.
