Each Dark Souls game has its own trivia page:
For the series in general:
- Darkhorse Casting: Unlike most AAA video games, rather than voice actors by trade, From Software mostly casts the characters with lesser known TV actors or those with a background in theater, resulting in the game's characteristically off-kilter, gruff, manic, and frequently ominous voice acting. Starting from at least as early as Demon's Souls, they've maintained this practice for all subsequent projects, including this game's two sequels, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring.
- Dummied Out:
- Though she is silent in-game, an examination of game data showed lines
recorded for Quelaag in which she first warns you not to attack, then taunts you after you do so. Presumably, she was originally planned to be passive when first encountered, but was later changed to being instantly aggroed as she is in-game. - Priscilla has unique sitting and standing animations that are never used within the game, likely a remnant of her original planned larger plot presence.
- A hybrid Millwood/Silver Knight set named "Ledo's Set" exists in the files, but was never used for lore reasons.
- Players were presumably able to get a version of the summon spell used by the Judicator Giants before the option was removed.
- There are unused model files in the game of Beatrice as a child. We can only guess at what her original role in the game was supposed to be...
- Though she is silent in-game, an examination of game data showed lines
- Fan Community Nicknames: While the Dark Souls community don't refer to themselves collectively by this term, they often address each other as "Skeleton" (particularly new players) in reference to the "Don't give up, Skeleton!" meme from Dark Souls II.
- Follow the Leader: Ever since its popularity, many games have tried to emulate the franchise's style; aesthetics, Dark Fantasy setting, weighty combat design, "tough-but-fair" difficulty, etc. It's gotten to the point where "Souls-like" is almost a genre of its own, much like Rogue. On a wider scale, the Souls series has lead to many more developers embracing higher difficulty in general after many years of lowering difficulty for the sake of accessibility.
- God Never Said That: Series creator Hidetaka Miyazaki has cited the manga Berserk as an influence on Dark Souls in several interviews. In this interview, he acknowledged he is a Berserk fan and that it has greatly influenced the series since the first game. In another interview◊ he gives a Shout-Out, noting that when Art Designer Masanori Waragai showed him his Catarina armor design, he felt reminded of Bazuso from Berserk and thought that old design was appropriate for Siegmeyer's character concept. He also said that the greatsword arts and playstyle in Dark Souls III were inspired by Guts. However, fanon sometimes exaggerates it, with some fans of both Berserk and the Souls games suggesting that Berserk was the primary inspiration of Souls. Miyazaki didn't cite it as the primary inspiration, but mentioned it among other sources of inspiration, including other manga such as Saint Seiya, Devilman, and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, as well as as his collection of Tabletop RPGs and Fantasy Literature, the earlier FromSoftware game series King's Field, and the Fighting Fantasy game books.
