Dark Souls

Is there a generally reccomended order for picking up the Boss souls? I know I can do them in any order, but is one area generally considered harder or easier than the others?

Edited by GNinja on Jul 27th 2022 at 9:36:39 AM

Not really? I guess Izalith normally gets shunted to the end but that's more because Izalith is the worst place to be. Nito's generally a good idea to do ASAP because it's the gate for a lot of miracles and Patches and stuff. <_>

I usually do New Londo first because the last ember is there.

I'd say it depends on what your build requires. New Londo, as Drag says, is the place to go if you're going for standard upgrade path weapons. Sseath's library is for all your sorcery needs, so on and so forth. I did library -> NLR -> Tomb -> Izalith first time around, I believe.

...Man, now that I think about it, as much as has been said about the second half of DS 1 in terms of world design and polish, I also think it just... wasn't very fun. NLR, Catacombs, Crystal Cave and the Tomb are actively unfun areas to navigate. The library isn't obnoxious in terms of gimmicks but it does have a lot of ranged enemies taking potshots at you. Demon Ruins are fine, Lost Izalith is infamously unfinished and has the lava gimmick but is otherwise inoffensive. I dunno, for the pre-Lordvessel areas the only ones I found especially annoying were the Depths (I got so lost I had to look up a map) and the first half of Blighttown (mostly due to the blowdart snipers). Maybe Ariamis, but that's meant to be rather brutal.

I mean, I think Anor Londo is the only place I've actually found fun so far. I don't know what that means exactly.

The Crystal Cave's not fun (I hate heights), but it's also all not really... long. Or worth counting as a separate area to the Duke's Archives as a whole.

So I decided to boot up Dark Souls: Remastered and the first thing that stuck me, after having played Elden Ring for a bit is that the solution to the problem of the jumping controls being shit was right in their face for a literal decade: the A key (or X if you're using a Play Station controller) is never used for more than contextual button prompts.

And yet they thought of mapping the jump controls to fucking R3 before they thought of using the damn thing.

I always found the DS control layout to be... pretty arbitrary, at best. The shoulder buttons being mapped to each hand is fine (even though it kinda excludes non-shield blocking as a matter of course) and so are the general movement and dodging controls, but everything else is varying degrees of mistifying.

Man, I remember the Belfry Gargoyles being harder than this.

Moonlight Butterfly has always been a cakewalk, though, even without summoning Beatrice.

Anyway, I finished the Undead Parish and Darkroot Garden (the Black Knight there unfortunately did not drop his halberd) and got the Elite Drip Armor Set, which shall be my chosen drip for the rest of this run.

Also, I realized they fixed that animation bug with the Longbow, that's neat.

The Gargoyles have always been pretty free with a +5 weapon. I don't remember the last time I actually lost to them.

Yeah, but I didn't have one.

I did have the Drake Sword, but even then it was like less than a minute.

I'm playing the Demon's Souls Remake now and, despite how immaculate the game's presentation is on PS 5, I think it fails as a remake due to it's refusal to change anything. Glaring flaws with the original weren't fixed, they didn't add back in any cut content (such as the entire world that was cut), and weird quirks that were smoothed out in later games weren't changed. It isn't a remake, it's a fancy remaster that was sold as a remake.

Edited by TheLivingDrawing on Dec 23rd 2023 at 11:38:05 AM

I do agree that they should have fixed more stuff. I think armor is basically as bad in the remake as it is in the original, world tendency is still a needlessly opaque and pants-on-head system, etc.

I was so baffled that they just... kept world tendency. Why.

In my opinion what they should have done instead was keep the audiovisual aesthetic closer to the original (compared to what it ended up being) and taken more liberties with the gameplay instead.

Imagine if they added back the cut world from the original. Or if they made the bosses better. Or if they made the game closer to future games while retaining what made the original unique.

Regarding the controls of the original, and there being a solution to the controls right there, that sort of thing is not uncommon I think—in game-dev and beyond.

(Indeed, we used to have a trope for it—now fallen into the Salvage Yard—under the name "The Pennyfarthing Effect".)

In short, while a simpler approach may be obvious in hindsight—in particular once the simpler approach has already been found—it may very well not be obvious until then.

See, for example, how long it took for mouse-look to become commonplace.

With how little content Demon's Souls has compared to its successors and how similar the remake is to the original, I am so glad I did not pay $70. That game was certainly the first Soulsborne game.

Edited by TheLivingDrawing on Jan 3rd 2024 at 12:41:48 PM

So, after several years, decided to play through this again due to playing every single other Soulslike game from From recently; Bloodborne, Sekiro, Demon's Souls, and Elden Ring. So far I've gotten a good ways in; rang the first Bell, making my way down towards the second.

I decided to play as a Wanderer this time; playing as a Dex-focused class isn't bad, though the Scimitar is lacking in terms of damage in my opinion, and the lack of heavy armor is kind of weird for me.

Music newsletter Tone Glow just did a short interview with now-independent composer Yuka Kitamura that touches on her work on the series.

IGN via PC Gamer: Vindication for Dark Souls 2 defenders as Hidetaka Miyazaki says many of its ideas 'carried the rest of the series'.

Praise the..... Adaptability?

I'm at Sister Friede as a pyromancer and I'm considering abandoning the playthrough. Not only because Freide is an absurdly cheap and terrible boss fight, but because magic is so bad that even careful building produced a build worse than a simple strength build. I have no idea why people have 3 as their favorite. 2 has it's quirks but it feels distinct from the rest of the trilogy and I believe it is the best of the trilogy for a variety of reasons. I'm glad Miyazaki doesn't treat 2 like it doesn't exist like other people in the industry. I always find that to be an extreme dick move that insults the effort put into said work and it's merits.

Edited by TheLivingDrawing on Apr 22nd 2024 at 1:26:01 PM

Yeah I keep hearing Magic isn't great in 3. Now, having just finished a Sorcery run in Dark Souls 1, I get why they kept nerfing it, since it is unbelievably busted in 1, but imo 2 and Elden Ring do a better job of staying between those two extremes.

It took me building carefully and going without a shield to make Pyromancy usable. And I still would've had an easier time with a strictly melee build. They needed to reduce casting times by just a little since the enemies are faster in 3. The change to a magic meter also made Boring, but Practical spells dominate heavier spells. Soul Spear's increased damage and piercing are negated by its FP cost making Great Heavy Soul Arrow your main spell for the whole game. How boring. Elden Ring at least made magic really good again even if it is kinda busted.

Edited by TheLivingDrawing on Apr 22nd 2024 at 3:44:17 PM