Video Game / Dark Souls

aka: Dark Souls 1

Prepare to Die.

"I remember the first time I died. Facing down my foe was to be expected. Even inevitable. Resurrected, my soul awoke and my battles were fought harder. Death became my friend. I remember the first time I died. But dying gets easier; it's how you die that leaves your mark. Prepare to die..."

— Dark Souls Hardcore Trailer

Dark Souls is the first game in the Dark Souls series, developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. The game is directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, who previously directed Demon's Souls, the predecessor to Dark Souls.

In the Age of Ancients, the world was unformed, and shrouded by fog: a land of gray crags, arch-trees, and everlasting dragons. But then there was fire, and with it disparity: heat and cold, life and death, light and dark. From the dark came the four lords: Nito, the First of the Dead. The Witch of Izalith and her daughters of chaos. Gwyn, the Lord of Sunlight, and his faithful knights. And the Furtive Pygmy, so easily forgotten. Aided by Seath the Scaleless, a traitorous dragon, they brought an end to the dragons, and ushered in a golden age called the Age of Fire. But now the flames are fading. The world suffers through endless nights, and mysterious brands called the Darksign curse humans with eternal undeath. These immortal undead are doomed to eventual madness as they lose their humanity, and thus are locked away in an asylum in the north to await the end of the world.

Players take the role of one of these undead, as they break out of the Undead Asylum and begin a quest through the huge, non-linear world of Lordran to ring the twin Bells of Awakening, prophesied to reveal the fate and true purpose of the undead.

The game is an Action RPG very much like Demon's Souls, and reuses many elements, such as the combat, online mechanics, and Nintendo Hard difficulty.

The game was released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on September 22, 2011 in Japan and October 4 and 6, 2011 in North America and Europe. A PC port, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition was later released August 24th 2012. The PC port content was released for PS3 and Xbox 360 as DLC named "Artorias of the Abyss" on October 23, 2012. On December 15th, 2014 FromSoftware began the PC version's transition off of the now defunct Games for Windows Live platform in favor of upgrading to support Steamworks, allowing players to transfer their data and achievements in the process. It has two sequels, Dark Souls II and Dark Souls III.

An Updated Re-release, Dark Souls: Remastered, was released May 25, 2018 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. The remaster adds up to 6 player online pvp / co-op, redone textures, minor quality-of-life improvements to the menu interfaces and level design, and depending on the platform, improved lighting, resolutions, frame rate and so on. And yes, praise the sun, they fixed Blighttown.

The following mods have their own pages:

• Dark Souls: Daughters of Ash
• Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Again
• The Scorched Contract

For its unofficial Fan Sequel, see Dark Souls: Nightfall.

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The game provides examples of:

A-C

• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Ornstein's Dragonslayer Spear, apparently. It's not especially notable for its sharpness in-game, but his Leo Ring states that it is rumored to have cleaved a boulder in two.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The lower areas of the Depths are wet sewer corridors infested with rats and slimes, with some parts of them also resembling catacombs.
• Action Prologue: The game's prologue, which involves Nito, the Witch of Izalith, and Gwyn taking on the dragons.
• Aerith and Bob: Some characters have fantasy names, such as Laurentius of the Great Swamp, the Witch of Izalith, and Solaire, while others have standard names like Oswald, Oscar, and Logan.
• After the End: The game takes place in the twilight years of Age of Fire. Most of Lordran, the former land of the lords, has gone to ruin, and the remaining humans have been branded with the Darksign, becoming The Undead and risking going mindless. In-game lore reveals that the end of the Age of Fire already came long ago, and the inevitable is only delayed because of Gwyn's sacrifice (and potentially your own).
• Airborne Mook: The Giant Mosquitoes in Blighttown are flying enemies, meaning they can reach the player from nearly anywhere in the swamp and are hard to hit with the swings of certain weapons.
• The Alcatraz: The Undead Aslyum, where civilization locks up people cursed with the Darksign, mostly out of fear.
• Always Night:
  • Anor Londo is know for its bright sunlight, but should the player attack Gwynevere, the city turns to night and remains dark for the rest of the game. Oddly enough, it becomes safer after doing this since most non-Darkmoon enemies vanish.
  • The Darkroot Garden and Darkroot Basin are both perpetually covered in darkness, which feels weird when you transition to another area where it's perpetually late afternoon.
• Ambiguous Ending: Both endings are short and without much, if any, context as to what effect on the world your actions may have had.
• Ancient Keeper: Kaathe and Frampt have been waiting for the day an Undead would appear before them so they can give directives towards the endgame. That said, their trustworthiness is suspect.
• Angels, Devils and Squid: Represented by three "factions" that make up Lordran:
  • The lords of Anor Londo are the Angels that try their best to maintain the crumbling world order through the underhanded herding of the Undead and a secret plan to find a successor who can replace Gwyn as fuel for the First Flame.
  • The demons of Lost Izalith and Gravelord Nito's minions are the Devils that prowl the land, spreading chaos and misery, but don't really have a significant impact other than to provide very tough enemies on your journey.
  • The creatures of the Abyss are the representation of the Squid, given they are grotesquely deformed, corrupted beings that threaten the very balance of the Dark Souls universe by indiscriminately trying plunge whatever they can into the world-destroying Dark. Darkstalker Kaathe claims it's the ushering of a new age for humanity, but he's proven to be lying when you meet the biggest, baddest Squid around in the form of Manus, Father of the Abyss. He's a former human whose humanity ran rampant and twisted him into this form, just like every enemy in the Chasm of the Abyss. It's heavily hinted that "humanity" as described in the game is the property that makes humans unique, and developer comments confirmed that said "humanity" are all pieces of the Dark Soul.
• Animal Motifs: The Four Knights of Gwyn each had their own unique animal motif.
  • Artorias the Abysswalker is associated with wolves, with his Wolf Ring and the Great Grey Wolf Sif guarding his grave.
  • Dragon Slayer Ornstein is associated with lions, with his Leo Ring and lion-shaped helmet.
  • Hawkeye Gough is associated with hawks, with his Hawk Ring, title, and affinity for sniping and marksmanship.
  • Lord's Blade Ciaran is associated with hornets, with her Hornet Ring and deadly affinity with a poisonous dagger.
• Animated Armor: The deadly Black Knights, unlike other knight enemies, are just possessed suits of armor and not human. Their bodies were burned to ash when Gwyn tried to link the fire. The Iron Golem boss is a massive body of armor powered by a soul-core made from an Everlasting Dragon's bone.
• An Odd Place to Sleep: Gravelord Nito sleeps in his giant coffin. Siegmeyer falls asleep in all sorts of odd places, including a poisonous swamp, standing up and clad in full armor.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Accidentally made an NPC hostile towards you? Pay Oswald of Carim a visit so he can absolve your sins and make said NPCs peaceful again. (Unless you make Oswald hostile as well, in which case you'll have to wait until your next playthrough.)
  • Certain enemies in the game have especially rare and valuable drops. However, not all of these enemies respawn. As such, any enemy of which there is a finite amount in the game will always have the very last one drop whatever you haven't gotten from the others yet, so you won't need to go through another playthrough.
  • Fell off a ledge into a Bottomless Pit? Thankfully, you'll still have a bloodstain, near the location you fell from.
  • The Ring of Favor and Protection gives quite a few powerful bonuses at the expense of breaking should you ever remove it. Trying to switch it out causes a pop-up window to appear, warning that it will break and thus preventing players from ever accidentally removing it.
  • If you defeat the Four Kings prior to obtaining the Lordvessel, you can still warp out of the Abyss using its bonfire.
  • There are two spots in the world where a player could get stuck (without going out of their way to break things). So in the very rare event that you get stuck and also are out of teleport items? You can still rub your Darksign to kill yourself and get out.
  • Remastered, while largely just a release with better graphics, did add a few of these. Among them, the ability to switch covenants at a bonfire, the ability to hold the cycle inventory button to go back to the first item like in Dark Souls 3, the password system to make summoning your friends easier, and the ability to use multiple copies of souls in your inventory at once along with gifting multiple items to covenants.
• Anti-Grinding: While the campaign itself doesn't punish grinding, raising your level leaves you vulnerable to being invaded by higher-level black phantoms. If you raise your level too high in the earlier areas, you'll likely end up regularly being invaded by hostile players equipped with powerful weapons and armor way above anything you have access to at that point. A similar punishment is that if you raise your level too high compared to the average level range for an area, you'll have a harder time finding players you can summon to help you. If you go too high, it might become near impossible to find other players.
• Arc Villain: The game as a whole lacks a real Big Bad, but it still has villainous characters.
  • Seath the Scaleless for much of the main game. He's certainly the most openly villainous of the bosses you face, being directly responsible for many of the various abominations you fight as well as kidnapping people to be experimented on. And unlike most other bosses in the game, he's fully lucid and in control of his own actions, though he has apparently gone mad.
  • Manus, Father of the Abyss for the DLC content, who is responsible for the corruption of Artorias and the fall of Oolacile. Though you kill him thousands of years before the main game, he casts a long shadow over the rest of the series, with the main villain of Dark Souls 2 being one of his descendants.
• Art Course: The Painted World of Ariamis is one of the optional areas of the game. It is an entire world hidden inside a painting in the Royal Palace of Anor Londo. It manifests in the form of the dilapidated ruins of a castle covered in snow, made to be a cold, dark, but comforting place where things that don't belong anywhere else can find respite.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • Enemies have trouble noticing dangerous falls, especially in areas with precarious footing like Blighttown. You'll be traveling along when you'll randomly gain souls from some enemy that accidentally fell off a ledge to its death.
  • In some areas, it's easy to cheese an enemy into a spot where it will walk endlessly, allowing you to whale on them with impunity.
  • Sif is a Lightning Bruiser, and constantly repositions himself around the map by jumping. Occasionally, he'll jump on top of you, one of the few safe places in a fight against him, and allow you to attack his legs before hopping away.
  • Rats in particular seem to have bugged attack priorities, where they'll often simply run away from the player, even when they outnumber you greatly, and are almost always placed in corners they'll run against fruitlessly. It takes a few seconds for them to turn around, in which time you will have ample opportunity to kill them. This is particularly noticeable in the Painted World, where you can easily walk through swarms of rats with no problem.
  • One of the best ways to grind souls in the early game involves taking advantage of this with the NPCs just past the gate in Darkroot Garden. They are far too tough to take on at early levels, but if you stand in just the right spot on a certain ledge, they will try to jump down to you, bounce off your head, and fall straight off the cliff, granting you 1000-2000 souls a pop.
  • The bat-winged demons of Anor Londo. Despite having a fierce thrusting attack, their evasive maneuver will often send them plunging backward to their deaths. (Extra points for forgetting they can fly.)
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: This is the objective of the dragon apostles, who seek to become immortal and transcend life by attaining an ancient dragon's body. However, going by what happens when you use the appropriate items to do so, it would seem that transforming into a dragon does little more than change your appearance and give you some new abilities.
• Ascended Meme: The "Praise the Sun" gesture is one for Miyazaki. The gesture originated in Demon's Souls, where it was used to extend the miracle casting animation while wearing the Ring of Sincere Prayer. Said gesture nearly didn't make the cut for Demon's Souls, but got in under the radar.
• Ascetic Aesthetic: The path that leads to the Kiln of the First Flame. It's unlike anything else seen in the game. The area is almost a White Void Room with a downward staircase floating in the void. Ghostly apparitions of the Black Knights walk across the staircase. It really builds of the dread of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
• Ass Kicks You: Four bosses (six, if you count Gaping Dragon with his belly drop and Giant Ornstein) have a move that involves squashing you with their posteriors, most visibly with the Asylum Demon and its variants. The Bounding Demons, who are nothing but dragon-zombies' asses, leap a hundred or so feet in the air and butt-drop on you if they're not kicking.
• Ass Shove: Backstabbing large humanoid enemies like the Man-Serpents and the Infested Barbarians with a one-handed sword will result in the player giving them a colonoscopy. Even more intentionally done with the Armored Tusk in the Undead Parish, a giant boar covered in silvery armor except for a small section of its rear, just crying out for a buttstab.
• Atop a Mountain of Corpses: Seath the Scaleless on a pile of dead dragons in the prologue.
• Attack of the Monster Appendage: The giant evil hand of Manus, Father of the Abyss grabs the player in a cutscene at the start of the DLC storyline.
• Attack the Tail: Several bosses drop unique weapons if you do enough damage to their tail. In the case of certain bosses, this makes the fight considerably easier. With other bosses, cutting off the tail is an achievement in and of itself.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Stone armor set can be gained relatively early and provides excellent defense, but its sheer weight makes it very difficult to travel around in.
  • One of the biggest examples is the Dragon Greatsword, a huge person-sized sword that appears to be made of flesh. Not only that, but it has a special attack which causes a huge Razor Wind to tear along the ground, wrecking enemies. Unfortunately, the stat requirements for it are insane, and by the time you have the stats to use it, there are other, better weapons available, because it also doesn't scale with stats.
  • The non-cursed version of the Greatsword of Artorias. It can easily land around the 500-600 attack strength at max level, enough power to easily destroy most enemies and wear bosses down. It also boasts the highest Divine modifier, which increases damage against undead, the vast majority of the enemies in the game, and does additional damage vs. Abyss enemies. Unfortunately it requires MASSIVE stat investment in strength, dexterity, intelligence, and faith to even use it at all, and THEN its scaling builds off all four stats, requiring further investment in all four to adequately get the most out of it. It's extremely powerful, but truly time consuming to use to its full potential.
  • Crystal weapons do more damage than their regular counterparts, but have the severe drawback of being impossible to repair. The only way to restore durability is to upgrade them, and that has a ceiling.
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: The Dark Lord ending, in which the primordial serpents bow down and declare you to be the Dark Lord.
• Ax-Crazy: Undead that have Hollowed are mindless monsters that usually attack anyone who gets close regardless of how passive they were in life. Of course, there are violently crazy non-Hollows as well, such as Lautrec (who abruptly commits murder to amass Humanity) and the Darkwraiths (who invade other players for their Humanity).
• Badass Bookworm: Mage characters in general; compared to the holy miracles and the blunt pyromancies, sorcery is an intensely researched form of casting and benefits from high Intelligence. The main sorcery teachers, Griggs and Big Hat Logan, are very academic and know powerful spells.
• Bad Boss: The eponymous owner of Sen's Fortress is implied to be this, as he regularly expects the Snake Men in his employment to traverse through his funhouse of axes swinging over narrow bridges suspended across fifty foot drops and Indiana Jones style boulders regularly rolling down his staircases with safety-precautions built for humans much smaller than they are; the fact they still rush full speed ahead through said "Home Alone" Antics when they spot you implies the punishment for refusing to do so is even more painful.
• Badass Normal:
  • Solaire of Astora. All of his item drops point out that none of his abilities came from magical equipment, but from pure training.
  • Sieglinde of Catarina is the only non-undead NPC in the game other than Dusk, and is looking for her father. What makes this significant is that she is met in the Duke's Archives and in Ash Lake, two endgame areas. As she is still alive at the end, she must somehow gotten through to those areas without dying. An impressive feat.
  • Havel is a hostile example. Most of Gwyn's generals are powerful gods, demigods, or dragons. Havel seems for all the world to just be a normal man who's incredibly strong.
• Badass Preacher: Clerics and other miracle users are able to invoke the power of gods to support or attack. Among the NPCs there's Oswald of Carim, who is powerful enough to absolve the sins of the Chosen Undead and isn't too shabby in a fight.
• Bait-and-Switch Boss: Knight Artorias from the Artorias of the Abyss DLC. A hideous Bloathead appears in his arena and it seems like it could be the boss, but then it's impaled from above by the real boss. Doubles as a Mythology Gag to the Penetrator from Demon's Souls, who did a similar thing to a Fat Official.
• Bald of Evil: Patches, the trickster thief returning from Demon's Souls, is as bald and cowardly as ever.
• Balloon Belly: Easily to miss while distracted by his more obvious feature, but the Gaping Dragon has a bloated body as another sign of his gluttony.
• Barrier Maiden: Gwyn, by virtue of being the fuel for the First Flame. Whether or not this is a good thing is a completely different matter. At the end, you can potentially take his place.
• Battle Trophy: You can cut body parts from certain enemies and keep them as weapons. You can also collect the armor and weapons of a lot of bosses.
• Beauty to Beast: Quelaag and her sister, The Fair Lady. Both are daughters of the Witch of Izalith, but the Flame of Chaos turned them into half-human, half-spider demons.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: The Lady of the Darkling/Darkmoon Knightess is fervently loyal to Gwyndolin because he accepted her as a follower despite her hideous appearance, providing her purpose in life. Eingyi is similarly devoted to Quelaag's sister because she sucked the deadly Blightpuss from his body, saving his life but becoming deathly sick in the process. Also, it's possible for Maiden Rhea to become friendly towards you should you save her from the Tomb of the Giants after her escorts all either hollowed or abandoned her.
• Beautiful Void: Lordran may be mostly empty and crumbled when the player arrives, but it still looks wonderful when the unpleasant monsters and zombies aren't around.
• Beef Gate: Several areas that are accessible early in the game such as New Londo Ruins, Tomb of the Giants, and Demon Ruins are populated by powerful enemies or guarded by a tough boss, but a skilled low-level player can reap substantial rewards should they overcome the challenge. Particularly notable are the skeletons in the graveyard outside Firelink Shrine; aside from being extremely lethal to low-level, inexperienced players, they also drop substantially fewer souls than the much easier enemies in Undead Burg in the opposite direction, making it clear which direction is preferable at the start. Similar enemies include the Black Knights strewn about certain area and Havel blocking the shortcut between the Undead Burg and Darkroot Basin. The general layout of areas also serves as a soft railroad.
• Being Tortured Makes You Evil: It's implied that Manus became the destructive Eldritch Abomination he is after being tortured by the people of Oolacile.
• Belated Happy Ending: Dark Souls II accepts the Link the Fire ending as canon and reveals it really did lead to a renewed age of prosperity like Frampt promised. Granted, the Chosen Undead has to burn in agony for thousands of years but the world is saved for the time being.
• Beneath the Earth: A large part of the game is spent underground exploring in some way or another, whether it is exploring the ruins of New Londo and Lost Izalith, the horrors of the Tomb of the Giants, or discovering the Great Hollow and the Ash Lake.
• Berserk Button: Mortals trespassing on the Tomb of Gwyn is one for Gwyndolin and as far as he is concerned, punishable by death. Clerics are a sore spot for Patches, who will become hostile if you say you are one.
• Beware My Stinger Tail: The Bell Gargoyles and their tail axes, which can be cut off and wielded as a weapon. Played even straighter by the Sanctuary Guardian, a manticore with a large and poisonous scorpion tail, which you can also sever and wield as a poisonous whip.
• Big Bad: The Artorias of the Abyss DLC gives one to the overall lore in the form of Manus, Father of the Abyss. He is heavily implied to be The Furtive Pygmy who lost control of his humanity and became a monster, and drags you into the past, where you get to witness a localized outbreak of the Dark.
• Big Fancy Castle: Anor Londo, the former home of Gwyn, is a city built like a massive golden castle.
• Black Knight:
  • A few enemies outright called Black Knights are scattered throughout the game, even in the early areas. These guys are tough, often very swift and strong; they don't respawn, so the game uses them as minibosses. They're usually off the main path, so encountering them is optional, but there's a chance of them dropping something powerful and awesome if you do manage to destroy them.
  • A summonable phantom Black Iron Tarkus and a black phantom Kirk, Knight of Thorns also count. Tarkus is so powerful that he can practically solo the boss you can summon him against, while Kirk is the only black phantom who attacks you more than once in the game. As far as mooks go, the Darkwraith Knights in New Londo Ruins are a Magic Knight version of this.
• Blackout Basement: The Tomb of the Giants is pitch-black, and filled with some of the toughest monsters in the game. There are only a few light sources you can find to make it easier, such as the Skull Lantern obtainable early in it (which has to be held in the off-hand instead of a shield, sacrificing defense), the Sunlight Maggot helmet, or the Cast Light sorcery.
• Blank White Void: The Abyss is a featureless, black void that lacks any sort of landmarks when you first visit. Even the boss spawns halfway inside the floor, further throwing the perspective off. Once you've won that battle, a bonfire is added.
• Bleak Level: A frequent level type, given the general tone of the game.
  • The Painted World of Ariamis. A destroyed castle on an icy mountain, infested with hideously deformed undead and Crow Demons.
  • The Northern Undead Asylum. Even snow-capped peaks appear somehow squalid under the area's perpetual gloom.
  • The Kiln of the First Flame, a barren desert at the end of the world guarded solely by a few Black Knights and Gwyn, the Lord of Cinder.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: The game suffers from numerous translation and grammatical errors, mostly in the item descriptions. Multiple patches since release have fixed some, but created others.
  YOU DEFEATED^note It's grammatically correct English, but when using "defeat" in the active voice, it's almost never spoken without a direct subject.
• Bling of War: The Armor of the Glorious, sold (and worn) by Domnhall, is shiny and decorated compared to other armors but just as effective. Lord Gwyn's robe combines this with Badass Longcoat.
• Blob Monster: The Slimes found in the Depths. They have a habit of dropping from the ceiling to attack the player's head, and their amorphous shape gives them high defense to physical attacks, but otherwise they're slow and unthreatening.
• Body Horror:
  • The Egg-Burdened, humans infested with maggot eggs. They are forced to crawl around due to the body-sized lumps on their backs, and if the player gets infected, their head is covered by a cluster of eggs.
  • Those who possess the Darksign will gradually decay into grotesque Hollows.
  • The accident involving the Flame of Chaos caused this to the children of the Witch of Izalith. Chaos Witch Quelaag and her sister have their bodies overtaken by massive spiders (with the latter being barely able to move or sense anymore), while Ceaseless Discharge had his original condition worsen and became a sore-covered, lava-filled abomination.
• Bonus Dungeon:
  • The Painted World of Ariamis is a hidden area in Anor Londo, and can only be entered by finding a key item in a different area. It features some very tough enemies and an exclusive boss, and has a lot of unique loot, including multiplayer items like the Red Sign Soapstone.
  • The Great Hollow is an area most players are extremely unlikely to come across on a first playthrough, since it is hidden behind an illusory wall located behind another illusory wall. It is much easier than the Painted World and is notable for its many Crystal Lizards. It leads to Ash Lake, a dead end that holds a secret covenant and the end of Siegmeyer's questline.
• Booby Trap: Sen's Fortress is like a convention center for these. Every hall has either giant swinging axes, arrow slits linked to pressure plates, or giant boulders snaking throughout maze-like corridors. There is even an elevator shaft with spikes at the top should you neglect to get off at your stop.
• Boom, Headshot!: Shooting an enemy in the head with an arrow does extra damage and stuns enemies longer. The same can be done to you. Quelaag can be pain-locked with a bow or well-aimed throwing knives; if you get summoned as an ally, you can make a best friend by spamming arrows into her lovely chest and face while your host can wreck her with impunity.
• Boom Stick: The Dragonslayer Spear can act like this, the heavy one-handed attack launching a lightning bolt.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The normal upgrade path for weapons only scales with strength and dexterity, does not do magic or elemental damage, and usually has a lower attack rating than other paths. However, because of the way damage is calculated, these weapons will often deal the most damage to enemies. They can also be imbued with resins for fire, lightning, or poison damage, albeit not as potent as weapons that inherently possess them.
  • Since the ultimate arbiter of a piece of equipment's usefulness is its numbers, "normal" gear is almost universally better in the long run than special gear (including boss and dragon weapons) simply because normal weapons upgrade to +15 and normal armour to +10, while all special gear either caps at +5 or (in the case of some armour sets) cannot be upgraded at all. The fact that the majority of special weapons simply cannot be buffed with resins or spells at all makes them even worse. While special gear will usually be stronger if you're not bothering to upgrade or buff your equipment, once you do, you'll always get better damage/protection for weight out of ordinary stuff like the Zweihander or the Ragged Set than you will out of fancy gear like the Dragonslayer Spear or the Lord's Blade Set.
  • Most straight swords. While they lack the heft of heavier weapons, the flashy bits or whips and all that, their decent damage, availableness, light weight and most of them using a combination of swings and thrusts in their movesets make them the Ol'Reliable of the game.
  • The combination of a spear and a good, stout, medium shield. Nothing fancy or particularly destructive, but the long reach and ability to poke out from behind a guard is about as safe as you can get in this game.
  • The Warrior starting class. Nothing flashy and hardly optimal if you ever want to use magic, but your Starter Equipment can carry you through ninety percent of the game, if you so choose: your Longsword is a deceptively effective weapon with low weight and stat requirements, a flexible moveset and good scaling, and your Heater shield may look like it's been through a war or two, but it has the weight and parry speed of a small shield and the defense and stability of a medium one. You also have just enough Strength and Dexterity to use many of the better weapons right away.
• Boss-Altering Consequence:
  • The first boss, the Asylum Demon, can be beaten within its first encounter, and you can only win its special weapon if you do so, but if you choose instead to go around it and head to the top of the Undead Asylum, there's a ledge where you can jump down and take off a significant chunk of its health with a plunging attack. If you do not take advantage of this opportunity quickly, though, the Asylum Demon will destroy the platform, bringing you down with it.
    • Downplayed with Great Grey Wolf Sif. In the "Artorias of the Abyss" DLC, the Player Character travels back in time to when Sif's late master Artorias disappeared in the Abyss. Just before the final boss of the DLC, a secret sidepath leads to a cavern where Artorias hid the wounded Sif, and the player has the option of protecting Sif from dark sprites. If they do, Sif will help them fight the final DLC boss and, more pertinently to this trope, recognize the player character in Sif's own boss cutscene (back in the present) and howl in anguish at having to fight them.
• Boss Bonanza: The Demon Ruins is home to a total of three bosses not separated by much distance (the average area has one boss, rarely two), with scores of Degraded Bosses in between those encounters.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Most enemies that are one-time encounters (that is, they don't respawn after killing them once) are this, most notably the Black Knights and the Titanite Demons. Titanite Demons are especially notable as they're the only source of Demon Titanite, the only crafting material that can upgrade the various weapons made from boss souls. There is an exception in a respawning Titanite Demon on a narrow bridge in Lost Izalith. You can farm it if you're good enough, but the fight can be difficult without being knocked off the bridge by the creature.
• Boulder Bludgeon: The giant round boulder-wielding Infested Barbarians located in the swamp of Blighttown are much more dangerous than the regular club-wielding kind, thanks to their extended move set, which includes slamming you repeatedly into the ground with the boulder, charging you from a distance by rolling the boulder in front of them, or just throwing their boulder at you from range (and immediately summoning another one into their hands). On the plus side, these versions are somewhat easier to dodge than the club-wielding versions.
• Breath Weapon: Several enemies use breath-based attacks, such as the fire breath of the Bell Gargoyles and the crystal/curse breath of Seath the Scaleless. Members of the Path of the Dragon covenant can use their own dragon breath with the Dragon Head Stone.
• Bright Castle: Anor Londo is an absolutely stunning castle city, with beautiful gothic architecture.
• Broken Bird: Every female character you meet has undergone some sort of tragedy and struggles with it, save Sieglinde, whose tragedy occurs within the game.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: The bottom of Blighttown is a poisonous swamp, home to mosquitoes, leeches, and spiders. You have to traverse the swamp and deal with the poison to reach most of the collectibles and connected areas.
• But Thou Must!:
  • The game railroads players towards meeting Oscar and seeing him die during the Undead Asylum tutorial. Normally, the Asylum Demon that guards the exit of the prison drops the Big Pilgrim's Key when killed, unlocking the exit. If you kill the Asylum Demon when you first meet it, either with Black Firebombs or Cherry Tapping, then it will only drop the Demon's Great Hammer, and the Big Pilgrim's Key gets transferred to Oscar instead. This is understandable since skipping Oscar would leave players without the essential Estus Flask.
  • One of the earliest examples is the fight against Quelaag. No words are shared between you and her, you just enter her arena and she proceeds to attack and try to kill you. However, if you then talk to her sister with the Old Witch's Ring equipped, you find that she thinks you are her sister. Also, the reason Quelaag attacked was to try and steal humanity from you in order to provide comfort to her agonizing sister. Knowing this can make subsequent playthroughs a bit heartbreaking, knowing she's just trying to save her sister from her pain and yet you have to kill her anyway, all the while her sister has no clue that Quelaag has died. Granted, you can mostly atone for this by joining the Chaos Servant covenant and giving her as much humanity as you possibly can.
  • If you manage to complete the DLC before visiting Artorias' grave in Darkroot Garden, then entering the boss arena will have Great Gray Wolf Sif actually recognize you as the brave hero who saved his life in the past, and he howls mournfully before taking up his master's sword as he is bound to protect it from anyone... including you. A rare case of this trope applying not only to the player, but to the boss as well.
  • Early into the Duke's Archives, you find the boss room of Seath the Scaleless, only to discover that you cannot damage him at all, due to his immortality and immunity to attacks as a result of the Primordial Crystal, which is elsewhere. This is required, however, as you have to die here to be placed in the cells elsewhere in the Archives, letting you escape and reach the bottom of the Crystal Cave where he has moved to. This forces you to lose your souls, and since the original boss room is a long way away from the prison, it's best to come in with a Ring of Sacrifice (or a Rare Ring of Sacrifice, since Seath can also curse you) to preserve them, or just enter without many souls.
• Call to Adventure: The Chosen Undead starts their adventure by being given a chance to escape the Undead Asylum thanks to Oscar dropping a key into the prison cell via a dead body. Once they meet outside, Oscar dies from his injuries and passes the torch of visiting Lordran and ringing the Bells of Awakening to the player.
• Canis Major: Great Grey Wolf Sif, a giant wolf who protects the grave of Knight Artorias. He is just as intimidating as the more gruesome monsters, and can even wield a sword with his mouth.
• Canon Welding: The scaleless dragon Seath makes an appearance, who was also one of two major deities in the King's Field series. Patches from Demon's Souls also puts in an appearance.
• Cardboard Prison:
  • The Northern Undead Asylum lets inmates keep their armor for some reason, plus some potentially dangerous starting gifts. They don't let you keep your weapon and shield, however; you have to escape the cell and loot them from corpses. Considering most of the inmates appear to be mindless hollows who just stand around slumped, there's probably little concern for danger from anyone partially armed, especially with the Asylum Demon kept there.
  • Downplayed with the prison in the Duke's Archives: your cell is incredibly easy to escape from, since you can keep your gear that's heavily upgraded by this point and the guard with the key is just snoozing outside your cell waiting for you to stab it in the back. Then again, there are Crystal Hollows in your cell and as soon as you get out, the guards unleash Picasas on you.
• Carry a Big Stick: The Great Club, which is essentially a giant tree branch that has high strength requirements but does monstrous damage.
• Carrying the Weakness: Ghosts commonly drop the Transient Curse consumable, which can be used to temporarily inflict the Curse status on oneself, which is convenient, since you can only harm Ghosts while you are Cursed.
• Cataclysm Backstory: The First Flame is on the verge of dying. This is actually the second time this has happened. The first time happened about 1,000 years before the main events of the game, and caused the loss of the two most proactive Lords, Gwyn and Izalith, the complete downfall of the city of Izalith, unleashed demons onto the world, and set in motion the events that caused the gods to abandon Anor Londo.
• Cats Are Mean: The Great Felines, wide-mouthed violent cats who serve as mini-bosses in Darkroot Garden.
• Cherry Tapping: It is possible, although tedious, to defeat the tutorial area's Asylum Demon using only the sword hilt or your bare hands instead of running away as intended, though one can speed up the process by choosing the Black Firebombs as an initial gift. The game even rewards you with a weapon should you manage.
• The Chessmaster: Gwyndolin, the only god remaining in Anor Londo, is a major player in the game's plot because he created the illusions in Anor Londo in order to push the Undead who arrive there towards linking the First Flame and continuing the Age of Fire. Completely outdone by the Pygmy, however, who set this entire chain of events into motion ages ago.
• Chest Monster: The mimics. Opening one will cause the mimic to chow down on the player, doing massive damage if the attack doesn't outright kill them. The game doesn't introduce them until Sen's Fortress, to lull the player into a false sense of security, and teaches the player to never open a chest without attacking it first.
• The Chosen One: Played with. Undead are constantly traveling to Lordran in an effort to fulfill the prophecy of the Chosen Undead, with some countries sending virtual armies of questing knights. It is not made clear if The Chosen Undead is a specific, predestined hero, or simply the first undead warrior who has the skill, humanity, and raw determination to get to Anor Londo and recover the Lordvessel.
• The Chosen Zero: The Chosen Undead, at least in the opinion of several in-game characters, though they don't know he is The Chosen One at the time. Petrus initially tells you to go away, and pays you to leave him alone. Rhea and her companions call you scraggly and a waste of time. Quelana calls you a fool multiple times, but in a Tsundere way.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Patches' betrayal spree continues from the previous game. Some dialogue implies that Shiva of the East was also originally to have this trait (and cut content confirms it), but it never goes anywhere.
• Clam Trap: Maneater Clams are giant legged clams that attempt to swallow you, doing massive damage.
• Clean Dub Name: The French dub received such treatment due to the translators' wish to make the game more serious by removing anything that might be seen by the players as vulgar^note All the "Gwyn" syllables were replaced by "Gwen", since Gwyn sounds exactly like "gouine", which means "dyke". The sequels dropped this.
• Cliffhanger: The Dark Lord ending is something of one, leaving it ambiguous as to exactly what happens now that the Age of Dark has begun. Later games reveal that it's explicitly not canon, though.
• Cobweb Jungle: Quelaag's Domain. The entire area is almost entirely covered with cobwebs and filled with giant spider eggs.
• Combat Tentacles: The Demonic Foliage in Darkroot Forest have long whipping vines as arms. The Pisaca in the Dukes Archives have tentacles on their heads, which they use to restrain you and deliver an extremely deadly attack.
• Companion Cube: The Male Undead Merchant has a wooden basket named Yulia, which he constantly pets and talks to. There is speculation regarding who/what Yulia really is, as if you smash his bucket, the Male Undead Merchant does... absolutely nothing. This has led some to believe that Yulia is really his uchigatana, and if you kill him, his dying words are "Little Yulia..."
• Companion-Specific Sidequest: The game doesn't have companions and side-quests per se, but major NPCs who can be summoned to assist you in multiple boss fights, such as Solaire of Astora and Lautrec of Carim, have a number of unique interactions and dialogues with the Chosen Undead throughout the game, which constitute their character stories. Siegmeyer of Catarina also gets a storyline like this despite not being summonable at any point.
• Continuity Nod: As the player crosses a bridge in the Undead Burg, the Hellkite dragon will land in front of them and then fly off. Later, when the player crosses a bridge in the downloadable content, the Black Dragon Kalameet will land in front of them and fly off in the same way.
• Convection, Schmonvection: You won't get burned even when standing next to a glowing lava river... unless you try to jump over it because there's a shiny piece of loot on the other side. In fact, you don't even get burned when standing on rock that is still slightly melted and glowing red, as long as it's not yellow-hot lava.
• Copy Protection: In order to dissuade players from breaking the street sell date and playing the game early, Black Phantoms wearing Smough's armor and with levels maxed in every stat were released into the game and will kill premature buyers on sight.
• Cosplay: It's perfectly possible to find nearly every set of robes, garments or armor identical to an existing human-sized Non-Player Character in the game and pose as them, with matching weapons and sometimes shield. Domhall of Zena also provides equipment worn by some bosses after you defeat them, ranging from a scaled-down Iron Golem set to Ornstein and Smough's Scary Impractical Armor to even Artorias's worn-out silver armor.
• Collision Damage: The Humanity Sprites in the Chasm of the Abyss in the Artorias of the Abyss DLC damage the player very quickly when they float through them.
• Cosmic Horror Story: The Artorias of the Abyss DLC confirms some of the most pessimistic speculation about the setting and backstory, placing the game firmly in this territory. Humans are revealed to turn into hideously powerful (and just plain hideous) monsters when their Humanity builds up too much and runs wild. The First Flame, which is responsible for civilization as we know it, is dying and there is no way to save it. The best anyone can do is prolong its life and only by offering themselves up to burn in agony as the Flame's fuel. It says something that the plague of undeath that has already laid several nations low is relegated to a back-burner problem.
• Crazy-Prepared: Havel the Rock, a human general whose equipment is specifically designed to fight dragons, sorcery, and gods, even though he was one of Lord Gwyn's generals. The guy's armor itself is carved straight from a rock, and requires ridiculous strength and endurance just to walk around in it. In order to achieve that, he has a ring that boosts his equipment load, also letting him carry his massive club, which is literally a Dragon's tooth. In his hidden room in Anor Londo, you can find a spare set of his rock armor, another Dragon Tooth, a miracle that pretty much negates all magic damage (crafted to fight against Seath the Scaleless), and a club with an Occult damage modifier, the damage type that is lethal to divine beings such as Lord Gwyn, his Knights, and the other Gods. The only other weapons with that modifier are found on people who are opposed to, shunned from, or feared by the Gods.
• Creepy Cathedral: The Undead Parish, an area at the top of the Undead Burg that hosts a large church. The church contains the soul of a long-dead Fire Keeper, and the first Bell of Awakening hangs at its peak, guarded by the Bell Gargoyles.
• Creepy Crows: You are initially brought from the Undead Asylum to greater Lordran by a gigantic crow. Later on, you fight crow demons in the Painted World. The unseen goddess Velka is associated strongly with crows and may be connected to the aforementioned giant crow.
• Critical Status Buff: The Tearstone rings provide significant buffs at low health. The blue ring increases your defense, the red ring increases your attack.
• Crystal Landscape: The Crystal Cave, lair of Seath the Scaleless; a deep chasm covered in giant, mostly blue crystals and populated by crystal golems. The crystals have significance beyond just prettiness, since in the game, they are associated with sorcery (Seath's original invention)—and with the uglier sides of it in particular. "Golems" are actually people trapped in crystal shells, while prolonged tinkering with crystal-based magic chips away at the sorcerers' sanity.
• Crystal Weapon: Crystal weapons are extremely powerful but have low durability and cannot be repaired by any means. Like most things crystal in the game, they are ultimately products of Duke Seath the Scaleless' research, who also invented several sorceries that temporarily turn regular weapons into crystals.
• Cute Monster Girl: Quelaag and her sister, half-spider demons who lean very heavily towards the "monster" side of things. Priscilla, a crossbreed between a human and a dragon, counts as well.
• Cute Mute: Anastacia of Astora is unable to speak until she is revived after being killed. The reason for being mute isn't very cute, however; cutting out the tongues of Fire Keepers is apparently common practice.
• Cute Witch: Witch Beatrice, a summon for two boss fights, wears a prettier Robe and Wizard Hat outfit that most sorcerers; it even shows off a bit of female curves when most armors in the game don't. This makes discovering her fate all the more painful.

D-I

• Damage-Sponge Boss: The two main DLC bosses, Knight Artorias and Manus, Father of the Abyss have above average damage resistance and noticeably more health than even the five endgame bosses.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: If you are unlucky enough to get grabbed by Kalameet, he will give you a status effect that makes you take double damage. When you kill him, you get the Calamity Ring, which has the same effect, in case you want the extra challenge or are a complete masochist.
• Dangerous Backswing: A lot of bosses swing their giant weapons in very wide arcs, so it is quite possible to get killed by them even when approaching them from behind while they attack someone (such as a summoned ally) in front of them, simply because the strike either starts or ends well behind their back.
• Darkest Hour: The game starts Just Before the End with the First Flame slowly dying, taking sunlight out with it. It takes the Chosen Undead escaping from their prison and making fast progress for some ancient folks such as Kingseeker Frampt to start having hope for the world's survival.
• Dark Fantasy: Like Demon's Souls, the game itself falls into this genre of fantasy, given its Crapsack World, ruinous areas, and fierce deformed enemies.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Zigzagged. Darkness is implied to be strongly linked to humanity, to the point that capital-H Humanity is represented in-game as a ghostly night-black substance with a life of its own. However, Manus was twisted into the terrifying monster he is today when his humanity "ran wild", whatever that means.
• David Versus Goliath: Almost every boss fight is against a being larger or more powerful than you in some way.
• Dead All Along: Laurentius of the Great Swamp and Griggs of Vinhiem eventually wander off and go hollow... but where they go hollow is very close to where you found and looted dead bodies earlier in the game wearing the exact clothing they were wearing. Same goes for Rhea, if Petrus doesn't get to her first.
• Deadly Dodging: Sometimes pops up in PvP. Some of the more evasive enemies can be tricked into running into environmental hazards, like the Snake Men in Sen's Fortress and the Armored Boar in Undead Parish.
• Deadpan Snarker: The Crestfallen Warrior, who never misses the chance to pass a snide comment on anyone who visits the Firelink Shrine.
• Decoy Leader: Gwynevere is this, simply being one of Gwyndolin's illusions.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Rhea and Quelana, who both warm up to the player after certain events.
• Degraded Boss:
  • The Taurus Demon, the Capra Demon, the Bell Gargoyles, Pinwheel and the Moonlight Butterfly can all be encountered as normal enemies later in the game. The Gargoyles are unique, non-respawning enemies, but mooks nonetheless.
  • A particularly weird example is the Bounding Demons. Zombie dragons are unique minibosses, and one of the only two in the entire game (the one in the Painted World) will tear itself in half trying to get to you, leaving its lower half behind once dead. The Bounding Demons of Lost Izalith are reskinned, living versions of these lower halves, meaning you have a chance to fight about thirty sentient and really aggressive zombie dragon asses.
• Dem Bones: Skeletons are the most frequent enemy in Gravelord Nito's portion of Lordran (the Firelink Shrine graveyard, the Catacombs, and the Tomb of the Giants). The ones in the Catacombs revive repeatedly unless they're beaten with divine weapons or their Necromancers are killed, and by the Tomb of the Giants they become beastlike and bizarre.
• Devour the Dragon: In the Ornstein and Smough boss fight, defeating one of them will cause the other to regain all their health and absorb the power of their fallen comrade. Smough gains lightning powers while Ornstein becomes huge.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • If you use Sequence Breaking to get past the Hopeless Boss Fight in the Duke's Archives, then you won't get tossed in the tower prison, preventing you from freeing the last Sorcery vendor and picking up a Firekeeper Soul. However, beating the real boss fight of the area will cause the prison doors to open anyway. In fact, while Logan will normally break himself out if you defeat the boss, he won't do it if you break sequence until you go sneak into your cell and trigger the breaking out cutscene.
  • In the Downloadable Content, you go back in time and potentially meet a younger version of the boss Great Grey Wolf Sif. If you took the time to save him from the Humanity Sprites before fighting the boss in present time, his cinematic intro is replaced by a longer version wherein he recognizes you and reluctantly prepares to fight you anyway.
  • You normally need the Lordvessel to warp between bonfires. However, it is possible to kill the Four Kings before obtaining it if you are very familiar with the game, which leaves you in the Abyss with no way out. Fortunately, the Abyss bonfire is the only one you can warp from with no lordvessel.
  • After defeating Gwyn, the player is presented with a choice: link the fire (by walking up to it and interacting with it) or let it die (by exiting the final boss arena). Attempting to leave without walking out (such as by use of a Homeward Bone or the Homeward miracle) deposits the player right back into the arena, ensuring that the game always ends shortly after Gwyn's death. This also prevents players who died either right after they beat the boss, or somehow manage to kill him but die in a way that the fight is treated as having been won, from being unable to complete the game.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: By the end of the game, you've killed almost every established badass in the universe, including a couple who are gods. The Downloadable Content also sends you back in time to own an Eldritch Abomination bent on plunging the world into darkness.
• Dirty Coward: "Trusty" Patches, who tries to kick you off a ledge while you are distracted, twice. He also uses one of the most low-risk builds in the game, carrying a greatshield and a spear so that he can poke at you while hiding behind his shield, putting himself in minimal danger in battle.
• Disc-One Nuke: There are several powerful weapons available early on in the game if you know how and where to obtain them.
  • The Drake Sword is the most famous because of how easily (if somewhat time-consuming) it can be obtained by new players. All it takes is buying a bow and about 50 cheap arrows in Undead Burg, then shooting off the Hellkite Dragon's tail from the complete safety of underneath the Sunlight Altar bridge. While it quickly loses its power as you play through the game (it doesn't scale with stats and needs rare Dragon Scales to upgrade) and requires 16 Strength to wield, its base 200 damage can carry the player pretty far for a one-handed sword. It even has a ranged attack! The only other downside is its moveset—all swings, no thrusts, making it annoying to use in cramped quarters.
  • If a player starts with the Master Key and spends their souls to level up appropriately, they can cut through the basement of the tower in Undead Burg and into the Valley of Drakes, where they can obtain Astora's Straight Sword, a weapon that does about 180 damage when using it at the lowest level possible (compared to the 80-ish damage from the usual starting weapons) and the Dragon Crest Shield, which blocks 100% of physical damage, is really good against fire damage and has fairly high stability, especially for a starting shield. You just have to steal it from an undead dragon that can one-shot you, or simply peck the dragon to death with arrows from a safe distance. This is a good alternative to the Drake Sword because the damage from Astora's Straight Sword scales with your stats, and you're prepared to go into the Catacombs if need be since Astora's Straight Sword is a divine weapon. Especially good for starting up a Faith build, since it only needs 14 Faith plus the usual 10 Str and 10 Dex to wield, something that most of the starting classes can get in about six levels or less.
  • Players that don't start with the Master Key can get the Uchigatana relatively easily in the Undead Burg by attacking the Undead Merchant. This weapon inflicts bleed build up for massive damage and has an enormous reach (unlike the daggers that inflict bleed). It also scales with Dexterity and doesn't require the investment of stats that Astora's Straight Sword does. It does have fairly poor durability, however, so it will have to be repaired regularly.
  • Starting as a Pyromancer gives you access to the equivalent of a regenerating pile of firebombs to throw at enemies. It's a while before you can find and rescue the first pyromancy trainer, but just starting out you'll be able to waste small groups of zombies in one hit or seriously damage Black Knights at a distance (provided you keep dodging their counterattacks). Killing Black Knights often gets you powerful weapons and armor, so one Disc-One Nuke can lead to another and another.
  • The Black Knight Sword is a random drop from the Black Knights, three of which appear as nonrespawning enemies in Undead Burg. The stat requirements are comparatively high (20 Strength, 18 Dexterity), but easily attainable. Should you be lucky enough to get it, which was made easier with an increased drop rate in 1.5, you're pretty much set. While the weapon only has mediocre stat scaling, its base damage is superior to the Drake Sword, it's slightly easier to upgrade (doable by the time you reach the second Bell of Awakening), and is powerful enough to carry the player throughout the entirety of the first playthrough and into New Game Plus. It also has a versatile move set with both wide sweeping attacks for attacking multiple enemies and a nice vertical combo when fighting a single opponent or in tight areas. All Black Knight weapons also have a hidden stat that deals bonus damage against anything classified as a "demon", including the very tough Titanite Demons.
  • There's a single chance of getting the Black Knight Greatsword from the non-respawning one in Undead Parish. Actually obtaining it requires some considerable favor from the Random Number God, but should you luck out and invest the stats to use it (32 Strength and 18 Dexterity, or just 22 Strength if you two-hand it), you have a weapon that, once fully upgraded (like the Black Knight Sword, it upgrades with Twinkling Titanite so you can max it out fairly early) is literally capable of defeating the Capra Demon in two swings, and virtually every basic enemy you encounter in one. With the proper build, the Black Knight Greatsword is quite able to carry any player through the entire game.
  • If one starts with the Master Key it is possible to get to the Darkroot Basin from Firelink Shrine, where there is a Black Knight that has a chance of dropping the Black Knight Halberd. Killing the knight can prove a bit difficult with weak gear but it is entirely possible to backstab him off the cliff for an easy kill. The Halberd is not only the strongest Black Knight weapon, it is arguably the strongest PVE (player versus AI/enemy) weapon in the game. Its moveset is not particularly good, but it has pretty great reach and absolutely insane damage. Its requirements are much higher than most of the other Disc-One Nukes (32 Strength and 18 Dexterity), but if you forgo a shield and two-hand the weapon, only 22 Strength is required. If you begin the game as a Warrior, you only need 14 levels to be able to use the weapon, which can take a little bit of time, but it's well worth the investment because the Halberd makes every single boss in a non-New Game Plus file a joke.
  • Another extremely powerful weapon that a player can get from the very start is the Gravelord Sword, one of the rewards for joining Nito's covenant. It takes some smooth moves and some tricky jumps. You'll have to dodge several skeletons and make an almost fatal leap of faith, including dodging the attacks of a giant demon that can one-shot you, in order to grab the items that will let you join the covenant. Get there, and your prize is a sword with extremely high base damage and the ability to inflict Toxic. It can last you the entire game, even into NG+.
  • Bum-rushing the Firelink Shrine graveyard, avoiding the skeletons, and getting to the end of it grants you the Zweihander. If you have the right strength/dexterity combo to wield it, it's generally considered one of the better greatswords out there. It takes down any enemy early on in a single hit, it hits like a truck against bosses (especially with a plunging strike), and it can last you the entire game potentially with the right upgrades.
  • Yet another extremely powerful weapon that a player can get from the very start is the Titanite Catch Pole, a rare drop from the non-respawning Titanite Demons in the Catacombs or Undead Parish. If you do get it, you have a lightweight halberd that has a very low stat requirement, deals both physical and magic damage, and upgrades with Twinkling Titanite. The fact that it deals magic damage allows you to hit enemies through their metal shields. At higher levels (40 Strength and 30 Dexterity), it becomes a tool primarily for dealing riposte damage (882 damage), surpassing the Black Knight Greataxe (862 damage).
  • For dexterity characters, the Great Scythe is located on the same Catacombs shortcut as the Gravelord Sword and is actually found before it, meaning that while you do have to dodge some fireballs and kick a few skeletons into the chasms, you don't have to make the jump or get past the Titanite Demon. It's considered one of the best Dexterity-scaling options, expecially since it can apply bleed.
  • Dumping your first few levels into Faith, along with some clever dodging, can allow you to completely ignore the Hellkite Dragon and join the Warrior of Sunlight covenant immediately after beating the Taurus Demon. The player gets the Lightning Spear miracle from this. Along with being a spell that can be obtained rather early, it decimates bosses up to the mid-game and can One-Hit Kill most standard enemies. Investing some more points into Faith and helping other players in co-op also ranks you up in the covenant, earning you an improved version of the miracle. Unfortunately, both have a low amount of charges, making them Too Awesome to Use if you're not certain about finding nearby bonfire locations.
  • In addition to the above, rushing past the Hellkite Dragon will have him fly off, allowing you access to the goodies lying on the bridge he was guarding. One of them is the Claymore, which is a very balanced greatsword that's easier than the Zweihander to use and has a very modest stat requirement (16 str, 10 dex). It also has C scaling in both strength and dexterity and a comfortable attack speed, allowing for powerful attacks that come out quicker than the Zweihander. It won't hit AS hard, but it is a reliable weapon that with proper building you can trust til endgame.
  • The absolute easiest weapon to get early on is the Estoc, which you can find on a corpse just sitting out in the open in the first part of the New Londo Ruins area. Literally all you have to do to get it after you arrive at Firelink Shrine is run down to the elevator, travel down to the Ruins and go pick it up—the only enemies between you and it are a bunch of hapless Hollows more concerned with bemoaning their fate than attacking you. The Estoc is the largest thrusting sword, meaning you can use it to stab from behind a raised shield. It has very modest stat requirements to use one-handed (10 Strength and 12 Dexterity), and it has the longest reach of all the thrusting swords, allowing you to skewer early game enemies with ease using its two-handed stabbing attacks.
  • The blacksmith in New Londo Ruins sells a Soul Arrow, a Heavy Soul Arrow, and Wooden Catalysts. With some grinding and soul items, any build has access to some sorcery to lay waste to enemies from a safe distance. With sorcerers, this effectively triples their magic damage output right from the start. With the Master Key, a sorcerer has more than enough spells to take out the Zombie Dragon and grab the powerful goodies it was guarding.
  • The biggest of all BFS-es, the absolutely monstrous Dragon Greatsword, is obtained by traveling to the very far end of the very ground floor of the world and cutting off the tail the last of the Everlasting Dragons. He doesn't even turn hostile! With the Master Key, you can do that within ten minutes of getting to Lordran, before fighting a single enemy. Subverted as amassing the strength and stamina to use it is unaccomplishable until very late in the game.
  • The Crystal Straight Sword and Crystal Greatsword. You can obtain these weapons once you meet Domnhall in the Depths, sold for 4000 Souls, and you can buy them in bulk. Their high power for their weight and requirements make them very appealing as boss-slayers for the next few areas, but they also cannot be repaired or upgraded at all. The further you make it through a playthrough, the more they start to get outclassed by other weapons you've invested more resources in, and they may even be outclassed from the start if you've found yourself one of the other examples.
• Distressed Damsel: Rhea needs to be rescued by the player after she gets betrayed in the Tomb of the Giants. Sieglinde and Dusk are trapped in Crystal Golems, and the latter is kidnapped by Manus in the Downloadable Content.
• Distressed Dude: Knight Lautrec is locked up in the Undead Parish, and pays you back by being a summon for the nearby boss fight. Logan gets captured twice throughout the game, needing rescue from Sen's Fortress and the the Duke's Archives.
• Door to Before: Most areas include initially one-way shortcuts that allow for easy navigation to previous safe zones. The earliest is in the Undead Burg, where a ladder can be kicked down to climb from the Undead Parish to an early bonfire and back again.
• Doppelgänger Attack: Pinwheel spawns clones of himself to attack you.
• Double-Edged Buff: Power Within raises your attack power and stamina regeneration in exchange for 1% of your HP per second of duration.
• Double Meaning: The messages at the end of the Undead Asylum pull double duty this way.
  • After defeating the Asylum Demon, the player encounters a message saying "Good job. Go straight ahead." In the tutorial, it's congratulations for defeating the game's first boss and instructions on how to get to Lordran. On the return trip, it's congratulations for figuring out how to return and instructions on how to get to the Stray Demon.
  • The boss chamber itself features a message saying "Get Away!", which is sound advice for the first Asylum Demon encounter. It also happens to mark the edge of the collapsing floor that leads to the Stray Demon, therefore doubling as a warning sign if you aren't prepared to face the boss yet.
• Down in the Dumps: Blighttown is this as well as being a toxic Bubblegloop Swamp, serving as a dumping ground for all sorts of waste and disease.
• Downloadable Content: The Artorias of the Abyss DLC adds a side-story to the game with a visit to the past of Lordran, adding a few new areas, four more bosses, and a player-versus-player arena. It is included with the Prepare to Die Edition release as well as Dark Souls Remastered.
• Down the Drain: The Depths are your classic sewer maze, complete with giant zombie rats.
• Dracolich: The undead dragons and the bounding demons, considering that the latter are the lower half of the former. Seath is also considered one by virtue of his Primordial Crystal, which grants him Complete Immortality unless it's destroyed.
• Dragged Off to Hell: If you remove the Covenant of Artorias ring while in the Abyss, you are horrifyingly dragged down into the darkness. The game even gives you a special message when you die: "You were consumed by the Abyss." In light of what happened to Oolacile in the DLC content, this kind of death could be considered a scary Fate Worse than Death if not for gameplay mechanics.
• The Dragonslayer: Dragonslayer Ornstein. You find his trophy room in Anor Londo, filled with the heads of all the dragons he's killed.
• Drone of Dread: The music that plays on the phonograph in the prison area of the Duke's Archives, which serves to incite the Pisacas into a frenzy and continues to play until you climb up and manually shut it off (or until you die and respawn at the bonfire, which is quicker and easier). It may have also been used to psychologically torture prisoners before everybody went hollow. The humming sound that comes from the phantoms in the Chasm of the Abyss also counts.
• Drought Level of Doom:
  • Everything verges on this at times. Although you can carry a maximum of 20 Estus Flasks and attune a lot of healing spells if you build your character right, the long stretches between bonfires filled with hordes of deadly monsters can make you burn through them terrifyingly fast. Add in weapon degradation, limited spell castings and the price of arrows, and resources can go scarce quickly.
  • Sen's Fortress is a infamous case, being basically one big Death Course designed to test the Chosen Undead before they reach Anor Londo. Not only is it filled with Death Traps, tough enemies, perilous drops and more Death Traps, there is only one bonfire anywhere in it and it's so deviously well-hidden that many experienced players who've beaten the game multiple times never actually found it without help.
• Dual Boss: The Bell Gargoyles are a fight against two gargoyles, with the second swooping in once the first loses half of its health. Smough and Ornstein much later in the game have the same trait, only both fight from the start, have very different movesets, and absorb the power of their fallen comrade to heal and boost themselves. Their boss fight is so infamous among players that they earned an onslaught of goofy fan nicknames◊.
• Duel Boss:
  • Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, is under normal circumstances a fight between only two humanoid characters without any other frills. Although you can summon Solaire of Astora to fight Gwyn alongside you if you meet him throughout the game and prevent him from going insane in his search of his "own sun" by killing the Chaos Bugs outside of Lost Izalith.
  • Artorias in the DLC, even moreso than Gwyn since there are no NPC summons available.
• Dug Too Deep: In the Artorias of the Abyss DLC, the people of Oolacile (possibly having been manipulated by a Primordial Serpent, if Chester is to be believed) were said to have disturbed the grave of Manus, thus resulting in the spread of the Abyss and the subsequent destruction of Oolacile.
• Dump Stat: The Resistance stat is useful for innate poison resistance, but it is barely useful for innate defense, since leveling up naturally boosts your defenses. The amount raised by increasing other stats is smaller, but even Resistance will barely raise defense when it's past a certain level. When you really need poison resistance, you can get plenty from gear and/or a Poisonbite Ring.
• The Dung Ages: Comes with the Dark Fantasy setting, very similarly to Demon's Souls. This aspect is most evident in the Depths and Blighttown, which are respectively a disgusting sewer and a plague-ridden shantytown built above a poisonous swamp. There are also hints of this with the implied poverty in the Lower Undead Burg.
• Dungeon Bypass:
  • There are a variety of ways to skip massive amounts of the game through the Master Key gift, mostly through Havel's shortcut in the Undead Burg and the door in New Londo Ruins that leads to the Valley of Drakes, an area that can be used to cut into many others.
  • Some careful drops can let you skip most of the Catacombs or the Tomb of the Giants. Considering the latter has severely limited visibility, you really have to know where you're going.
  • The end of the Painted World can be reached in two or three minutes with a careful drop into the courtyard, a quick sprint to and beatdown of the zombie dragon, and jump-attacking its discarded hindquarters to make them stand up so you can hop down to the boss's fog door.
  • Reaching and maintaining level 2 or higher in the Chaos Servant covenant allows you to skip Demon Firesage, Centipede Demon and the entire lava portion of Lost Izalith, as well as save Solaire.
• Dungeon Town: The Undead Burg, Undead Parish, and The Depths are all part of one large city. Several other areas are cities as well like New Londo and Anor Londo. Lordran is in fact a dungeon country, as it's completely surrounded by a huge castle wall (visible from the Firelink Shrine).
• Dynamic Entry: Artorias does this before his boss fight, jumping down from offscreen to kill a hollow with a Sword Plant.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: As Miyazaki originally intended Dark Souls to be a single standalone game, many elements present in the original become this over the course of additional installments.
  • There are the lightning-breathing wyverns in Valley of Drakes, when it becomes established through further installments that lightning is the Achilles' Heel of dragons and their descendants.
  • Curse is far more dangerous in this game than its sequels. Instead of just being a One-Hit Kill, it's a One-Hit Kill, halves your HP upon reviving, and can only be cured via a relatively expensive consumable.
  • Warping between bonfires was something you had to earn at the halfway point of the game instead of being available from the outset, and even then you could only warp to certain bonfires. Warping is also a simple list menu, instead of having pictures to aid with identifying which bonfire is which. This is especially noticeable for bonfires named after their larger location. For example, the bonfire named Anor Londo, where the location of the same name actually has four bonfires total, two of which are warpable to under different names.
  • The act of resting at bonfires does not instantly reset the world; you have to wait at the fire while the fog animation plays out, and only then is the world reset. This is usually a technicality, but it can be the difference between life and death when you are being pursued by an enemy you want to evade by reseting the world, in which case you may rest by the fire and be sitting on the ground as the enemy runs through the fog and strikes you.
  • The equipment system is just weird compared to later games. There are no less than 4 different blacksmiths, and weapons can only be infused with a different element by a specific one (if you can find the right Ember to give them). Ascending a basic weapon down an alternate path requires you to level it to +5 and then transform it at the appropriate blacksmith, which resets it to 0, requiring you to upgrade it back to +5 with unique Green Titanite Shards before using specific-coloured Chunks to push it to +9 and a coloured Slab to finish it at +10. If you don't then basic weapons can be upgraded as high as +15 if you can find the Large Ember and Very Large Ember you need to give to Andre, with the normal path effectively being treated as another ascension path in its own right. Meanwhile, all non-basic weapons cap out at +5 and cannot be ascended at all. You can't upgrade sorcery catalysts or miracle talismans at all, although Pyromancy Flames can be upgraded at a pyromancy trainer for large amounts of souls with no material requirement. Making a boss soul weapon requires you to find a basic weapon of the same class as the boss weapon, upgrade it to +10 (unless it's a catalyst), and then combine it with the soul at one of the blacksmiths to create the boss weapon. Basic armour sets can be upgraded to +10 and some special armour sets can only be upgraded to +5 with Twinkling Titanite, but a few (including most of the superheavy sets) can't be upgraded at all. Starting from Dark Souls II the systems around upgrading equipment would be radically streamlined, and boss souls would simply be traded to a specific NPC for the appropriate weapon or spell.
  • And strangely enough (since this is the second overall Soulsborne title), there's no dedicated stat waifu like the Maiden in Black to trade your Souls in for levels at the hub; instead, you can level up at any Bonfire in the world, which is certainly much more expedient, and the main Fire Keeper beneath Firelink Shrine serves only to reinforce your Estus Flask. Granted, this is a case of things changing partway through development: Crossbreed Priscilla was supposed to fulfill this role until she was relegated to the Painted World of Ariamis.
• The Eeyore: The Crestfallen Warrior is about as cheery as his counterpart in Demon's Souls, even sharing the same joyless laugh. Eventually, he leaves the Shrine to "do something about" Frampt and promptly Hollows on the outskirts of New Londo. The Crestfallen Merchant is no cheerier.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • The Bed of Chaos: a tree-like monstrosity born from the Witch of Izalith's failed attempt at recreating the First Flame with her Lord Soul's power over chaos. Not only did it devour her and some of her daughters, but it also became the source of all demons roaming throughout Lordran.
  • Manus, Father of the Abyss: an unknown being (possibly the Furtive Pygmy) whose Humanity had gone out of control and turned him into a crazed, ape-like creature with multiple red eyes, disproportional arms, and control over the darkness of the Abyss. All he now cares about is to spread this darkness over Lordran, starting with Oolacile.
• Eldritch Location: The Abyss, a horizonless void of pure darkness (although anything within it is still lit up). One NPC tells you that it is not for mortals. He's right, as walking into it will kill you unless you have the ring called Covenant of Artorias, which allows you to survive it. It is also the location of the Four Kings.
• Elemental Motifs: The four bearers of the Lord Souls and the locations they're found in can be seen as themed after the four classical elements: Seath is Air (his domains are located in the highest point of Lordran, with plenty of empty tall space and his sanctum is a cave of crystal with bottomless chasms and invisible pathways), the Bed of Chaos is Fire (the source of Pyromancy dwelling in the hell-like, lava-filled ruins of Lost Izalith), Nito is Earth (dwelling in the dark, cavernous depths of the deepest place in Lordran) while the Four Kings can be associated with Water (the Ruins of New Londo are flooded by the time you find them, and they get power from the Abyss).
• Elite Mook: Several, from the boulder-throwing Infested Barbarians to the Black Knights.
• Empty Room Psych: Most rooms have something in them, but there are some exceptions which is guaranteed to cause the player to frantically search every wall for hidden passages. Of particular note is a long hallway guarded by a Balder Knight in Sen's Fortress that leads to a room-sized area containing absolutely nothing.
• Endless Corridor: Gwyndolin fights you in one. The corridor is not actually endless, but it is extremely long. It's possible to chase him all the way to the end, where he will have nowhere to run. After killing him, said corridor turns out to be yet another illusion created by him, just like the fake daylight in Anor Londo.
• End of an Age: The entire point of the game. The Age of Fire, the time when the gods ruled the world, is coming to an end. The lords' powers are spent, their kingdom of Lordran is an empty ruin populated entirely by undead, and the First Flame that made it all possible is rapidly fading away. At the end, it rests on the Player Character's shoulders to either extend the Age of Fire for just a little longer... or to snuff it out entirely and usher in the Age of Dark.
• The End of the World as We Know It: The fading of the First Flame is expected to result in this, to the point that Gwyn was willing to burn in agony forever to keep the Fire going. Kaathe claims it would result in a new golden age for humanity instead, but he has a bad track record of encouraging people to embrace the Dark, only for it to destroy them. A possible, if not likely, result of his Age of Dark would be the Abyss swallowing everything.
• Establishing Series Moment: The entire first level serves as a fairly effective one, but most prominently is the second encounter with the Asylum Demon. First coming up against it and finding yourself horribly outmatched, followed by getting properly geared up and thrown back in for round two effectively establishes how much of the game will continue.
• Evil Overlord: An ambiguous example — you can choose to end the Age of Fire and become the Dark Lord, but what this entails exactly isn't explained. Kaathe claims you would become the lord of an age of humanity, but two separate groups (New Londo and Oolacile) that previously took his advice and starting using Dark powers were promptly twisted into inhuman monsters.
• Evil Sorcerer: Seath the Scaleless is a dragon credited with inventing sorcery. He's an insane wreck in the present after vainly trying to solve the mystery of the scales of immortality that every dragon but him possessed.
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: Sen's Fortress, a tower opened by the Bells of Awakening. The area is incredibly malicious, filled with countless Booby Traps. The Duke's Archives also counts, and it's even more evil since it's the lair of Seath the Scaleless.
• Exact Words:
  • Kingseeker Frampt says that the chosen undead will succeed Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight. He does not tell the undead that Gwyn is currently burning alive instead of ruling his kingdom and you will face the same fate by succeeding him.
  • Gwynevere gets in on it too, when you leave her chambers after receiving the Lordvessel.
    Gwynevere: "Now thou shalt go forth, Chosen Undead. May thou be one with the sunlight for evermore."
  • Following the theory that Manus, the Eldritch Abomination hellbent on spreading the abyss, is what became of the Furtive Pygmy after his Lord Soul went out of control, Darkstalker Kaathe's words take on a whole new meaning when he tells you of your ancestor's wishes.
    Kaathe: "Become the fourth lord, so that you may usher in an age of dark."
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The Demon Ruins. Demons? Ruins? Both present in abundance.
• Expy: The Taurus Demon looks a lot like Zodd and Artorias looks (and fights) an awful lot like Guts from Berserk (fitting considering that Berserk was one of the inspirations for the series). A lot of enemies, or at least their movesets, return from Demon's Souls.
• Fallen Hero: Artorias was tainted by the Abyss after getting his ass kicked by Manus.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Besides the "Prepare to Die" tag line (which is apt, as unless you are extremely lucky or skilled, you're going to die several times before you get to the mid-point of the second area into the game), there are the endings to the game. Your character either postpones the start of the End of the World as We Know It while driving the world into further chaos by killing dozens of powerful beings on the journey — or starts the apocalypse, choosing to be the ruler of a dying world. Also, if the interpretation hinted at by several collaborated statements of Word of God is true, then by giving up on the game before completing it, your character begins going insane and fully turning into a Hollow. In the end, it comes down to either delaying the end, with almost a complete consensus from all characters that there is no way to completely stop it, or getting it over with.
• Fake Difficulty: Usually averted; one of the game's main selling points is that it's hard but fair. However, the one point people will generally agree that it rears its ugly head is the boss battle against the Bed of Chaos, generally considered to be utter bullshit for being a platforming-based Puzzle Boss in an otherwise completely combat-based game with somewhat flaky jumping controls, that relies on random One-Hit Kills via Bottomless Pits to provide challenge. It's almost universally considered the single worst boss in the entire franchise (Demon's Souls and Bloodborne included).
• Fake Ultimate Mook:
  • Ceaseless Discharge. It is the largest boss in the game, deals very heavy fire and impact damage, and looks very intimidating, but it telegraphs its slow attacks heavily and can even be baited into falling off a cliff.
  • When you first fight the Capra Demon, it is in a small area aided by two extremely fast enemies, so for beginners it is very difficult. As a Degraded Boss in the Demon Ruins, fighting them alone is much less of a hassle, but it is rare to happen as they are placed tightly together so you will usually attract two or three at the same time (though there are ways to bait them out).
• Fanservice: Gwynevere is a giant god in Anor Londo with a so called "amazing chest". There's also Chaos Witch Quelaag and her sickly sister, The Fair Lady, who are beautiful topless women.
• Fan Disservice: Due to the Witch of Izalith's Flame of Chaos, Quelagg and her sister have the lower bodies of giant demon-spiders, with it being especially painful for the latter.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • In the backstory, there is such a fear and hatred of Undead that they are hunted down and imprisoned. In some cases, this is presumably to stop them from harming people should they turn Hollow — however, Petrus (when initially spoken to) doesn't seem too keen on the player for being Undead and requests that the player keep their distance, and some of the game's cut content outright states that the Way of White admonishes the Undead. This doesn't come up much in the rest of the game, as the majority of the cast is Undead.
  • Humans in general get a lot of grief from the native inhabitants of Lordran. This is particularly pronounced in the Artorias of the Abyss content. Given what Humanity is connected to the Abyss, this may be justified.
• Fantasy Character Classes: At character creation, you can select a class to determine your starting stats and gear. This does not limit your later development in any way and you can potentially take up any role regardless of your starting class choice, but keep in mind that some classes are optimal towards a certain style of play:
  • Warrior: The Warrior is a Lightning Bruiser — starts with excellent armour and a metal shield, and with a good longsword and high enough stats to use many of the other better weapons immediately, and they have decent mobility to boot. Magic stats are relatively low to start, but with some patient investment basic spells and miracles can become an option later. A superb choice for a new player or otherwise an optimal choice for a player who wants to focus on physical combat.
  • Knight: This is the Mighty Glacier class, the most durable of all starting classes with the most robust armour and highest starting Poise and Vitality, and will soon be casting miracles due to their rather high Faith. However the heavy plate armour also makes the Knight slow and limits how they can evade attacks. The Knight is a very forgiving class for mistakes and thus perhaps the best choice for a new player to learn the game.
  • Wanderer: The Wanderer's scimitar has excellent reach and speed and their light armour allows quick rolling and evasion, and they can pick up sorceries quite quickly as well to become a Magic Knight. However they cannot take as much punishment as the other "physical" classes. A relatively forgiving class to start with, but still, watch yourself.
  • Thief: A relatively challenging start as the Thief is a bona-fide Fragile Speedster, the Wanderer taken up to eleven — generally poor physical stats (except Dexterity which is very high) and limited to lighter weapons and armour due to low Strength, forcing them to rely on parrying and backstabs with their dagger to deal effective damage. The Thief starts with the Master Key gift as standard, so take another gift; two Master Keys is a waste.
  • Bandit: The Bandit hits really hard and is proficient with many heavier weapons like axes and swords, but their starting axe is already powerful enough to carry you through half the game. That said the armour and shield are nothing to write home about. The high Strength of the Bandit is also converse to a low Dexterity, and magic potential is also very poor. A decent choice for an intermediate player and an optimal physical combatant.
  • Hunter: The Hunter has fairly average stats all-round and high Dexterity, proficient at melee or range with bows and lighter weapons. Use the bow to "kite" and soften up enemies before you close, ducking in and out and striking true with the shortsword. A versatile class that relies on tactical thinking and weakness exploitation to make up for a lack of raw power, this one is for intermediate players.
  • Sorcerer: Magic is the Sorcerer's bread and butter; they start with the Soul Arrow sorcery and can pick up sorceries very quickly. They have fantastic damage potential and can command a lot of useful magical effects eventually, but their limited physical stats and lack of armour will make them poor fighters and thus very easy to die in direct combat, so perhaps this is a choice best left to experienced players.
  • Pyromancer: The Pyromancer starts with a decent axe and the Fireball pyromancy, giving them a reliable way to deal with tough bosses and groups early on. Though poorly armoured, they are quite resistant to fire and poison. As pyromancy scales with upgrades to your Pyromancy Flame and not your stats, you can allocate points into physical areas and be a decent fighter as well. Overall a beginner-friendly start offering a lot of offensive power.
  • Cleric: Clerics can use miracles, a slew of defensive and support magic which makes a difference in keeping a run between bonfires going, and they can hit fairly hard with their maces and hammers as well, but they start with only robes and a wooden shield. A good choice for an intermediate player.
  • Deprived: A club and an old, battered plank shield. And that's it. The Deprived starts out naked and lacking magic of any sort, and all gear will have to be obtained or purchased. Though the balanced stats look inviting, the lack of any initial specialisation might hamper later-game builds. It also starts at the highest level of all the classes, which means that level ups will be more expensive. Only the professional or truly crazed need apply.
• Fat and Skinny: Smough and Ornstein, who fight you as a pair. The former wears armor that makes him look very bulky, while the latter has smaller but still strong lion-themed gear.
• Fat Bastard: Smough, while actually not all that fat according to the artbook (he wears armour that gives him an overweight appearance), doesn't show much respect for his fallen comrade should you choose to defeat Ornstein first. Of course, he wasn't that much better in the past given his cannibalistic tendencies. Even Frampt knows that Smough is a bastard, going so far as to offer one soul if you try to feed him Smough's Soul. if you listen carefully, Smough will let out a chuckle after you kill Ornstein first, with Smough smashing his "friend" into smithereens.
• Fate Worse than Death:
  • Getting hit with a "curse" attack by a basilisk or other petrifying enemy. It turns your body to stone, killing you instantly, and whereever you revive, you're stuck at half health until you get cured. Also, becoming hollow (slowly turning you into a mindless husk) and linking the fire (forcing you to burn for aeons to preserve the Age of Fire).
  • Firekeepers. They're forced to spend the rest of their life guarding a single, lonely bonfire and ensuring that it remains lit despite the fact that fire as a whole is slowly dying, and are explicitly forbidden from ever leaving their bonfire, and it's heavily implied that even conversing with others is frowned upon. If they ever protest their job, they get their tongue cut out so they can't complain anymore. If they so much as step one foot outside their bonfire's area, they get their legs chopped off. Oh, and many, many people want to kill them, as their souls are the only things capable of powering up the precious Estus Flasks. Their souls are also gnawed by infinite amounts of humanity that have been donated to their bonfires. The Firekeeper of Anor Londo is noted to wear her brass armour to disguise the swarms of humanity underneath.
• Field of Blades:
  • The gravesite of Knight Artorias is a large, grassy field, the center of which is marked by his greatsword and a large number of gravestones and regular-sized swords sticking up from the ground. It's not explained who else is buried there, though it is probably the resting places of the Forest Hunter covenant members whose spirits guard the site.
  • The Gravelord Sword Dance and Gravelord Greatsword Dance miracles obtained from Gravelord Nito should you join the Gravelord Servant covenant can count as a combination of this and Storm of Blades, with the Gravelord Swords rising up from the ground to impale enemies.
• Final Boss: The burning Hollow of Lord Gwyn, encountered in the center of the Kiln of the First Flame, is the final enemy confronted by the player during a standard playthrough. After defeating him, the ability to either link the First Flame, or initiate an Age of Dark by leaving the arena after Gwyn is slain, both become available. The credits then roll and the game starts over with New Game Plus.
• Final Boss Preview: In Artorias of the Abyss, that's Manus' hand that drags you back in time. You also get a good look at Gwyn himself in the main game's intro.
• Final Dungeon Preview: About midway through the game, you'll be taken to where you can place the Lordvessel after acquiring it in Anor Londo. Just behind where you put it is a large stone door that will only open once you have all the required souls from the main bosses, leading to the final area, the Kiln of the First Flame.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: The Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith are based around this. The areas are lava-filled underground caverns swarming with demons and are home to the Bed of Chaos, the twisted fount of life that birthed demons and chaos into the world.
• Fire Means Chaos: One of the gods of Anor Londo and Grandmother of Pyromancy the Witch of Izalith attempted to recreate the First Flame when it began to wane (and potentially bringing about an Age of Dark along with it) with the help of her Daughters of Chaos and her Lord Soul. Unfortunately for her, she wound up creating the Chaos Flame, a corrupting fire that turned everyone in Izalith into Chaos Demons, the Witch becoming the Bed of Chaos and Izalith itself becoming a magma-filled ruin. After the Bed of Chaos is slain by the Chosen Undead, the Chaos Demons were left to fend for themselves as the First Flame was continuously rekindled by the Lords of Cinders. By Dark Souls III, they slowly began to die out, turning to stone without the twisted bed of life that created them.
• Fission Mailed: Your first encounter with Seath the Scaleless. He will be completely invincible, instantly healing all damage done to him, and will inevitably kill you, leaving you to wake up in one of the Archive's jail cells. A very good time to equip a Ring of Sacrifice (or, to be on the even safer side, a Rare Ring of Sacrifice as he can curse you while killing you) if you have one available.
• Flunky Boss: The Capra Demon and its two dogs. Also, Gravelord Nito with his resurrecting skeletons.
• Forest Ranger: The Forest Hunters, particularly Pharis, who reside in the Darkroot Forest and protect it from any trespassers.
• Forever War: It isn't outright warfare for the most part, but there has been a long conflict over whether the Age of Fire should end or continue, a conflict that has continued for at least 1,000 years.
• Four Is Death: The Four Kings of New Londo, one of the last bosses in the game. The Four Lords who received Lord Souls as well which included the Four Kings.
• Friendly Fireproof: Generally played straight in most situations; most enemies will have their attacks go right through other enemies that they may hit, particularly noticeable in fights like Ornstein and Smough or the Bell Gargoyles. Notably averted, however, during the fight against Gravelord Nito, whose sweeping sword attacks and toxic area blasts will usually wipe out the horde of skeletons that fight alongside him- and if you don't have a Holy weapon then exploiting this is essential to beating him, because they constantly revive faster than you can kill them yourself and would overwhelm you without Nito constantly striking them down.
• From Bad to Worse: The further you get in the game, the worse everything gets, either in difficulty, the implicit horror of the backstory behind the place you're going to, or both. You start off abandoned to rot forever in an asylum and escape to a country where everyone normal died long ago, and from there go through dozens of more terrible areas to reach your ultimate reward of either becoming fuel for the First Flame or becoming the Dark Lord who covers the world in eternal darkness.
• From Nobody to Nightmare:
  • The Furtive Pygmy went from the smallest and weakest of the Lords to the mighty Eldritch Abomination Manus.
  • The Chosen Undead, going from a nameless dead warrior in eternal prison just like so many others to the scourge of Lordran and arguably the world, taking down gods and ancient, powerful beings along the way, even possibly becoming the new Dark Lord and ushering in an age of darkness by extinguishing the flames of life.
• Fungus Humongous: The mushroom platforms growing in the Great Hollow. Enemy-wise, the Giant Mushrooms wandering around Darkroot Garden. The infants are the size of a child while the adults are a good eight feet tall and can kill you in a single punch.
• Gainax Ending: Given how out of the way and obtuse the lore in this game is, the endings can easily fall into this. The player has to make a decision that is indicated to have massive, wide-reaching effects on the world as a whole, but what exactly those effects are are never really explained.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Moan%. Effectively, if you kill Priscilla fast enough, the game will constantly loop her death dialogue, making it impossible to leave the Painted World without save editing. This hasn't been patched out in the Remaster.
• Game Mod: Modding has been done for the PC versions of the game, mostly texture edits and item models, though full gameplay mods also exist. On the uglier side of things, it's not uncommon to find modded files of characters with near-infinite health and stamina, which can even be transferred to consoles (this is part of why Dark Souls doesn't have built-in mod support, in order to keep multiplayer as hacker-free as feasible).
• Gameplay and Story Integration: The Flavor Text for the Great Magic Barrier miracle says it was created by Havel to counter Seath the Scaleless and his magic, which Havel despised. Sure enough, using the miracle when you fight Seath yourself can prove to be extremely effective, as it renders Seath's breath attacks almost a non-threat.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • You'll never lose your mind like the early-game zombie enemies, even if you spend the whole game Hollow. Maybe that's what makes this undead the chosen one; their ability to stay sane through all the trials. However, should you fight her in Dark Souls III, Yuria of Londor states that "A hollow need not be mad", implying that it's possible for hollows to retain complete sanity.
  • Despite being cursed with the Darksign like you, friendly NPCs won't respawn if you kill them.
• Gangsta Style: A variant occurs with one of the bows, of all things. The Black Bow of Pharis is held horizontally, while every other bow is held vertically. It has the best range of any bow in the game.
• Garden of Evil:
  • The Darkroot Garden is one of the more lush areas, but it's full of living plants trying to kill you.
  • Lost Izilath is some kind of twisted inversion of the usual traits of this trope. It's a deep underground city full of lava and demons, but everywhere you go, there's bare tree roots covering everything. The source of it all is the Bed of Chaos, or rather what's left of the Witch of Izalith. So it follows the "plantlife everywhere" part of the trope while visually reminding you of death and fire instead of smothering greens and poison like most gardens of evil.
• Gem Tissue: The semi-crystallized undead populating the Duke's Archives, who have magical crystals sticking out of their bodies that give them various sorcerous abilities.
• Gentle Giant: The game has two NPC giants.
  • The giant blacksmith of Anor Londo is better at smithing than talking, but he's happy about the company and perhaps the nicest NPC in the game.
  • Hawkeye Gough, one of Gwyn's four knights (now retired) spends his days carving messages into wooden discs and is always polite and courteous, despite having been blinded by people who thought he was a monster. He also happens to still be a damn good shot with his bow that is as big as he is.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: Gwyndolin, who teleports away down a seemingly endless hallway as soon as you catch up to him.
• Ghibli Hills: Oolacile Sanctuary, the thick but bright forest that serves as your only real safe haven in Artorias of the Abyss. The Royal Wood was presumably this before being corrupted by the Abyss.
• The Ghost: The Furtive Pygmy and Gwyn's Four Great Knights, excluding Ornstein in the base game. The additional content adds all of the absent Great Knights, and heavily implies that Manus, Father of the Abyss is the Furtive Pygmy.
• Girlish Pigtails: One of the female hairstyles. According to Miyazaki, a female graphic artist asked that they be included when she had to leave development due to illness.
• Girl with Psycho Weapon: Maneater Mildred and her huge meat cleaver.
• Glasgow Grin: The Great Felines of Darkroot Forest have unnaturally wide, toothy mouths. Alvina of the Darkroot Wood also has one, and in her case it falls into Cheshire Cat Grin thanks to her taunting attitude.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Many hollows have glowing, red eyes. The Black Dragon, Kalameet has one glowing eye. Manus and the bloatheads of Oolacile have many.
• God-Emperor: Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight, who founded Lordran by defeating the Everlasting Dragons and ruled over it from Anor Londo for many years.
• Godiva Hair: Chaos Witch Quelaag and her sister, the Fair Lady, are topless but have their breasts covered by long hair. They still have Barbie Doll Anatomy underneath it.
• Godzilla Threshold: The Darkwraiths were considered to be such an enormous threat to Gwyn that in order to keep them from spreading out of New Londo, he had a flood unleashed upon the entire city, killing everyone in it, and sealing them away. It didn't work.
• Golem: The Iron Golem, animated by the bone of an everlasting dragon, and the Crystal Golem enemies created by Seath.
• The Goomba: The Hollow Warriors seen in the first section of Undead Burg. Their move set is almost identical to that of the Dreglings in Demon's Souls, and are the easiest enemies in the game to fight. That said, they still pose a threat, especially in groups.
• Gotta Kill Them All: In the second half of the game, the goal becomes to defeat the bearers of the Lord Souls, of which there are four in total, which must be placed in the Lordvessel at the Firelink Altar.
• Götterdämmerung: This is the Twilight of the Lords, the setting's equivalent to gods. They've apparently been in decline for quite some time. Gravelord Nito's power has been drained by a wicked necromancer. Anor Londo (the first city of the gods) is nearly vacant, save for one god and his false image. Seath the Scaleless is completely insane. New Londo, the second city of the gods, is a sunken, ghost-filled ruin with four insane demigod kings sealed inside. The Witch of Izalith has lost her godly powers in a failed attempt to stop the end of the age of Fire, which has instead resulted in the birth of armies of demons. Lord Gwyn sacrificed his life to try and prolong the age of fire, and has become an insane godlike shell of himself. Your job is to finish the Twilight of the Lords so that either the age of the gods can continue, or an age of man can begin.
• Gradual Regeneration:
  • While a constant health regeneration ring is no longer available, one can still accomplish temporary regeneration through a Miracle and Paladin Leeroy's Shield, Sanctus.
  • The Ring of Evil Eye will restore health with each enemy you kill, although the amount is so pitiful that it's really only useful for keeping your health topped off in areas full of numerous weak enemies without having to waste Estus; at all other times, it's better to use one of your two ring slots for something more powerful.
• Gratuitous Latin: Vereor Nox, said by Rhea as a goodbye. It means "Fearfully Respect the Night/Dark".
• Great Big Library of Everything: The Duke's Archives, the place where Seath studied and created sorceries, and eventually performed dangerous experiments. Naturally, Big Hat Logan loves hanging out here and reading the unbelievably vast collection of tomes.
• Great Bow:
  • The Dragonslayer Greatbow, a bow so large that it towers the wielder, to the point it requires an Anchored Attack Stance to be used. As the name suggests, its immense size enables it to fire lance-sized projectiles made for hunting dragons, which understandably makes it extremely powerful against most things smaller than dragons. It's basically guaranteed to stagger/knockdown anything near human proportions (as long as it can be), yourself included. The Silver Knights are fond of using it, with a particularly infamous chokepoint where two of them will be more than happy to knock you down from the roof of Anor Londo as you're scaling the structure for an alternate entrance.
  • Hawkeye Gough, the predecessor of the Silver Knights, has his own homemade bow that is heavier, bigger, and he uses it to shoot down Black Dragon Kalameet despite being blind himself.
• Grey-and-Grey Morality:
  • While it may seem that the sides are cut-and-dry, discovering Darkstalker Kaathe in the Abyss shows that Gwyn is not quite as pure as he seems and that Frampt hasn't exactly been truthful with the player, making their actions just as questionable as Kaathe's desire to bring about the Age of Dark. The true "moral" decision seems to be between embracing or fighting the darkness rather than behaving a certain way. Things get even murkier in the Dark Lord ending: both Kaathe and Frampt are heard congratulating you and pledging their loyalty, raising the question of whether anything either of them told you had any truth to it.
  • Later installments in the franchise help to clarify the matter some, as much as anything in the series is properly explained. Artorias of the Abyss offers a second example of Kaathe encouraging people to utilize the Dark power of humanity with it resulting in them being corrupted into monsters, meaning that using Dark abilities is at best likely to backfire and at worst guaranteed to do so. Dark Souls 3 indicates that the fading of the First Flame affects all fire, up to and including the sun itself. However, the Firekeeper suggests that letting the Fire die would result not in the world ending, but beginning anew.
• Griefer:
  • The bridge-flipping levers in the Catacombs can be used for griefing. Patches even takes advantage of them to screw the player over.
  • Instead of invading, the Gravelord Servant Covenant uses Eyes of Death to curse other worlds, making enemies stronger and in NG+ turning the game into a nightmare. The only way to break the curse is to find the curse sign (which moves with the Gravelord Servant) and invade their world, meaning you can't use healing items, allowing them to dictate where the fight happens. The only way these advantages are offset is that three people can invade the Gravelord Servant by touching the sign.
• Grievous Harm with a Body:
  • The inhabitants of Blighttown aren't choosy with their weapons; some of them will happily smack you with a decaying corpse.
  • While most of the "Tail" weapons look like actual weapons, the Guardian Tail Whip is the Sanctuary Guardian's ripped-off scorpion tail.
• Grim Reaper: Nito is effectively this, as the First of the Dead and a powerful necromancer. If you use the Gold-Hemmed Black Set and/or the Dark set and a scythe, you can rock the reaper look.
• Grimy Water: The swamp underneath Blighttown. It's mud brown, very shallow and poisonous.
• Grumpy Old Man: Despite the Flavor Text of his equipment seeming to describe him like this, Big Hat Logan is one of the more genuinely nice characters in the game until you kill Seath. Played straight with Vamos, though.
  Vamos: Hmph? Why, you have... an ember don't you? Aah, forget about it. I don't deal with that kind. What has gone wrong with embers these days?
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: The serpent men who take you prisoner in the Duke's Archives don't think to strip you of your weapons before tossing you in your cell. They also see nothing dangerous in falling asleep right outside of your cell, well within range of your weapons, while carrying the very key that unlocks your cell. Presumably Seath doesn't hire these guys for brain power.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • While the Covenant system is less vague than the Tendency system of Demon's Souls, the game leaves a great deal unexplained. Not all covenants give any immediately obvious benefits, and some of them are very well hidden and can even be permanently missed until New Game Plus through intended progression. The biggest example is the Darkwraith covenant. To reach it, you have to find and kill the Four Kings in the New Londo Ruins before placing the Lordvessel on the Firelink Altar for Frampt. Otherwise Darkstalker Kaathe will never appear in the Abyss, locking you out of both some interesting dialogue about the setting and the Darkwraith covenant.
  • It is possible to save Solaire from being possessed, but it requires a very specific action to be taken (killing a non-respawning sunlight maggot in the maggot hallway) that isn't even remotely hinted to be important. It's also not possible to stop his possession from happening without first joining a specific Covenant (one hidden behind an illusory wall) and raising your rank in said Covenant, which opens a shortcut to access Lost Izalith a different way than you normally would.
  • In a out-of-the-way part of Blighttown is a small item. The wall behind that item is fake, revealing a treasure chest with a bigger item. The wall behind that treasure is also fake and leads to two areas, a Covenant, and the end of one of the major side quests in the game. The only hint that these areas even exist is that you can see an unusual-looking cave area while in an area that isn't anywhere near the entrance to the place.
  • Speaking of said sidequest, Siegmeyer of Catarina is encountered throughout the game in various locations, and at the end of his quest is a very valuable reward. Thing is, it's very easy to lock yourself out of this reward by mistake, because the second-to-last leg of it has different outcomes depending on what you do to a group of non-respawning enemies in Lost Izalith. If you ignorantly kill these enemies before Siegmeyer arrives, which is very possible because Siegmeyer's appearances do not follow the logical progression of the main story (and he's hidden out of the way in several of them, to boot), he'll treat it as you fighting the battle yourself and give you the consolation prize, a mediocre ring.
  • The location of the one and only bonfire in Sen's Fortress. To find it, you have to walk off the roof of the fortress at a spot where the wall around it is broken. It's not too hard to find if you're used to combing every area, the presence of a giant up above throwing down fireballs can encourage players to run past it in panic. While common knowledge now thanks to player messages, there are still players who've beaten the whole game and are surprised to discover that the area has a bonfire.
  • Your first encounter with Seath the Scaleless in the Duke's Archives is a Hopeless Boss Fight, but the game doesn't explicity reveal why (the reason is that his Primordial Crystal is still intact) outside of dumping you into a new area after losing to him. You have to progress down to the Crystal Cave to fight him, as he moves there once you enter it; prior to that, going back to fight him is fruitless
  • There are plenty of game mechanics and items that don't properly get explained, such as being able to jump while running, or certain weapons providing resistances that their descriptions/stat sheets fail to mention.
• Half-Human Hybrids:
  • Crossbreed Priscilla, who is implied to be locked away because of her half-dragon lineage and Lifehunter abilities. The Chaos Witch Quelaag and her sister the Fair Lady are both half-hideous-lava-spider, half-gorgeous-naked-women, although they weren't born that way.
  • The player can become a half-dragon hybrid should they rank up the Path of the Dragon covenant.
• Hailfire Peaks: The Ash Lake is a mix of Palmtree Panic and The Lost Woods, being a gray beach area alongside massive trees. The Painted World of Ariamis is a mix of Slippy-Slidey Ice World and Big Fancy Castle, hosting a small palace atop a snowy mountain. New Londo Ruins is a mix of Big Fancy Castle and Big Boo's Haunt, as the former second castle-city of Lordran now flooded and haunted by ghosts.
• Halfway Plot Switch: The game starts out implying that you're trying to find a cure for the Darksign before switching into the conflict over whether the Age of Fire should be prolonged or ended.
• Handicapped Badass: Artorias seems about half dead when he jumps you, and one of his arms doesn't work at all (and because of this, he doesn't have a shield for this fight). He's still one of the hardest bosses in the game. Hawkeye Gough is blind, but can still shoot dragons out of the air with ease.
• Haunted Castle: New Londo Ruins is a castle city just like Anor Londo, but is filled with the ghosts of its citizens who died when it was flooded.
• Hard Levels, Easy Bosses:
  • The Catacombs is very dangerous for low-level players, due to being filled with skeletons, which take a lot of hits from non-elemental weapons, and will be revived by necromancers unless you kill them or kill the skeletons with divine weapons. The boss of the area is Pinwheel, a Squishy Wizard who goes down quickly if you attack him aggressively, especially if you wait until late in the game to explore the area.
  • The Depths can be a dark, claustrophobic nightmare the first time you go through it. The Gaping Dragon, however, can be the easiest boss you've fought up to this point if you thoroughly explore the area before facing it.
• Harder Than Hard: Each New Game Plus cycle up to the seventh will increase the health and damage of all enemies and bosses; non-boss health usually only doubles, but damage is multiplied by the number of your current cycle, meaning enemies can be hitting for up to seven times their normal damage. Griefers can have some fun with this.
• Heaven Above: The city of the gods, Anor Lando, is built on massive towers built upon massive towers that ascend well above the clouds. This gives the player the clearest view of the bright day sky they're ever going to get in this dreary game, making this divine realm seem even more heavenly.
• Hell Is That Noise: In Oolacile Township, the regular enemies, Bloatheads, mutter to each other and sometimes laugh maniacally when they see you. When you're out in the open in Oolacile, you'll also hear an occasional female scream from somewhere off in the distance.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Siegmeyer attempts to do this for you in Lost Izalith. That said, you can stick with him and prevent him from dying, leaving him grateful though a little embarrassed. The Link the Fire ending can be interpreted as this, regardless of whether it is done willingly or because of deception.
• Hero of Another Story: Most of the NPCs are this to a degree, though Solaire and Siegmeyer are the most notable. They're largely going on their own personal adventures in Lordran at the same time as the Player Character, who bumps into them from time to time.
• He Was Right There All Along: The Demon Centipede can be seen clinging to the side of the building with the bonfire and Capra Demons directly preceding the Demon Firesage, but can only be fought once you reach the lava lake below said building.
• Highly-Visible Ninja: The painting guards in Anor Londo act like ninjas, given that they use twin curved swords and throw knives, but they wear a pretty visible white uniform.
• Hint System:
  • The Orange Guidance Soapstone allows you to leave messages for other players. Players can leave purposefully misleading or outright false messages, like writing "Jump down here!" in front of a Bottomless Pit. A common joke in Sen's Fortress is to place a message or summon sign on a pressure plate
    • There are several messages put down by the game's designers (visible by using Seek Guidance) telling you exactly where to go and giving hints about characters and treasure. One message in particular that is available to all without Seek Guidance tells players of the invisible bridge in one level that is not hinted at otherwise.
  • Keys, once you find them, often have a description that gives you a hint on where they are meant to be used and what may lie beyond. One for the Undead Burg, for example, warns you of the dogs of the Capra Demon.
  • A common gimmick is to place the message "Amazing Chest" before any encounters with a female NPC (Or Smough, for the Squick factor) "Need Head" Is a common hint as well. Video Game Perversity Potential at its finest.
• Hitbox Dissonance:
  • Thoroughly abused in Anor Londo where most players that remember enemy placement behind walls use long weapons to damage them from behind walls. Naturally, the enemies can do the same. Also the case with Havel the Rock if you try to kill him from behind the Darkroot Basin door. Beware one-hit kills.
  • It is also entirely possible for this to happen on stairs. Don't assume that standing above an enemy's slash or stab means it won't get you.
• Hitler Cam: Used repeatedly, along with its cousin Dutch Angle, to frame the Chosen Undead during the Dark Lord ending.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: You can easily make Seath accidentally destroy the Primordial Crystal, the item that grants him his immortality. If the player is primarily a sorcerer or sorceress, it also falls under this as Seath is the creator of magic in this universe.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The first battle against Seath the Scaleless; his health bar never goes down, despite whatever damage you deal to him. The same thing happens in his second boss fight, but this time you have access to his Soul Jar, and after breaking it, you can damage him.
• Hope Spot:
  • The "Bartholomew" trailer has one close to the end. During the final part of the song snippet used in the trailer, the tagline pops up word by word. It then shows the PC getting roasted by a dragon while five other words quickly flash on the screen. Fight. Struggle. Endure. Suffer. LIVE.
  • Happens in the story as well. Halfway through the game, you have a small community in Firelink, but each and every one of your companion characters can (and probably will) meet an unsavory end in the second part of the game, whether going hollow or being murdered by your own hands. Every one of the trainers go hollow after you buy all their spells (save Laurentius, who hollows if you indulge in his curiosity about advanced pyromancy). Out of your Firelink gang, you can save only one good character, Anastacia the firekeeper, plus a few others who are never at risk like Domhnall, Ingward, and Patches; all of the the others are either hollowed or revealed as murderers by the end of the game.
• Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: Crossbreed Priscilla is a cross between a human/god and a dragon, suggesting this, though it's never explained how she came to be.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: Gwyn was once the most powerful and beloved of the Lords, but by the time of the game he's been reduced to an insane husk of himself.
• Hub Level: Firelink Shrine is the center of the game world, houses most of the trainers should you find them and has quick access to many areas of the game once you unlock the shortcuts.
• Hulk Speak: The giant blacksmith in Anor Londo isn't very good at talking, but he does appear to be at least somewhat intelligent.
• Human Sacrifice: The Way of White and the other followers of Gwyn sacrifice undead to prolong the Age of Fire. The Darkwraiths kill humans to collect their humanity and prevent it from being used to preserve the Age of Fire. Linking the Fire makes one the ultimate sacrifice.
• Hybrid Monster: The manticore who serves as the Oolacile Sanctuary Guardian, a horned, winged lion/gryphon with a scorpion tail.
• I Am Who?: There are two possible interpretations. In the course of the game, ringing the Twin Bells of Awakening will make Kingseeker Frampt appear, telling you that he is looking for the successor of Gwyn, and tells you to continue the Lord's plan to preserve the Age of Fire. However, if you pledge allegiance to the Darkwraith Covenant, the Primordial Serpent Kaathe reveals that your ancestor was in fact the Furtive Pygmy and that you are the rightful successor to the Pygmy. Both arguments end up becoming half-truths: On one hand, you are supposed to succeed Gwyn... as the Lord of Cinder, burning in the Kiln until the Third Age of Fire comes to an end. On the other, you are the Pygmy's descendant... as is the rest of humankind, you're just the one who got this far. Even then, given what happened in Oolacile with Manus, there's no telling what will happen to the world should the Age of Dark occur.
• I Call It "Vera": Avelyn, a crossbow in the Duke's Archives, as well as Sanctus and Grant, the legendary shield and mace used by Paladin Leeroy.
• Iconic Outfit:
  • The Elite Knight Set. It was featured heavily in advertisements, trailers, and official art for the game. In fan cotent it's effectively the official character design for the protagonist, perhaps because of the The Everyman look to the armor. It probably also helped that in-game, with the exception of few specialized armor sets for specific situations, it was a best overall armor set in the early versions, and after several nerfs it is still a viable end-game set. It gets a reference in Dark Souls II, where the Looking Glass Knight can potentially summon a NPC that wears an eerily similar armor set.
  • Artorias' armor set is used to represent the Artorias of the Abyss content.
• Iconic Item:
  • The Zweihander is iconic among players. Relatively easy to obtain in the beginning of the game, relatively low stat requirements, high damage, wide swinging arc and its relatively long reach make it a popular starter weapon for strength-builds.
  • The Greatsword of Artorias as well, due to being the signature weapon of the knight of the same name (himself featured heavily on promotional posters for Artorias of the Abyss), its low cost and requirements to forge while being considered one of highest damaging weapons in the whole game, and the background of the boss whose soul is needed to make the weapon.
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: Undead Burg, Blighttown, Demon Ruins, Lost Izalith, The Abyss, Tomb of Giants, etc. Almost all of Lordran.
• Iaijutsu Practitioner: The Iaito moveset turns your character into one, the moveset's R2 strong attacks are all Iaijutsu attacks that cover a good amount of ground.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Executioner Smough used the ground bones of his victims as spice for his food, appalling the Four Knights (including his buddy Ornstein). The Butcher enemies are also mentioned in flavour text to be cannibals, and Maneater Mildred bears a self-explanatory name.
• I'm Dying, Please Take My MacGuffin: Oscar, Knight of Astora, who gives you the Estus Flask, the key to refight the Asylum Demon and his quest to ring the Bell of Awakening, though he was unaware there are two.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice:
  • Ornstein has this as his most deadly attack once he's powered up by Smough's death. It's almost an instant kill. Artorias does this to a monster in the DLC story. It seems to be a specialty of the Great Knights of Gwyn.
  • The Pisacas are fond of grabbing you with their tentacle hair and impaling you on a massive spike.
  • The backstab and riposte animations for many weapons involve the weapon being shoved right through the victim. This looks especially ridiculous when done with a halberd.
• Improbable Weapon User: Havel the Rock wields a huge tooth taken from one of the ancient dragons as a club. Then again, this is also a guy whose entire suit of armor was carved out of rock.
• Indy Escape: The main obstacle in the middle of Sen's Fortress is a contraption that launches giant cannonballs down the fortress hallways, which need to be dodged or outran. You can reach the contraption and redirect the boulders manually, but it will adjust itself again once you leave. Killing the giant that drops the boulders stops them, but it's the only giant that respawns after using a bonfire.
• The Ingenue: Anastacia and Reah. The former is the lady who keeps the bonfire of Firelink Shrine alive, while the latter is a princess maiden of the Way of White. Both are very proper in attire, though they're cold to the player at first and only warm up if they accomplish certain side tasks.
• "Instant Death" Radius: A glitch that allows players to apply a weapon buff to otherwise unbuffable weapons lets them create this if used on the Stone Greatsword. Its special ability normally slows down any hostiles within a certain distance of the user, but when buffed, the damage of the buff is applied to this effect as well, causing anything near them to take constant unblockable magic damage.
• Insufferable Genius: Logan, a powerful sorceror and one of the magic teachers, is described as one, though in practice he's one of the nicer people in the game, if somewhat condescending.
• Intangible Man: The ghosts of New Londo Ruins are invulnerable to normal attacks and blocks, requiring the player to use a cursed weapon or curse themselves (either the full curse status or the temporary Transient Curse item) in order to interact with them.
• Invincible Minor Minion: The Skeletons in the catacombs. You can defeat them, but they'll quickly revive and reassemble themselves as long as the necromancer hiding himself nearby is alive. Divine weapons will kill them permanently even if the necromancer is alive, which is important for the boss fight with Nito, who serves as the necromancer for his own group of skeletons.
• Invisible Block: The Crystal Cave has several invisible bridges, which the game will alert you to through a message written on what looks like thin air. Beyond that, falling snow will break on the bridge and reveal where it's safe to walk. Most of the bridges in the area are straight, but an optional one leading to a Blue Titanite Slab has several twists that will require careful observation of the snow (replete usage of Prism Stones or shooting arrows into the ground to reveal which directions you can walk in also works) to reach the end.
• Invisible Monsters: Two of the Forest Hunter NPCs wear the Ring of Fog, making them partially invisible and harder to spot.
• Invulnerable Civilians: Averted, as all NPCs can be killed. Even worse, one accidental hit on one, be it a merchant, or a blacksmith, and that NPC is permanently hostile, and often leads to their death, which can be disastrous later on if you happen to kill a merchant. You can make all hostile, yet alive, NPCs non hostile by paying Oswald of Carim an obscene amount of souls. 500 souls times your Soul Level to be exact, resulting in (for example) people at level 50 needing to amass 25,000 souls just so the woman who sells moss doesn't try to kill you.
• Island of Misfit Everything: The Painted World of Ariamas is said to be a place where things that don't belong anywhere else are kept. This is why is it home to some of the game's odder enemies, like the Crow Demons, a second Undead Dragon, more Bonewheel Skeletons, and a few enemies that call back to Demon's Souls. Its boss is Crossbreed Priscilla, the biggest misfit of all.
• It's All About Me: Lautrec, despite helping you on occassion, is full of himself and only assists for his own benefit. Patches also counts, as an overconfident coward who's willing to backstab anyone just to get more loot to pawn off.
• It Sucks to Be the Chosen One: That is this game in a nutshell. Crushed, stabbed, burned, fallen, eaten, thrown, electrocuted and cursed to come back to life every time before suffering some other brutal death. Linking the fire means your ultimate reward for suffering through all of that is to burn for eternity in the Kiln of the First Flame until the cycle begins anew.

J-P

• Jerkass:
  • Lautrec, a mostly blunt and sinister knight who is also a bit of a religious zealot, and rarely has anything nice to say. He's still helpful to the player for a good amount of the game, but he eventually kills the Fire Keeper of Firelink Shrine and runs off with her soul, becoming an optional invasion fight.
  • Patches is a trickster who can nearly kill (or at least inconvenience) the Chosen Undead twice, and can easily go aggro if you tell him that you're a cleric.
  • While it isn't immediately evident, Petrus gradually reveals himself as a judgmental jackass who abandons the mission group he was supposed to protect, and will do all he can to kill Reah if she makes it out of the Tomb of the Giants.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: The story and lore of the game, exacerbated by the use of Story Breadcrumbs. You're unlikely to learn much about Lordran and its history unless you read the descriptions of items you collect.
• Jumped at the Call: The Chosen Undead is very quick to travel to Lordran and fulfill Oscar's dying request. Considering your other option was staying at your prison cell until the end of time, it isn't any surprise.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Petrus starts out as a relatively normal person, but quickly acts on his disdain for Reah once Patches tricks her and her bodyguards into getting trapped in a pit. If you don't buy all of Rhea's miracles after rescuing her from the Tomb of the Giants, then Petrus will assassinate her.
• Justified Tutorial: The Undead Asylum. It's you in a neglected, derelict prison scrounging around for any available weapons and gear.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: The Maiden Dress and Antiquted Dress sets put the player character in a Pimped-Out Dress, which does nothing to impede your fighting ability, and even enhances certain skills.
• Kill the God: Starting in the second section of the game, the goal shifts towards fighting the old lords of Lordran to take Lord Souls/shards of Lord Souls from them. You end up fighting every lord mentioned in the intro by the game's end except the Furitive Pygmy, unless he turned into Manus.
• Knight in Shining Armor: Oscar and Solaire, noble knights of Astora who are never seen without their armor. Siegmeyer wants to be this, but is a bit too bumbling most of the time.
• Knight Templar: Allfather Lloyd, the leader of Thorolund. He organized a religion based around hunting undead and sacrificing them to prolong the Age of Fire. The Darkwraiths would likely have been the Knight Templar Evil Counterpart to the Way of White if they didn't go Drunk with Power and become Always Chaotic Evil.
• Kudzu Plot: One of the most defining aspects of the game's story. There are so many aspects of the lore, characters, character motivations that are left up in the air including what effect the end of your journey has on the world.
• The Lava Caves of New York: The Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith. Both dwelve deeper into the underground than Quelaag's Domain, which is already under Blighttown; Blightown itself is below The Depths (you could think anything under that point is quite deep), which is in the lower levels of the Undead Parish. The Ash Lake, the real surface of the world, is at approximately in the same depth as Demon Ruins.
• Large Ham: Siegmeyer puts on a good amount of bravado whenever he shows up.
  "I am Siegmeyer of Catarina, and you shall feel my wrath!"
• Laser-Guided Karma: The Darkmoon Covenant is all about this. You may kill a person or two that you find expendable, abandon a covenant to join a better one, invade and kill another player for humanity or kill Gwynevere and think nothing of it after that. However, the Darkmoons are here to remind you that no bad deed goes unpunished. At anypoint as a Human if you've sinned you are branded for a Darkmoon invasion by another player, and unlike a regular invasion, it will continue to happen even after you've killed the area boss. However it's avoidable if you absolve yourself by talking to Oswald at the top of the Undead Church and paying an amount of souls depending on your soul level and the amount of sins you committed before getting absolved. The exception to this is if you kill Gwynevere. Then you are permanently branded as a sinner until New Game+.
• Lava Adds Awesome: The Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith, late-game Lethal Lava Land areas where most of the demons seen throughout the early areas originate from.
• Lava Magic Is Fire: The pyromancy line includes the more dangerous Chaos pyromancy, that leaves burning chaos lava in its wake. The lair of the Chaos servants is a lava hellscape generated by one of their own being consumed by Chaos until he started spewing lava everywhere.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: "Trusty" Patches is a character from FromSoftware's first "souls-like" title, Demon's Souls, which is owned by Sony. He lost his original name (Patches the Hyena), but is otherwise nearly identical in appearance and personality, and shares the same voice actor.
• Leap of Faith:
  • This is how your character escapes from The Painted World of Ariamis.
  • You enter the Abyss via one of these. Unless you don't have the Covenant of Artorias ring equipped, in which case you enter your death.
• Legacy Character: Patches the Hyena, who first appeared in Demon's Souls, returns as part of the Catacombs/Tomb of the Giants segment of the game, still ready to kick players off cliffs like he used to.
• Leitmotif: The game's original soundtrack (as well as the additional content) has one for every boss fight (sometimes repeated, in the case of the Moonlight Butterfly and Gwyndolin) and a few key locations, namely Firelink Shrine, the Daughter of Chaos, Princess Gwynevere's chamber, and the Ash Lake.
• Lethal Lava Land: The Demon Ruins and the first half of Lost Izalith, full of magma and fire/chaos demons. The magma damage can be resisted using the Orange Charred Ring (or, to a lesser extent, by lots of fire resistance), which is required to travel through it in Lost Izalith.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Siegmeyer is foolish and distracted throughout most of the game, particularly during the point in Anor Londo where he gets stuck thinking of a solution to defeating the Silver Knights while you kill them yourself. However, in Lost Izalith, he risks his life to attack some Chaos Eaters for you, and is a remarkably good fighter and will survive the fight if you assist him.
• A Light in the Distance: The staircase at the entrance to the kiln inverts this. Instead of a light at the end of the tunnel, it's a dark at the end of the light. What that could actually mean in relation to the ending is anyone's guess.
• Limp and Livid: Artorias spends most of his fight in a limping pose, attacking with jumps and flips rather than walking normally. Appropriate, since he recently had his ass handed to him and the only reason he's fighting you is because he's been completely corrupted.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Magic-based characters, be they sorcerors, pyromancers, or clerics, tend to struggle early in the game when their spell options are limited and they lack the attack power to defend themselves if they run out of casts. They gradually get stronger as they obtain better spells and more attunement slots to place them in, plus better catalysts/talismans and upgrades to the Pyromancy Flame. In successive runs of the game, they can get more and more casts by buying spells again, since they refresh with each cycle. With the right spells and equipment, you can take down full New Game Plus Level 7 bosses in just a few hits.
• Living Relic:
  • Dusk of Oolacile was the sole survivor of the destruction of Oolacile long ago, and afterwards became displaced in time due to being trapped inside a Crystal Golem. Once freed in the present day, she can be summoned to purchase ancient Oolacile sorceries.
  • The remaining gods of the Age of Fire are still around, most of them much weaker than they used to be.
• Living Shadow: The humanity phantoms in the Chasm of the Abyss, which look like the Humanity sprites consumed as an item but are much more aggressive.
• Lonely Piano Piece: The final boss battle is set to sad piano music, to set the mood of the fight against the husk of the god who burnt in the First Flame.
• Long Song, Short Scene: The hidden track used for the trailer music. The last moments of the song do show up in the Dark Lord ending, but none of it is used elsewhere.
• Long Game: One that spans over a thousand years! The entirety of history since the Age Of Ancients has been a story of chessmasters competing with each other through increasingly elaborate long games. On one hand, Gwyndolin has been conspiring with Frampt in order to trick the Undead into extending the Age of Fire for a thousand years after Gwyn used himself as fuel, while it's hinted that Kaathe has been trying to do the same to usher the Age of Dark. Even beyond that, it's implied that the Furtive Pygmy knew from the start that shattering his unique Lord Soul and creating Humanity would ensure that the spread of the Dark would eventually win over Gwyn's wavering Age of Fire one day. And that isn't even getting into other theories, like the one where the crow in the beginning is sent by Velka, or is Velka herself, and she is essentially orchestrating both sides to her own ends by delivering the Chosen Undead.
• The Lost Woods: Darkroot Garden and Darkroot Basin, a cliffside forest region full of deadly critters and ents. Its main landmark is the gravesite of Knight Artorias, which remains fiercely protected.
• Lovable Rogue: Patches plays himself up as one, always asking for the player's forgiveness even if his tricks nearly kill them. It's in their best interest to forgive him, too, since he sells useful items as a merchant.
• Love Makes You Evil: The Lady of the Darkling helps lead an occassionally excessive Secret Police because of her intense dedication to Gwyndolin, who in turn is ambiguous in alignment because of his manipulations of Anor Londo that are used to convince undeads to continue the Age of Fire.
• Love Redeems: Eingyi was a nasty little joker, and is implied to be the reason why the swamp below Blighttown is poisonous. However, after meeting the Fair Lady and her saving his life at the expense of her own health, he happily resigned himself to serving the ill girl faithfully and carrying her eggs for her.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • The Capra Demon fight is often decided in the first few seconds. The moment you step through the fog door both the boss and the two attack dogs that accompany it will immediately attack you (the Demon will typically leap at you, which does a ridiculous amount of damage at the level the player is likely at), commonly resulting in instant death. Coupled with the very narrow space you fight the Capra Demon in you have very little room to maneuver out of the way. Should you get past the initial assault, however, your odds of survival increase substantially.
  • If you don't kill Ceaseless Discharge with the scripted event of falling into the lava it can become this; sometimes it spams relatively easily avoidable attacks with massive openings to do damage, and other times it uses extremely dangerous screen-nuking attacks with a short recovery over and over.
  • Likewise for the Hellkite Dragon. If you choose to fight it directly in battle and not shooting it with a bow, your victory depends almost entirely on the how much the dragon wants to nuke the bridge with fire and in many cases cause instant death.
  • The Demon Firesage is either manageable or next-to-impossible, depending on whether he mostly uses his easy-to-avoid belly-flop, or his insanely cheap shockwave attack.
• MacGuffin: The Broken Pendant in Artorias of the Abyss. It's never explained why, but it holds so much importance for Manus that he is willing to reach across time just to get it back.
• Magical Eye: The Calamity Ring obtained from slaying Kalameet is made from his singular eye. While the ring is equipped, a red eye-like orb shines above the player's head and any damage taken by its wearer is doubled.
• Magic A Is Magic A: Sorceries, miracles, and pyromancies are all forms of magic, but each one has a different design focus. Notably, each type of magic also has multiple schools of magic, which further subdivide each type of magic into a number of different focuses.
  • Sorceries are focused around powerful single-target damage and scale off of Intelligence. Their signature spells, the Soul Arrow series, are fairly powerful medium-range projectiles that collide with enemies to deal heavy damage. They also allow you to coat your weapon or shield in magic, increasing their magic attack and defense respectively. Another interesting element of sorceries are their emphasis on stealth, with many spells like Aural Decoy and Hush allowing players to make up for their lack of defense by getting the jump on enemies. This makes sorceries rather useful for stealthy players or invaders. Sorcery uses Catalysts to cast their spells, and primarily deal Magic damage.
    • Oolacile Sorceries are distinguished by their white, yellow and grey colour scheme, and are exclusively sold by Dusk of Oolacile. These sorceries focus entirely on deception and misdirection, and feature notable standouts like Chameleon, which lets the player transform into a background item to hide from other players, and Hidden Weapon, which disguises their currently equipped weapon.
    • Abyssal Sorceries are found exclusively in the DLC, and are an advanced form of Humanity manipulation. They are only found in the destroyed remains of the Oolacile township, and are implied to have been corrupted by the rampant mutation of humanity that occurs there.
    • Crystal Sorceries are advanced spells invented by Big Hat Logan after he moves to the Duke's Archives. They are the final tier of sorcery available, and are extremely powerful as a result. They take the form of normal sorceries, but with crystalline effects. They are exceptionally dangerous to use, and their complicated structure requires heavy investment in Intelligence to be able to cast, but they pay out by dealing exceptionally high amounts of magic damage on every hit.
  • Miracles are supportive spells meant to accent a "cleric" style of play, and scale off of Faith. Their repertoire includes several varieties of Heal, which can be a huge help for slower, tankier characters who shrug off damage instead of moving out of the way. They apply Holy damage to their weapons and Holy defense to their shields, and have powerful defensive spells like Wrath of the Gods and Karmic Justice to keep things even. They also notably function as Anti-Magic characters, since the miracle Vow of Silence can prevent casters (including themselves) from using spells in an area around themselves for a short time. Miracles use Talismans to cast their magic, as well as primarly dealing Holy-accented Magic damage with occasional dips into Lightning.
    • Sunlight Miracles are the higher tier of Faith magic, and mostly act as straight upgrades to the normal Miracles. In particular, Sunlight Miracles are fleshed out as full-on support magic, with Soothing Sunlight and Bountiful Sunlight acting as area of effect heals. This makes Sunlight Miracles very useful for cooperative play. In addition, the powerful Sunlight Spear and Sunlight Weapon miracles deal very strong lightning damage, making them useful for combat outside of cooperation.
    • Gravelord Miracles are fairly underdeveloped, with only two miracles to their repitoire- Gravelord Sword Dance and Gravelord Greatsword Dance. Ultimately, both are the same spell, and are used by Gravelords to defend themselves when players invade them to stop their curses. Gravelords also come equipped with the very powerful Gravelord Sword weapon, which can make up for their lack of variety in useable spells, and their Faith requirement of zero makes them powerful to use for any player.
  • Pyromancies are spells that split between long range area of effect damage and powerful augmenting buffs. In particular, their default Fireball spell and its higher tier bretheren can be very effective for taking out enemies at a distance and laying on damage to bosses at long range, which can be useful for players who are just starting out. Pyromancies require neither Intelligence or Faith to use, instead scaling entirely off of the Pyromancy Glove currently equipped and requiring very little investment to properly use. This means that any character with low enough Intelligence to be unable to use any Sorceries and low enough Faith to struggle with properly using Miracles can equip a Pyromancy glove and gain access to useful magic. Pyromancies are cast using Pyromancy Gloves, and primarily deal Fire damage.
    • Chaos Pyromancies are the second tier above Pyromancy and are associated with the Witch of Izalith and her children. The primordial Chaos Flame that the Witch created gave birth to a menagerie of terrifiying demons, but also gave birth to some of the strongest Pyromancies available to the player. In particular, Great Chaos Orb, Chaos Firestorm and Chaos Fire Whip will tear through anything that they touch, often leaving behind puddles of extremely damaging lava to help defend the caster. These Pyromancies are only sold by experienced Pyromancers such as Quelana, who don't exactly go showing themselves off to any newbies...
    • Abyssal Pyromancies originate from the same place as Abyssal Sorceries, but the only spell in that category is Black Flame, the strongest version of Combustion.
• Magical Society:
  • The Dragon College of Vinheim, the place of study where both Griggs and Logan, the sorcery teachers, originate from.
  • Seath and his Channelers control the Duke's Archives, a research area that has devolved into mad science by the time of the game.
• Mage Killer: There is a character named Havel the Rock who has high Magic resist armor, a weapon that increases Magic and Pyromancy resistance, and a shield with very high Magic defense. He also is the creator of the Magic Barrier spells, which very heavily reduce Magic damage. His flavour text states that he hated magic almost as much as he hated Seath, who just so happened to be the father of sorcery.
• Magikarp Power:
  • If you fully upgrade a useless hilt of a broken sword, it can be combined with a certain boss' soul to create a unique sword (if made from a regular weapon the sword has worse stats, but can damage ghosts).
  • Several weapons have relatively low base damage but gain signficant bonuses from player stats, making them more useful at higher levels.
• The Magocracy: The nation/citystate of Vinheim, which is run by the higher ups at the Dragon College.
• Make My Monster Grow: If you kill Smough first in the battle at the end of Anor Londo, Ornstein will take in his power and grow to twice the size. In this form, he obtains Smough's butt-stomp move (now creating an electric shockwave), can impale you with his spear, and generally hits stronger and with more range.
• The Man Behind the Man: Gwyndolin, to Gwynevere and Frampt, using his illusions to push undead towards linking the first flame. That said, he's only carrying on the legacy of his father, who has long since hollowed.
• Mascot Mook: The Black Knights appear on the game's disc and various promotional images.
• Mask of Power: Pinwheel wears three of them. The player can obtain them, with each one being relatively bad as armor but providing a minor stat boost. The Mask of the Father increases equip load, the Mask of the Mother increases health, and the Mask of the Child increases stamina regeneration.
• Mega Neko: Alvina and the Great Felines are the size of large horses.
• Megaton Punch: The adult mushroom people attack you by throwing a hook with their fists. It does a ton of damage, but is quite easy to avoid.
• Meaningful Name: Firelink Shrine, a shrine with one of the few bonfires still attended by its Fire Keeper. The name gets a new meaning later in the game; the shrine built on top of the Firelink Altar, where the Chosen Undead must go if they want to link the First Flame.
• Mercy Kill: You arguably do this to Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, who seems barely sentient now that the First Flame has burnt him to a crisp. If you pick the Dark Lord ending, this happens to First Flame and the Age of Fire in general, snuffing it out to prevent another cycle.
• Metal Slime: The crystal lizards/geckos (making a return from Demon's Souls), which shine brightly but tend to turn invisible (and are thus un-attackable) when you run into them. Should you manage to catch one, you're likely to get some rare ores for weapon refinement.
• Metroidvania: As seen in this picture◊, all the areas are connected, there are multiple routes to different areas and each area has its own goal, with only strength of enemies and keys to doors standing between you and the next area.
• Mini-Boss: Plenty show up as unique, nonrespawning enemies at various points in the game, the first one encountered likely being the Black Knight in the Undead Burg or the Maneater Boar in the Undead Parish.
• Mirror Boss: While not true bosses, the Black Phantom minibosses operate like preset, AI-controlled player characters.
• Misidentified Weapons: Notable examples include the Scythe (which is actually and clearly a bardiche) and the Black Knight's Halberd, which, despite the name (even in Japanese, using the kanji for "Axe-Spear") isn't an halberd, but clearly a glaive. Flamberges wielded by the Snake People are also similar to oversized Kriss knives rather than being the more typical, almost serrated straight blades seen in Europe.
• Missing Secret:
  • There are no ways to level up the Way of White or Princess's Guard covenants since they're exclusively co-op groups, despite every other covenant being able to be ranked up to +3.
  • A little fewer than half of the game's bosses drop a special boss soul upon death, and each one has one to three weapons that can be forged using it. However, the Guardian Soul, obtained from the Sanctuary Guardian in Artorias of the Abyss, doesn't have any corresponding boss weapons (the Sanctuary Guardian only has a tail-cut weapon), leaving it with no purpose other than to be consumed for more souls.
• Mix-and-Match Critters:
  • Great Felines, which look like an unholy combination of a cat, a bear, and an alligator.
  • The Sanctuary Guardian, which seems to be the game's take on a chimera, having the body of a lion, two sets of wings, the horns of a goat and the tail of a scorpion. It's in part a manticore, albeit without the human face. Although given the horns and wings, perhaps it's a chimera/manticore hybrid.
• Monster Closet: The doors that the thieves in Lower Undead Burg burst out of lead into completely empty, featureless rooms. They don't even contain locked doors or anything, raising the question of what exactly these buildings were used for in the past.
• Monster Knight: A few enemies that are otherwise non-human will use weapons/armor and fight like a typical knight enemy. Prominent examples are the Capra Demons (goat demons weilding machetes), the Balder Knights (undead knights), the Black Knights (Animated Armor), and the Darkwraiths (skeletal knights).
• Monster Modesty:
  • The Capra Demon, the most humanoid of the demon enemies, wears pants whereas the others have no clothes.
  • In the Royal Wood area added in the DLC/re-releases, there are less transformed versions of the demonic foliage in Darkroot Forest that wield either pitchforks or hedge trimmers and wear burlap pants.
• Mooks Ate My Equipment: The Gaping Dragon has an acid vomit AOE attack that degrades equipment more than most attacks do, making him dangerous to fight with low-durability weapons like the Uchigatana or crystal weapons.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: The Gaping Dragon has a large set of long, curved teeth, which are located in its ribcage◊ rather than its tiny head.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Pinwheel has six arms that each hold a lantern, though he mostly uses them for casting spells rather than attacking. The female Snake People in Sen's Fortress and the Duke's Archives have four arms, three of which wielding Flamberges, while the free one can be used to throttle the player or cast spells.
• Multiple Endings: There are two endings available as a Last-Second Ending Choice, depending on whether you light the First Flame's bonfire in the Kiln of the First Flame or leave with the door after killing Gwyn.
  • The Link the Fire ending, wherein the player is sacrificed to the fire after the culmination of his trials until it eventually comes full circle again. This ending is like the good ending in Demon's Souls, in which it gives an excuse for the constant New Game Plus cycle.
  • The Dark Lord ending, wherein the player can decide not to rekindle the first flame, plunging the world into darkness and ushering in an Age of Man, with the player ruling over what's left of the world as the Dark Lord.
• Murder, Inc.: Darkwraiths and Forest Hunters, covenants who invade other players for humanities and item loots, respectively.
• Mushroom Man: The Mushroom people, which include the adults and children as enemies. Despite looking harmless, the adults can dish out a Megaton Punch that will One-Hit Kill even high-leveled players. There is also Elizabeth in the Oolacile Sanctuary, who is similar to them, except without hands and feet.
• Mystical White Hair: White hair is used as a symbol of mysticism for Priscilla, the half-dragon in the Painted World of Ariamis, and the Fair Lady, Quelaag's sister who serves as the Fire Keeper of her domain and has ties to Chaos Pyromancy.
• Naked Nutter: After killing Seath and buying all of Big Hat Logan's spells, Logan can be found in Seath's lair in the Duke's Archives stripped down to his underwear and hat, having gone completely insane from his time spent in the Archives.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Great Grey Wolf Sif, Gravelord Nito, Dragon Slayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough, the list goes on.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Most of your actions bring doom to the other characters.
  • Telling Laurentius about Quelana or Chaos Pyromancy causes him to go looking for them. He hollows in Blighttown.
  • Buying all of Rhea's spells will leave her completely defenseless. She is kidnapped and sent to the Crystal Prison, where she hollows.
  • Repeatedly helping Siegmeyer destroys his self-confidence, which leads to him going hollow out of despair. This one is ambiguous, as the other possibility is that he hollows because he finds out the mother of his daughter is dead.
  • Releasing Lautrec from his cell results in Anastacia's death. To be fair, he kills her regardless of whether you help free him, but at least in this case you know you're responsible.
  • Sometimes even talking to characters can get them killed. Exhaust of all the Crestfallen Warrior's dialogue? He'll go to New Londo Ruins and turn hollow. Really, the only way to ensure they live is to not talk to them at all.
• Night of the Living Mooks: Many of the enemies encountered are undead of some sort, including zombies, skeletons, and ghosts. Then again, almost everyone you meet is undead, including the player character.
• The Night That Never Ends: After destroying the illusion of Gwynevere in Anor Londo, the once Shining City is plunged into permanent darkness.
• No Antagonist: Oddly enough, despite how deadly Lordran is, there's no real Big Bad to be found, and neither ending is clearly happier for anyone. However, Gwyndolin and Manus are the closest examples of plot-driving antagonists, the former manipulating you into following Gwyn's path, and the latter outright corrupting everything around him.
• No Kill like Overkill: You get 20% more souls when a single attacks deals damage greater than 150% your target's max HP.
• Non-Malicious Monster: Priscilla. She's the only boss in the game who will not attack you until she is attacked first. She will instead simply point you to the exit.
• Noob Cave: Undead Burg, the destroyed town above Firelink Shrine, is an easy-ish opening area where the only enemies are hollows and the path forward is clear.
• Noodle Incident: The game doesn't say exactly what was done to create the assorted Bite rings; just that the rumors surrounding them are supposed to be incredibly horrific.
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • Blighttown is particularly guilty, being nothing more than a series of crude wooden platforms balanced precariously several hundred feet above the ground. Humorously, the logical results of this actually manifest in gameplay, as enemies occasionally fall off them with no input from the player.
  • Sen's Fortress is notorious for this, though it was also made specifically for this purpose. Even without the plentiful death traps, the entire building only has railings in places where normal people would never be expected to go, and the majority of its walkways are suspended above a hundred foot drop, while axes swing across the narrow path and snake men take pot shots at passersby. The fact that Indiana Jones style boulders roll down its staircases every few seconds like clockwork, regularly crushing said snake men employees patrolling said "Home Alone" Antics funhouse makes the absurdity even more hilarious.
• No-Sell:
  • The effects of the Poise stat. A character with high poise will be harder to interrupt or stagger while taking damage, and it usually correlates with heavier armor. Thus, a well armored character, in addition to being able to absorb more damage, can simply bull through and continue to strike home where other characters would be driven back under a rain of blows.
  • This is why enemies like Havel the Rock, the Titanite Demons and the myriad of bosses are so dangerous: not only do they hit like a train, they're also nigh on impossible to either stagger or interrupt their attacks, making timing your attacks essential.
• Not Completely Useless: The binoculars look weak compared to, say, the Master Key as far as starting items go, but they do have a use. They're the only way to enter first-person view outside of bows, meaning it can be used to assist in aiming crossbows and throwing items, eliminating part of the difficulty of challenge runs that disallow bows.
• Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: Priscilla was feared as a horrific abomination that would overthrow the gods due to her half-dragon heritage and Lifehunt ability, but when you actually meet her she's non-hostile until attacked and all she wants is to be left alone.
• "Not So Different" Remark: The Crestfallen Merchant believes the player and himself to be the same as the vile denizens of Sen's Fortress.
• Obviously Evil: The Darkwraiths, who wear skeletal armor, take people's souls, serve the Abyss, and are called the Darkwraiths.
• Old Magic: The Demon Firesage is described by its Soul item description as the last practitioner of the old fire magic arts before the Chaos Flame transformed him into a demon. Unlike every other fire-based creature in the game, he does Magic damage instead of Fire. This is because his fire is treated as a Spell, whereas most fire-base magic is connected to the First Flame in a relatively new art called Pyromancy.
• One Stat to Rule Them All:
  • Endurance is the one attribute all PvE and PvP builds raise equally since it both increases Stamina, which is useful regardless of playstyle, and allows you to carry heavier armor and weapons by increasing your maximum equipment carry weight.
  • Dexterity is this to a lesser degree, as it not only scales weapon attacks but controls spellcasting speed, thus melee and magic builds make this a priority stat.
• Orcus on His Throne: All of the bosses you fight will wait for you to show up for varying reasons, but Gravelord Nito, one of the Four Lords, and the first of the dead (making him the ruler of death itself) is perfectly content to sleep away his days in his coffin, observing death throughout Lordran.
• Orgasmic Combat: When your player character receives a particularly damaging attack, they make some rather suspicious moans.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: The ghost enemies were cursed by the flooding of New Londo and cannot be hurt by things that aren't cursed.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling:
  • In Darkroot Garden, just after the sealed door, the player can gain several thousand souls each time by tricking each hostile NPC into running off a cliff, and there is a bonfire just outside the door. The only downside is that getting past the door early requires grinding 20,000 souls to purchase the Crest of Artorias from Andre (or making the very unwise decision to kill him for it).
  • Anor Londo is considered the best place to grind for souls in the game:
    • The first area has six Sentinels who drop 1,500 souls each for a total of 9,000 souls for clearing them all, and the Darkmoon Knightess' bonfire right between all of them to reset them.
    • The entire main castle section (between the fog gate and Ornstein and Smough's arena). Not only does it have a ton of Silver Knights (about a dozen of them, if you're willing to hunt them all down) that drop a thousand souls each, there's also the Royal Sentinels (two of them, worth 3,000 souls apiece) and two more Sentinels worth a collective 3,000; that's 21,000 souls on New Game, and 63,000 on New Game Plus, before overkill and Covetous Silver Serpent Ring/Symbol of Avarice boosts are applied. As if that weren't enough, Ornstein and Smough are among the most active multiplayer bosses, and have a huge soul yield (25,000 for a New Game Phantom and a record-high 75,000 for a New Game Plus Phantom), so cuing up to be summoned while grinding is as lucrative as boss-grinding can be.
  • Once you open the front door in the Painted World of Ariamis, you can farm the phalanx monsters in the middle of the courtyard, just a few dozen steps away from the bonfire.
  • The underground cavern in the Tomb of Giants area, just before you encounter the boss Gravelord Nito, where small skeletons respawn infinitely whenever you walk into the water at the bottom of the cavern. The skeletons are easy to kill (although because this is Dark Souls they can still pose a danger if you're not careful and they mob you) and, while they don't drop a lot of souls on their own, you can fight so many of them at once it racks up quickly. Even better, they're one of the very few enemies in the game to also drop Humanity, so this is an excellent place to grind especially if you're trying to gain ranks in the Chaos Servant covenant.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • NPC Phantoms, both beneficial and hostile, can only be encountered when you are human and before you've defeated the boss in the area you are in. It is very easy to miss both the summon/invasion and any items after they disappear if you don't know ahead of time, especially with Kirk, who invades thrice and has to be killed every time for his armor set to spawn.
  • Killing an NPC will cause them to remain dead until the next New Game Plus cycle, locking you out of their services or sold items until then. For example, if you kill Ingward (likely to pull off Sequence Breaking in New Londo Ruins), you lose his ability to cure Cursed status without an expensive Purging Stone.
  • Oswald can absolve sin if you seek him out, making NPCs neutral to you and reducing how often the Blades of the Darkmoon invade you. Naturally, if you aggro Oswald, you can no longer absolve your sins for the rest of the playthrough.
  • Some merchants go hollow after buying all their items. Two of them can die prior to that happening for some story reason, potentially taking away their merchant status before you've bought everything you could from them. Specifically, Laurentius will leave and go hollow if you tell him where to get advanced pyromancies (though the circumstances mean you'll still have access to one of the two other pyromancy teachers), and Reah will get murdered by Petrus if you don't kill him or buy everything from her before killing any two required bosses. Additionally, if you kill the Bed of Chaos before meeting Quelana by acquiring a 10+ Pyromancy Flame, she won't ever show up and her spells and upgrades are lost.
  • There are many Yes or No options in the game when talking to characters, and saying the wrong thing can permanently lock you out of certain things until next cycle.
  • After a certain point, the Firelink Shrine bonfire will go out. Though this important hub world bonfire can eventually be restored, it can remain out depending on whether you return the Fire Keeper Soul to her or use it to upgrade your Estus Flask with a different Fire Keeper.
• Personal Space Invader: Several enemies have devastating grab attacks, with the ones belonging to enemies like Mimics being capable of causing a One-Hit Kill to anyone without extremely high health and defenses. The grab attack of the egg-burdened enemies in the Demon Ruins can infect your player with that status a few minutes afterwards.
• Philosophical Choice Endings: "Is a world's fading life worth preserving at all costs or is it better to just put it out of its misery?" The game is set in a dying world that barely clings on to life. The ending asks the player, after they've seen the best and the worst the land has to offer, whether it is worth sacrificing their character to artificially prolong its life for a few centuries or whether the current age should finally come to an end, giving the world a chance at rebirth: in the context of the story, you will either sacrifice yourself to artificially prolong the current Age of Fire for a little while longer or put it out of its misery and embrace the impending Age of Darkness. Essentially, it is a question of the ethics of euthanasia, only applied to an entire world.
• Physical God: Gwyn, Nito, and the Witch of Izalith mentioned in the intro, figures of legend who started and ruled over the Age of Fire after killing the Everlasting Dragons. Those who ascended into Lordship at the behest of Gwyn have similar levels of power.
• Physical Religion: The dominant religion of the setting is based around worship of the Lords, with Anor Londo as a forbidden holy city.
• Pillar of Light: Appears when placing the Lordvessel at Firelink Altar. It removes the Brilliant Light that obstructs your way in several areas.
• Pimped-Out Dress: Princess Gwynevere's and Dusk of Oolacile's dresses. Dusk's dress, which has several bows and ribbons and a lace shoulder cape, is actually obtainable as an armor set in game.
• Piñata Enemy: The Forest Hunters and the Darkmoon Soldiers, who are quick, cheap sources for souls. The single respawning Titanite Demon is this as well for the Demon Titanite upgrade material it drops.
• Planet Heck: The Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith are clearly meant to evoke a Hell-like atmosphere. They're underground Lethal Lava Lands filled with decrepit ruins and overrun with demons.
• Planet of Hats:
  • Astora is a standard medieval place of knights, blacksmiths, nobles, and witch hunts involving physical mutilation.
  • Carim is a rather more twisted place where people are religious, yet use humanity and souls for nefarious purposes, and they're also dubious.
  • Catarina is full of knights wearing puffy onion armor, and the majority of them are jubilant.
  • Thorolund is a theocracy that adheres to divine magic and has a lot of clerics.
  • Vinheim is attuned to sorcery, with everyone there being involved in sorcery in some way or another. Most famous among them are the dragon scholars.
• Pocket Dimension: The Painted World of Ariamis is a pocket dimension inside a painting.
• Point of No Return: The Fog Gate to the Final Boss in the Kiln of the First Flame, Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, is a one-way trip for a playthrough of the game. After defeating the Final Boss, the player cannot return to the rest of the game and only has two options: Link the First Flame for the standard ending, or walk back out the now-clear Fog Gate, which will automatically give them the Age of Dark ending. Even Homeward Bone will not allow you to leave once the boss has been destroyed.
• Post-Final Level: After collecting all of the Lord Souls during the non-linear second half of the game, the Chosen Undead uses them to open the door to the Kiln of the First Flame, a large but empty area containing nothing but a few spread-out Black Knights and the final boss's arena.
• Power Crystal:
  • The Primordial Crystal grants Seath the Scaleless true immortality.
  • Crystalized weapons get considerable stat boosts over other forms, at the cost of being unable to repair them (save for the times you reinforce them).
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: The Purging Stones which remove curses. With a bit of deduction you can figure out the terrible process in which they are made (they have a skull on them and describe how humans are only able to transfer curses, not break them; you're just screwing the spirit of some dead guy over to save yourself). The process behind creating the "bite" rings is also similarly terrible.
• Precursors: The game strongly implies that all humans, lords and gods were hollows before the coming of the First Flame and the life and souls that came with it. The stone dragons also appear to be this, but in the present day only a few are left.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Unlike Demon's Souls, in which about half of the gear was either male or female only, all armor can be worn by either gender, making gender purely aesthetic. Unlike a lot of games, armour doesn't change its appearance depending on the wearer— a woman wearing full body plate is almost indistinguishable from a man, while a man wearing female armour (such as the Maiden Set) is basically cross-dressing.
• Puzzle Boss: The Bed of Chaos is an odd platforming-based puzzle boss. Before you can reach its core and pull off a single hit to end the fight, you have to jump past pits and dodge incoming attacks to reach the two weakpoints on the sides of the arena that expose it.

Q-Z

• Ragnarök Proofing: Despite a full-scale Zombie Apocalypse going on, most of the areas look surprisingly good. The Undead Burg is fine, even if it's starting to get overtaken by vegetation. New Londo looks to be in good shape aside from the flooding. Lost Izalith looks great and Anor Londo looks absolutely pristine.
• Random Drop: Many enemies drop rare unique weapons like the Titanite Demons and the Channelers. A few drop rare armor like the Mimics. There's plenty of standard enemies that just drop generic armor or consumables every so often.
• Random Drop Booster: The amount of humanity points stored increases the item discovery/drop rate stat, up to 210 with ten Humanity. Either the Covetous Gold Serpent Ring or the Symbol of Avarice will add another 200 (but will not stack if both are worn).
• Rare Random Drop: The drop rates for some items, particularly Titanite Slabs (which come in four separate flavours) can be infinitesimally low. Basic non-elemental Titanite Slabs, (used to max out all standard, Lightning and Crystal weapons and non-special armour) drop only from the Darkwraiths of New Londo with a drop rate of 0.21%. Fortunately, the game gives you at least one guaranteed slab of each type during a playthrough (if you can find them, since some are rather well-hidden), but if you want more (to upgrade a full set of armour, for example) you're going to be reduced to farming, quite likely for hours.
• Reclining Reigner: Gwynevere, the current princess of Anor Londo, spends the whole game resting on a comfy couch in the palace and never moves. This is because she's an illusion planted there by her brother— the actual Gwynevere is nowhere to be found.
• Recurring Boss: The Black Phantom Kirk of Thorns will show up to harass you if you're human three times in the game.
• Recurring Element: Almost every FromSoftware game features recurring elements and Call-Backs to earlier games they made, and Dark Souls contained multiple to Demon's Souls:
  • The Asylum Demon strongly resembles the Vanguard, except you're supposed to run from it during the extremely difficult first encounter rather than dying to it.
  • The Hellkite Dragon on the bridge between Undead Burg and Undead Parish is a repeat of the Red Dragon (and to a lesser extent, the Blue Dragon) from the Boletarian Palace, being an ultra-strong dragon stage hazard that breathes fire down a bridge.
  • The Bell Gargoyles are take-two of the Maneaters, right down to the second one joining the fight when the first one is at half HP.
  • Blighttown is the Valley of Defilement again, as a poisonous swamp where you travel across wooden supports.
  • Maneater Mildred is Executioner Miralda (a masked woman wielding a brutal weapon) wearing even less clothing.
  • Averted with Shiva of the East, who was supposed to be a straight rehash of Master Satsuki, with the Chaos Blade standing in for the Makoto sword (Shiva would have betrayed you if you gave him the Chaos Blade, same as Master Satsuki with the Makoto), but this was cut and the Chaos Blade was just made an alternate boss weapon option to Quelaag's Furysword.
  • The Pisaca are similar to the Mind Flayers (both tentacle-faced monsters), although the enemy archetype would be revisited even more blatantly in Bloodborne and Dark Souls III.
  • Pinwheel is a rehash of the Fool's Idol (both Doppelgänger Spin mage bosses), which would be seen again in Dark Souls III in the Crystal Sage.
  • The pairing of the Necromancers and the reanimating Skeletons in the Catacombs was another take on Demon's Souls' Reapers and Shadowlurkers (another element that would be revisited again in later games).
  • The fate of Fallen King Allant was mirrored in the fate of the Witch of Izalith, reduced to a basically helpless Zero-Effort Boss within the heart a gigantic treelike abomination (the Old One and the Bed of Chaos respectively).
  • The Painted World of Ariamis contains a lot of references to the game's bosses. Phalanx reappears as a mass of melting hollows wielding shields and spears, another Berenike Knight appears as a stand-in for the Tower Knight, and the area's invader, Xanthous King Jeremiah, wears a hat similar to the one the Old Monk wears.
  • Artorias' entrance is the same as Penetrator's, and Artorias himself is probably the boss most similar to Penetrator in general.
  • Gwyn, Lord of Cinder has a lot of resemblances to False King Allant as hyper-aggressive swordsmen kings, including the grab attack (although Gwyn can't drain soul levels with his).
• Recurring Traveler: Solaire, Siegmeyer, and Sieglinde are met multiple times throughout the story, whereas most other people start in one area, more to Firelink, and don't leave until they go hollow.
• Red Shirt: Vince and Nico of Thorolund get a single interaction with you at Firelink Shrine before heading off on an undead mission, and promptly hollow when Patches tricks them into a pit.
• Regional Riff: The dramatic swell that plays when you first enter Anor Londo. It later shows up as Ornstein and Smough's boss music as Orchestral Bombing, and in Gwyndolin's boss theme as a One-Woman Wail.
• Religion of Evil: The Gravelord Servants. While the actual lore behind the Darkwraith Covenant presents their goals as ambiguous, the Gravelord Servants revolve around sending monsters to attack random people. Though to be fair, they are serving what amounts to Death in Lordran.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: The Man-Serpents who patrol Sen's Fortress and who act as prison guards in the Duke's Archives, and the the frog-like Basiliks in the Depths and Great Hollow. Then there's Gwyndolin, who has a writhing mass of snakes in place of legs.
• Rescue Arc: You save a good number of characters as you explore areas, like Rhea from the Tomb of the Giants, and Siegmeyer's quest is a series of rescuing him. The hidden quest to prevent Solaire from going insane could be considered one.
• Reviving Enemy: The skeletons in the Catacombs will revive after death unless their nearby necromancers are killed; the necromancers are among the few non-respawning normal enemies. The skeletons in Gravelord Nito's fight can't be stopped this way, but they won't get back up if killed with a divine weapon.
• Riddle for the Ages: Many. Is there a cure for the Dark Sign? Did Gwyn know what would have happened to him when he Linked the Fire? Who are Priscilla's parents? Should the Age of Fire actually continue or end? The game ultimately leaves the end result of the central conflict unanswered! You can find hints regarding the answer to some of those, but nothing definite.
• Roaming Enemy: The various special NPC hollows, which appear under special circumstances, and are tragic to fight.
• Roar Before Beating: A number of bosses do this, most notably the Sanctuary Guardian.
  • The player can get on this, too, with the Dragon Torso Stone; the stone lets them roar, producing an area knockdown effect and a temporary attack buff. Needless to say, a beating generally does follow a roar in this case.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: Giant venomous rats appear in early areas like Undead Parish and the Depths, with an especially large one being a mini-boss.
• Roundhouse Kick:
  • A character in the Artorias the Abysswalker DLC, Marvelous Chester, does a leg sweep version of this.
  • Mimics will occasionally perform a deadly flying kick on you, sending you flying.
• Ruins for Ruins' Sake: While New Londo and Izalith may seem like candidates, their backstories are given in-game. There are ruins in the Darkroot Garden and Basin, which indicates that the area was once the kingdom of Oolacile and the Royal Garden from the Artorias of the Abyss DLC/Prepare to Die Edition.
• Running on All Fours: The Feral Skeletons, giant, human skeletons that run on all fours.
• Sackhead Slasher: The Butchers, a pair of massive and tough enemies in the Undead Burg Depths who ambush you with their giant cleavers and wear sacks on their heads (you can loot such a sack from their bodies and wear it yourself, although it offers next to no protection). Further down in Blighttown, there is also an NPC invader named Maneater Mildred, who likewise wears a sack on her head and wields a Butcher cleaver. All three of them are said to be cannibals, and the first Butcher is introduced hacking away at what is very likely human meat.
• Sacrificial Lamb: Oscar of Astora, the friendly NPC who rescues you from your cell and provides you with the Estus Flask, dies from getting injured by the Asylum Demon as soon as you meet him. You can also kill him, though this could be seen as a Mercy Kill — he outright tells you he will go Hollow once he dies, and indeed will attack you if you return to the Undead Asylum later.
• Sacrificial Lion: A good number of friendly, likable NPCs will suffer tragic deaths, usually by going Hollow, depending on the circumstance.
• Sad Battle Music: Several of the boss themes, specifically Sif, the Moonlight Butterfly, Priscilla, and the final boss.
• Saved by the Church Bell: Online players may sometimes hear a lonely church bell ring in a certain part of the world. This means that another person has rung said bell. Since the bell is actually one of the early game objectives that require fighting a particularly powerful boss, and is named The Bell of Awakening, hearing one actually gives a powerful sense of hope, as someone has achieved that particular objective, so you can too!
• Saving the World: The end goal of the game is supposedly to save Lordran by becoming Lord Gwyn's successor. The actual way the world is "saved" varies; either the player is sacrificed to reignite the First Flame or they let it go out to start a new era.
• Scenery Gorn:
  • Blighttown is a decrepit pit of decay and death; the upper part of it is a shantytown mostly made of poles and lashings, like a crazed treehouse project. The lower area is a nasty, poisonous swamp-cesspit in the bowels of the city. If you take the time to look around, though, you can even see the city high above the chasm you're in, and vice versa.
  • New Londo Ruins, after you've drained it, is wet and slick everywhere with mountains of bodies lying everywhere.
• Scaled Up: Players who join the Path of the Dragon can eventually transform themselves into an anthropomorphic dragon, complete with a Breath Weapon and an insane bonus to unarmed damage, at the cost of not having any poise.
• Scenery Porn:
  • Like Demon's Souls, the game features beautifully◊ rendered◊ dark fantasy areas with atmosphere to (literally) die for.
  • There are many locations in the game that simply look gorgeous, such as the city of Anor Londo bathing in the evening sun or the massive underground Ash Lake, stretching as far as the eye can see. The best part? Most of what you see isn't for show. Upon entering the Undead Burg, you may not realize that, yes, you can climb up that tower and make it to the top of that huge arching bridge and the ruins it connects to on either side. You can even see the arching bridge as far down as the Valley of Drakes, and conversely, you can see the bridge in the Valley of Drakes from the Darkroot Basin.
  • You can even see the Duke's Archives from the Undead Burg in what seems like a simple decorative skybox. Think again; you'll be visiting it later in the game.
• Sealed Evil in a Can:
  • The Darkwraiths sealed within the flooded areas of the New Londo Ruins and the Four Kings sealed within the Abyss.
  • Manus, the Father of the Abyss, was sealed away until the people of Oolacile disturbed his grave.
• Secret Police: The Blade of the Darkmoon covenant, who are dedicated to hunting players who have sinned according to the Book of the Guilty.
• Sequel Escalation: Of Demon's Souls. More weapons, more armor, more areas, more bosses.
• Sequence Breaking: Has its own page.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook:
  • The most efficient way to defeat the Bounding Demons in Lost Izalith is to lure groups of them in to attack you, an action that under normal circumstances would be ill-advised, because unlike most enemies they are capable of damaging each other with their attacks.
  • This is also an efficient way of killing the first Black Knight in Undead Burg.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: Marvelous Chester, who wears a very well-made long coat and top hat. The player can obtain this armor by killing him.
• Shield-Bearing Mook: The Sentinels/Royal Sentinels in Anor Londo. They are completely invincible from the front thanks to their massive shields. Other enemies have shields, but they aren't as difficult or invulnerable as these guys.
• Shifting Sand Land: While the heat has mostly died out, the Kiln of the First Flame is a desert made of ash and cinder.
• Shining City: Anor Londo was once this, as the golden home of the gods. Now it is a lost city only accessible through the top of Sen's Fortress.
• Shoot the Dog: Happened to New Londo in the past, when it was flooded with most of its citizens still inside to stop the Darkwraiths. When you drain the water you can find huge piles of dead bodies in the lower parts of the city, along with some very-much-still-alive Darkwraiths.
• Shop Fodder: The three types of coin items can't be used, but feeding them to Frampt nets you a decent amount of souls.
• Shout-Out:
  • There are numerous nods to Berserk:
    • The plot is set off by a mysterious brand which curses the protagonist to fight demons and other monsters.
    • The Darkwraith Covenant's icon looks like a Behelit.
    • Rickert of Vinheim is probably a reference to the namesake character from Berserk, as is his profession as a blacksmith.
    • The cover of the PC version◊ shows Knight Artorias in Guts' typical pose from the manga◊. The armor they have is also suspiciously similar. Not only that, when you actually fight Artorias, his fighting style is similar to a Full-On Berserker Guts, right up to his left arm being dead weight.
    • The Wheel Skeletons are probably based on these monsters◊.
    • The Taurus Demons look like Zodd.
    • One of the summonable phantoms, Witch Beatrice, looks like an adult version of Schierke (and unused content for the game includes a child model for her that resembles Schierke even more).
    • Dark Sun Gwyndolin has been compared◊ to Griffith, an androgynous white-haired lord with a connection to a dark sun/eclipse.
    • Broken Straight Swords are broken in the same way as the blade Guts used during the Eclipse.
  • There's an armor set out there which can make you look like Elminster.
  • One of the scripted black phantom invaders you'll encounter in the game is called Paladin Leeroy.
  • One of the recurring NPCs that can be summoned is named Witch Beatrice. Bonus points for being a summon for the Moonlight Butterfly.
  • The Silver Knights in Anor Londo use their bows to fire javelins, reminiscent of the swords fired by Archer.
  • Oswald may be a reference to the corrupt Pardoner from The Canterbury Tales, who, like Oswald, pardons people of their sins for a high price. Additionally, he is a masked, stylishly black-clad pardoner, and has a weapon called Velka's Rapier that has a completely unique strong attack in its moveset that involves slashing a "V" into the air. Zorro he isn't, but he's certainly evocative of him.
  • Alvina of the Darkroot Wood is a dead ringer for the Cheshire Cat.
  • A small, frail leader like Gwyndolin hiding behind an illusion of the giantess Princess Gwynevere? Very much a man behind the curtain situation.
  • Upon dying, a person is at risk of completely losing their humanity and turning into a horrific creature called a Hollow.
  • After escaping the Undead Asylum, a large raven takes you under its wing to the Raven's Nest.
  • Ornstein and his Lion motif might be a reference of the famous American composer Leo Ornstein.
  • Translated text from the Design Works artbook reveals a couple of Harry Potter references: the rotating stairs in the Duke's Archive were inspired by the moving staircases in Hogwarts and Sieglinde is apparently is supposed to resemble Hermione underneath that onion-shaped helmet.
  • The NPC Summon Black Iron Tarkus may be a reference to the minor character from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Tarkus. Additionally, Smough and Ornstein are probably the expies of black knights Tarkus (the big one) and Bruford (the small and agile one), including the disrespectful treatment of the latter's death by the former, and it has been directly stated that the Armor of Thorns is a reference to the 77 Rings challenge.
  • The story of Artorias of the Abyss involves the player rescuing a princess at the behest of a sentient mushroom.
  • The Silver Knight Armor, with its white half-cape, worn without a helmet combo'd with a suitable BFS, makes a female Chosen Undead look like they walked right out of Claymore. There's even a customization option to give the player character the Claymores' trademark silver hair and eyes.
  • One of the invader NPCs is Jeremiah, a king in exile. His armor is conspicuously yellow, and includes wrappings.
  • Pinwheel's Theme includes a few notes that sound like they belong to another mask-themed villain.
  • The Chaos Eaters in Lost Izalith look suspiciously like the Yithians from H. P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time. They also somewhat resemble Like Likes from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and just like them, they can swallow you and damage your equipment.
  • The name of Anor Londo might be one to The Lord of the Rings, as "anor" is the elven word for "sun" and Anor Londo is the home of Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight and his family. Thus, "Anor Londo" could mean "City of the Sun".
  • The passageway to Anor Londo is opened by ringing two bells. Making them Londo Bells.
    • Not to mention one of the bosses is known as the Moonlight Butterfly.
  • The cragspiders in Blighttown are named after an enemy from the Glorantha setting, while Quelaag is nearly identical to Glorantha's version of the monster.
  • Solaire and his signature "Praise the Sun" pose seem to be a homage to Taro Okamoto's "Tower of the Sun", a designer building located in Osaka.
  • The Balder Knights have dark grey skin and silver armor, calling to mind the Shin Megami Tensei series' depiction of the Norse god Baldr.
• Sorting Algorithm of Threatening Geography:
  • Barring Sequence Breaking, early areas includes a forest, a town, and a church which are overrun by undead but mundane in-of themselves. Mid-game, the locales turn more hostile, including Blighttown and Sen's Fortress. Late-game areas are even more threatening and/or far more esoteric, including The Grim Reaper's crypt, a cave made entirely of crystal shards, and finally a giant kiln surrounded by a wasteland of ashes.
  • Artorias of the Abyss has its own sequence of escalating geography: It starts in a forest with a few ruins. Then you find a coliseum and on the other side is a ruined city. Through the city you find a path to an underground mine filled with physical manifestations of darkness.
• Sibling Yin-Yang:
  • Queen of Sunlight Gwynevere and the Darkmoon God Gwyndolin.
  • Of the two known Primordial Serpents, Kingseeker Frampt, who serves Gwyndolin's plot to artificially extend the Fire, and Darkseeker Kaathe, who serves the Dark and its desire to extinguish the Flame.
• Silence Is Golden: There's very little dialogue at all throughout the game, and what exposition there is is kept short and ambiguous, or scattered through other characters who, thanks to the nature of time in Lordran, only appear every so often. There's also almost no music except for in boss fights and certain special areas such as Firelink Shrine, allowing the game's desolate atmosphere to shine.
• Sinister Minister: Oswald of Carim, a pardoner, qualifies, in spite of being more morally ambiguous and ominous than anything else. Then there's Petrus, a cleric who turns out to be a murderous liar.
• Sinister Scythe: The Great Scythe and Crossbreed Priscilla's Lifehunt Scythe are these, though they're in the same weapon class as halberds and other polearms^note (Later games would give them their own "Reaper" weapon class). There is also a weapon simply called a "Scythe," but its closed blade makes it look like a Bardiche, instead.
• Skippable Boss: In normal play, eight of the twenty-six bosses are completely optional, four of them being optional in the main game and the other four being part of the Artorias of the Abyss content. With Sequence Breaking that number goes higher as many bosses can be bypassed using the Master Key or the Chaos Servants' shortcut to Lost Izalith, and running through the Demon Ruins' lava with high fire resistance skips Ceaseless Discharge. With these sequence breaks, only twelve of the bosses are mandatory in a glitchless run: The Asylum Demon, Belfry Gargoyles, Chaos Witch Quelaag, The Iron Golem, Ornstein and Smough, Seath the Scaleless, Pinwheel, Gravelord Nito, Great Grey Wolf Sif, The Four Kings, The Bed of Chaos, and Gwyn himself.
• Skull for a Head: The Capra Demons, all of whom have a completely bony goat/cow head meshed with an otherwise fleshy body. The Darkwraith armor set gives the appearance of this.
• Slasher Smile: Marvelous Chester has a wide grin at all times, and wearing his top hat forces the player to grin as well.
• Sleepyhead:
  • Kingseeker Frampt occasionally lapses into a very deep sleep, which can be a bit irritating if you want to feed him items. Give him a good smack (but only one!) and he'll wake up.
  • Siegmeyer who is often found asleep, sometimes standing up, and, on one occasion, while standing in the middle of a poison swamp.
• Sliding Scale of Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • When Oscar dies, you actually get a piddling amount of souls, mirroring how you lose your souls if you die. Oddly, these still automatically fly into you even though Oscar stabs himself, though this is consistent with how you get enemy souls even if they fall to their deaths.
  • If you meet Quelana of Izalith in the swamps of Blighttown and either use her ability to ascend your Pyromancy Flame beyond +15 or buy any of her unique Pyromancies, the next time you speak to Laurentius, he asks in wonder where you found such power. If you tell him, he departs from Firelink Shrine in search of Quelana himself but fails to find her, and if you return to Blighttown yourself, you'll find him gone hollow and have to put him down. This is justified as, despite being the starting Pyromancy trainer and capable of upgrading your Pyromancy Flame as far as the normal maximum of +15, Laurentius himself only has a +8 Flame, and Quelana is apparently invisible to anyone who doesn't have at least a +10 Flame. The same will occur if you show him any Chaos Pyromancies; in this case, he most likely fails to find the very well-hidden Chaos Servant covenant.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The Painted World of Ariamis takes place in a snowy landscape; the only other snow in the game is at the end of the Northern Undead Asylum. The Crystal Caves looks icy but is moreso a Crystal Landscape.
• Smash Mook:
  • The Infested Barbarians in Blighttown, who use either giant clubs or giant boulders to attack you.
  • Sentinels and Royal Sentinels in Anor Londo, who use oversized halberds and shields to mash the player into the ground.
• Smug Snake:
  • Petrus, who seeks to betray his mistress for the crime of "not being worthy" of the family name, and smugly attempts to kill the player, should they know the truth about their "mission".
  • Lautrec, a sadistic bandit-knight who mockingly laments the player and other victims coming to him to be slaughtered.
  • Oswald, a sanctimonious creep who talks down to the player.
  • Patches, an overconfident, Card-Carrying Villain thief who brags to the player about how they'll strip all the goods off of their corpse... of course, he quickly changes his tune when the player survives both of his betrayal attempts.
• Solemn Ending Theme: The credits theme "Nameless Song".
• Soul-Powered Engine: The First Flame/Flame of Disparity. When the Flame was dying at least one thousand years ago, Gwyn sacrificed himself and became the Flame's fuel, and have been burning alive (or possibly undead) ever since. If the player chooses the Link the Fire ending, they replace Gwyn as its new fuel source.
• Spanner in the Works: The player can become this towards Gwyndolin by a series of events by either attacking Gwynevere and/or finding Kaathe, a primordial serpent who serves the Dark, and leads the player into extinguishing the Flame for the Dark's own machinations.
• Special Ability Shield:
  • The Crystal Ring Shield shoots a ring magic attack after a Shield Bash.
  • The Sanctum replenishes the wielder's health even when left on the back.
• Spikes of Doom:
  • One of the more sadistic traps in Sen's Fortress involves an elevator that you ride up. If you stay on it after the first stop, it continues going up right into a spiked ceiling. If you look closely, the elevator is caked with blood. If for whatever reason you end up taking it back down, make sure it hits the ceiling first.
  • The various statues in the Catacombs trigger vicious spikes to jab the player as they pass through.
• Spikes of Villainy: Knight Kirk, a notorious Darkwraith (actually a Chaos Servant) who can invade and attack you up to three times, wears the Armor of Thorns, which is appropriately covered in spikes. It has the effect of damaging whatever enemies the wearer rolls into.
• Squishy Wizard:
  • Pinwheel packs some pretty powerful sorceries, but has pathetically low health and goes down quick against almost every weapon in the game.
  • The Dusk Crown Ring allows you to cast extra spells, but halves your health.
• Stationary Enemy: The Parasitic Wall Hugger, a giant Unique Enemy in Blighttown. As the name implies, it is affixed to a wall (feeding on the runoff from the Depths) and doesn't move, only attacking you with its claws when you enter melee range.
• Status Effect-Powered Ability: You can only inflict any sort of damage on ghost-type enemies if you are Cursed (majorly debilitating debuff that halves your maximum Hit Points). Luckily, there is a consumable item that imitates the effects of a Curse minus the HP debuff for a short time.
• Stealth Pun: Blighttown is a literal and figurative slog, filled with slowing muck, few bonfires through a giant complex, and hard-hitting enemies mixed with snipers who deal Toxin damage that drains health at a far faster rate than Poison.
• Surplus Damage Bonus: A relatively little-known mechanic, any single hit dealing at least 150% of an enemy's maximum health's worth of damage will provide a 20% bonus to the souls gained from the kill.
• Swamps Are Evil: The swamp section of Blighttown, an obvious callback to Demon's Souls' Valley of Defilement.
• Systematic Villain Takedown: In the opening of the game, the player learns of the four people with the Lord Souls, Gwyn, The Witch of Izalith, Gravelord Nito and the Furtive Pygmy. In the second half of the game, the player has to collect the Lord Souls from Nito and the witch, and kill Gwyn in the Kiln of the First Flame. The Furtive Pygmy plays no role in this story, aside from the implication he is your ancestor.
• Taken for Granite: In the Depths, Great Hollow, and during both encounters with Seath, you're likely to find a bunch of statues that used to be people, usually courtesy of the nearby frog-like basilisks breathing gray gas that inflict Curse if you stay in it too long. These statues are actually other players who got cursed. In an unusual variation on the trope, though, people turned to stone also sprout a bunch of leaf-shaped rocky spikes from their bodies, as if they were growing granite crystals from the inside out.
• Take Up My Sword: Oscar of Astora asks you to take up his task to ring the Bell of Awakening (he doesn't mention that there are two) at the beginning of the game.
• Teleport Spam: Gwyndolin and Pinwheel, two magic-based bosses that are capable of warping to evade the player.
• Temple of Doom: Sen's Fortress. While it isn't in a jungle or desert, it's an ancient fortress built as a testing ground for undead who want to succeed Lord Gwyn. It's one of the most dangerous places in the game and packed full of booby traps.
• Thematic Theme Tune: Bartholomew and All Saints' Day by The Silent Comedy in various trailers. In the latter, the only sung lyrics increase in desperation as the trailer goes on.
  "One day, will this be over?"
• Theme Naming:
  • Gwyn, the Lord of Sunlight, has children named Gwynevere and Gwyndolin.
  • The two Daughters of Chaos whose names are known start with "Quel".
• The Theocracy: The nation of Thorolund, a religious region where the game's miracle teachers originate from.
• A Thicket of Spears: The Phalanx found in the Painted World of Ariamis is a Mini-Boss and an obvious Shout-Out to Demon's Souls, as it consists of a mass of formless blobs each of whom points a very long spear at you the moment they see you.
• Thin Chin of Sin: Marvelous Chester from Artorias of the Abyss is a mysterious merchant in the Royal Wood who sports a Joker-like pointy chin and mad grin. As you descend in to the ruins of Oolacile, he will ambush you as a Dark Spirit and try to kill you.
• Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: If you free Big Hat Logan he gets access to The Duke's Archives, the library of the Mad Scientist and grandfather of sorcery dragon Seath the Scaleless. Logan will develop and sell powerful crystal versions of sorceries, and after the player has bought them all and killed Seath the Scaleless he gets completely lost in the knowledge and doesn't even recognize the player. After this, he'll disappear from his usual spot and show up nearly naked and completely insane in the room Seath is first fought in. Upon killing him, it's revealed he went so far as to try (and partially fail) to replicate Seath's curse-inducing crystal breath.
• Throwing Down the Gauntlet:
  • The Gravelord Servant covenant lets you challenge a random player to a battle by leaving a symbol in their world that spawns powerful, rampaging enemies. If they find it, they can invade your world and return the favor.
  • The Red Sign Soapstone is designed for this. It has infinite uses and its only purpose is to leave a sign on the ground others can touch if they wish to challenge you.
• Throwing Your Shield Always Works The Crystal Ring Shield, crafted using The Soul of the Moonlight Butterfly and any +10 shield. When used as a weapon, rather than the usual parry, it will actually throw rings of light at the target, at the cost of durability.
• Timey-Wimey Ball:
  • Time travel makes no sense and comes across as just a throwaway thing for gameplay purposes, until you start finding out about the specific summons and avenging the Fire Keeper. It's still pretty inconsistent.
  • The flow of time in Lordran is warped, allowing individuals—both NPCs and other players—from the past and alternate dimensions to be summoned or invade as phantoms.
• Tin Tyrant: The Iron Golem, a towering metal construct who fights with an axe. The Black Knights and Silver Knights are fully armored enemies who appear as Elite Mooks in various levels.
• Title Drop: Kaathe tells you about the Dark Soul if you bring him the Lordvessel. It was the Lord Soul the Furtive Pygmy possessed and passed the pieces of down to his descendants—that is all of humanity. So "Dark Souls" actually means "Human Souls".
• Token Evil Teammate: Lautrec is rude at best and murderous at worst, but he's summonable for two of the game's bosses, tying with Witch Beatrice for second-most NPC summons (Solaire gets more than either of them).
• Tongue Trauma: Anastacia of Astora had her tongue cut out so she could never say any god's name in vain. This is apparently common practice in Astora.
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • The Ring of Sacrifice and Rare Ring of Sacrifice will prevent you from losing your souls and humanity if equipped at the time of death. The latter also undoes curses if that is what killed you. The catch is that they break once you're revived and only a finite amount can be gained in each playthrough. Since the most likely places you can die also mean dying would be frequent, the rings have little purpose (except the first time you fight Seath, where dying is the only way to progress).
  • The Ring of Favor and Protection increases your health, stamina and carrying capacity, but there are only two (with one being very well hidden) in each game run and it cannot be removed once equipped or it's lost.
  • Crystal Weapons are exceptionally powerful and durable. However, you they can't be repaired by any means (other than upgrading them, which has a limit) and are useless once they break, making them only worth using if you have no other option.
  • The Divine Blessing, a potion that fully restores your HP and cures all status effects (except for curse, unfortunately). It's also quite hard to get and only available in a very limited number per playthrough, so you better not waste it.
  • Black Firebombs can be thrown for high fire damage with a splash effect, and are handy for cheesing a lot of deadly early enemies or bosses, but you can only find five early in the game plus ten if you choose them as a starting gift. By the time they can be bought from the Crestfallen Merchant, standard attacks have caught up to them in damage, and since they don't scale they're mostly useless later on aside from range.
  • Gold Pine Resin is the strongest of the three resin buff items, since lightning damage is the weakness of many bosses, and unlike lightning-ascended weapons the buff doesn't override stat scaling. Unlike the infinite Rotten and Charcoal resin, you can only get six Gold Pine Resins in the early game (three from a chest in Undead Burg and three from Domhnall), so they're in short supply until you can get deep into Darkroot Garden or the Great Hollow to farm them off of Mushroom People.
  • The DLC adds Elizabeth's Mushrooms to this list. They give you incredibly powerful Regenerating Health for 30 seconds, but there are only four of them in the entire game, and three are a reward for beating the DLC.
  • The game discourages this habit with regard to normal healing items. You only have one, your Estus Flask, and it always tops off whenever you reach a bonfire. Therefore, if your life is in danger, chug away!
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • The Player Character, who starts as nothing more than an Undead prisoner, quickly climbs their way to the top after countless trials and becomes able to fight powerful beings such as the Lords introduced in the prologue.
  • Each subsequent iteration of New Game Plus (up until +7) increases NPC health and damage potential, making enemies and bosses much harder to fight. The same also applies to allied and neutral NPCs, which can lead to shenanigans such as Leeroy oneshotting the 400~ HP Bonewheel Skeletons with over 2500 damage.
• Took a Shortcut: Pops up from time to time, primarily with Siegmeyer, who manages to easily get to the middle of Sen's Fortress, inside the palace of Anor Londo, and deep into Lost Izalith before the player arrives despite how bumbling he tends to be onscreen.
• Town with a Dark Secret:
  • New Londo and Oolacile feature Sealed Evil in a Can in the form of the Abyss; the former was flooded to prevent the Abyss and its Darkwraiths from conquering more, while Oolacile demonstrates what happens when the can gets unsealed (put simply, Dusk is the only sign that it ever existed in modern day).
  • Anor Londo can be revealed as a darkened shell of its former self, with a Decoy Leader illusion set there to make it look alive and Gwyndolin using his Secret Police to attack anyone who discovers otherwise.
• Tragic Monster:
  • The Witch of Izalith and her children became demons with various deformities as a result of their failed attempt to relight the First Flame.
  • The Pisaca in the Duke's Archives were all humans who had been subjected to Seath's experiments after his Channelers abducted them.
  • At the end of the game, you'll find that Gwyn himself is one, having gone mad from burning alive for the past thousand years.
• Trailers Always Lie: The "Prepare to Die" trailer makes it look like the giant crow is one of the game's bosses with an alarming slow-mo shot of it reaching out for the Chosen Undead, but in fact it's actually completely peaceful and helpful.
• Tree Trunk Tour: The Great Hollow Bonus Dungeon, which is set inside a colossal Archtree and populated by basilisks and other nasty monsters.
• Tsundere: Quelana, who is fond of calling the player a fool, and Rhea of Thorolund, who initially doesn't have the time of day for them. They both warm up as The Protagonist progresses through their quests.
• Turns Red: Ornstein and Smough do this, as the only bosses with a definite second phase. When one dies, the other gains some of his abilities and becomes significantly more difficult (and also heals up to full health).
• Underground Monkey: The Asylum Demon is rehashed into the Stray Demon and the Demon Firesage. While the later two have a slightly different moveset, they all use the same model and fighting style. They're also all low in the area of fire resistance, despite the last one appearing to be covered in flames.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change:
  • The Moonlight Butterfly and Dark Sun Gwyndolin serve as Bullet Hell-esque bosses, with their fights focusing on dodging projectiles and spells until you can reach them and attack. The latter is even fought in a very long vertical corridor.
  • One of the biggest complaints about the Bed of Chaos is that it's more like a platforming challenge than a fight, in a game with rough jumping controls and easy knockback.
• The Unfought: The Furtive Pygmy, who never shows up or is even properly mentioned outside of the intro, unless you buy the speculation that he became Manus, Father of the Abyss.
• The Undead: Almost everyone you meet is undead, whether or not they look or act like it. This makes sense within the setting, as those who bear the Darksign stay warm and fleshy for a while before they turn into mindless ghouls.
• Undead Child: The baby skeletons in the Tomb of the Giants, tiny skeletons that infinitely spawn.
• Underground Level: The Catacombs and the Tomb of the Giants take place in a cavern that goes deep under the Firelink Shrine graveyard. Once you reach the Tomb of the Giants, there's almost no light left from above.
• The Unreveal: The identity of Gwyn's first born (revealed to be the Nameless King in Dark Souls 3), the location of the Pygmy (possibly warped into Manus), and what happens after the First Flame dies.
• Upgrade Artifact: Unlike Miracles and Sorcery, the strength of Pyromancy is entirely dependent on the reinforcement of the user's Pyromancy Flame, not their stats.
  • Some Rings also qualify, while others are either an Amplifier Artifact or the occasional Lethal Joke Item.
• Urban Segregation:
  • Compare the opulence of Anor Londo with the tight, cramped streets of the Undead Burg. Granted, the Undead Burg has been abandoned as a city for a long time but the difference in luxury enjoyed by the gods compared to their subjects was extremely vast.
  • Even among the lower stata of undead society, there is a great deal of disparity. From the Undead Burg, you descend to dilapidated slums housing a criminal underclass, and from there to the Depths where those banished from the Undead Burg dwell. And then it's on to Blighttown where even the cursed occupants of the Depths would fear to tread.
• Useless Useful Spell: A lot of the Sorceries, Miracles and Pyromancies are interesting, but ultimately worthless due to a variety of flaws.
  • Undead Rapport is a Pyromancy that turns undead enemies to your side for a while. Unfortunately it has to be cast from such close range that you could spit in their face and it has a slow cast time, so it's almost impossible to actually use without being hit.
  • Acid Surge projects a cloud of acid fog that degrades the equipment of anyone caught within it. Unfortunately, this is completely worthless in PvE, and even in PvP the effect is so miniscule (it only does 8 points of equipment damage, when most equipment has between 200 and 400 durability on average) that it'll basically never do anything. It actually works effectively against opponents using crystal katanas (katanas have low durability to start with, and converting them to crystal reduces this further to 10% of normal in exchange for monumental damage), but there's no way of knowing whether that opponent's katana is crystal or not just by looking at it.
  • The Poison Cloud Pyromancy is more useful than Acid Surge, but even in PvP poison just isn't that effective, not to mention the fact that even trying to cast it can make you very vulnerable if your opponent just charges through the cloud and hacks you down. Toxic Cloud is marginally more effective, but still not very popular, especially as it's not hard to avoid yet only comes with a single cast.
  • The Iron Flesh Pyromancy used to be broken until the developers nerfed it savagely hard. Now while it's active you move as if you're encumbered (over 100% encumberance level), meaning you plod around like a statue and cannot backstep or roll at all. While it still gives your body automatic deflection, it doesn't boost your actual defense enough to make up for how easily opponents (in PvE or PvP) will run rings around you. You can't cancel it until it wears off on its own, either.
  • A lot of Sorceries and Miracles replicate the effects of fairly common or easy to find items (e.g, Remedy heals Poison, Toxic and Bleed buildup, Homeward warps you back to your last bonfire just like a Homeward Bone, Hush silences your footsteps like the Slumbering Dragoncrest Ring). Since one of the biggest restrictions on magic use is the number of slots you have available to equip spells in, these are generally extremely difficult to justify using.
  • The Resist Curse sorcery. Contrary to its name, it doesn't grant you Curse resistance (which might be slightly useful), nor does it actually cure Curse once it's been inflicted on you (which kills you instantly then locks you in Hollow form with 50% of your health reduced until you cure it), but instead it removes the buildup of Curse you've accumulated before it becomes fatal. Since status condition buildup fades over time as long as you're not receiving more of it, the only way this would be any use is if you stop to cast it while you're actually in a fight against a Curse-causing opponent. (like Seath the Scaleless or a pack of Basilisks). And just to add insult to injury, it only comes with four charges.
• Vader Breath: The Titanite Demons make this sound, in spite of the fact that they don't have faces.
• Vampiric Draining: The Dark Hand, which is really the awakened power of the Dark Soul, allows undead to steal the humanity from others in a sort of vampiric kiss.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Kiln of the First Flame, a massive ash desert that doesn't seem to make physical sense in the world (it has an open sky despite being hundreds of feet underground). The whole affair is made out of melted stone that, if you pay attention to the direction of the melting, was made by a massive fire tornado and provides a not-so-subtle hint about what the player is about to do if they Link the Fire.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • You can help other players in their games by allowing your phantom to be summoned.
  • You can ease the suffering of the Daughter of Chaos by offering them Humanity.
  • You can avenge a Firekeeper who had been murdered, and even restore her to life, provided you're willing to part with a Firekeeper Soul.
  • During Artorias of the Abyss, you are able to save a wolf cub, the young version of Great Gray Wolf Sif, in the Chasm of the Abyss near the end of the story, and will be repaid with a summon for the fight with Manus. If you do this before fighting Sif, a complete redo of his introduction cinematic plays instead of the original, to show that, thanks to Artorias of the Abyss happening in the past, Sif remembers who you are: the old undead friend who once saved his life. He's still honor-bound to guard Artorias's grave, regardless of whoever trespass into it.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Killing Hawkeye Gough. The guy helps you take out a boss and is nothing but kind to you, yet you can kill him for absolutely no reason. The same applies to many other friendly characters as well.
• Video Game Perversity Potential: One of the more common messages outside Gwynevere's chamber is "Amazing Chest Ahead".
• Villain Team-Up: Ornstein and Smough certainly aren't big fans of each other (and Smough will happily smash Ornstein if he falls first), but they're more than happy to work together to kick your ass.
• The Voiceless: Anastacia of Astora, the Fire Keeper of Firelink Shrine cannot speak because she had her tongue removed. She gets better if revived after Lautrec kills her, though she considers her restored ability to speak sinful.
• Void Between the Worlds: The Abyss is an empty void of darkness that shows up in a few places, and can only be traversed while wearing the Covenant of Artorias ring.
• Wake-Up Call Boss:
  • The Bell Gargoyles that stand between you and the first Bell of Awakening. The Asylum Demon is a Warm-Up Boss (by Dark Souls standards) and the Taurus Demon is the same thing in a more precarious arena, but the Gargoyles are where the game stops going easy on you. They can fly, breathe fire over a wide area, have a number of quite fast attacks that can take an incautious player off guard (unlike the slow and telegraphed swings of the two demon bosses) and, most significantly, you have to juggle fighting two of them at once. As the saying goes, the true Dark Souls begins here.
  • If you manage to overcome the Gargoyles by summoning help (summoning Solaire makes them much easier, summoning Solaire and Lautrec trivialises them) then the next candidate is the Capra Demon (and his two dogs), who requires you to master your dodging reflexes at a time where your equipment is not at an optimized state, requires precise awareness of your cramped surroundings and, unlike the Gargoyles, has no naturally occurring NPC summons available to help you.
• Walking Spoiler: Darkstalker Kaathe's mere existence is a spoiler for the alternate ending of the game.
• Warm-Up Boss: The Asylum Demon, being the boss of the tutorial dungeon and an Early-Bird Boss if you don't choose to flee from it and collect your equipment.
• Warp Whistle: Obtaining the Lordvessel allows players to warp between the major bonfires.
• Was Once a Man: Quite a few enemies. Hollows, the Pisaca in the Duke's Archives, and the children of the Witch of Izalith were all either humans or gods before being transformed into monsters by various calamities.
• Weaksauce Weakness:
  • You can kill the Hellkite Dragon that guards the bridge in Undead Burg by climbing a nearby tower and shooting its wings with arrows. Or rather, one arrow, which causes it to fall out-of-bounds. The only difficulty in regards to that is the Black Knight that lies in wait on top of the tower. This only applies to the console version if it hasn't been patched at all.
  • Ceaseless Discharge in the Demon Ruins can be killed very easily by running back to the fog gate and waiting for the boss to slip and catch his hand on a cliff. Whacking it a few times causes him to fall down and lose all of his health instantly.
  • Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, the Final Boss, is cripplingly weak to parrying. He can be done in by three ripostes if you are built right and have any skill with the parrying function.
• We Have Reserves: Hawkeye Gough indicates that this was how Gwyn's knights defeated the Everlasting Dragons. According to him, they lost knights at a ratio of roughly sixty to each slain dragon.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Gwyndolin, by virtue of his father being dead and him carrying out his legacy. We don't know enough about their lives together when he was alive, but the fact that he was raised as a girl suggests it wasn't that great.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Darkwraiths turn out to be this. They want to be strong enough to bring about the Age of Dark, which is what Kaathe says is Humanity's prophecised Golden Age (whether or not this is true is up to the player).
• Wham Episode: Meeting Darkseeker Kaathe is this for the main game, revealing the existence of the Dark Soul and that Kingseeker Frampt and the gods are merely using you to futilely prolong the Age of Fire. Conversely, the entire Artorias of the Abyss DLC is this as well, showing the consequences of ushering in the Age of Man and allowing the Abyss to spread, and revealing that even Darkseeker Kaathe is hiding things from you.
• Wham Line: Sieglinde drops one when she visits you in Firelink Shrine for the last time.
  "My father? He went on his final adventure. Don't worry, that's just the way he is. Undead or no. Sort of reassuring, really. If he goes Hollow, I'll just have to kill him again."
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • When you attack Priscilla the half-dragon, she calls you out on such offensive dickery. This is also something of the standard response to you attacking non-offensive NPCs.
    Why?
  • Eingyi will call you a monster and attack you if you kill Quelaag's sister.
  • After dealing enough damage to Sif, he'll start to limp, attack slower, and stumble/ Unlike most cruel actions, doing this is compulsory to complete the game.
  • Killing Elizabeth, the immobile, grandmotherly, harmless mushroom, leaves her screaming in confusion.
• When Trees Attack: The Demonic Foliage that patrol Darkroot Garden, which appear to be grassy ents that attack by whipping with their vine-arms.
• The Wild Hunt: The Forest Hunter covenant. A group of bandits lead by the Cheshire Cat-like Alvina, they indirectly guard Sir Artorias' grave with the rest of the forest. Joining up with them allows you to invade other players' worlds and loot their corpses.
• Witch Hunt: The Undead in the Undead Asylum were victims of this, rounded up and imprisoned to await the end of the world. An item description also mentions a band of clerics who hunt Undead.
• Wizarding School: The Dragon College of Vinheim. According to lore, the higher ups in the college effectively run the nation/city state, whatever it is.
• Wolf Pack Boss: The Four Kings. who successively spawn as time passes and can swarm you if you're too slow.
• Worf Had the Flu:
  • Knight Artorias' limp left arm suggests that it's broken and not strong enough to wield his signature Greatshield (which he had given to Sif at that point) during your fight with him. Considering he handily beats most players with that handicap, he would be unthinkably powerful if he had both hands intact, untainted by the Dark, with both his Greatsword and Greatshield at his arsenal.
  • All the Lord Soul bosses are ancient beings who have deteriorated in some way: Seath's gone blind and mad, Nito's been having his power siphoned by Pinwheel, the Witch of Izalith (as the Bed of Chaos) is immobile and barely sentient, the Four Kings have been partially consumed by the Abyss, and Gwyn himself has gone Hollow and no longer possesses his Lord Soul. If any of them were in better condition, they'd be unbeatable
• The World Is Just Awesome:
  • Despite being a Crapsack World, this pops up from time to time. Standing atop the Undead Parish, having just rung the first Bell of Awakening, provides players with an absolutely breath taking view of the world around them, where they can see all of where they've traveled, and some of what is to come.
  • The cutscene that plays when players first arrive at Anor Londo gives a sweeping view of the city.
• World Tree: The Great Hollow is a variation of this, being just one among an entire forest of world trees. The level is just one long descent down the inside of an enormous tree. The Ash Lake shows that there are hundreds of these under the world, implying the entire world is supported by the branches of the archtrees.
• Wretched Hive: What the Female Undead Merchant thinks of Lower Undead Burg. It is filled with thieves as she said, indicating that this was true at one point in the past, but they've gone hollow since then.
• Wutai: The "Far East" is implied to be this. The player never visits it, but there are a few characters from there who appear to be a samurai and a ninja, as part of the Forest Hunters.
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: Several characters speak like this, in particular Gwynevere and Oswald of Carim. The Giant Blacksmith combines it with Hulk Speak. Averted with Elizabeth the mushroom (funnily enough), whose largely correct grammar comes as a bit of a surprise after all the "thouest" and "whencefore"-ing.
• You All Meet in a Cell: Your character starts the game in the Undead Asylum, locked up until Oscar throws them a dead body with a key attached.
• You Already Changed the Past: To add to the general weirdness of time travel in the game, the Artorias of the Abyss content takes place in the past of Oolacile via time travel, during the time in the lore when Artorias stood against the Abyss in that region. Via this, you kill Artorias in the past after he was defeated by Manus and consumed by the Abyss. The player is the one who actually defeats the Father of the Abyss. Your deeds were credited to Artorias, and his early demise due to his corruption was forgotten.
• You Fool!: Alvina calls you this if you attempt to kill her. Quelana uses it as a term of endearment.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
  • Lautrec does this to Anastacia of Astora, the Firelink Shrine Firekeeper. Kingseeker Frampt says this of the remaining Lord Soul owners.
  • The player can benefit greatly from this trope, as many NPCs drop useful items if killed. Bonfire keepers are frequent victims: once the player finds other nearby bonfires, they're of more use dead.
• You No Take Candle: Snuggly/Sparkly the Crow speaks in very simple broken sentences to get across what she wants in her trades.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The intro states that the rise of the Darksign and the Undead has more or less caused the collapse of the world. What makes it even worse than a normal zombie apocalypse is that there's no real way to avoid being "infected". The Darksign apparently just appears on people and slowly causes them to go Hollow.

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"Well, now you know... And I can die with hope in my heart."