Dark Souls III Review

Dark Souls is one of those series that is completely ubiquitous if you've spent any time online in the last decade. The franchise has become famous, on a nearly mythic level. It seems like we're all at least tangentially familiar with FromSoftware's famed dark fantasy RPG series. It feels like each and every Souls game has a devout, zealous fanbase of players who play and replay the games over and over to analyze the cryptic worldbuilding or to come up with new ways to challenge themselves, such as beating the games without taking any damage or completing the games with Donkey Konga bongos. 

The embarrassing truth for me though, is that I've always been incredibly intimidated by these games. The extreme difficulty and oppressive world design has always stressed me out, even from afar. I could just tell that I wouldn't enjoy the games. Nevertheless, I'd still attempt some of them here and there. I sunk a few hours in Bloodborne, and while I loved the gothic setting and the design of the hunter and his weapons, I found it to be stressful and terrifying. I also tried the original Lords of the Fallen and really didn't care for it. Over the years though, my interest built and built until my intrigue won out, and I decided that I need to try and discover where the fun is in the Souls series. I started with Dark Souls III, which many people regard to be the most accessible (whatever that means in this challenging genre) title in the franchise. I'm pleased to say that I've now completed Dark Souls III, and I absolutely found the fun; in fact I found a great deal of fun in my time with this game.

 

I did a great deal of research into the franchise before I settled on playing Dark Souls III, like some maddened scholar in his library, poring over ancient tomes and scrolls by candlelight, looking for arcane secrets to the universe. I wanted to be as prepared as possible to give myself a leg up and not feel quite so intimidated by the infamous difficulty and often unpleasant world design. I took to studying the bosses, the ideal character builds, weapons, armor and items to utilize in my playthrough. Then I realized that you could essentially roleplay as a member of the Belmont clan from Castlevania, and equip whips as weapons. I immediately decided to go this route, which ironically threw out a good deal of the preparation that I had done, as whips are regarded as one of the least effective weapon classes in the Souls series, and I was willingly making the game considerably harder on myself by choosing this path. Whips just aren't available as weapons in many video games, so as a Castlevania and Indiana Jones fan, I was willing to take on this extra challenge just to add the "cool" factor to my experience. I'll add that I did verify in my research that people were able to make capable, even lethal, whip-based character builds, so I knew it was possible, it would just take some additional work to get comfortable with the weapon's unique moveset.

 

 

One of the core driving factors in keeping me invested in Dark Souls III was forcing myself to actually learn the game. The difficulty of the game haunts you like a specter throughout its runtime, catching you off-guard and punishing you for being unprepared. You don't have to be afraid of this specter though, once you learn how the game is supposed to work. It takes learning the game's mechanics and how your character functions, and it also takes dying hundreds of times. But, if you have the intelligence and the patience, to watch and learn from the enemies that are getting the better of you, you'll find yourself achieving better clarity as you suddenly understand their movements and when to press your attack versus when to block or evade their strike. If you enjoy learning, this is a very satisfying element of the gameplay loop, and was constantly feeding that part of my brain that thrives off of learning a new skill, as well as giving me exercises in patience and determination. 

There are many bosses in Dark Souls III that seem impossibly difficult at first, and only upon giving yourself some "research runs," where you're not focused on killing it, but really just trying to study the boss and its moveset, do you begin to feel more confident passing through that intimidating fog wall and into the boss arena. You can watch videos and read strategy guides to give yourself an advantage, but you won't really know what it's like until you're in the actual battle; where you can physically find the boss' blind spots or get a real sense of its size or speed.

 

Image Credit: ds3builds.wordpress.com

 

Sometimes you've studied a fight a million times, and you feel familiar with your opponent, but you're just not being able to deal enough damage or sustain a boss' damage output - that's when you start treating Dark Souls like the RPG that is. You can read your opponent's every move and tell what his or her next action should be, now it's time to start exploiting that information into farming the enemy for Souls, which are the currency in this accursed world of the undead. I've heard someone explain the farming process in Dark Souls as the player getting even with the developers, since every enemy type can be so absurdly lethal. You get enough Souls and you can visit a bonfire (basically a checkpoint, but much cooler) where you can travel back to your home base and convert the Souls into experience points to start boosting your chosen stats. This is how you can transform your humble, weak husk of a man or woman into an all-powerful being capable of felling gods. 

Stats affect your max health, focus (mana) and stamina, as well as your defense, melee combat damage and magical damage output. Conventional knowledge puts forth the time-tested theory that centering your build almost entirely around Strength can make Souls games considerably easier. High Strength allows for your character to wield comically enormous weapons, and then subsequently dole out absurd damage and shatter an opponent's poise, which leaves them open for crushing blows. There are countless videos of people clad in nothing but a loincloth, equipped with a gargantuan hammer and just putting on a clinic, beating a boss senseless like they're playing as some sort of superpowered caveman demigod.

 

My character wearing Champion Gundyr's armor with my coiled whip

 

If you still can't manage to get through a particularly challenging section or boss, Dark Souls III has yet another function to assist you with the game's difficulty. While it's a somewhat bizarre, arcane mechanic, the game has co-op functionality and you can summon another player into your world to help you through various segments of the game. In my own playthrough, I stumbled and fumbled my way through sections of the early game. Then I began farming experience points to make my character stronger and sturdier, which helped me get through large chunks of the middle game, never getting stuck at any specific point for too long. Then I hit a legitimate roadblock, that I just could not get through. There's an optional boss in the late game named Champion Gundyr. I had decided to roll through all of the bosses, including all of the optional ones, so I could see the full game; whether I could skip Gundyr or not was irrelevant to me. I needed to get through him. After bashing my head against the virtual wall dozens of times, I had to put the game down. 

 

After a few days of avoiding the game, I called my best friend Nick to get his help. His character had already beaten the game, and was one of those "Strength focused, Ultra Instinct cavemen with a giant weapon" builds that I had mentioned earlier. I had actually summoned in Nick once before on a fight that I thought I couldn't handle by myself, only to see the boss literally erase him in a single attack, which was one of the funniest things I've ever witnessed. We chalked that up to a freak accident, and Nick and I rolled straight over Gundyr and it felt so satisfying watching that troublesome gladiator get absolutely blown apart by Nick's enormous greatsword. To really stick it to Gundyr, I then stole all of his armor and wore it for the rest of the game and looked awesome. 

To provide full transparency for the purpose of this review, I did get Nick's help for the rest of the game, from Champion Gundyr through the next few bosses to the conclusion. I enjoyed my time playing co-op, so I figured I'd have more fun just rolling through the rest of it cooperatively, and it gave Nick and I a reason to play something together. We're both typically too busy being dads and husbands, so it was a fun experience to spend a few hours wrapping up Dark Souls III together.

 

As I alluded to earlier in the review, the scenery and locales of the Souls franchise can be incredibly unpleasant to explore. Being a "dark fantasy" setting, you're often tasked with exploring dank, haunted dungeons, fetid swamps and gloomy, gothic castles, and Dark Souls III is no different. Sometimes these can be fun to navigate, but when combined with the difficult, ghoulish enemy types that you encounter across the course of the game, it can create a stressful atmosphere, at least until you're stronger and can withstand some damage, or easily kill enemies. I have to say that I really didn't enjoy the vast majority of the zones that you explore across the course of this game. With most of these areas, I tried to sprint through them as quickly as I could, in a desperate attempt to find another region that I actually liked. By the time I reached the end, there were only a couple of locations that I really loved. 

Lothric is a kingdom that is in active decline; with warring internal factions, a rampant plague and it has been besieged by dragons. You begin the game high atop the ramparts surrounding the kingdom, and can venture and fight your way down the walls and into the violence-filled streets. Then much later in the game, you return to Lothric and take the fight off the streets and straight to and through the grand palace, where you ultimately kill the two princes (like that Spin Doctors song) of the city.

 

 

The other location that I really enjoyed in Dark Souls III was Irithyll of the Boreal Valley. The first time you see Irithyll is after navigating through a particularly nightmarish, underground network of catacombs and when you finally ascend back out of those stuffy, dusty tunnels, you find yourself high up in the snowy mountains with the tall spires and steeples of the city looming in the distance. It's instantly awe-inspiring. The northern lights are dancing up above the city and gusts of snow flurries course through the sky. If you've ever played Final Fantasy XIV, Irithyll instantly brings to mind the gorgeous, snowy city of Ishgard, which is my favorite location in FFXIV, by the way. Once you enter Irithyll, you find a quiet, eerie city that is kept in a state of perpetual night. The city's aesthetic is romantic in a way; and you can almost imagine being dressed in a warm, cozy jacket with a hot cocoa and wandering around to take in the sights. 

The homes and various buildings and cobblestone streets look beautiful and it made me want to explore every inch of Irithyll. Spectral, undead guards and knights patrol the streets. An enormous cathedral stands high over the city, a majestic sight that conjures imagery of some cold night in a medieval European city. Irithyll is no doubt cursed though and you find that the city is the domain of a truly evil villain (the in-game boss Pontiff Sulyvhan), and those knights and guards work for the Pontiff, and they're happy to execute you where you stand. By the time I finished my time in Irithyll, I was sad to leave and I almost considered writing a World Tour article for the site, just to spend a little more time talking about it. Unfortunately, we really don't see enough of the overall city to give me enough to talk about for an entire article, so I might instead refocus that love into a World Tour piece about Ishgard, since they're visually and thematically similar locations.

 

 

There's not much more that I have to say about Dark Souls III. As with most Souls titles, understanding the story is a sort of meta-game in itself. You're required to parse all of the environmental storytelling, read all of the item descriptions and speak to every NPC that you can, just to get the loosest idea of what's happening in the game's world. There's something neat about piecing together the lore of the universe, but I don't think it would take away anything from the game to have some sort of Death Stranding-esque Corpus to serve as a massive in-game compendium and bestiary of everything you encounter, and let you access it at a bonfire to read up on lore. You can easily enjoy the game without knowing what's going on or why you're doing anything, but taking the time to learn the history of the world can definitely improve your experience.

 

 

If you're curious about Souls games but have always been intimidated by them, like I was, I can definitely recommend Dark Souls III as a good starting point. It is a genuinely difficult game, but with a lot of patience and learning, and some likely necessary experience farming, you shouldn't have too much trouble. I definitely can recommend co-op if you have a friend to play with too, though you might feel like you're robbing yourself of some of the triumph of overcoming a tough fight by yourself. There is a real sense of satisfaction that I felt like I had earned as I got better at the game and started conquering some of the challenging locations and bosses, before getting Nick's help. 

Now having started Elden Ring, I think that game is even more accessible than Dark Souls III, from what I've garnered so far. Though Elden Ring is a significantly longer game, so maybe that would keep you from getting into that game over Dark Souls III. Either way, I think you'll find enjoyment and a fascinating, introspective journey by taking on the challenge of a Souls game, and you'll find yourself to be more patient, determined and crafty than you may have originally thought you were capable of being.

 

VERDICT: Recommended
Reviewed on PC