Welcome back, my beautiful freaks, to Sean's Workshop!
Okay, so I know I'm late to the party. To quote CircletoonsHD, "I'm so late that it seems like I never got an invite to the party, showing up to Dark Souls' house a decade later with a party platter." But, as explained previously, I didn't have the hardware nor funds to play it.
But now that I've played it, I get the appeal. And unlike early adopters, I have access to a decade of information in the form of wikis and youtube walkthroughs and build ideas so I won't get lost and so I understand what to do and where to go.
Which is why I'm doing this entry and one major mission statement; Dark Souls Remastered is great and fair. Let me explain.
Dark Souls isn't hard. The rules of Dark Souls are different than most games. There's no such things as "invincibility frames", so things like rolling aren't used to avoid damage at the last second that games like Wind Waker and Devil May Cry allow. The combat is slow paced and everybody follows the same rules. Everyone has the same rules regarding wind up and attack, from the player character to the common enemies to all the bosses, everybody has the rules. You can parry, and you can be parried. You can backstab, and enemies can backstab.
Dark Souls is built around its difficulty. There's no damage sponges in Dark Souls. Yes, bosses have greater health than you, as to higher "level" enemies. But everybody plays by the same rules regarding attacks and dodging. Even the most difficult bosses require you to fight the same way; blocking, dodging and striking, and then getting out of the way when they get ready to attack.
Dark Souls tells you how to play through the gameplay. Yes, there are a few tutorials in the early game that teach you the controls, as you'd expect from a modern game, but all the battles, all the boss fights, how to navigate the world, all taught through gameplay. For example, the Undead Asylum teach you how to fight human sized enemies and how to handle boss fights with the Asylum Demon. The Undead Burg teaches how to handle the ambushes and how to use items in battle, and the gargoyles teach you to handle fighting two bosses at once. Blight Town teaches you how to handle poison and toxic damage, and you're rounded out with a skill check with Ornstein and Smough. And if you can beat Ornstein and Smough, you're capable to handling the rest of the game.
Dark Souls is robust in how it handles classes/builds. Now, yes, you have classes that determine how you start the game. The Warrior is a different experience than the Sorceror or Pyromancer in the beginning, but as you level up, you can build anything you want. Want a giant weapon wielding magic user? Go ahead. A katana wielding cleric? Done. The possibilities are endless.
That said, I ended up creating and abandoning several characters before I settled on the one for my first playthrough; a bandit with the master key that I intend to make a Giant Dad(yes, I'm going for the meme. Sue me, it looks fun!)
You can experience as much or as little of the story as possible. Dark Souls has a massive amount of lore, but very little of it is necessary to see. You get a goal at the beginning, to ring the bells of awakening and then go link the fire, but beyond that, all the story is in the item descriptions. You don't need to talk to anyone. But if you do? Well, there are entire youtube channels dedicated to the lore. My favorites are Vaatividya, The Ashen Hollow and the Silver Mont.
And finally, a personal note;
Dark Souls is a good allegory for living with depression.
This videos what actually made me interested in Dark Souls in the first place. Without rehashing the entire video, Dark Souls shows you how the whole world is against you and is dead set on destroying you. And speaking from experience with living with Bipolar Depression, I know how that feels like. Every failure feels like a quiet death, setting you back to where you started.
And yet, you keep getting back up. You keep trying again, and again and again. You push forward, heading to the next bonfire, which is a small victory in and of itself, all so you can spend your souls and move forward stronger. You only go hollow if you give up. You build upon those who came before you, learn from their mistakes as well as yours, and gain strength from them lifting you up.
But we see those who succumb due to losing their purpose, their reason for going on. The Crestfallen Warrior, once you ring both bells of awakening, lost his purpose in mocking any undead who come through Firelink Shrine. Siegmeyer of Catarina loses his purpose when you save his life again and again, and goes hollow in Ash Lake, to be slain by his daughter. Vince and Nico of Thorolund go hollow when their ward, Reah, is trapped. Reah herself goes hollow when she teaches you all her miracles. Laurentius of the Great Swamp goes hollow if you show him Izalith Pyromancies and he can't find Quelana.
All of these people show that, if you lose hope, lose your purpose, you lose yourself and die a little death. But if you don't lose hope in yourself, if you don't give up, you can succeed where others have failed.
And that's what battling depression is; you keep fighting, or you lose a bit of yourself to darkness. And if you give up entirely, you "go hollow", not enjoying anything you did before, and even possibly contemplating taking your life.
I've been hollow; I've had days in the past when I didn't know why I got up in the morning, when I just floated through my day, just going through the motions. But I did just that; I kept getting up. Kept moving through the day, looking for a purpose. Many of these blog entries were written when I was hollow, trying to find something, anything to make me feel whole again.
I still don't have a purpose today. But thanks to people carrying me when I was down and the efforts of my doctors, I'm no longer hollow. I've regained my humanity, as is the mechanic in Dark Souls. And like the mechanic where, the more humanity you have, the easier it is to find items, I see more opportunities ahead of me. I live knowing that sometimes, the quest for meaning is the quest to keep a man going.
So yeah, I love Dark Souls. It kicks my ass every time I boot it up, but does so in a way that is not cheap, and that every time I take damage, it's my fault. Just as a difficult game should be.
But for now, goodbye and stay beautiful freaks!
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