YOU DIED: Ranking
the Souls Games
Two-part Article, Day Two
You can find part one of this article here
Bloodborne is a
game I have gone into length about here in TIF in my most
recent review. As you can tell, I think Bloodborne is not only an exceptional game, but also a truly
remarkable entry to the Souls series.
Bloodborne takes the largest creative
leap of any of the Souls games,
taking the core essence of what makes the Souls
game work and building upon it in new and interesting ways. Whereas Dark Souls II worked to refine the Souls formula, Bloodborne redefines what
it means to be a Souls game. Bloodborne tasks the player to confront
the horrors of Yharnam’s eldritch world, and to derive for themselves what is
reality and what is a nightmare. Bloodborne’s
journey is both external and internal, as players feel they have a real hand in
the night’s brutal hunt while at the same time succumbing to a growing sense of
madness. Everything about Bloodborne,
from its world to its combat to its various design decisions, is cohesive. I
wrote recently on twitter that Bloodborne
feels like the biggest budget ‘indie’ game I’ve ever played. The creativity,
innovation and unshackled artistic expression in Bloodborne is amazing to behold. Bloodborne bucks the conventions of modern gaming, like mini-maps
or checkpoints or hand-holding, delivering a brilliant and compelling
experience Miyazaki and team must know
is profoundly successful. Bloodborne feels,
in every way, to be the purest realization of a developer’s ideas I have seen
in quite a while. Bloodborne is
unfettered by so many of the design decisions that feel mandatory for making
your game commercially successful. As I was playing through it, I got the real
sense the Bloodborne is exactly the game it wants to be. You
cannot say that about so many other games.
Bloodborne’s combat
completely retooled the tenants of the Souls
games, and brought the series in a new and unexpected direction. In contrast to
the slow, defensive style present in the previous three Souls games, Bloodborne ‘s
combat is aggressive and brutal. The game takes away the Souls players’ precious shield, making the only viable option
evading enemy attacks. Bloodborne supports
this fast-paced action-oriented combat with a number of smart systems. For
example, players have a brief window to recover health they just lost by doing
damage to enemies. The hunter’s guns give players a viable parry/riposte
system, allowing them to get up close and personal with the games many
monsters. The dodges are made swifter than they ever have been, and require
less stamina consumption, further encouraging players to nimbly maneuver around
the battlefield. Bloodborne’s combat
system could have easily been unbalanced: with either enemies too readily able
to down the player, or the player too easily able to mow down all that oppose
him or her. But that’s not the case; Bloodborne
is perhaps the best balanced Souls
game to date. Every attack, every monster, every boss encounter, is tough but
fair. No cheap tactics will let you breeze through the game, like in Demon’s Souls. Every single victory in Bloodborne is earned fairly, which is so
rewarding as you progress through the game. What Bloodborne does allow for, more than any of its counterparts, is a
higher skill ceiling. The many styles of weapons, tactics, and agility meant
that, once I got a hold of the systems Bloodborne
had to offer, I felt like a complete badass. This design decision might have
been at odds in previous Souls games
in which the feeling of hopelessness reinforces their brutal worlds, but this
is not the case for Bloodborne. You
are a powerful Hunter of beasts—though they are deadly and powerful, so too is
the player. This powerful feeling and fast combat makes Bloodborne the most accessible of the Souls game, while at the same time keeps the series’ characteristic
difficulty. A commendable accomplishment.
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| Your hunter is quick and powerful. The combat in Bloodborne is the series' best. |
Yharnam, the world in which Bloodborne
is set, is the most hostile of any of the Souls
games. Enemies spot you easily and angrily rush towards the player to kill
them. The aggressive enemies, combined with the lack of purely defensive
options, give the player an amazing sense of tension going through Bloodborne. Each new environment is more
terrifying than the one before it, which is an impressive feat given how
powerful the game can make you feel at times. My blood drained from my hands
during nearly every boss encounter, as I knew that one slip up could result in
my death. The brutal struggle of Bloodborne’s
world gives players a near series best feeling of accomplishment when you
conquer the obstacles before you. And speaking of Bloodborne’s world, it is just fantastic. Though a little more
diversity of environments would have been nice, Bloodborne’s world is fully realize and beautiful. Yharnam truly
feels like a Victorian city, beset with this supernatural plague. Going through
it, exploring every hidden corner, is amazing. Bloodborne uproots player expectations when it comes to exploring,
too, shocking me on several occasions as new environments were discovered in
totally unexpected ways. The game also redefines what it means to progress
through a Souls game. Previously, you
have had a pretty clear main path to follow, encompassing a majority of the
game’s areas and bosses. That is not the case in Bloodborne. Over half the bosses in the game are optional.
And I would know, I did a speed run through the game on NG+ to unlock a
special item: from start to penultimate boss took me a little over 2 hours. But
there is even more than that. Entire enormous areas in the game are completely
left up to the player to discover, some of which are my favorite areas in the
game. Without a real sense of exploration, you could miss nearly half of the
content Bloodborne has to offer. This
gets back to the complete design confidence I mentioned earlier. I cannot think
of many other games that puts so much faith in its players, knowing they will
work to discover all of the game’s hidden secrets. It’s a fantastic thing to
experience.
Bloodborne has my
favorite aesthetic of all the Souls
games, too. I’m a big fan of horror, and Bloodborne
nails its depictions perfectly. The world is consistently foreboding, the
monsters are frightening abominations, and the bosses have some of the most
evocative design in the entire series. Bolstered by the power of the PS4, Bloodborne is a joy to look at and
listen to. The sound design is excellent, from distant shuffling of footsteps
to the spooky lullabies sung by women with eye-covered brains for heads. At
this point in time, Bloodborne has my
second favorite soundtrack of the series. I listened to it back to front
several times while writing my Bloodborne
review, and look forward to putting it on whenever I’m in need for a little eeriness
in my life.
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| Yharnam is fantastic to explore. If you don't scour the world you can miss a lot. |
There are a scant few ways Bloodborne
stumbles in comparison to its peers in the Souls
series. The game’s biggest misstep is its healing item system (I sound like a
broken record, I know). But the Blood Vial system could use tweaking. Overall,
Blood Vials work well. You collect them from fallen enemies or buy them from
the store, similar to Moon Grass in Demon’s
Souls and Lifegems in Dark Souls II.
To deal with players having too much healing while they are exploring, which
was an issue in the two games I just mentioned, Bloodborne limits players to holding 20 Blood Vials at a time. The
other issue of consumable healing items was not fixed, however. After a tough
area or boss, I would be depleted of my entire Blood Vial stock. Again, like in
Demon’s Souls or Dark Souls II, I would then have to stop what I was doing to go
back to a past area to farm Blood Vials and blood echoes to purchase more Blood
Vials. Fortunately, I found a great area pretty early on that, after only about
10 minutes or so, could replenish my full supplies of Blood Vials. Still, this
annoyance could have been dealt with, either by giving the player ~20 Blood
Vials at every new lamp reached or boss defeated. A little would have gone a
long way.
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| All it takes is one tough area or boss to fully deplete your Blood Vial stocks. |
Bloodborne’s bosses
could have used a little more diversity, too. As I wrote in my review, “Bloodborne’s
bosses fell into three categories: one big monster, a powerful humanoid
creature, or a swarm of small enemies.” Each style of encounter played out the
same way: stay behind the big monster and attack its legs, parry the humanoid
and follow up with the Visceral attack, and kite around the boss zone to take
out one small enemy at a time. Sure, each of the bosses was fun and
challenging, but I would have liked to see some that required a totally unique combat approach. I emphasized combat
because I do not want gimmick bosses
back, like Bed of Chaos from Dark Souls
or the Dragon God from Demon’s Souls.
Still, Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls had overall more
mechanically interesting bosses to fight than Bloodborne.
 |
I loved the visual design of the bosses and the fights themselves. There is a unfortunate
sameness to how to beat certain types of bosses, though. |
Finally, and this is quite minor, but Bloodborne probably has the mot obscure plot of any of the Souls games. It made it a little hard at
times to understand why I was going to an area or killing a certain boss. It
doesn’t really matter and you do get
the gist of what is going on, but Bloodborne
does demand pretty intense player commitment to trying to piece together the
world / plot’s disparate pieces.
I’ll let the conclusion of my review sum up what I’ve said here: “Bloodborne is
a game that gives and gives and gives. It takes the tenants of the Souls
game and boils them down to a core foundation, upon which Bloodborne innovates
and redefines what a Souls game is. Exhilarating combat, an
ominous world and a real sense of mystery kept me engaged all throughout my
playthrough, and I only want more. Bloodborne is an important
game for the future of a game series I hold so dear.”
And so here we are, the ‘best’ Souls
game. Dark Souls is a
masterpiece. Dark Souls is one of the
best games of all time. I’ll never forget my first playthough of Dark Souls, which had me in awe the
entire time. Nearly every piece of praise I have dolled out for the other Souls games on this list can be applied
doubly to Dark Souls. The game is
over-flowing with creativity. Dark Souls
took the ambitious foundation laid before it by Demon’s Souls and built a game whose successes are uncountable. Dark Souls began the fervor for the Souls series in earnest, as some of the
design decisions I talked about in Demon’s
Souls pushed players away. Dark Souls
welcomed players into its terrifying, unforgiving, but completely compelling
world. Lordran is a place I never wanted to leave. Despite exploring for
literally hundreds of hours, so many of the game’s secrets still compelled me
to play further. Dark Souls is the
only Souls game I finished, put down,
and came back through to play again. I’ve beaten the main story four times, and
gotten through both NG+ and NG++. I bought and completed the DLC as soon as it
was released, on multiple characters. Dark
Souls is the only Souls game that
got me to actively participate in PVP; I made a new character entirely for the
purpose of invading and defeating other players. I still think about going back
to play through Dark Souls again. A
lot of what keeps driving me back to Dark
Souls is its intangible elements—but so much of what makes Dark Souls the best Souls can is very tangible. Let me get into it.
Every single element of Dark Souls
is successful. Though it was later tweaked in Dark Souls II and innovated upon in Bloodborne, the combat in Dark
Souls is phenomenal. Each attack you made had to be carefully measured. The
defensive nature of Souls combat
worked perfect. Both you and your enemies would feel each other out, giving
little options when it came to exposing each other’s weaknesses. But each enemy
had a trick, and it was exhilarating to patiently feel out your foes to
discover their Achilles’ heel. Dark Souls
took the ideas present in Demon’s Souls
and refined them perfectly. While still a little too powerful, magic was
reigned in substantially, limiting the number of times the player could cast a
spell until either he or she died or reached the next checkpoint (bonfires, in Dark Souls). Dark Souls also introduced pyromancy and dark magic, which changed
up how player built their characters. The game had an eye for balance too. Both
pyromancy and dark magic were overpowered at first, but were later fixed with
game patches. That adept eye for balance is one of the things that sets Dark Souls apart. The equip burden
system was at its series best in Dark
Souls as well. You could trade of defensive capabilities for mobility
options, so players always had to judge their play style to see what worked for
them. Each encumbrance had its own advantages and disadvantages, and tasked the
player with balancing them. Even though Bloodborne
now has my favorite Souls combat, Dark Souls had a fantastic system in
place.
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| The measured, brutal combat works perfectly for Dark Souls. |
The real standout in Dark Souls
is its fantastic world. Dark Souls
did away with the hub world system present in Demon’s Souls and created an open world for the player to explore. Dark Souls’s open world is the most
brilliantly design one I’ve ever played in. The sense of space Dark Souls provides the player is
unmatched in gaming. Lordran is big and diverse. Over the course of your
journey you encounter a crumbling medieval palace, a wooden shantytown built
upon a poisonous swamp, a pristine Victorian sky loft, a dark forest, a
fortress of crystals, a drowned haunted city, a fiery hellscape, and more. I
could go on an on. The diversity of Dark
Souls’s environment is amazing, and is the best of any Souls game. You would think with a world like that each zone feel
separate from one another? You would be wrong. The world in Dark Souls is seamlessly interconnected,
creating an awe inspiring woven tapestry. For example, from a crypt you can
view the lava-filled zone, from the starting area you can look down to see the
poison swamp, from a booby-trapped fortress you can see the elevated Victorian
city. Even more than that, you’ll unlock shortcuts in the world that completely
redefine how you understood the world. Seemingly disparate zones will link up
in shocking ways, giving a real sense of a connected world. Dark Souls was the first game to
introduce non-traditional exploration methods (especially in the DLC), which
was later expanded in Bloodborne. The
design of each of these areas is brilliant. That booby-trapped fortress I
mentioned is probably the best-designed environment in all of the Souls series. But (almost) every
location you visit is great to play through. Interspersed in this world are
bonfires, checkpoints the player can use to respawn at or, later in the game,
warp between. The bonfires are an excellent solution to marrying Demon’s Souls’s difficulty with Dark Souls’s open world.
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| I felt at home while resting in Firelink Shrine. |
The same excellent diversity you experience while traveling through the
world of Dark Souls is present it its
bosses, too. Dark Souls has a lion’s
share of the series’ best boss fights. As bosses are a highlight of any Souls game, this is not an insubstantial
accomplishment. Nearly every boss fight is unique, challenging a wide swath of
player skills to achieve victory. Entering into a boss area gives the player
immense tension; you would have no idea what to expect. For this reason, Dark Souls is probably the most
difficult Souls game (assuming you
use the cheap tactic and/or magic in Demon’s
Souls to make it easier). But, like all Souls
game, the more you played and the more you died, the better you got. The sense
of claiming victory against all odds is at its best in Dark Souls. No game kicked my butt for longer before I figured out
how to clear a section and proceed. The feeling of accomplishment you get is
100% worth your struggles.
What will you use to heal up as you progress through the deadly world of
Lordran? You guessed it, the Estus Flask. The Estus Flask is a great healing
system. You read that right—I love the
healing item system in Dark Souls. At
the start of the game you are given a certain number of times you can use your
Estus Flasks. A drink from the Estus Flask heals the player for a great amount
of health, very quickly. Flasks are refilled whenever you visit a bonfire. This
system is great because it balances risk and reward. Resting at a bonfire
refills your flasks but brings back all enemies you just killed, making it so
you can’t just constantly have a ton of unused ‘chugs’ from your flask. As you
progress through the game you can gain more drinks from your flask and also
level up your flasks so that it restores more health, both of which fill your
needs as the game’s enemies get tougher and tougher. The Estus Flask removes
any of the grinding caused by Moon Grass, Lifegems, or Bloodvials. A refill of
your stock is only one quick bonfire rest away. It also limits how far the
player can explore (assuming they get hit) because you can only ever have so
many drinks from the flask before it is empty. I like that Miyazaki and team
are always trying out new ideas, but I really loved the Estus Flask system and
hope future healing systems take direct inspiration from Dark Souls rather than the other Souls games.
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| Don't make too many mistakes, you only have so many drinks from the Estus Flask. |
Going through Dark Souls also
gives the player the perfect mix of exposition and mysteries. At every step of
my adventure I knew what I was doing and why I was doing it. There are a number
of NPCs in Dark Souls that help to
flesh out the world in places where the world doesn’t lend hints of its own. Lordran
has a compelling lore that you can seek out and assemble into a cohesive
narrative with a little bit of work. My love for Lordran is part of the reason
I loved Dark Souls II so much, just
because its history and mythos is so fascinating. Even more than the other Souls games, Dark Souls invests a lot of time into building up every character
that is present. Several NPCs have compelling quest lines that work
independently of the main story. Many of the bosses in Dark Souls have rich history behind them, giving the player an unmatched
sense of connection and understanding of boss motivations. Everything in Dark Souls is just so damn thoughtful, it’s crazy to me that it
came out only two years after Demon’s
Souls. There is an artisan, handcrafted feel to every single element in Dark Souls—everything has a definite purpose.
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| Don't let its pristine beauty fool you, this Dark Souls location will take you to task. |
When I think about things Dark
Souls could have done better, I often feel like I’m nitpicking the game.
But nitpick I shall. The difficulty curve in Dark Souls could have been tweaked to make for a better experience.
In several instances during your playthrough the difficulty will spike massively, which can cause a lot of
frustration. And I’m not talking about going to a late game area too early in
your exploration (which definitely happens), but rather, the main story route.
At around 1/3 to 1/2 of the way through the game, you encounter an extremely
difficult area with an even more difficult boss fight. Without a lot of
patience, and some grinding to level up, this area can stonewall a player
pretty easily. Imbalanced combat options were an issue for the game when it
first released, too. As I mentioned briefly earlier, pyromancy and dark magic
were both way too powerful initially. For the most part, patches fixed these
two. A final nitpick is the camera. I could have brought this up with any of the
Souls games but decided to do so
here, since it is a major issue for the series. Locking onto enemies can cause
any number of issues with the camera: it can move erratically, get stuck behind
walls or objects in the environment, or fix itself on an unintended target. I
did not have many issues with the camera while playing through Dark Souls, but even a single camera
problem can cause you to die. Every death in Dark Souls, and the Souls
series, is the player’s fault—your impatience or incorrect read of an enemy
attack got you killed. Except, of course, when the camera is stuck behind a
wall and you can’t see anything. This is rare, but it happens, and is
incredibly frustrating when it does. Those deaths are ‘unfair’. In a game so
expertly crafted, it’s a shame the camera is a little wonky.
Dark
Souls is a perfect game. Please, if you have the means, give Dark Souls a try. It is a master class
of game design, world building, and tactical action combat. Don’t be
intimidated. You will die, but each death teaches you about the game. As Tim
Rogers put it in his Gamasutra
article about Bloodborne, the player
is the experience points. This is true for any of the Souls games. So play them, explore their beautiful and sad worlds,
discover their secrets, and prepare to die.
And that wraps up my
ranking of the Souls games! What do
you think? What am I right about? What am I wrong about? How would your list
look? Be sure to let me know in the comments or on twitter, @alexsamocha.
