The Impact Factor

YOU DIED: Ranking the Souls Games

Two-part Article, Day Two

You can find part one of this article here

#2 Bloodborne

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.

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.

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.

 

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.”

#1 Dark Souls

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.