If I had to give two reasons why I hate having unpopular opinions it would be these. ONE! Every time I mention one or more of them on the internet someone somewhere is convinced that by hammering the supposed awesomeness of the subject even more then suddenly I’ll like it and. TWO! Every time I bring it up people that share that opinion turn the comments section into a circlejerk. Case in point my opinions on Dark Souls.
This game is supposed to be jesus to the people that have played and liked it and here I am saying that it’s a dumb game. It sounds like a good game in theory; challenging open-world third person Action RPG. This pitch given to me by the entire fucking world sold me on the game. Then I got it and actually tried to play the fucking thing.
Holy hell is this game overrated, I thought as I kept playing hoping for it to get better. I didn’t like it’s first impressions because it threw me into the world with no context. That’s a good idea again in theory but in practice I lose interest because the game gave me no reason to move forward. I fought through the first few areas and got to a boss fight on a castle wall with a pretty big thing that immediately proceeded to jump off the building. That was spectacularly unfulfilling, I thought, maybe something cool will happen later. Progressing through I got to giant bosses galore only to find little to no creativity or variety in the boss fights. All the fights are won with variations on the idea hit the fucking thing in the back until it dies. Mechanically speaking it isn’t even very interesting. It has a block and a roll, but the block, roll, and attack functions all take from the same pool of stamina so you’re fucked if one of them runs out in a critical moment because you’ll need the other two to get out. On top of this the leveling system isn’t even that important for an action RPG.
The story is one of the game’s most praised aspects. It keeps hinting at this broad world of adventure and magic and shit but what it actually shows is some pretty decent environmental visual design and nothing else to show for it. I guessed that I didn’t “Get it” like most of the world told me after I quit a few boss fights in but found myself returning to it because I had nothing better to do and what the forums told me to do was “read the item descriptions.” Why the fuck should I need to go looking for something that is a main selling point in the game, that’s like Skyrim forcing you to do an easily missable side quest to learn about the dragons or Deus Ex forcing you to look at the computer in your office to learn an essential plot point. Those things are called flavor text, optional things to flesh out the world. If a game is supposed to have good storytelling then fucking tell me a story. Making the lore contained in really boring and poorly written item descriptions isn’t called pacing and making the lore hard to find. It’s called lazy and terrible design. For a selling point it makes the game lose serious points.
I think the biggest problem I have with Dark Souls is that it’s a game that by all rights I should love. I love a good Metroidvania, a good Action-RPG, a good story, some good fantasy and an interesting world. My mind keeps coming back to that old pitch I heard; Challenging open world action RPG. That pitch really sounds like something I have no right not to enjoy. Hell, with better execution this game might have been my favorite game of all time.
In conclusion the game isn’t something I can recommend despite how much I wanted it to be awesome. I went into this game expecting it to dethrone the original Deus Ex, my favorite game of all time, and what I got was really disappointing. I think I would have liked it better if it had a story to speak of and didn’t take a really boring route with the lazy and poorly written item descriptions. I find it to be so hard to reconcile the fact that a game that I should love is such a piece of crap. Wouldn’t buy the sequel, wouldn’t buy Demon’s Souls, wouldn’t even fucking keep trying to play this piece of shit game if I didn’t want to finish it so I could say I finished it and it was shit like I do with Mass Effect.
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