Tuesday, February 23, 2021

The Incredible, Interconnected World of Dark Souls 1

Since publishing my last post, I have beaten Dark Souls: Remastered for a second time. That’s how good it is. I was enraptured. It seems the kind of game I’ll play once every year or so, an elite group. Before playing it myself, I didn’t really “get” Dark Souls – I had seen footage of some bosses, heard about how good it was, how hard it was. Now, I understand. I understand how revolutionary this game was, how impactful it still is, how masterful the combat is, and how wonderful its world is designed. Here, I want to tell the story of my two characters, how I experienced the game both times, and will tie that all together with the incredibly well-designed spaces of Lordran that I got to explore throughout my time with Dark Souls. Many spoilers below, so I recommend playing the game before reading this. You won’t be disappointed, I promise. You will go through many hardships, but Dark Souls is as fair as it is challenging.



I named my first proper character Luna, pictured above during one of the only moments in which she wasn’t wearing armor. Wearing the Black Iron set didn’t feel quite right for that cutscene, as a guard of the Sun Princess preparing to link the Fires. Luna started as the Warrior class and struggled much at the beginning of her journey. She first died to the Asylum Demon as I, filled with hubris, attempted to defeat it with only the broken sword you are given at the very beginning of the game. She wielded the Uchigatana for nearly the entire journey, after murdering the Undead merchant for telling her to jump off a cliff. I got the Grass Crest Shield soon after gaining access to Darkroot and carried that to the endgame as well, during which I wore mostly the Black Iron armor set. Well, I wore it after returning to the Undead Burg to get Havel’s Ring, anyway. The bearer of that ring killed me many times in my first journey to the Burg before I realized that I should just focus on the Taurus Demon instead.

 

I put most of my levels into Dexterity, since the Uchigatana scales only with DEX and I love its versatile moveset. I invested a single early stat point into Resistance because I thought I couldn’t go wrong with a little more defense against poison, bleed, and curse. Of course, that was indeed wrong. RES is the worst stat in the game and should probably have been removed, though it’s probably good that this is my biggest complaint about the whole game. My trend of investing one too many points into certain stats continued, since I ended up with 16 points in Strength, put just 20 points into Attunement, three shy of the next spell slot, and 41 into DEX, one more than the “soft cap,” since I thought the cap was 50. In short, I made many mistakes, both in combat and in my build, but pushed onward.

 

Like many players, I bought fully into the “Chosen Undead” narrative, believed Kingseeker Frampt, adored Gwynevere as a beacon of light in a dark world, and linked the Fire at the conclusion so that the Age of Dark may be kept at bay for a little longer. This seemed, after all, to be the “good ending.” More on that later in this post.

 

I didn’t get the Rite of Kindling from Pinwheel until near the end of that first journey, since the Catacombs were the last major area I visited before placing the last of the Lord Souls in the Lordvessel and marching onward to the last fight against Gwyn. That’s why I was happy to have the Heal miracle, to patch up lesser wounds. I didn’t kill any Fire Keepers for their souls, nor did I kill Lautrec for his ring, though his sidequest disappointed me. I revived Anastacia after disposing of him, all of which I’ll never bother with again since he has the best ring in the game and kicking his ass off a ledge is the rare combination of easy and extremely satisfying.

 

Luna never visited Oolacile, though she did rescue Dusk. I just kind of forgot about the Artorias DLC in my mad rush to link the Fire. The first journey took me around 31 hours, if memory serves.

 

I fought every boss but Gwyndolin and those in the DLC with Luna. The Taurus Demon gave me the most trouble, funny enough. It killed me upwards of ten times and led to a temporary uninstall when I thought it stole 8000 souls from me by leaping up to the tower from which I planned a plunging attack and sending me off the ledge. Turned out that my souls were just atop the tower. No harm, no foul. The day after uninstalling, I re-installed and beat that demon by equipping my strongest weapon at the time – a battle axe – and baiting it to the other end of the wall after the first plunging attack. I repeated the strategy one last time for a relatively easy kill, a welcome reminder that every boss would have a weakness and could be overcome.

 

My first big triumph while controlling Luna was against the Capra Demon, which lurks in the Lower Undead Burg. I dispatched the dogs with a two-handed heavy attack each, then was free to dodge roll and punish the goat-headed demon’s lag on my way to a first-try victory. To appease my ego, I here list the other bosses I defeated on the first try (before getting to the real points I want to make): Moonlight Butterfly, Seath the Scaleless, Crossbreed Priscilla, Demon Firesage, Centipede Demon, Stray Demon, Pinwheel, and Gwyn, Lord of Cinder.

 

Most of the other bosses kicked my ass at least five times, for the record. And for a few of those first-try fights, I was assisted by either an AI or a fellow player. Gwyn killed me a few times in my second playthrough, since I didn’t save Solaire the second time through.

 

Anyway, though the boss fights of Dark Souls are undoubtedly some of its best and most memorable moments, the single moment of my first playthrough that stands out above all others is the first elevator ride back to Firelink Shrine. Well, not if you count the time when I played on mouse + keyboard and rode back up from New Londo Ruins over and over after killing the passive Hollows down there. That was me trying to get used to the unusable controls and failing, and also inefficiently grinding for souls so I could afford the Heal miracle which I then couldn’t use anyway, because I didn’t understand Attunement back then.

 

No, in my first proper playthrough on a controller, the moment I’m talking about is when I first returned to Firelink from the Undead Parish. See, the Parish was pretty tough the first time around. I died during the fight with the fanged boar once, after landing a single backstab that came just before dying to a crossbow bolt from above. I enlisted the help of a summon sign’d player from another realm to help me clear out the Tower Knight and Channeler minibosses, since they absolutely destroyed me in my first time entering the Parish proper. Then, of course, the Gargoyle fight was pretty tough… and I didn’t find Andre’s bonfire until after I had already cleared the zone. That made the trek back and forth from the last checkpoint pretty tedious.


But Ringing the first Bell of Awakening was one hell of a triumphant feeling.

Adding to this feeling was my exploration of the surrounding area, finding Andre, upgrading my katana, running past the Titanite Demon, finding the Grass Crest Shield, and eventually returning to the Parish to find the elevator… back down to Firelink Shrine. That was an “Aha!” moment of familiarity, and Lordran began to make much more sense, began to feel like a world I was inhabiting rather than just a set of polygons.

 

I’ve started Sekiro since beating Dark Souls again, and it’s a great game too, don’t get me wrong. But it feels much more like a linear trek through one level after another, at least so far. Dark Souls 1, unlike other From Software games and even its direct sequels, feels like an interconnected world rather than a straight line with some interesting detours. The Parish-Shrine elevator showed me that interconnectedness for the first time. I understood that this was not just a real-time action-RPG, but would also borrow elements from Metroidvania titles. You don’t pick up new movement abilities that allow for access to new zones or shortcuts back to old ones, but rather keys that open locked doors. The skills you gain are primarily in your mind… and your stats, to be fair. I felt like I was improving my abilities in combat moreso than I was making numbers bigger, though both of those certainly happened. And as you progress, the game world becomes more and more interconnected, whether in finding new routes into and out of zones or through visiting places that can be seen from elsewhere.

 

To name just a few of those… you can see Demon Ruins and Ash Lake from the Tomb of the Giants, can see Anor Londo from most places above ground, can see that the gate to Sen’s Fortress is at first shut tight across a short bridge across from where Andre works his forge, and can see both the graveyard and Undead Burg from Firelink Shrine.

 

That first return to Firelink felt incredibly organic, really sold the illusion of being in Lordran, and its homelike feeling only deepened with each return trip I made. In returning to old zones, the player can flex their progression on earlier enemies, can build a sense of familiarity with the environments of the game. Back when I played on mouse and keyboard, I ground for souls in the graveyard near Firelink when I realized I was wasting time in New Londo, using the Morning Star to break apart the skeletons’ bones. They were like minibosses presented as regular enemies, paired off to present overwhelming challenges to my scared self as I played with suboptimal controls. I avoided that graveyard at the start of my controller playthrough, but coming back to the Catacombs at the end of that first proper journey and decimating the skeletons was a beautiful full circle to draw from my experiences. It’s all the more beautiful because they’re less than thirty seconds away from where the giant crow first drops you off.

 

Returning time and again to Firelink as you cross Lordran serves to make Dark Souls feel less like a video game a la Super Mario Bros., where the player’s journey is in a line from left to right. It makes you feel like an explorer trapped in an unfamiliar, dying land. Yet the gentle strings of Firelink Shrine’s soundtrack are familiar, welcome, beautiful. No combat will happen around the bonfire until you reach the graveyard or head up the stairs toward Undead Burg… or unless you murder one of the NPCs residing there. It is truly your safe haven, but it's impossible to forget the death and desolation all around.

 

Now seems a good time to mention the music. In a similar vein but much more unsettling than Breath of the Wild, Dark Souls knows how to save its soundtrack for the right moment. Many areas in BotW feature only whispers of older Zelda melodies, reflections of its broken land. Dark Souls takes this a step further with silence. It looks at BotW’s Hyrule and laughs like, “You call that broken?” 


There is so much violence and death in Lordran, even before the player arrives. Piles of bodies and/or bones make up some walls, floors, and ceilings, especially in New Londo (after you use the Key to the Seal) and in the Catacombs. The player eventually treks into what feels like Hell itself, in Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith. The sins of humanity, the folly of the gods, the inevitability of the Age of Fire’s ending… these are all communicated through setting, not an element often nailed so thoroughly by game developers. Silent soundtracks in certain areas sell the ambient noises of the environment, of the player’s movement, of enemies, of combat, and make areas with music all the more special. Ash Lake’s tune, “The Ancient Dragon,” comes to mind, with its haunting vocal melodies and occasionally booming drums that so perfectly match the area.

 

This atmosphere accomplished something that no other game has done. It drove me to walk. If you’ve played any RPG – let’s take KOTOR, for instance – you can probably relate to me almost always running top-speed everywhere I go. There's no reason not to, unless confined by stamina. In KOTOR and its lone sequel, players usually invest in the Force Speed power as soon as possible, so that getting around the environments isn’t a chore. Of course, I sprinted most places in Dark Souls, too… but it just didn’t feel right for many of the zones in moments of calm. I had to look up at Anor Londo’s spires, Demon Ruins’ lava-drenched walls and ceiling, Ash Lake’s eerie beauty, and the gorgeous crystals and creatures of Crystal Cave. The excellent sounds of my heavy armor clanking and the perfect, fluid animations made walking just feel… right. If ever there was a game to take your time in moments of peace to just walk and take in the scenery, this is it.


No way was I sprinting through there.

 

Dark Souls makes understanding the lay of the land, enemy spawn locations, items, and how each zone connects to each other zone immensely satisfying. Finding the next bonfire feels not just like a checkpoint, but also both a marker of your progress and a familiar safe haven in an unfamiliar and unforgiving world. It brings such relief, adds to the accomplishment of beating a boss. It may feel like you’ll never see the next one sometimes, especially if a certain boss has decorated the floor with your guts a double-digit number of times, but there’s always a way forward, or ways around. And some bonfires are delightful secrets, like the one in Darkroot, outside the door that requires the Crest of Artorias as its key.

 

I’ve never experienced anything quite like my treks into the Depths, Blighttown, or the Catacombs. I’ve never felt that genuine unease, that despair-ridden homesickness, from being far away from familiar territory in a video game, especially as Estus Flasks and Heal charges ran low. The oppressive, claustrophobic walls seem to close around you; the enemies become terrifying threats to send you back to familiarity in the worst way possible – with wounded pride and endangered souls, tethered to your bloodstain.

 

The corpse run mechanic, as an aside, is ingenious in its induction of stress that allows for post-death redemption. I prefer Sekiro’s resurrection system as a player, but Dark Souls’ corpse run is much better from a design perspective. It leads to risk-reward weighing, excitement, and either triumph or more despair upon Retrieval or defeat. And we love games that make you feel genuine emotion, even when that emotion could be classified as negative.

 

Anyway, the elevator from the Undead Parish to Firelink is not the only place in Dark Souls 1 where the game’s interconnected world design becomes wonderfully apparent. That elevator is also the way to get back to the Undead Asylum, by hopping off at the right time and rolling at the right spot. This return serves to make the Asylum feel like more than just a tutorial area – it makes it feel like a part of this rotting world we inhabit as we play Dark Souls. And returning there to get the Peculiar Doll from your old cell allows you to get to the Painted World in Anor Londo.

 

Even absent sidequests like that, the player descends ever-deeper into Lordran, getting lost and finding the way again. Even after a second playthrough, I couldn’t tell you where half the items in Blighttown are, though I found many of them both times. The Undead Burg is connected to the Parish and Lower Undead Burg, the latter of which connects to the Depths, which is nowhere close to the deepest point in the game. No, it rather cheekily drops down to Blighttown, which drops further into Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith. The Burg also connects, through Havel’s watchtower, into Darkroot, which in turn leads us to Artorias’s grave, the Hydra, Oolacile, and back to the Parish, which connects to Sen’s Fortress and thus to Anor Londo, a walled city high above the rest of the game’s zones.

 

The many tendrils of this world stretch out in all directions, sometimes leading us back to other areas, sometimes leading to a boss that serves as a fingernail of that particular limb of the world, a stopping point from which we return to another zone. The game world stretches up from its roots in Lost Izalith all the way to the Duke’s Archives atop a mountain that overlooks Anor Londo. The walled city can be seen from the very first time you lay eyes upon Lordran in the claws of the giant crow.


Arriving there was magical, made all the sweeter by the brutal trials of Sen's Fortress.


Anor Londo, though disconnected from most of the other zones in the game, represents the Age of Fire and the hubris of the Lords. Gwyn, in linking the Fire for the first time, tries to keep the Age of Dark at bay. And yet, even here in the land of the “gods,” we see endless death as far as the eye can see. All that remains alive and non-hostile within the walls of Anor Londo: a lone firekeeper, and a few trees reaching up for the light of Gwyndolin.


Even before the city darkens, many of these trees live in shadows.


Most of Anor Londo, though gorgeous, is cold, dead, unfeeling stone. Nestled high above the rest of the world, this place is just as hellish as the Depths or Lost Izalith, just with a veneer of beautiful architecture. Most of Lordran is covered in similar, if less grandiose, structures. This game world has much to say about our own. Here, in my little Squirrel Hill apartment, all that is alive (other than the two human beings) is a single jalapeño plant, trapped in a little pot beneath a UV grow light. The closest nonhuman living thing other than our plant and neighbors' pets is a little patch of trees a few blocks away. Anor Londo is a reflection of what we have done to our world. Perhaps an age of Dark comes for us as well.

 

Let’s pivot back to Dark Souls before I weep for Earth's creatures. Even in Anor Londo, we can see the interconnected, 3D puzzle-like design that constitutes my favorite feature of Dark Souls. The first bonfire in this zone leads us to the Duke’s Archives later on, and down an elevator onto where we will eventually meet Gwynevere. First, we must get through a Chapel filled with Painting Guardians. On its lower floor, we can enter the Painted World of Ariamis, an optional “bonus zone,” if you will, that has its share of looping level design as well, complete with shortcuts and verticality ranging from a high tower down into secret tunnels below a well.

 

Below the Chapel, we find (well, we’re supposed to find. I didn’t until the winged demons before the Silver Knight Archers killed me a few times – a running theme of my first journey) Darkmoon Tomb and its bonfire, which can later lead to Gwyndolin. Then, after getting past those notorious archers, Solaire can be found at another bonfire. After getting near the Ornstein and Smough boss fight, we can find a broken window that leads down to an item and the giant blacksmith, and/or a door back outside.


Shortcut pictured here on my second playthrough, minutes before I finally darkened this decadent, desolate remnant of the Age of Fire.

 

This shortcut leads back to the weird spiral staircase elevator that can loop back to Darkmoon Tomb or the painting Chapel. Anor Londo, high above the other zones, still features that sense of interconnectedness, mystery, and adventure that permeates the rest of the Dark Souls experience. And after Ornstein and Smough lie dead, it gives us access to fast travel via the Lordvessel, allowing the rest of the game to become much more fast-paced and less about exploration.

 

I can understand the argument against fast travel’s inclusion, since the second half of Dark Souls did indeed feel a lot less like an adventure through unfamiliar territory, uncovering new links between zones and so on. The Valley of Drakes does lead us to Blighttown, New Londo, and Darkroot, which would allow the player to get around relatively quickly, even without fast travel. But I still like its inclusion, since repeatedly going through the Valley would get a little tiresome, to say the least, especially if you change your destination partway through or if you just want to hit up one last merchant before facing a particular boss. Oh, and the post-Lordvessel post-boss bits would need to be redesigned, since the Bed of Chaos, Seath, and Nito all have arenas which would be either tedious or impossible to get out of without being able to warp from bonfire to bonfire. Well, bosses do drop a Homeward Bone most of the time. But isn’t that a kind of fast travel anyway? It would admittedly be cool to see some Skyrim-esque dungeon design where the boss room unveils a shortcut back to the entrance once they are defeated.

 

Either way, I much prefer this fast travel system to being able to warp from the beginning of the game, as in Sekiro or DS3. Even with more linear areas like Anor Londo or Sen’s Fortress, shortcuts can be found and links to other zones established. The masterful world design of Dark Souls makes the player into an adventurer through unfamiliar and hostile territory, asks us to map out the world in our minds, with no world map to speak of. It’s all the better for not including one, instead pushing the player to think for themselves. And the wiki’s always there if you need it.

 

Even on a second playthrough, new connections were forged. I found places I missed the first time around, like Oolacile, that jump from house to house in the Undead Burg, and the Gravelord Servant covenant in the Catacombs. The DLC is certainly more linear than the main game, but is interconnected primarily through time rather than space. Oolacile would later become Darkroot, with Artorias's grave remaining in the same place. That was interesting to see, and the extra challenges were welcome... though cutting off Kalameet's tail was exponentially harder than anything else it had to offer.


Oh, and I first visited Ash Lake during this second playthrough as well. The Great Hollow and Ash Lake are two of my favorite areas now, annoying to navigate as that tree may be. Solana, my second character, invested in Strength and Intelligence because Luna relied on DEX and had a few miracles. This strong sorcerer became a Darkwraith of Kaathe. I didn't invade people all that often, but it felt like the right contrast to my previous playthrough as a servant of light. Fall Control made getting down the Great Hollow tolerable, and Ash Lake’s inclusion increased my immersion in this wonderful world even further.



 

An ancient place, unnecessary when it comes to completing the game, Ash Lake serves to pique interest in the lore of this world and adds to the sense of being a part of a larger world full of mystery and mystique. It seems to be a remnant of the Age of Ancients, seems to point to Dark seeping into the Age of Fire. Note the dark water, the monsters, the Hollow archtrees. Here, we can find the Everlasting Dragon, which rather disappointingly has no dialogue and for some bizarre reason does not mind you chopping his tail off. Still, getting to Ash Lake in my second playthrough was a highlight of my overall Dark Souls experience, an amazing set of moments that brought me even further into this world borne of From Software’s twisted imaginations.


An archtree seen outside Nito's boss arena. Hearing that I could actually get there blew my mind.

 

As we see in the intro cutscene, we stand during Dark Souls at a crossroads of Yin and Yang, borne of the disparity brought by fire. “Heat and cold, life and death, and of course… Light and Dark” came to Lordran with the introduction of Fire. At the game’s start, the Age of Fire approaches its end. Our choice (unfortunately, only after the final boss lies dead at our feet – previous choices, such as covenants, do not play into the ending) is to either sacrifice ourselves so that the Age of Fire may continue for a while longer, or to let it burn out and become the Dark Lord.

 

Luna, named for the moon, chose to link the Fire. She began as a warrior and ended a miracle-wielding pyromancer. From Dark, Light. Solana, named for the sun, started as a Pyromancer of the swamp and ended a strong, dexterous sorcerer clad in heavy armor, with her “unusual face” (as the character creator text read) proudly bare beneath a maxed-out black cap. She ended Gwyn and became the Dark Lord. From Fire, Darkness.

 

Which ending is better? Hard to say. The Age of Dark is inevitable. Time here seems cyclical. The “Chosen Undead” would become the next Gwyn should they choose to link the Fire, a burned husk waiting to be killed by either the Dark Lord or the next fuel for the First Flame. And Oolacile seems proof enough that humanity would not take well to an Age of Dark. I’m still processing these endings. I think I prefer the Dark Lord ending for now, since upholding the hierarchy of the gods seems an unworthy goal when compared to being at the helm of inevitable Darkness. 





Either way, the journey to these points was absolutely magical. Dark Souls has quickly become one of my favorite games of all time, one I will no doubt play many times more and will recommend until video games become obsolete. I will carry these fond memories of its masterfully interconnected world until I next return to Lordran.

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The Incredible, Interconnected World of Dark Souls 1

Since publishing my last post, I have beaten Dark Souls: Remastered for a second time. That’s how good it is. I was enraptured. It seems the...