Essay – Brightest Flame, Darkest Souls

Amazing chest ahead

Dark Souls is the Dark Souls of the Dark Souls series.

For more than a decade, Dark Soul's developers FromSoftware have held the keys to a new genre, exemplified extremely exclusively by their own efforts. Not really RPGs, not quite character action, but a convoluted compromise of sorts. The ‘Souls-like’ is a style of game still in its infancy, as illustrated by its name – no genre gets a real poorly-descriptive title until the originator is dethroned, and that moment looks to be quite far off. With each iteration released by FromSoft, a new standard is set, and a host of imitators have risen to the challenge only to fall short. That’s not to say they’re all bad games – I have enjoyed quite a few of them, and think many make worthwhile contributions to the format. But the fact remains that nobody is under the illusion that any of them are anything more than a Souls-like, something aspiring to the qualities of a Souls game. And when you say Souls, you really mean just one game.

Since the release of Dark Souls in 2011, the franchise, the company, and the world have moved onwards and upwards, but somehow, nothing has taken its place. While many fans of the series might place another game as their favorite, and plenty have never actually played DS1, it would be hard to find one that doesn’t honor its pedigree. Even FromSoft’s magnum opus, the gargantuan, both in scale and success, Elden Ring, is arguably best described as an open-world Souls-like. Nobody’s clamoring for ‘Ring-likes’ or tagging their game’s store page with ‘Ring-like’ yet, in spite of that game snagging an order of magnitude greater sales than DS1. Why, then, did Dark Souls in particular have such an outsized impact? What explains its timeless appeal, its renown, its unchallenged authority? In order to answer that properly, we must first address the likely popular responses, and prove them definitively false. To discover what makes Dark Souls good, we need to explain why it’s not as good as you think. Here, in rough order of how common I think the claim is compared to its relevance, are the wrong reasons to like Dark Souls.

ONE: The Difficulty

Dark Souls is a notoriously difficult game. This reputation is at the heart of almost all popular commentary on the game and series, to the point that the series and the genre named for it is almost a shorthand for difficulty. When Dark Souls came out, it quickly became the de facto measure by which one could prove their gaming bona fides – a game that required such skill and resolve to finish that the act itself could go on your resume. Even the game’s marketing leaned into this quite heavily, with the PREPARE TO DIE tagline becoming so synonymous with the game it was the subtitle for the later ‘complete’ and PC releases, and many developer interviews and reviewers harping on about how damn brutal the game is.

All of which makes it slightly embarrassing [and somewhat socially unacceptable] to point out the obvious fact that Dark Souls really isn’t that hard. It’s certainly harder than many contemporaries, or rather, it requires a level of attention and thought that exceeds the expectations of developers targeting the broadest possible market appeal. But it’s not a game that requires some level of mental acuity or physical ability that is beyond the reach of the general population – it’s no white knuckle, lighting-reflex, one-miss-and-you’re-done stress test. It’s honestly a relatively slow-paced game, one with plenty of wiggle room in the not-quite vestigial RPG elements to let players find a playstyle they enjoy, pump the numbers into or beyond viability, and carry on. And a lot of people have beaten it, even people who frankly are not what anyone would consider to be elite gamers. If you doubt this, consider the fact that you are several paragraphs into an essay about a videogame that is unlikely to be particularly exciting or enlightening. With the attention span and pain tolerance demonstrated here and now, I conclude that you, too, could beat Dark Souls. In fact, I would argue that a big part of why it became the measure for gaming prowess is that it’s a climb where every rung is decidedly within reach.

And, more to the point, the difficulty alone cannot explain why Dark Souls is so good, or impactful. The barrier to entry is arguably a draw, part of the appeal of engaging with the game to begin with, but it’s not going to carry a playthrough for most people. The victory over challenges, the hard-fought progress, all of this is present in most games people enjoy, and isn’t particularly unique in the case of Dark Souls. In fact, a lot of legitimate complaints about DS1 come down to obnoxious difficulty spikes and things that make the game pointlessly frustrating. There are a lot of games that are much harder than Dark Souls, and few of those will be bragged about outside of circles of absolute masochists. Challenge doesn’t seem to linearly scale with game quality in the way implied by defining Dark Souls’ impact by its difficulty. There are hundreds of ways in which Dark Souls could be harder, hell, there’s entire communities of modders who have spent a decade or more implementing them. But those changes don't necessarily make Dark Souls a better game, or even a better benchmark for gamer cred.

TWO: The Lore

Dark Souls is a monumental work of elaborate and thought-provoking world building. The development team clearly did this the right way, the way that produces truly engaging Science Fiction and Fantasy settings, by layering on events, characters, mythologies, and societies, then carving away the details, leaving enough structure to hold up the narrative without bogging it down in pointless exposition or tedious history lessons. The end result is a compelling but narrow framing of every item, every creature, and every place in the game, giving them a reason to exist beyond the convenience of a game designer.

Many in the gaming world took the wrong lesson from this, imitating only the surface level qualities of the game’s style of exposition. Superficial vagueness and non sequitur namedrops through scattered lore fragments became a favorite technique aped by less-clever developers, almost becoming an identifiable feature of the Souls-like genre itself. But beneath the seemingly random details of the wider world in which it takes place, Dark Souls really does have a remarkably coherent arc of history, cast of characters, and symbolic tradition, all rich enough that there’s a cottage industry of internet historians mining those fragments for content. Covens of inquisitive players draw dubious deductions, unearth cut material, and argue over the intended meaning of Japanese phrases, all to support their own thesis on the events of Dark Souls.

"So Clark Kent would arrive on Earth to fulfill the hopes of a generation that enjoys Tolkien's Silmarillion and deciphers a theogony that obliges them to memorize the children of Iluvatar and the Quendi and the Atani and the flowery meadows of Valinor and the wounds of Melkor: all things that, if they had had to be studied in school, would have driven the same generation to occupy the university or high school in protest against notionism."

- Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality

While undoubtedly successful and enthralling, the lore of Lordran is not really the reason Dark Souls 1 in particular holds a special place in most people’s heart. In fact, every game FromSoft has made in the past decade and a half has had a very similar amount of craftsmanship put into the past, the origins of everything the player seeks to end, and all the nuance fleshing out every design and point of commonality. Some have gone even further in one way or another – Bloodborne is a confusing nightmare within a dream, where nothing is certain except existential horror, and Elden Ring probably has over a novel’s worth of backstory to the factional conflicts, fluctuating eons of change and stability, and notes about the meaning behind certain clothes dyes.

And very few people, even among the ones who would rank Dark Souls 1 as their favorite game, could probably pass a reasonably challenging multiple choice quiz about the lore. There are plenty of verifiably straightforward facts laid out by the game in plain English, things that your professor of Dark Souls Studies would tut at you for not having absorbed through the item description required reading. Who did Gwynevere run off with? Which craftsman is credited for the repeating crossbow Avelyn? Who are the four Knights of Gwyn? Don’t worry about looking these up, and more importantly, don’t pretend like they’re particularly important things to know to appreciate the game. These are minute details, compared to the larger picture, which most players will have understood – that Gwynevere is gone, that the great craftsmen have moved on, that there were four Knights, and now¹ there are none. And even if they don’t know that much, does it really diminish the game? Maybe merely the suggestion that there is more depth is enough to lend an irresistibly intangible intrigue. But I think it’s less important than the lore historians would admit.

THREE: Novelty and Innovation

It’s easy to point out that for a lot of people, Dark Souls was the first time they’d ever played anything quite like it. It’s even easier to point out that plenty of people had. Demon’s Souls was a true exclusive to the Playstation console of the time, and due to Sony’s grip on the license, it never made it to anything but the Playstation of two generations later. But put it side by side with Dark Souls, and the core differences, even to a trained eye, are tough to point out. In many ways, Dark Souls is a spiritual successor to the title from two years earlier, or even more closely related than that term would imply. And for all the differences that do exist between the games [there are plenty] the similarities are uncanny, even for things that first-timers playing Dark Souls would find very creative and novel.²

But even Demon’s Souls draws upon a longer legacy, with FromSoft’s earlier catalogue on the PSX and PS2, specifically the King’s Field and Shadow Tower series. These first-person dungeon crawlers have the same gloomy settings, the same slow, thoughtful pace, the same vague worldbuilding philosophy, and even a lot of the smaller mechanical and thematic details. Reusable healing flasks, rare weapons having unique magical skills attached to them, the stamina system, illusory walls, all things that helped make the Souls games what they were, and were pioneered a decade earlier.

FromSoft’s own work isn’t where the inspiration stops. Much of the art and design of their games draws from historical sources or other media, including some dramatic parallels with the manga Berserk – you can take about half the panels from Berserk and find a screenshot of a Souls game that replicates it. Drawing inspiration is fine [or awesome if it’s from a sick source like Berserk] but my point is that very little in Dark Souls 1 is purely original. If your rebuttal is that it was just the first time ‘most people’ had seen it, I’ll have to remind you again that Elden Ring by definition popped a lot more cherries in that regard.

FOUR: Any of the Mechanics

If you want to release a Souls-like, here’s a neat trick – take any identifiable mechanic from a Dark Souls game, anything at all, and shoehorn it into whatever you’ve already made. Multiplier bonuses for how many individual mechanics you transplant this way, and extra points for doing it in a way that somehow inverts the original intent.

Bonfires, Estus, Bloodstains, Invasions, and so on – if you can think of it, someone somewhere has put it in their game as an attempt to trick a YouTuber into saying ‘Dark Souls but with ______.’ It works well enough, since plenty of people on the critical side of gaming ALSO see refillable healing flasks and checkpoints you sit down at as intrinsic parts of the so-called ‘Souls-like formula,’ an equation you can plug a few variables into and crank out the freshest genre of our generation. Sadly, this kind of coarse imitation rarely produces noteworthy results. And it’s not that any of the specific mechanics are secretly bad, or particularly hard to calibrate well. They may be essential, but are not sufficient to explain Dark Souls’ success.

FIVE: The Multiplayer

Leading on from point four, another often-lauded part of the Souls games is its unique interpretation on player interaction, most of which is much more indirect than in other online games. For those not in the know, or as a refresher, there are basically three ways in which players can affect each other. The most direct is summoning – a player can put their mark down on the ground somewhere in their single-player session, and that mark… maybe, kinda sorta, might show up in someone else’s world… if they’re playing, and at the right location, and are in human form, and are within the same level range, and haven’t beaten the nearest boss, and are on the right server and celestial alignment. Interact with that mark, and eventually, if nothing goes wrong, the first player will unload from their instance, and respawn in the second player’s, and they can then play together, communicating only through movement and animations, until someone dies or the boss assigned to the area is defeated, at which point it all has to happen again. The co-op is limiting, frustrating, confined by obscure rules, and perfect for the kind of game Dark Souls is. You can’t fully rely on it, you can’t even trust that your fleeting alliance will help more than hinder you, and the loneliness settling in as your mute brother in arms fades out of existence is one of the most melancholy things in an already gloomy game.

The second, and most extreme, are invasions. Unlike with summoning, there are a few different ways to ‘invade’ another player, but they’re all just as bafflingly restrictive as the summons. However you manage it, it’s technically very similar to co-op summons, except it’s usually triggered without the subjected player’s foreknowledge, revealed only with the sudden declaration that the invader has arrived. For a game that’s all about careful consideration and slow progress, having another player enter your session with [almost always] the sole aim of ruining your day can justifiably send chills down someone’s spine. Or at least mildly irritate them. And for all the arbitrary restrictions placed on the mechanic, the game is open-ended enough for players on both sides to find creative ways to screw with each other, build up tension, or play a petty prank.

Finally, the one that’s almost unavoidable, and most indirect, are the bloodstains and messages. These are left by players, either manually constructed from words and sentence fragments, or upon their death, revealing on use a ghostly projection of their final moments. Messages and bloodstains have taken on an outsized role in the Souls community for being the main way to express oneself to other players in-game, and because they’re all over the goddamn place. Every secret wall has three layers of messages pointing you to the secret, every suspicious niche that doesn’t have a secret in it has four layers of messages of people going back and forth about whether there’s a secret in it, every ledge, trap, and ambush is presaged by a thick mat of bloodstains, and every female NPC has a message about feet nearby.

But none of these things really play a big role in why Dark Souls has had a lasting impact. For one thing, a lot of the more interesting multiplayer features either weren’t introduced until later entries, or were outright broken for most of the game’s life cycle.³ PVP, particularly duels, had a small but dedicated fanbase, one that didn’t mind horrific desync, obnoxious backstab and parry mechanics, and insidious hackers. But for every person who spent a lot of time laying down red soapstone, there are ten times as many who did one fight with a guy who teleported behind them with a club bigger than both character models put together and never bothered again.

SIX: The Exploration

Now we’re getting closer to what I think does help explain what’s so special about Dark Souls, and for a long time, I think this is the quality I would have professed as the main reason. One of my favorite things about FromSoft’s work is how satisfying the games’ worlds are to explore. Slowly working your way through, eying up every doorway as a potential bottleneck, peering over ledges looking for hidden paths or caches, gradually securing footholds in the form of checkpoints. It all forces you to really pay attention, not just to the surface level of hazards and progression, but the structure of the environment you’re learning more about. It’s one of the reasons I played most of the games on my first encounter in offline mode, so I wouldn’t be spoiled or distracted by bloodstains and messages telegraphing every single secret, shortcut, and trap.

And of all the games, Dark Souls 1 is almost inarguably the best in terms of a compelling structure. Where Demon’s Souls had totally disconnected sets of isolated, mostly linear stages, Dark Souls went above and beyond in presenting most of the game world as a connected region, with coherent routes taking you around back to places you might have glimpsed distantly far earlier, and only a few arbitrary transition points. Many of the paths and shortcuts are completely optional, and might never be visited by a player, but their inclusion does more than add arbitrary branches and padding – they physically ground the experience in a player’s mind, aligning distant scenes into a mental map that obviates the need for an in-game map. Beyond that, it also frames the whole setting brilliantly, making use of fantastical scale and impressive vistas to convey the illusion of a massive world while restricting players to a relatively thin slice of it.

The subsequent FromSoft games largely stuck to this model, but in many ways fell short of DS1's high water mark. DS2, being a poorly managed project from start to finish, is noted to have extremely incongruent transitions, and a confusing and arbitrary layout. DS3 is much the same, albeit with a bit more polish concealing the joining seams. Bloodborne and Sekiro, though very different sorts of games, still attempt to replicate features of the DS1 world design. And Elden Ring goes all in on a fully traversable open world, massive sprawls dotted with points of interest, in a way that feels very much like a scaled-up version of the DS1 layout. Which sounds great, until you realize that the answer to 'what if you could walk all the way to Anor Londo' is 'it turns out that's not very fun.'

But for as well-intentioned and engaging as the layout of Dark Souls is, it's still not perfect. A lot of the areas are incredibly frustrating to traverse, a lot of the side routes or shortcuts are so obscure that it's unlikely anyone would find them unassisted, and even if you did, it might not gain you anything. Amusingly, when you create a character you have a choice of starting item, and one of them just straight up lets you skip many of the most annoying parts of the game for free.⁴ Several whole areas are hidden behind multiple layers of obfuscation, while some of the intended pathways, including ones that are utterly required for progress, feel like you're doing some kind of glitchy sequence break. A big part of replaying Dark Souls is completely avoiding as much of Dark Souls as you can, and it turns out there's quite a bit you can avoid, along with the headaches they induce. Finally, most of the end game areas are noticeably unfinished, lacking the pacing, balance, and detail present in the first 70-odd percent of the game. It's tough to say that Dark Souls is a great game specifically because of the exploration when one of the first things a returning player will want to do is figure out how to skip the shit where you walk through a blinding field of lava for several minutes.

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The Truth

There are more examples than these, but those six are the main sorts of reasons I see a lot of people give when discussing why Dark Souls has become such an enduring phenomenon. And, as I've attempted to point out, I don't think any one of them is even a good summary of why this one game has had so much impact. Instead, after many years of playing, watching, contemplating, complaining about, and returning to Dark Souls, I have come to a different conclusion. I think the main appeal that is specific to DS1 is its peerless embrace of the principle of player agency. It, more than almost any other game of its type, gives players choices, and then holds them responsible for dealing with the consequences.

I would argue that the best example for this lies in the much-lauded 'difficulty' that gives Dark Souls its confrontational reputation. Not, as I pointed out earlier, that it really is that hard to play or beat, but rather in what about it makes it seem hard, or more accurately, 'unforgiving.' After all, when you die in Dark Souls [or most Souls-likes] it's not Game Over, prompting you to return to some earlier state. Instead, you respawn, along with most of the enemies, but losing only the earned currency you absorb from enemy kills.⁵ You keep all of your important 'progress' even if you fall – shortcuts and one-way doors remain open, items retained, major enemies and bosses stay dead, and all of your equipment stays intact.⁶ But by the same token, because the game is constantly auto-saving and there's no [intended] way to roll back to a prior state, you also can't undo using consumables, permanently losing a juicy bloodstain, or murdering an NPC. By making death an expected event, rather than a fail state, this format opens up the possibility to make every other mechanic have more weight, every decision made by a player one they have to ride out to the end.

Take the exploration, for example. Dying and respawning at the last-used checkpoint seems like a fairly lenient system, one that in fact earned Bioshock some well-deserved criticism for making the combat feel hollow and essentially pointless. Why is it so different in Dark Souls? Well, for one, your main goal in most instances is making your way from one checkpoint to the next, and every time you die or return to one to recover, the majority of enemies return at their full strength as well. Breaking through is often a battle of attrition, with the health recovery flasks refilled at checkpoints acting as your main resource. For another thing, reaching a new checkpoint and touching it does not necessarily represent forward progress. In fact, from the game's starting point, there are multiple directions a new player can go in which end up at checkpoints that are brutal slogs to return from. If you decide to descend into the hostile depths and set your respawn point at the bottom of an agonizing climb,⁷ you've dug your own grave, and the game makes no overture to bail you out. It's up to you to dig yourself out, at least until you get far enough to unlock the warp system.

The same is true of other choices – murder a merchant, and you're going to lose access to their services for the rest of the playthrough. Feed an item to a giant toothy snake, and it's unlikely you'll see it again. Spend your resources upgrading a weapon you end up not using, and you've given up investment in something you will. But the most immediately relevant at a moment to moment basis are your decisions in controlling your character. Combat in Dark Souls 1 is a mix of timing, distance, pacing, and most importantly, situational awareness. Rushing into a fight on a perilous ledge is inherently dangerous in DS1 in a way that few other games ever made really capture. Paying attention to your environment, keeping an eye on enemy movements when you're facing a crowd, and using the right attack or posture⁸ to suit the situation are all keys to victory, and do not reduce purely to reflexes and a DPS calculation the way combat in 'lesser' games would.

My first experience with FromSoft was seeing part of a playthrough someone had recorded of the first English localization of Demon's Souls, and my heart skipped a beat when I saw the character start to swing a halberd in a narrow hallway, only for the polearm to bounce off one of the walls. The fact that there was some physical reality beyond gussied up navmeshes⁹ to grapple with felt like a revelation, something I hadn't even considered third person action games capable of, much less ones exclusive to the console ecosystem of Madden-playing knuckle-draggers. And this is one of the few of Demon's Souls intensely hostile design decisions that Dark Souls 1 carries on and embraces.¹⁰ Every step you make, every swing you commit to, is a choice, and if you make a shitty choice, you'll be tumbling off a cliff, standing in fire, or opening yourself up for a sucker punch, cursing the lack of guardrails you're used to games providing. But by the same token, the game gives you plenty of options to make good decisions as well - enemies can be lured into similarly perilous positions, you can use a shield or some clever footwork to force them into juicy openings, and every weapon has a multitude of attack types, many of which travel along different arcs and ranges.

And, again, if you make the wrong choice, you have to live with it, and more importantly, find some way to mitigate the consequences. Take a shitty death, and you can still recover most of your souls by making it back to your high water mark before getting caught out again – an enterprise you may be willing to invest other nontrivial resources into, or risk making a bold dash for. Let your primary weapon degrade and break far from a blacksmith¹¹ and you'll be reduced to using whatever's in your bag, or can be found on the ground, until you can drag yourself back to civilization. That is in fact how my first playthrough went, deep in the putrid pit below Blighttown, after I broke my only upgraded weapon on multiple failed attempts at the boss, and had to crawl out using a crude cudgel. In what other game could I have similarly redeemed myself for my sins of Greed, Sloth, and Pride?

Over the course of the sequels, as with most of the electrifying qualities of DS1, this respect of and demand for players' decision making skills was watered down, rounded off, incrementally phased out. First to go was the warp system – or rather, the lack of warping at the onset. Where the ability to trivially escape any deep pit a player has found themselves in was a significant mid-game unlock in DS1, every later game has it available from the onset. You could argue that it's a necessary concession to dampen the impact of concurrently worsening world and level design, or is a 'quality of life' change, but you know that's not fair. All it does is further flatten the game world, turning every branch into just another checkbox in your mental list.

Another way the sequels took a step back was in implementing stat respecs – in Demon's and Dark, every point you committed into strength, or dexterity, or the spellcasting attributes, was permanent¹² and increased the cost of further points, eventually forcing players to either commit to a build or risk becoming spread so thin that they fell behind the damage curve for endgame. From DS2 on,¹³ the ability to cash in all your levels and re-engineer your character became increasingly readily available, [albeit always limited per-playthrough] in a further conceit to 'quality of life.' [one which I personally don't mind all that much] Similarly, killing NPCs in later games is less of a potential nightmare than it was in Demon's and Dark 1 – DS2 has a bizarre mechanic of paying to summon the ghosts of slain NPCs, Bloodborne replaces many critical NPC functions with inanimate objects, and DS3 and Elden Ring generally keep the 'important' NPCs in non-combat areas or has them respawn automatically.

Finally, the combat took a turn, one which I suspect most people enjoyed, but which I think eroded the original appeal of the series significantly. Going back to DS1 from later games can be frustrating, as the movement and attacks are relatively stiff, the flow of combat awkward, and so on. As the series progressed, it steered further and further into a particular style of character action, revolving increasingly around the use of dodge-roll i-frames¹⁴ to phase your way through ever more complex and rapid attack chains with timing and reflexes. New, flashy abilities tied to weapons give players edgy anime protagonist moves, the screen is frequently filled with flames, screaming, contorting masses of limbs, and tumbling character models. There still are nerve-wracking encounters on narrow rooftops, tight hallways where you have to remember to stab forward rather than attempt a dramatic sweep, and clever ambushes that empower players that can keep their head in a crisis, but all of those elements feel more and more like token nods to the original conceit as dodge-rolling or parrying through a lengthy combo becomes more critical to survival than paying attention to where you choose to stand your ground.

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But that's all a lie too. I may be personally enamored with DS1's commitment to the slow, cautious, and deliberate manner it engenders in players, but I'm obviously in the minority. Plenty of people prefer the wild ride, the wind in their hair, free teleports to everywhere they've ever seen, elegantly tumbling right through every attack, the Good Feel Brain Juices squirting all over their grey matter with every bleed proc or stagger. But somehow, even those people tend to respect DS1 in a way that can't be explained away by pure nostalgia. And in the end, I think it's more than a single justification can illuminate. Dark Souls 1 is, more than anything else you can say about it, a very thoughtful game. A level of genuine care uncommon in studio productions was taken in crafting every nuance of it – and I'm obviously not talking about polish or refinement, but in engineering an experience. Few games in the series have worse collision, worse hitboxes, worse animations, and so on, but those rough edges hardly detract, and maybe even reinforce the sense that the hands that built the game were guided by a higher purpose, to present something deeper than a smooth, well-oiled jack-off machine.

Because while Dark Souls certainly didn't introduce that many people to the ideas it embraced, it did something much more important. It sold those ideas – the challenge, the story, the hostility and reprieve, the moments of companionship and rivalry, and all the mechanics that hold players accountable for their failings. More than just presenting a series of obstacles, or a stimulating narrative, or a bunch of branching paths with glowing loot shimmering at their tips, it weaved those things together into a coherent tapestry, validating the presence of each individual stitch as a vital component of the whole. It's a game that's worth overcoming, worth reading the descriptions in, worth thinking about, dwelling on, revisiting.

The world of the Dark Souls series revolves around the concept of the First Flame – the whole of conscious creation, the light of the mind, the will that gives Man dominion over the nature they were wrested from, embodied in a single searing moment of revelation. Dark Souls is that first flame. A dimly recalled golden age, to which all others, however far removed, are compared, sustaining themselves on the endlessly recycled ashes of all that was built by those hallowed hands. The focal point of every degenerating cycle, with champions and challengers great and small through the ages failing, unable to kindle a fire to match that original radiance. And as the embers grow cold, and the last of light fades, our gaze turns away, to the dark expanse, hoping to catch a glimpse of some distant spark of brilliance.

1. Assuming one has the Leo Ring

2. How nostalgic are players who started with DS1 at the memory of a second boss health bar appearing mid-fight, an NPC rescued earlier joining you in a pivotal fight, sprinting across a bridge occasionally engulfed in dragon fire, or carried by demons to an otherwise unreachable area? I'd honestly like to know, because in every instance I was merely reminded of when those things happened in Demon's Souls

3. Like vagrants, miracle resonance, covenant mechanics, and formalized duel locations

4. The Master Key, also owned by default by the Thief class, lets players open up several locked doors that otherwise require finding a specific key, and one of these doors in particular is the intended 'exit' from a big loop of mid-game progress – being able to enter these areas early lets you skip to the end of the early game, including several scripted events that can be time consuming or frustrating to navigate in the proper direction like the bridge drake and armored boar, while also granting direct access to a necessary boss that otherwise involves making your way past two extra bosses and two long, frustrating whole areas

5. You also lose your 'humanity,' becoming a shriveled Hollow until you spend a humanity sprite at a checkpoint to restore your supple flesh. Hollows cannot summon co-op partners, or be invaded, and offering to BE summoned or performing an invasion are two ways to earn these humanity sprites

6. Unless it breaks – DS1, like Demon's Souls, is unusual in having a persistent durability system for all weapons and armor, which is generally lenient enough to only punish people who completely forget about it

7. Like, say, the Ash Lake

8. In addition to different animations for 'light' and 'heavy' attacks, bound to the bumper and trigger of the corresponding arm they're wielded by, every weapon also has unique animations for attacking after a roll, after a backstep, out of a sprint, and all animations are further differentiated if a weapon is held in one hand or both

9. A navmesh is an invisible layer used to allow AI entities to navigate the game world, and also generally corresponds to the allowed and intended playable space

10. Some of the others, like 'world tendency' and carrying capacity, are probably best left in the past

11. The first blacksmith you'll likely encounter does sell some items which make most of his services, such as basic upgrades and repairs, available to the player at any bonfire, but while it should be an obvious priority it's not a guarantee that players will opt to invest in them immediately

12. The 'final' boss of Demon's Souls actually has a move that permanently drains one level from your highest stat, which is less of a respec opportunity and more of a particularly infuriating penalty, but I guess it at least lowers your total level and makes getting those points back a bit cheaper

13. Bloodborne and Sekiro, again, are too different to really count in this context, but neither technically have respecs or particularly need them

14. i-frames, or invulnerability frames, are the span of time during which the player character cannot take damage, typically applied during certain animations including dodge rolls. The exact duration of the i-frames are imperceptible, and in DS2, were frustratingly tied to a stat, meaning dodges offered less safety at low levels than the prior game

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