Brick By Brick

jtrevett:

doshmanziari:

Truth be told, I usually like to wait a few months before trying to discuss a videogame, especially one as large as Dark Souls 3, at length, so this’ll be something of a minor look at my experience with the game.

My biggest takeaway from Dark Souls 3 right now is wondering why it needed to be made; and, accepting that it has been made, what its value as a followup and supposed conclusion is. It’s easy to argue for the unnecessariness of any media if you have a reductionist view of human experience. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m asking what this installment contributes to Dark Souls, as a fiction, that wasn’t just better left alone with the first game.

The trickiness with asking these questions is that it makes it sound as if Dark Souls 3 is a bad game. Barring an unlistenable soundtrack, a handful of bosses that are either outright horrid or have tired designs, and some references to prior games that are nothing but base fanservice, Dark Souls 3 is a fairly good videogame. But its existence feels especially questionable after Bloodborne, with its revamped offensive-based mechanics and unfamiliar cosmos (there is also a lot to be said about how it is representative of a huge increase in detail and fidelity). Dark Souls 3 can’t even fully commit to the end of its world, which is really the only thing its narrative had going for it, as when you decide to let the bonfires go unlinked, the Firekeeper’s words allude to a rekindling.

I had for a long time felt that the Castlevania series could have sustained itself even during its highly reiterative phase of titles helmed by producer Koji Igarashi if only the design had at least been as good as Symphony of the Night, but now that I’m thinking about Dark Souls 3 I’m not so sure. I’ve glanced through several reviews of the game and it seems like others are starting to feel the fatigue of diminished returns. I don’t expect, however, that this will mean, should there be another Dark-Souls-alike, that reviewers will let their fatigue be reflected in their scoring (to say nothing about how wrongheaded numerical bottom-lines are anyway). After all, nearly every reviewer felt compelled to give the aforementioned Castlevania games high scores as if because their stuffed, obsessive-compulsive designs were intrinsically owed a silver or gold star.

If you’ve played Dark Souls 3, what do you think?

Edit: Geez. This has already gotten one response by a troll, who I’ve blocked. Please don’t respond if you’re going to approach this in bad faith. Thanks!

For me, the takeaway from Dark Souls 3 is that we shouldn’t listen to Prince Lothric. He’s the voice that says that it’s time to let it die - that diminishing returns mean the thing is as good as over already, and we should “let it all fade into nothing.” He might have a point, but these games have never given much stock to nihilism.

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This is a good response.

I agree with your comment about the series and nihilism, but – this may be misconstruing your words – I don’t think that an ending involving humanity’s unequivocal extinction would necessarily be nihilistic. A post-anthropocene conclusion would seem to me the same as if each of the trilogy’s entries were self-contained: it’s just another way to reinforce the transitory nature of everything, and to suggest a vaster historical scope to the game’s universe and its characters. Of course, the games aren’t self-contained, so it might just be that I have an opinion that’s in conflict with what the games seem to want to suggest themselves. Dark Souls’ prologue did a lot to influence my attitude towards that game’s fiction and the subsequent two games’ decisions.

Items like Siegward, Ornstein’s armor, or the use of “co-operators” in the description of the sunlight talismans are cheap, dead-end forms of fanservice that do degrade the game*, but most of my conflict with Dark 3 lies outside of those things. It’s a bigger question of what this narrative does to enrich what was already there. Perhaps, given how these games ended up stressing cyclicality, this question is not a problem. It could be taken as a sort of parallel to global history and humanity’s recurrent fuckups. That’s stuff worth exploring. It’s just hard, for me personally, to want to explore it without feeling bored and disappointed: boredom with what has been recycled, and disappointed that that cyclicality has, in my opinion, shrunk the size of this universe.

*Gonna quote something I wrote elsewhere here:

Looking out on those series of bastions next to Firelink Shrine and the foggy landscape beyond in Dark Souls gave the sense that here was this enormous world, full of more history and mystery than you could ever imagine. That, plus the implied subjectivity of the Chosen Undead’s quest, even led me to wonder if Dark Souls’ supposed cosmogeny was in fact regional, rather than global.

When the Greatest Hits reappear, and in the most unimaginative way, it shrinks that world. No matter how wide this landscape is, no matter how many years pass, everything is ultimately reducible to a few key players who are now key because the teams at From Software have realized which elements the fandom liked most. It reminds me of how Metal Gear Solid 2’s ending implied a depth to the narrative’s mechanical underpinnings, and then MGS4 destroyed all of that depth by revealing that every historically major thing led back to Important Metal Gear Solid Characters.