A year ago I played Dark Souls 3 for the first time. I hated it. Immensely. I’m not even sure how to express the depths of my hatred for it because of how joyless of an experience it was. I’m laughing as I write this because of how hyperbolic it sounds, but I need you to understand how much I didn’t enjoy playing this video game.

What makes the whole situation even funnier, to me and maybe only me, is how I crowned Dark Souls Remastered my favourite game played in 2022. Huh?! What is going on here? Why was there a Mariana Trench sized gulf between my experience with the first, and third games in the trilogy? I dunno. I’m a big dumb gorilla who mostly writes opinion pieces, and plays fighting games. If I could explain the disparity in my experiences I would have turned it into an article already. That’s what I do.

Finding the dead smith at his forge in Anor Londo.

However, I recently watched 3 different videos that got me thinking about my perspective on Dark Souls 3. The first video is titled Dark Souls 3 is Thinking of Ending Things by Jacob Geller, which I’d encourage you to watch as I’ll only be scratching the surface of it here. The video gets into how the vibes of Dark Souls 3’s lore, as Geller puts it, suggest that the world of Dark Souls is wrestling with itself, and on the brink of collapse. This is attributed to how all 3 games take place during the Age of Fire, which has been prolonged past its natural conclusion.

What caused Geller’s video to really dig its talons into me is how it challenged 1 of my major criticisms of Dark Souls 3: that it’s derivative. Many of the game’s locations are callbacks to the first game’s Lordran, despite Dark Souls 3 taking place in an ostensibly new kingdom called Lothric. There’s a poison swamp, catacombs full of demons, and we even get to visit the city of Gods Anor Londo again! This is just Dark Souls dressed up with prettier graphics, and a better frame rate. I see exactly what you’re doing FromSoft! I will not be so easily deceived.

In my defense, I feel like it was easy to arrive at the conclusion that Dark Souls 3 was derivative. My assumption was that the development team deliberately reused locations to invoke nostalgia for the original Dark Souls because of how poorly its sequel Dark Souls 2 was received. If FromSoft could get everyone to unknowingly attribute all of their positive feelings from Dark Souls onto Dark Souls 3 thanks to some familiar imagery then it’d be received more positively. They’re not the only developers to attempt doing something like this, so I naturally concluded that was why Dark Souls 3 was so chock full of callbacks to the first game.

Regardless, watching Geller’s video opened my eyes to another possibility: perhaps the familiar imagery was meant to highlight how much the world of Dark Souls had been perverted by the prolonged Age of Fire. Every building is crumbling to dust, and many of the human residents have gone insane, or been transformed into horrific monsters. Seeing how much worse everything is compared to the original Dark Souls really drives home just how awful the Age of Fire has been for everyone, and everything.

Given this newfound perspective, I don’t think my original conclusion on Dark Souls 3 holds any weight. The game might be derivative at a surface level, but digging for even a little additional context provides a very compelling argument for why Dark Souls 3 makes so many callbacks to older games in the franchise. This isn’t merely fanservice. It helps to accentuate how much the world has fallen into disarray, and really drives home the ending when, regardless of the player’s choices, the Age of Fire ends. The world of Dark Souls simply can’t continue on like this, and needs to end things.

Standing in Firelink Shrine.

Geller’s video makes an excellent case for why Dark Souls 3 has so much familiar imagery, but what were those other 2 videos I mentioned at the top of the article? More importantly, what aspect of my criticisms toward Dark Souls 3 did they address?

Well, I’m glad you asked.

The remaining 2 videos that challenged my perspective on Dark Souls 3 are both by hbomberguy: Bloodborne is Genius, And Here’s Why, and In Defence of Dark Souls 2. As I’m sure you’ve surmised, neither video is about Dark Souls 3, but hbomberguy makes a point in both wherein he claims that using shields is the wrong way to play Dark Souls.

Now, I realize that claiming some way of playing a game is wrong is an incredibly loaded statement. However, hbomberguy does elaborate on what he means by this across the contents of the 2 videos, which I also encourage you to watch. The short version is that he believes FromSoft’s games are typically more fun when players aren’t passively hiding behind their shield. He also blames FromSoft for implicitly teaching every player that is how the game is meant to be played during the tutorial, and first few levels of Dark Souls.

As someone who played the majority of Dark Souls 3 hiding behind a shield, all this anti-shield rhetoric caused me to question if I was the source of my own frustration. That other aforementioned criticism is that I found Dark Souls 3’s bosses, and combat to be hugely repetitive. However, I approached the overwhelming majority of the game’s different challenges in exactly the same way. Hiding behind a shield was the equivalent of walking into every fight with a hammer, and once you hit enough things with a hammer everything starts to look like a nail. 

Looking over the crumbling Castle Lothric in Dark Souls 3.

Part of that ultimately falls on me, but it’s no wonder that I played in this way when Dark Souls 3 taught me the exact same set of lessons as Dark Souls’ tutorial. I was given a shield immediately, and it was largely the determining factor in me beating the tutorial boss on my first attempt. By playing passively, I was able to slowly chip the boss down, and win, cementing the lesson that I could continue playing Dark Souls 3 in the same passive way that I had with Dark Souls.

This passivity was exacerbated by how inextricably broken my attribute points ended up being distributed so I could continue to hide behind a shield, while primarily attacking with magic. By about the mid-game I was doing very little damage to the majority of bosses, so I started building everything around the spell Pestilent Mist. This spell summons a poisonous cloud that deals a percentage of the target’s max health as damage. This meant that Pestilent Mist would always do the same amount of damage provided I could keep a boss within the radius of the spell. Hiding behind a shield made this a lot easier, so I continued doing this for the remainder of the game, as I watched every single boss fall to my noxious farts.

To really illustrate my point, here’s a video I originally posted on Twitter where I show how effective Pestilent Mist is at dispatching one of Dark Souls’ more notorious enemies: Mimics.

Does that look exciting to you? This is the gameplay equivalent of choosing the clearly marked dialogue options that skip combat in an RPG. It’s a deliberate decision to not engage with the game because dropping a fart cloud is safer.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about all of this – so much so that I wrote an entire article sharing what’s been running through my head for the past few weeks. I’m thoroughly convinced that Dark Souls 3 was such a miserable experience for me entirely because I wasn’t willing to actually engage with the game on its level. If I’d taken the time to be more involved, and engaged then I might have had a much better experience overall with the title.

Part of me thinks that it might be worthwhile to return to Lothric with this newfound perspective to see if it helps. However, the negative memory of the game is still so recent that I don’t know that I have the mental fortitude to engage with such an undertaking. I’m aware that’s an unsatisfactory way to end this article, but that’s where I’m at now. I guess if you ever read a sequel to this post, you’ll know what happened when I went back to Dark Souls 3.