Imposing towers reach towards an amber and sombre sky. Earlier, this place was populated by stalwart sentries defined by rigorous routines that superseded mere design. In narrative terms, the long and lonely lives of these🦄 lost souls have releꦜgated them to repetition, living only to die, over and over again.
Despite the initially grimdark nature of this structure, it all comes full circle on your return to Anor Londo, where solitude screeches at the beginning of the end. Atmospherically, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dark Souls’ illustrious denouement achieves a kind of power that I have never properly encountered elsewhere. That final fight with Gwyn, scored by music so melancholy that even the softest hums transcend volume, is probably one of the most perfect conclusions to ever grace a video game. It’s a shame, then, that it is only temporarily conclusive. In spite of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:FromSoftware’s usual commitment to standalone games - 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Demon’s Souls, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Bloodborne, Sekiro, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Elden Ring, and Dark Souls prior to its sequels - we eventually got both Dark Souls 2 and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dark Souls 3. These are excellent games in their own right, but should t𒆙hey have retained the Souls namesake? Ten 🐼years on from the iconic studio’s first venture into the mainstream, I’m not so sure.
Dark Souls 2 is not a direct continuation of its predecessor. This alone should be testament enough to why it could have easily been given a different name - yes, there are similarities to Dark Souls𒉰, but then every FromSoft game is at least﷽ somewhat comparable to the studio’s 2011 megahit. It does, admittedly, look more distinctly “Dark Souls” than the Gothic Victorian streets of Bloodborne or the feudal Japanese temples and towers of Sekiro, although in hindsight I’m not sure this is enough to justify the name. Aside from having ridiculous mobs, Dark Souls 2 is a great game - the negative light it is viewed in today, I think, likely has to do with its inherently tainted identity. If it had been called something else, I would wager critical reception might have endured past initially glowing but since dampened perspectives on it.
Dark Souls 3, meanwhile, does follow on from the original game. While Dark Souls is my favourit🔯e game in the trilogy - I haven’t actually finished Dark Souls 2 or Dark Souls 3, although I have watched both to completion multiple times and am intimately familiar with their trajectories - I have always understood when someone cites the third entry as the most impressive one. It is a phenomenal game with one of the single best expansions in industry history. I also think it might have done well not to have built on an ending that already felt satisfyingly ambiguous and successfully defeatist. The end of Dark Souls is potentially the best thing FromSoft has ever done - and that’s coming from a Bloodborne fan. It never needed to be referenced, let alone built upon. I can’t help feeling that the successes of Dark Souls 3 are not only derivative of the first game, but actively detrimental towards it.
I know that people will disagree with me. That’s fine. If you love the Dark Souls trilogy for what it is, more power to you. I love it, too! I’m just musing on what might have been because, in case you missed it, Dark Souls turned ten years old yesterday. To celebrate this, our features editor, Jade King, put together an excellent piece on why it’s potentially the bes🙈t game ever made. It was while I was reading that piece that the idea for this one struck me. The premise of Dark Souls being a standalone game has always been a sort of vague, elusive thought for me. It wasn’t until I saw its magnificence celebrated to mark such an important milestone in its lifespan that I finally felt capable of articulating why: I enjoy the Dark Souls trilogy, but I enjoy Dark Souls as a self-contained experience far more. From tꦑhe Undead Asylum to Firelink Shrine, to Sen’s Fortress and The Duke’s Archives, the first entry in FromSoft’s most successful series is the studio’s magnum opus not just because it’s the best game in the trilogy, but because it is such an emphatically perfect game in and of itself.
For what it’s worth, I think reasoning why Dark Souls is so rightfully celebrated is, at this point, ten years on from launch, a rather tired and pointless endeavour. We’ve talked about the combat until our voices went hoa💎rse, written about its fragmented lore until our fingers bled, and marvelled at its immense but focused scale until our brains decided to implode of their own accord. We know Dark Souls is good. The position I am taking now is that it is this ver🌌y fact that should have earned it the right to exist in its own perfect circle, looping round its leading level design for ten years and tens and tens of years thereafter.
The end of Dark Souls is far stronger than the end of Dark Souls 3 because 🌸the conclusion was simple: whether you link the First Flame or not, the world is doomed - although its ambiguity allowed hope to vainly and vaguely persist. It’s often said that the best stories don’t offer closure. One of my favourite novels is Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, which famously ends by actively resisting any kind of catharsis. Paradoxically, this is what generally leads to a significantly more cathartic impact down the line, because you are left to wonder and fill in the gaps for yoursel💛f. After all, the fragmentary nature of Dark Souls forces you to personally fill in gaps anyway, right? It’s like a novel where half the words have been erased and half of what’s left has been subbed out for arcane synonyms pulled from ancient, likely mistranslated texts. It was never a game that needed a trilogy so much as it was an experience that earned the right to be spun off into nebulously similar titles like Bloodborne and Sekiro.
Someone once told me that good art doesn’t reference - it is referenced. Dark Souls refe🍷renced none and is referenced by all. Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3 reference recklessly and relentlessly, to the point where when someone talks of being inspired by Dark Souls now, it is, almost always, stated in relation to the first game specifically and exclusively. Maybe if the second and third entries had opted for a more unique identity, they could have achieved a similar calibre. As it stands, however, the full trilogy will never hold a First Flame to the self-contained initial entry that started it all.
Happy tenth anniversary, Dark Souls. You were f🔴ar too clever to deserve mimics.