Dark Souls Sucks

[Kruyurk]

I love Demon's Souls and Dark Souls.

 

[Skinwalker]

I love Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 3, Dark Souls 4 (Elden Ring), and Bloodborne. I will probably love Demon Souls and Sekiro once I play them.

DS2 sucks, tho. That's the one bad soulsgame.

 

[Drakortha]

Soulcucks

 

[Odoryuk]

Primus sucks

 

[Necrensha]

Primus sucks

 

[Silverfish]

Sorry you lost to Pinwheel, bro.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Dark Souls was a fluke and everything afterwards is just a futile attempt to recapture the magic

Yet another poor soul who has never played Demon's Souls, which together with Dark Souls conclusively establishes that neither was a "fluke".

 

[jackofshadows]

Reads as a skill issue. OP suck.

 

[Elttharion]

 

[Socrates]

I've yet to play a WRPG that comes even close to the worldbuilding, atmosphere, uniqueness, and bold design that FromSoft has accomplished. WRPGs declined hard.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I love Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 3, Dark Souls 4 (Elden Ring), and Bloodborne. I will probably love Demon Souls and Sekiro once I play them.

DS2 sucks, tho. That's the one bad soulsgame.

Remember the proper terminology:

• Demon's Souls
• Dark Souls
• King's Souls
• Blood Souls
• Soul Souls
• Ninja Souls
• Elder Souls

 

[NJClaw]

DS2 sucks, tho. That's the one bad soulsgame.

DS2 is a weird one and, for someone, an acquired taste. It's worse in many aspects, but it still excels at many different things.

For example, to this day, no other game has even tried to replicate its NG+ mechanics, and it's a real pity. DS1 has something similar with the Gravelord Servant covenant, but good luck experiencing it without hacking the game.

 

[JarlFrank]

Dark Souls is pretty great actually. I played through it last year and had a blast. Even the second half, which is generally considered worse (rightfully so) wasn't that rough. I quite enjoyed the much-maligned Tomb of Giants, for example - great atmosphere.

The world design is excellent. Lots of hidden areas, many places are interconnected like a metroidvania, usually there's a sealed gate you can only open from one side which starts to feel like a gimmick after a while but it works well enough for the purpose it has. There's a large variety of locations and they're all densely atmospheric. Your claim that it's all just dark and gloomy and looks like shit isn't even true, the first proper area you enter is a medieval castle with daylight, later on you enter the bright city of Anor Londo, there's a gloomy forest with plenty of green, and Lost Izalith adds a little red with its lava streams. And when we look at Dark Souls 2, it gets even more colorful, beginning with the starting town which is a beautiful and serene place, and pretty much going through the entire game which boasts great diversity of locations.

The gloomiest-looking Dark Souls game is 3, and I'd honestly consider that one the worst of the series. More linear level design with fewer interconnections and backtracking, and a greater focus on choreographed boss fights that are way too hard for their own good (many DS3 bosses took me 20+ attempts).

But DS1 and 2 are excellent games if you're an explorefag, as is Elden Ring.
The genre gave birth to some other quite good games, too. It has some features I dislike (losing your XP on death and having to do a corpse run to get it back fucking sucks), but the exploration-focused gameplay is top tier.
The only soulslikes that suck are the ones that embraced the difficulty meme too hard and overfocus on boss fights above everything else. Lies of P receives a lot of praise but from what I've read, it is far more linear than any Souls game and its main focus is on the combat, particularly boss fights, rather than exploration. A fundamental misunderstanding of what soulslikes are about.

 

[Socrates]

A fundamental misunderstanding of what soulslikes are about.

A big one that is often missed is the catharsis of triumph.

 

[NJClaw]

smaug I know you're like a fetus or something, but I assure you: hating on popular good games won't get you laid. Trust me, I tried.

 

[JarlFrank]

The closest experience to the original Dark Souls I found outside of FromSoft titles is Bleak Faith: Forsaken, a game made by three Balkaners. Mega janky, as expected from small team balkanware, but intensely atmospheric and focused on exploration of a massive and interconnected world. Very unique game. Quite enjoying that one.

The best game I discovered last year was a solo dev 2D soulslike called Fire in the Beastlands. Very interconnected map, quite open exploration, and a secret good ending I missed (you gotta do secret things to get it, I missed a bunch of stuff and got a letdown ending). Cool tribal stone age setting. Extremely well-made and full of soul.

These games alone justify the existence of soulslike as a genre.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

Just look at this shit. Is this an inside joke? Why does everything in these games look so shitty?

Why you wanted boring orcs again?! if there's one thing JRPGs do well is monster design creativity, while westerners reuses tokien and greek mythology stuff over and over again.

 

[Fedora Master]

Dark Souls was a fluke and everything afterwards is just a futile attempt to recapture the magic

Yet another poor soul who has never played Demon's Souls, which together with Dark Souls conclusively establishes that neither was a "fluke".

I'm not a child, so no, I don't own a PlayStation.

 

[smaug]

smaug I know you're like a fetus or something, but I assure you: hating on popular good games won't get you laid. Trust me, I tried.

I like Dark Souls, however, its fanboys are so repulsive I am compelled to shit on it out of principle.

 

[Skinwalker]

I love Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 3, Dark Souls 4 (Elden Ring), and Bloodborne. I will probably love Demon Souls and Sekiro once I play them.

DS2 sucks, tho. That's the one bad soulsgame.

Remember the proper terminology:

• I am a kike
• I am a kike
• I am a kike
• I am a kike
• I am a kike
• I am a kike
• I am a kike

Oh?

 

[Just Locus]

Even the second half, which is generally considered worse (rightfully so) wasn't that rough.

I think part of what makes the latter half of DS1 so terrible is because the first half of DS1 is so fucking good.

My favorite example of how intelligent DS1's level design is is how the mimics are first introduced:

• Placed at an odd angle when every previous chest was facing a straight direction
• In the middle of a room as opposed to being against a wall
• You find it after going through a portion of Sen's Fortress which is already established as a place full of traps

An attentive player would easily figure out that the chest is fake or at least feel suspicious about it.
This is in contrast to Gravelord Nito's level:

• You're forced to drop from a great height (taking quite a bit of damage before even starting the boss fight)
• After taking damage, your first inclination would be to drink Estus to regain some HP, but skeletons would be hitting you from below that you couldn't have known
• After that, you would decide to run to find maybe where the fuck Nito is or avoid the skeletons picking at you from below, without knowing that you're actually waking up even more skeletons, making the fight "harder" through no fault of your own.

There are a lot of examples of the other 50% of DS1 just contrasting with the first half of the game's design. Like how the first fight with Seathe has a scripted death that a first-time player wouldn't have known, thus losing all their souls, or how with Ceaseless Discharge—more people remember the exploit that kills him instantly than the actual fight itself.

These kinds of mistakes sting extra hard because the first part of the game is so good. It was pretty frustrating to see the developers fall into design pits that they so easily avoided earlier.