As a video game sophist, a sophiticated gamer if you will, my auteur indie game pallet can never truly be quenched. Namely because I lack the attention span for anything remotely challenging or creative; and prefer instead to sink yet more hours into comfortable, yet, unengaging titles that I have long since stopped gaining any unique pleasure from. Like an amphibian this water is my home and all venturings outside it are but transient and in opposed to my nature as a wet cretin.
So when did these beloved games become so meh? Time and time again the fires were lit only to turn the world around it to ash: ash? Speak not in riddles tale weaver for I am but a simple reader. Rule 1: remember your audience, rule 2: they are basic.
Dark souls, is the story of a dude setting himself on fire to stop the end of the world. 2 doesn't matter and three takes the bioshock approach and say’s “yeah what if that, but a bunch of times,”
So many people set themselves on fire that the world is pretty F’n burnt out by this point and everyone has given up on doing it. So what does the world do? Call up one of the people who burnt themselves before and get them to do it again. Only they have date at nando’s or whatever and CBA, so the world summons up the unburnt ash of one who failed to light the flame to go and cock block them.
So what does this have to do with postmodernism? Nothing but bringing it up is part of what I do as an elite sophist. Anyway here is the story of me weebing out over a katana (the most powerful of blades, (that thing which i, a master warrior (sexless imbicile) have studied))
I named the damn thing, forgotten what. Yet to get it was a trial of fire and steel. Well mostly the latter, I say mostly because the furnace never gets hot enough to make true steel… and blah blah blah, wasn't joking when I said I was a weeb.
After beating the first boss I found him, a withered corpse with rags for clothes gripping the (objectively) greatest tool of humankind's candle like existence.
He approached slowly, pacing towards me without fear nor hesitation as though as his mind was taken with the Sakura fall on a languid afternoons stroll in the zen garden, hand on hilt, blade in the sheath... he cut me down in two seconds. Rinse and repeat, only this time i’m prepared, bombs, knives and all manor of dastard subterfuge. I lob, hurl and spit my arsenal as vitriolic in my attack as a rabid dog... He cut me down again. This is the essence of the dark souls experience. Eventually I gave up, played through the game some and came back a touch more buff and several levels senior, and still barely made it out with a drop of blood left in my ninehundred ninety nine cut bearing body.
The dark souls series has a well established reputation as feeling like a swift kick to the bollocks and it’s players are all serial masochists, but this game is very much a kinky safe space. There is no shame or humiliation in death unless...
“Yeah sure, whatever? Why i does it need to be a kink?” well most, many, the more popular games are very much empowerment fantasies; to a degree dark souls three is too, not two, nor one though however, if I had to pick one: definitely three. Dark souls is very much a dis-empowerment fantasy, where you are significantly less able that your opponents and overcoming them is by no means inevitable, combine this with your character being a nobody and you’ve turned things on their head. Upon succumbing to that appeal one realises it is somewhat perverse: Kinky eh?
Well Three isn’t so straight forward, you move with a certain brisk elegance now, you no longer move like a clunky undead, but like embers flicking in the flames updraft. Your character is reviled for being ash, a desperate spurt from a dying world; yet there is hope. a knowledge of past mistakes which can be built on and learned from, if dark souls is depression: then dark souls three is rebuilding your life after the fact. There is a sense of importance as the lands converge and timer runs down of a world at the brink of dusk, you play an undeniable role as you gather the bosses’ remains.
The levels while feeling somewhat more linear, do a wonderful job of obfuscating their gaminess in their architecture and landscaping, they don’t feel like levels as you play, but are places you push through, it’s only when you need to flip a switch and open a shortcut that you realise the illusion that game puts you under. The immersiveness of the scene.
I recently, i mean not that recently, maybe 6 months ago. Got ahold of the DLC’s for the game. Asses of arendelle and the cock ring city. If you even got tired of mistress Ds3 shoving things near your taint then the dlc’s are some hardcore scenes that fulfil some of the playerbases most depraved fantasies. The challenge is ramped up - a certain tightening of the nipple clamps, through both level design and enemy toughness though not to the point of being unplayable; it feels more honed than anything.
The former having longer gaps between bonfires, making each encounter more costly, straining the player to sustain themselves through the harsh cold of the painted world.
The ringed city is a series of puzzles woven into combat, the game is excruciating until you clock the solution, at which point it recedes into just being bloody pedantically tough. There are no safe-words in this place, and I never quite finished it.
In summary: dark souls 3 is a game for kinky weebs, no normies allowed REEEEEEEEEEEE
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