Dark Souls progress: part 4

Original forum post: 10 February 2014

Been playing the game pretty sporadically since my last progress update a month ago. (A month in terms of when I originally wrote them, that is; these first four are going up on this blog in one batch!)

Dark Souls progress: part 3

Original forum post: 11 January 2014

Update!

Lvl26, 13h playtime. Main weapon: Longsword (now upgraded to +4).

Dark Souls progress: part 2

Original forum post: 8 January 2014

Dark Souls progress: part 1

Not being a PS3 owner, it’s no surprise that Demon’s Souls passed me by. But somehow, I managed to completely miss the fuss about Dark Souls until very recently. The 400-page-plus thread on the main videogame forum I visit was one my eyes always glanced past in the topic index. So it wasn’t until last year’s anniversary issue of Edge proclaimed it one of the games that Should Have Got A Ten (alongside my beloved GoldenEye) that I took any notice of it:

People fixate on the difficulty because it’s the easy talking point, but FromSoftware’s masterpiece is arguably less preoccupied with difficulty than your garden-variety firstperson shooter. We’ve grown accustomed to being asked to choose between words like casual, normal, legendary, survivor, insane, nightmare and the rest before we ever taste a second of gameplay. Dark Souls boasts the courage of its design convictions. The world of Lordran has an established temperament and everyone who travels there will face the same travails. The uniformity of experience is part of what makes flinty-eyed Dark Souls veterans feel such intense solidarity when they discuss the game. Nobody gets a free pass. Nobody is born with a silver dagger clenched in their teeth.

The game holds you in exceedingly high regard. It believes you are capable of accomplishing remarkable feats, ones that might well seem impossible when first encountered. If you bailed out before completing the game, it was only because you disagreed with its opinion of your capabilities.

That had me intrigued. Then in December it was offered for about £4 as a download on Xbox Live, so I snapped it up.

This post – and subsequent ones in this series – are basically the progress updates I posted in the Rllmukforum Dark Souls thread. I bought the game and began playing early in December, but didn’t really get stuck into it until after Xmas. This first progress update was originally posted there on 1 January 2014 (getting stuck on Dark Souls: a fun way to spend New Year’s Eve!)

As for the difficulty: I’ve played lots of challenging games, but the hardest ones I’ve completed before now are probably Perfect Dark (you might not remember it being such a hard game, especially compared to Jet Force Gemini, but levels like Attack Ship and Maian SOS are ridiculous on Perfect Agent, especially with the low framerates of the original N64 version!), Ninja Gaiden Black (default difficulty) and Ninja Gaiden 2 (but only on its default Path of the Acolyte “Normal” difficulty; I’ve reached the werewolf boss in my Path Of The Warrior “Hard” run, which I return to approximately annually…).

Right, let’s praise the Sun and get going!