Holy shit. That pretty much summed up my Dark Souls experience, don’t get me wrong, not in a bad way, this, my friends, is the epicest of holy shits ever. I just beat Dark Souls, after leaving it for a month or two after my review for it, due to frustration of constantly dying, but hey, that’s my first Souls game! (Yeah, I started Dark Souls before Demon’s Souls). I was playing a knight in my first brief play through of 7 hours and only reaching the black knight at the top of the tower in Undead Parish *Whistles and looks away*, but then three friends of mine almost killed me insisted that I should resume the game, I restarted the game with a pyromancer, and let me tell you now, it makes absolutely no difference what class you decide to start with, my “pyromancer” who, from the word is supposed to be heavily invested in intelligence, winded up to be a strength built bad ass that spurts fire and stuff from his hand! Sick, ey? Well, to the most part, I admit my character was a bit overpowered, taking in consideration that first thing I went for was the Drake sword, which is pretty much the strongest weapon for starting characters, then moved on to wield a black knight’s great sword, which is not only super strong, but gets stronger every time you increase your strength, and finally I had the demon’s great axe which I upgraded to the maximum of a +15 which lets the axe scale ridiculously with my strength, while that was an epic PVE character, I got pummeled hard when I decided to go PVP, with my very low vitality, and my insanely slow weapon, I barely got any hits in!
The way this game is developed, being “open world” and all, takes its “open world”ness to an extreme, it allows you to pretty much tackle any boss, any time, save for a few of course, but the order in which you progress makes no difference what so ever, for example, I killed the Capra Demon before I rang the first bell of awakening past the bell gargoyles, I killed Gravelord Nito right before I killed Gwyn, to game veterans, my way of tackling the game may seem insanely stupid, since I was making it hard on myself with the Capra before the bell and all, but to put this in perspective for the non souls gamers, it’s like as if Luke went to free Han from Jabba without ever first facing Vader, makes no sense!
An element that proved very handy in this game, is its co-op, whoever helped me pass a boss, you have my sincerest gratitude. This game would have been SO much more punishing had it not been for co-op, I mean seriously, if a boss is giving you a hard time, you have two options, either suck it up, keep dying and just deal with it, OR summon a friendly phantom to help you kill said boss! It’s just so beautiful!
After the game is beaten you are taken to new game +, where (as Neil Patrick Harris once said) the grass ain’t green and the girls ain’t pretty, literally, everything is 2 to 3 times harder, has more health, and drops more souls, you also start with all the gear you had when you faced Gwyn in your previous play through.
All in all, this game is one of the most wonderful/challenging games I have personally ever played, and honestly, I don’t want to play it again for the time being, I deserve a little break!
Metal Geek 