DARK SOULS III
Badly explained, crudely ported: best Dark Souls yet?
“YOU DIED.” Any player of From Software’s games will see those words burned into their retinas. The DarkSouls series has specialized in being the most hardcore action RPGs available. DarkSoulsIII is the latest in the series, and possibly the last.
Like its predecessors, DarkSoulsIII is set in a thinly-sketched world, where some of the dead come back to life. At every turn of its twisted world, once-human revenants wait to jump out, items lure you into traps, and giant abhuman or inhuman leviathans are walled away in cathedrals, castles, and caves. Oh, and you’re dead, too.
Players again take the role of an undead character, doomed to never die. This time, you’re the Ashen One, tasked with rekindling the fire in the new area of Lothric, by dragging back the souls of the towering Lords of Cinder, who first kindled it, to the Firelink Shrine. Which means killing them and anyone else who stands in your way. That’s an unusually straightforward mission for a DarkSouls game.
Despite subtle plot hints, the game has little more story than that—the writing is more targeted at creating atmosphere than explaining anything. Miss the opening cutscene and you’re likely to be completely lost. For most of the game, you’re just exploring the world, trying to avoid dying, and finding the few routes through.
For example, one of the bosses is called the Curse-Rotted Greatwood. You don’t know it’s anything except an ugly, giant tree until you step too close to it and it comes to life. Once it’s finally dead, if you scour item descriptions, you might get the impression that the villagers diverted their curses on to the tree, causing it to come alive—but that’s the entire context for its existence.
Not that this game needs a clear story— it just needs atmosphere to support its unparalleled exploration experience. The core loops haven’t changed from previous games, leaving them impressively hardcore, and they throw up enough stories.
Every step is a gamble. You know that you need to be ready to defend, charge, or flee, all the time. You know that the folds of the landscape contain traps and rewards in equal measure, that no matter how lowly the creature, it can kill you in seconds, that sometimes you just will die, despite all your preparations. You also know that you need to make it to the next bonfire checkpoint before you die, else the enemies will respawn, and you’ll need to do it all again.
That’s made complex by the combat being so unforgiving. Enemies are aggressive, and if their attacks connect, you’ll die quickly. Your choices are to dodge, block, or run— all of which use your character’s limited stamina up, as do attacks, meaning even a short combat is about careful resource management, to get your character into a position where he can fight back.
That counts double for boss fights, which are much longer, and typically involve two or more stages of combat. Given that there is almost never a bonfire just before a boss fight, you often stumble into a big battle badly injured, low on crucial Estus health potions, with no idea how to survive the boss’s long-range, high-damage attacks.
And when you die, there are new gambles to be made. Your souls—the game’s only form of currency, used for leveling up,
upgrades, and buying items—are left where you die. So you’ve got to make it back there, wherever it is, beyond all the enemies that were reborn at the moment of your demise. Then decide whether to make the gamble again, or retrace your steps to a bonfire to cash in your souls at the Firelink Shrine. TRACING THE BLOODLINE Between the last DarkSouls and this one, From Software released the PlayStation-exclusive Bloodborne, a stellar game with familiar DarkSouls mechanics and a Cthulhian theme, but which focused more on dodging than blocking attacks, bizarre transforming weapons, and introduced effective ranged weapons. DarkSoulsIII has learned from that experience, and your characters move quicker than before.
However, From Software has added more variety to the weapons. Now, you can use weapon skills to attack in unique ways for each weapon—a halberd might allow you to charge at the enemy, while a broadsword gets something like an uppercut. These moves use power from a new meter— Focus points—which is also used for magic, requiring you to choose more carefully which weapon to use.
This has particularly helped ranged weapons, which had been slow and left you vulnerable to fast enemies. Now, the short bow has a special weapon skill that allows you to rapid fire, the crossbow allows you to push back enemies who get too close, and the longbow and greatbows penetrate through enemy defenses. These are finally viable options as you level up.
That doesn’t mean the game is much easier—far from it. The later bosses, ready to seize on every mistimed dodge, were well beyond the capabilities of my aged fingers. The wider world, of cathedrals, woods, and swamps, is packed with stronger enemies. At least the landscape—beautiful, complex, and weirdly laid-out—draws you on to its looming castles and tumbledown towns.
Like all of From Software’s titles, Dark SoulsIII has its flaws. It doesn’t really explain its story, or how to play, particularly well. It doesn’t tell you what you’re meant to be doing. It doesn’t give any support to weaker players. The later bosses all start to get a bit similar (giant knights with outrageous combos and reach). And the PC version is, as ever, the most unstable, with network problems, and repeated crashes for users running it on higher settings.
Criticisms aside, this is still the most accessible DarkSouls yet. The story, combat, and systems have been streamlined to make you focus on the most important element: surviving against the odds in its twisted world. Even then, you’ll die, die, and die again—happily.
Dark Souls III
ENLIGHTENED The perfect core loop; exceptionally tough combat; beautiful, unusual, hostile world.
SHADED PC version issues; linear, thin story; unfriendly to new players.
RECOMMENDED SPECS Intel Core i73770 or AMD FX-8350; GeForce GTX 970 or Radeon R9; 8GB RAM; 25GB storage.
$60, www.darksouls3.com, ESRB: M