I’ve always loved the Demon’s Souls soundtrack
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i almost just longposted about sen’s fortress. close one
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Coward.
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i haven’t kept track of which post-lordvessel branches are in vogue lately but tomb of the giants is goated as hell
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Is this "“goated” as in “greatest of all time” or a different meaning?
in the tom brady sense yes
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It’s like the only place in the game that puts a pit in my stomach and has me with my head in my hands close to tears
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it’s just so unfair that they’re so big and strong AND fast and spooky
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I have a distinct memory of getting stoned and listening to yes while blasting through the tomb of the giants in like 2012 and it’s one of my fondest gaming moments
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shoutout to these guys who desperately wanted the autograph of darkwraith debbie
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You’ll cowards can’t even abyss walk.
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there are some big Dark Souls 2 stans on SB right now. It has the most interesting spatial logic of ALL of the games, a quality which usually gets misconstrued as badly made or incoherent. I can’t say this from experience, but I have heard people call it the most Kings Field-like of the post-Demon’s Souls From games.
Toups kicked off a good discussion about it three hundred miles up-thread:
It feels like a game doing things with space that games do really well, that many games right now don’t do and have been designed explicitly to avoid doing. I recommend it. But I definitely recommend getting your hands on The Scholar of the First Sin edition, if only for Alia, one of the best NPCs that DaleNixon is probably thinking of.
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It has the best NPCs in the series.
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I’d say this is only partially misconstrued but by no means damning
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Definitely. It’s based in something but it really isn’t the killing blow of critical observations that a lot of people wielding it think that it is. It’s like, yeah, volcano at the top of an elevator, so what??!
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Damn, I kinda wanna play the game that way
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I enjoyed Dark Souls 2 SotfS a lot last playthrough because the levels are excellently designed from a combat challenge/pacing POV, there’s lots of alternate routing options, and the bosses are bite-sized little encounters that don’t overstay their welcome.
I understand what Toups was saying comparing it to Anodyne 2 or mysterious NES games, but those games have that aesthetic much more strongly than DkS2. Because in parts DkS2, like the rest of the series, is also trying for the exact opposite (realism/coherence/uncomplicated beauty). So I think the SB contrarian framing that the disjointedness is compellingly dreamlike is trying too hard to construct a positive aesthetic in the abstract rather than accurately describing the experience.
So instead of trying to savor some deep aesthetic paradox here, it seems more straightforward to me to just put things this way: “if you can set your expectations low on the coherence of the artwork and world design, DkS2 is good otherwise”
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I hear ya. Most compelling about your argument is that there are moments in DS2 where it is conventionally coherent, in addition to the compelling incomplete or wonky-world bits that we’re trying to celebrate. Still, I’m not yet willing to write all this off as discourse judo. With a bit more work maybe there is a theory which can describe the probably accidental way DS2 contributes to and takes from an old and now maligned aesthetic of the medium! So, what more can you say at this point, but time – which is one and the same with space – is just convoluted in that way?
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