shaming yourself and beating yourself up over failure is an unhealthy attitude. accepting that you made a mistake and working to improve it is. That’s what i was saying. At its best this series encourages a healthy attitude toward failure, while sardonically acknowledging that you are going to fail a whole lot (see the crestfallen warrior in every game)
One of the things I rolled my eyes at a lot, especially at the time, was Bamco’s “Prepare to Die” slogan that they tossed up over everything Dark Souls. They even named the complete edition after it.
In retrospect, though, I think they were setting expectations that most players would not have had going into it. That the game is going to kill you. That you are going to die in it. And that’s okay, because now you know what you’re getting into, and what it’s going to do to you, and it’s not your fault if it happens. You wanted a game that gives you the feeling of a cruel world, so here it is.
It isn’t that difficult of a game, really. It’s just setting expectations on how people are to approach it, which is more important than I had given credit for.
Yes! that’s also why i like the scene early on in 2 where Strowen the firekeeper mocks you and tells you you’re going to die “over and over again”. (Jokes aside, the entry where Miyazaki wasn’t involved is the most intriguing meditation on struggle and failure in the series)
Last night while laying in bed, I had a pretty sweeping urge to play Dark Souls 1. Thoughts of climbing the ladder out of blighttown, trudging through waist deep sewers in the depths, navigating obstacles in sen’s fortress. Failing those obstacles and sometimes finding more pain below, instead of the fall to death you expected.
But I was also gonna finally emulate Front Mission 5…
I never finished my playthrough of the port but I think the original in its release form was even jankier. Weird and grotesque is pretty much the defining DS2 quality
I get, like, Eternal Ring vibes off of it a little. It put me off at first cos it’s really jarring in contrast to the other souls games I have in memory and wasn’t sure that it was as intended or an artifact of the port. I am a little neurotic. But now that I know that it isn’t just me I’ll give it another couple hours
I don’t think i like it at 60fps, I wish there was a way to cut it to 30
The repetition as punishment thing reminds me that I completely cleared out Dragon Shrine in DS2 because it took me so many attempts to kill the ancient one. I still had to run to, and then up, those goddamn steps at least thirty times.
Sailing the Great Sea, thinking about the journey, etc.
Another oddity in DS2 is the way you can hunt enemies in an area to extinction. I didn’t even notice until I was in No-man’s Wharf, and after enough deaths the enemies stopped appearing.
There were a couple areas early on that I ran out of enemies on, but I don’t recall the specific reason why oh yes I do god damn Pursuer. Death to all parry checks in these games.
Random question: did they change the collision detection between your weapon and the environment at some early point in these games? I have a recollection that in Demon’s I had to be careful how close I was to a wall or object in the environment or else my weapon would bounce off of it and I’d be in trouble. I also know that in Bloodborne I’ve been slashing people through walls and such every so often. It is possible I just misremembered it, but it’d be an oddly specific thing to do so of.