Lively Souls (Part 2)

yeah this i think is the crux of what annoys me when normies talk about souls games. they see death in the game as “failure” when it explicitly isn’t. you are intended to die! death is Just Another Mechanic that you can even exploit to your personal benefit to fast travel. and the game is meant to be a “classical RPG” where you get many choices to overcome a particular challenge, some more reliant on individual skill than others.

brief teg story: i used to work as a line cook at an arts college cafe, making pizzas and burgers and stuff (pizza making is fun). one of the entree cooks was this 50-ish year old guy who didn’t play many games. one time we hung out because he didn’t have anything to do and wanted to socialize, and i liked him, so he came over to my place and i introduced him to dark souls 2. he had never played a souls game, and had terrible reflexes, and ~was instantly hooked anyway~. he saw the game for what it is: a slapstick RPG comedy with room for all sorts of playstyles. he immediately got the game after and kept talking to me about it at work lol.

these games are way more accessible than the marketing/discourse around them would suggest, i think. the constant “death is a failure, you must struggle using nothing but action gamer reflexes” messaging does them a disservice.

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I think it’s ambiguous, and deliberately so. These games have a broad view of the pride/shame axis and are ready to meet each player wherever they’re at. The NPCs you meet incarnate different points of view on this: for instance there is Patches who is utterly shameless and uses any trick he can think of to survive, and Solaire who lives towards a lodestar of finding the Sun and abides by a self-imposed code of honor.

Many players love to roleplay as Solaire and that’s certainly one attitude the games anticipate and encourage. But, in order to wear Solaire’s armor, you must first ruthlessly murder him, the most un-Solaire-ish act imaginable. DkS thrives on ironies like this

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ds2 mimics are exactly the same as ds1 mimics!

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this is something I’ve never noticed as an explicit decision, but it’s interesting to see some analysis on it:

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honestly this is why the wildly varying character sizes never bothered me. the tone of all these games is so mythological that it just feels intuitive that some of the dudes are hella large. the big dudes of myth permeate the soulsverse.

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When I was a child, I found it childish. As an adult, I find it – elegant, economical, intuitive.

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they walk on reverse all fours

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you know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them walk, one of us would always die too quickly for that to happen

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iirc there’s a hex called “dead again” that is supposedly the reason the corpses can’t be kicked around everywhere.

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The cocaine era of From Software?

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bro this shit will give you eyes on the inside bro

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dark souls 1 often feels to me sort of like you’re a miniature figure running around a world inside a glass dome. is it the only one to feel that way or is demon’s souls like that too?

the shallow depth of field may be a big part of it, but it’s also the way the world decomposes into self-contained components like tunnels, staircases, bridges, slotted up flush against one another. it’s these ‘veins’ of the world that really stick in my mind, moreso than the big vistas

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Demon’s has a real different feel; the world is split between four disconnected zones, you teleport between your hub and the levels like a Mega Man, and you only get occasional snippets over the horizon to help place them next to each other. Instead of Dark Souls’ nesting-doll world, the gaps between levels make the world feel more expansive. To me, it feels like the difference between strict screen-by-screen Zelda scrolling and the large rooms in Link to the Past.

The older King’s Field and Shadow Tower games are a lot closer in world structure to Dark Souls, a big continuous world. They don’t really have the far views that frame the world, so it feels more traditionally dungeon-y, the player more like a termite worming through.

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king’s field 2j is definitely the one that established that design style, the first game (jp only) is really just a single dungeon to crawl

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And when they don’t have a far draw distance, using a tool like starting on the outside of an island before going in helps shade at the bounds of the world, unlike the first game starting with the dungeon doors slamming shut behind the player, unclear if that gate even leads to fresh air, very discombobulating.

I just hit the teleporter trap dungeon in Elden Ring and, yeah, it’s a small cute reference, but it’s notable for how willing they are to bend open their tileset rules and open a yawning gulf in a templated dungeon, I still expect a trick like this to be small and self-contained (and it was). It’s so difficult to create interest by cracking open your structure when you have a very tight structure to begin with. Some of the earlier King’s Field games have more terrifying and dreamlike dungeons because they aren’t as tightly bounded, and they aren’t as clear on content length, boss cappers, and the like.

What they could achieve with less careful mapping takes much more deliberate effort now that they’ve nailed down so much of the rest of it.

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sorry, are you saying screen-by-screen Zelda feels more expansive in this analogy? (like, the fragments become more distanced in your mind and don’t immediately reconcile into a big picture)

i was thinking more about the immediate visual qualities. for as bleak as the setting is, there’s almost a lightness and breeziness by which the world invites you to mentally take apart and play with it (imagine how many more floors you could stack on top of this tower … etc) which stands in contrast with the thick, impenetrable atmosphere of bloodborne for instance. funnily enough, it has the most in common with sekiro when i think about it

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To me, Demon’s and flip-screen Zeldas feel more expansive than continuous worlds. Game worlds, like cities, always feel so large when I first see them…but as I crawl over them and map them they shrink down. With blank transition space a chunk of the missing space is preserved, and I generally prefer it that way.

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I’d argue dark souls 2 arrives at a similar kind of expansiveness-way-of-disjointedness. something I really like about it.

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My experience while playing it is that there are only a few parts that really emphasize the disjunct between levels, but I really notice the expanded freedom they grabbed to theme and shape levels. The flooded sunset towers, the pirate cove, the fogged woods, the slag heaps… Dark Souls will extend a color wash over a zone but it’s all within a consistent mood. That game is very blue and green.

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