Dark Souls

This is a /v/ related article, which we tolerate because it's relevant and/or popular on /tg/... or we just can't be bothered to delete it.

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Dark Souls is a game all about dying. Over and over and over and over. Except this time it has monstergirls.

Dark Souls is a third person RPG created by From Software and Namco Bandai Games. It is the spiritual successor of Demon's Souls (would have been sequel, but the developers lost the rights to the Demon Souls' name), and is considered by some of its playerbase to be one of the hardest games ever created, which is very wrong. Veteran players will tell you that the game is exceedingly fair, and you only die as a result of your own fuckups. Just be ready to fuck the fuck up again and again until you learn it. And since it generally rewards skill and being a munchkin, it is popular in /v/-circles for its punishing gameplay.

For reference, imagine a fantasy tabletop game run by a Killer DM who wants to your character to die if you get the least bit sloppy with your Spot checks, don't optimize your build, and don't carefully study the rulebooks and monsters manuals before you even start playing. Oh, and other players in other groups will occasionally come to your table and roll some dice to kill you, often before you can even roll initiative, for some loot and lulz. At the same time though, the Killer DM is also fair by making your frequent deaths more of an inconvenience then it might be so that you can learn through trial and error if nothing else so that you do eventually beat his challenges. That is pretty much the Dark Souls experience.

Relevant to /tg/ mainly in that people sometimes throw it around as "this is how you do a grimdark setting properly", "wouldn't it be cool to set a game in this setting?" (Answer: No, because the damn thing is so vague), and "the material GMs can rip off file". Both Dark Souls and the younger brother Bloodborne have their own board game incarnations, with the former being a exploration dungeon crawler and the latter a card game of collecting blood tokens and defeating monsters.

Also explicitly said by the creator to have been heavily inspired by Berserk, be it in its aesthetic, character similarities, or just blatant references. That has to count for something.

Story

One of the most definable aspects of Dark Souls is its method of storytelling... or lack thereof. Besides the opening cutscenes of all three games, nothing is outright explained to the player. Any lore you find is either based on dialogue with NPCs or descriptions of items and weapons, and even then it's often cryptic and intentionally vague, usually left up to interpretation. As you play through the games, a bigger picture becomes painted as you gather items and converse with the world's inhabitants, with the player connecting the dots and speculating what's happened. This can feel rewarding to someone who finds satisfaction in building the world piece by piece and interpreting things their own way, but understandably infuriating to anyone who wishes for something more straightforward. Much of the lore explanations that we have are often speculative or what little we know actually did happen, which isn't much.

So do note the summary below is only one interpretation of the events unfolding and NOT set in stone, if you do play through the series yourself you might come up with a completely different interpretation of said events. With ~90% of the series's lore being intentionally vague these are as valid as any other interpretation out there.

This article contains spoilers! You have been warned.

Dark Souls I

At the beginning of time there were rocks and dragons. Then there was fire, and four people picked up the fire: Gwyn, the Witch of Izalith, Gravelord Nito and the Furtive Pygmy. The first three of them used the power of the fire to become badasses and kicked the dragons' asses, and built the realm of man: Lordran. Things went pretty swell until the Witch of Izalith noticed that the fire was going out and tried to rekindle it, only for it to go wrong and become a horrifying abomination made of fire, sticks and demons. In a desperate final attempt Gwyn kindled the fire with his own soul, which worked for a while. Around this time people stopped dying: if they did they came back from the dead. This was swell at first until the undead started to turn into Hollows, crazed murderous zombies. A search for the cure of this undeath started, and for the meantime the undead were shipped to an insane asylum.

That's where the game begins. You (your player character is called the Chosen Undead in the Dark Souls community) escape the asylum, ring two bells because a sullen guy in chainmail tells you to and you meet a horrifying snake with human teeth, no lips and a horrifying flesh-mustache. This snake, Kingseeker Frampt, tells you to take Gwyn's job because he's no longer fit for it and to go fetch a bowl to put souls in. You then travel through a trap-riddled fortress and make it to Lordran. Here you meet Gwyndolin, Gwyn's giantess daughter, who gives you the bowl and well-wishes. To get to where Gwyn is you need to fill the bowl with four souls: those of the Witch of Izalith, Gravelord Nito (who's a spooklord doing weird things with skeletons), Seath the Scaleless (a traitorous dragon who turned against his kin for being bullied because he didn't have scales) and the Four Kings of New Londo, whom were given power by Gwyn for their loyalty. You have to kill a big dog wielding a big sword to get to them, too. Putting their souls in the bowl lets you meet Gwyn, who's becoming Hollow himself. Beat him and you can succeed him... as the kindle for the fire. Bad End.

Alternatively, with some sequence-breaking you can meet another of Frampt's kind, Darkstalker Kaathe. Kaathe tells you that succeeding Gwyn will only prolong the inevitable and make this shit start all over again, so you have to let the fire go out so that humanity can live free of the fire's influence. Except in the DLC you discover what this means: you travel back in time to a period where everybody and everything is corrupted by the Abyss, the manifestation of a world without fire. You descend into the Abyss and defeat Manus, a manifestation of the the Furtive Pygmy, to make sure the future happens. Letting the fire go out means the curse of undeath ends, and the world alongside it. Bad End.

Yeah it's a pretty dark game.

Dark Souls II

Your character (a different person than the Chosen Undead from DS1) has lost their memory as part of becoming undead and travels to the land of Drangleic to get it fixed. Drangleic has been ravaged by a war with an invading army of giants, and it really shows in places. Here you meet the Emerald Herald, a top-tier waifu who tells you to gather the souls of the four lords so you can meet king Vendrick. These four lords are a Balrog-expy, a female prisoner locked beneath a prison fortress, a monster made of corpses and a spider whose ass is also a spider. They are all linked to the original four lords: Gwyn, the Witch of Izalith, Gravelord Nito and Seath respectively. After these battles (which you can have in any order you want) you get to make it to the king's castle, only to meet queen Nashandra who tells you that the king has left and you gotta find him if you want access to the Throne of Want, the throne that Vendrick never took but will grant its owner immense power. After a grueling trek involving boatloads of knights, the undead and a creepy foreskin frog you finally find Vendrick... who has become a mindless Hollow. Taking his ring nets you access to the manor of Aldia, Vendrick's older brother. He's been turned into some kind of fleshy tree-like abomination after his experiments regarding the curse of undeath, seeking a way to escape the cycle of light and dark. You meet Aldia a few times througout the game where he tells you about all this. Going past Aldia's manor you travel up to the shrine housing the Ancient Dragon. He was one of the creators of the Emerald Herald, whose mission it was to break the undead curse. She failed, and now guides you to meet the Ancient Dragon who gives you a way to enter the memories of the dead. Through this you can go back in time to the war against the giants and defeat their king, which nets you the key to the Throne of Want.

This is where Nashandra reveals herself to be a shard of Manus of the Abyss and tries to murder you in a rather easy boss fight. After putting her down Aldia shows himself and seeks to test you to see if you're worthy of the Throne or the ending of the cycle. Defeating him nets you the same choice as Dark Souls 1: continue the cycle of Light and Dark and get the Bad End, or don't turn the world to Light again and let it end for the Bad End.

As part of the three DLC packs you travel to the realms of other kings, who too had their queens who were shards of Manus and manipulated their kings. If you gather all their crowns as well as Vendrick's and bring them to Vendrick's final resting place you can get yourself a neat crown that renders you immune to going Hollow.

Dark Souls III

The fire is going out yet again, but it's so terribly weak now that it might not even last another cycle. This sees the rise of the Unkindled, those Undead who tried but failed to link the fire back in a previous age and were turned to ash. In practice they're pretty much undead. Now the Unkindled seek to gather the Lords of Cinder, four big badasses who did pull it off back in their day but don't feel like trying it again. So it's your job to find them, kick their asses and either get them to do it or use the cinders you take from them to link the fire yet again. So you set out to kill yet another four big bosses and get something from them. In this you're aided by the Fire Keeper of the Firelink Shrine, which is your hub world of the game where you can buy stuff, level up and advance the plot. The Lords of Cinder are a group of elite soldiers keeping the Abyss in check and murdering Undead and Unkindled alike (which is a problem now that they are unkindled themselves), the ooze Aldrich who ate a fan-favorite character from Dark Souls I and now wears the corpse as a hat, Yhorm the giant who is highly resistant to just about anything but a single weapon whose special attack can take him down in a few hits and the brothers Prince Lorian and Prince Lothric, the former being a crippled and nearly brain-dead husk of a man (who can still kick your ass) and the latter being a small and frail wizard whose magic can revive his brother. After collecting the four cinders you can fight the final boss, the amalgamation of all previous Lords and link the fire, which doesn't consume you this time around to hammer home how weak it has become.

There are three alternate endings. One has you give the Fire Keeper some eyeballs so that she can put the fire out (it makes sense in context), which gets you the second ending you see in Dark Souls 1 and 2. Another is achieved by doing the previous one, then killing the Fire Keeper so you can take the First Flame for yourself, you selfish bastard. The third requires you to break out a strategy guide because no way in hell will you find that one on your own. At the end of a highly specific number of tasks you become a creature that is part Unkindled, part Undead. Instead of letting the fire consume you, you consume it and become the Lord of Hollows, escaping the cycle of fire and dark that Aldia tried to accomplish so long ago. This is arguably the "best" ending, but given that this is Dark Souls everything is relative.

There are two DLC packs this time around. The first one is Ashes of Ariandel, which sees you teleported into a world inspired by the Painted World from Dark Souls I. After fighting a bunch of vikings you meet a woman in a church named Sister Friede who tells you to leave and gives you a parting gift. At this point you can do just that, or opt to explore some more. You start to realize that this world you're in is decaying: riddled with rot and filth it longs for the fire that allows it to be reborn. But the fire is not there and you eventually discover why: the local religious leader Father Ariandel is flagellating himself and uses his blood to snuff out the flame whenever it starts to build up. And this was not his plan: it was the plan of Friede. Who is in service to the Dark and seeks to end the Age of Fire. What follows is a battle with Friede and her fancy scythe, who gets up after you beat her and is joined by Ariandel who tries to beat you to death with a bowl. After beating this duo you think it's over... only for Friede to get up yet again and pulls out a second scythe to try and murder you with. After all this you can find a lady in the attic of the church who paints the world you're in, formerly using the blood of Ariandel. She tells you that to paint fire she needs special paint and that her uncle is getting it for her. You also fight what should be an expy of Artorias the Abysswalker and his puppy dog Sif from Dark Souls I, but the delivery is a bit flat.

This comes to a head in the second DLC, The Ringed City. You get teleported to a world gone crazy, where everything is folded together in a variety of non-euclidian ways. Traveling the ruins of the Earthen Peak of Dark Souls II fame you fight a pair of fiery demons and make it to the Ringed City. Dodging entire companies of archers and massive knights devoured by the Abyss you discover an amnesiac knight whom you help get his memory back (and you know who this is) and fight a massive fuck-off dragon who can easily wreck your shit. You eventually make your way to the ruler of the city: Princess Filianore, the youngest daughter of Lord Gwyn. She's asleep and holding an egg as a shoutout to Angel's egg, so of course you gotta touch that shit. This destroys the egg and everything around you, turning the city into a massive wasteland. Traversing this massive open land (one of the largest in the series) you fight who might be one of the last knights of Gwyn and find your target: the same guy who teleported you into the painted world, the uncle of the painter lady. This is Slave Knight Gael, who is on the hunt for the Dark Soul of Humanity. And when you find him, he's got it. What follows is one of the most impressive and dangerous battles in the game against not Gael but the Dark Soul itself. Striking him down nets you the blood of the Dark Soul, which you can give to the painting lady to paint a new world and let the old one burn. This would've been a lot better were it not that this DLC stuff is contained within itself and has no effect on or a big relation to the plot of the main game. Still, it's an awesome battle.