I mentioned a few days ago that this blog/newsletter/thing was going to come out once a day, and focus on distractions more than work. My distraction for the past few days - during the comedown from Coup Week - has been “Dark Souls II.”
The accepted wisdom is that this is the weak leg of the “Dark Souls” trilogy. There’s even a popular explanation why: Hidetaka Miyazaki, the director of “Demon’s Souls” and “Dark Souls,” was distracted by developing “Bloodborne,” so the studio’s b-team finished this sequel. They overcompensated, creating a bigger, more diverse, more ungainly map, and doubled the number of boss fights.
Coming from “Bloodborne,” I didn’t get the game at all. From Software, the publisher of these games and their cult, had made “Bloodborne” faster and more aggressive, focused on dodging and counter-attacks, with no shields until the bonus content near the game’s end. That had been a tough adjustment for “Souls” fans, who were used to tricking out shields and “tanking” damage. Death in “Bloodborne” had no consequences except, well, dying; death here was punished, with a player’s maximum health decreasing every time he fell off a cliff or onto an ax. The jump to that playstyle was tough for me, and I put the game down for a while.
Returning to it was easier after research. Yes: Research. There are vast and comprehensive wikis for each “Souls” game, and I poked around enough to learn two things. One: While you can die and die again forever, some enemies disappear after dying once and the rest after dying 10-12 times. Two: A magic ring that you can sprint to in an early area caps the punishment from dying at 75 percent of total health.
After that, I could get lost in this deeply confusing and difficult game. The map embraces every gimmick: The walk-slowly-through-water area, the run-over-hot-coals area, the glowing poison lake area, the glowing poison statue area, the forest of invisible enemies, multiple belfries (one with gargoyles), the area where everything is obscured by a snowstorm, the mountain with dragons on every clearing, the hall of living minotaur statues, the room where you use spider’s webs as ladders - etc, etc. A number of areas strongly, purposefully recall deadly areas from the last game; two bosses are updates of bosses elsewhere in this game. Did you like fighting the “Dragonslayer” who reels around the room with a halberd? Fight two of ‘em!
The gimmickry largely worked on me. The “Souls” boss fight is a shared experience. People post their strategies, or their despair and need for strategies, on Reddit or game-specific forums; people rank the bosses by difficulty, making fun of the people who had trouble with The Old Iron King (a slow-moving demon who can easily knock you into lava) or wondering what’s wrong with people who blazed past Ruin Sentinels (a trio of eerily tall knights who attack separately then all at once).
It’s addictive. When I give myself an hour or three to play, I usually set a goal - get to the next area, kill the next bosses. “Dark Souls II” feels more segmented than the other games, which can be freeing - you reach the end of an area, watch a boss’s corpse disappear, and don’t know whether you plunge forward or if you’ve strip-mined the place already.
The worlds in “Bloodborne” and “Dark Souls” - I’m halfway through the latter - were memorable in part because they were so coherent, each key opening a shortcut, each light beckoning you deeper into the world. (In “Bloodborne,” that meant getting darker and more surreal; in “Dark Souls” it meant moving from a dark asylum to a nearly abandoned city.)
This world is memorable because it’s so dreamlike, with logical coherence falling away until you are somehow exploring the dream of a dead giant. It clicked only after I died often enough to find better weapons and better “titanite,” the ore used in these games to increase a weapon’s damage.
The first wanderings around this world are desperate. Anything could kill you, and often does; a “hollow” (a zombie, though the twist is that you’re usually one too) can dodge your short sword and swing back. There’s the death scene: A groan, an animation of your character falling down, another animation of him disintegrating under the legend “You Died.”
There are people who play this, the first time, without any advice or spoilers. That’s just not how I approach games. Life is short - not so short that I feel ashamed for playing these games, but short enough that I don’t want to miss the sword that’ll let me inflict 200 points of damage instead of 80. The game seemed to crack open for me after I found and upgraded three weapons - a fast-swinging bandit axe, a Red Twinblade that delivers more slashing hits than any other weapon, and a Zweihander (two-handed “ultra greatsword”) that I imbued with electricity. There is a term for that, the “zaphander,” I learned while doing it. You start the game doing 40 points of damage or so with a sword; a two-handed zaphander, swung at an enemy wearing armor (metal + electricity), can do 530 points or so.
Oh, and I didn’t mean why this matters. In a typical game, the actions your character can do are a function of how fast you can press buttons. That’s not how these games work. Each gives you a “stamina” bar, which you can add to, that is drained by any motion other than walking or climbing a ladder. Sprinting depletes it. Dodging depletes it. Absorbing a hit with your shield depletes it; a common way to die is getting hit once, absorbing the damage, then running out of stamina so the next hit knocks the shield away. Swinging a weapon or casting a spell drains the meter, too. Another common way to die is connecting a blow, then another, then trying to swing again and realizing you have no stamina left - time for your opponent to rush in and kill you.
With so few places to go, memories of this game have taken the place of IRL memories - wasn’t getting them, anyway. There’s a fraternity of players, with different levels of commitment. Some build multiple characters for one multi-player combat; some just share tactics for getting past particularly tough bosses. I’m not done yet, but close to it, and thinking constantly about how satisfying it is to form virtual memories instead of real ones.