There are a lot of games in the world, thousands and thousands of them, without the Internet you'd probably never even know half of them existed either, I'd assume. That's how I felt about From Software's "Demon's Souls" for PlayStation 3 a few years ago. The game was a gem, a classic, it was even the console's selling point for me.
Let's fast forward a couple years and From Software, with Namco Bandai's help, have released "Dark Souls" for us to enjoy. If you aren't familiar with either Dark or Demon's Souls, let me fill you in, the premise of the game is that player's character is trying to stop the world from becoming corrupt and overrun by creatures of all natures. The game is praised for being excessively challenging, difficult and unforgiving, however, most people feel this difficulty is inflated by "poor controls, uncontrollable mechanics, unforeseeable traps, and unfair advantages for the creatures." Personally, I agree the game's initial difficulty is probably somewhat inflated the first time you pick it up, you have no idea how to play, the game's environments and inhabitants are new to you, and you have no idea what kind of things to expect from it. That being said, the difficulty drops just that much more, each progressive time you advance forward, little by little your personal skill increases, your environmental awareness reaches 'Bear Grylls' levels, and you can pick out traps and enemies from miles away before they can even react to you.
In Dark Souls, you are an undead, given the task of dealing with the dieing Flame, which gives the world life. To do so you must ring the Bells of Awakening and acquire the Lord vessel. Doesn't sound so difficult but let's be realistic here, would I have spent the first two paragraphs explaining the game's difficulty if it was going to be a cakewalk? Before we start, you are asked to create your own custom character, selecting a gender, name, physical appearance, adventuring class, and gift. Your class and gift have the most impact on early game play, and less so over the course of your journey, so you should pick whatever you think sounds the most useful to you in the most immediate sense. You can select to be a lightly armored thief, heavily armored knight, balanced warrior, ranged oriented hunter, magic casting sorcerer, fire wielding pyromancer, or healing cleric, or the dirty naked depraved, all these classes have different initial play styles and you should take a few moments to consider how you want to go about your adventure.
Your adventure starts in a rundown Asylum, a sort of tutorial stage where you are taught, via the game's unique Message System which allows players and some NPCs to leave messages for other players online to read but we'll get back to the online aspect later, how to perform the basic actions of the game such as attacking, running, blocking, dodging, jumping, lighting bonfires, and so forth. After an exciting encounter with your first boss, which may or may not be a simple affair depending how accustomed to the controls and combat you've become, you are treated to a cinematic of your character arriving in Firelink Shrine, the game's "Central hub" so to speak. You can speak with NPCs, learn Miracles, and choose for yourself how you wish your adventure to unfold, I won't go into to much detail but each path leads to a unique area of the world which feels challenging in its own way and grants you a feeling of actual adventure.
With all that said, the technical aspects of the game are pretty solid. The controls feel intuitive, but can sometimes get a little clunky depending on how much you're trying to do at once. I've accidentally kicked enemies, doing no damage, instead of attacking them for a kill more than once, because I was trying to move forward at the same time I attacked. However, the overall response time and input feels acceptable on both consoles. Only real minor complaint being the inability to cycle backwards through magic and items.
The game looks visually pleasing as well, though the character creation screen does not do it much justice, the character models, armor, weapons, demons, monsters, environments and all that jazz, look fantastic. More than once I stopped to look around and just take in the area or observe some of the finer details of the weapons and armor, such as the Elite Knight's Armor, or the Mask of the Father, Mother and Child. All around good looking, with only a very minor complaint that when you die, you are reverted to undead form, which looks very bland and manages to detract from the overall appearance of the character.
While the audio of the sound effects and voice acting are typical of the genre, they do very well to fit the atmosphere of the game. No extravagant voice acting or over the top sound effects needed, simplicity at it's finest. However, the game's audio does manage to shine with the beautiful selection of music provided by Motoi Sakuraba. The tracks are only played during select portions of the game, however, they add quite a bit of impact to those sections by giving quite an epic feel to them. The music could very well be one of my favorite aspects of the game, and if you are lucky enough to pick up a collectors edition somehow, From Software and Namco Bandai have provided a downloadable soundtrack for your listening pleasure.
Really, everything about the game is a fairly good improvement from it's predecessor, Demon's Souls, except for one largely glaring issue. The online game play portion. Some people are reporting having no issues with playing online comfortably and while this is terrific the vast majority of players have been giving reports saying they cannot actively engage in online play, invading others worlds, being invaded, summoning friends and random players for difficulty boss encounters, all of these aspects of the game have become somehow, erratic and unpredictable or completely absent for some players. This is a serious problem, considering that a rather large portion of the re-playability of the game is the PVP and Co-Op! As we speak I have read rumors of a patch hitting soon to fix several bugs and glitches, as well as sort out the online problems, but this could possibly be to little to late, as most players who are familiar with these bugs and glitches have already abused them to their maximum potential and ruined what little fun could be had online for anyone who invades them or that they invade. This isn't to much trouble if you're just looking for a fun challenging game, but for those of you looking for a solid player vs player experience this could be an issue. Co-op remains relatively unaffected, so enjoy it!
Dark Souls ate a good several hundred hours of my gaming time, and of all those hours I would say 80% of them I was having a blast. The other 20% were either a pain in the neck trying to figure out why I couldn't find any friends or foes online or a good chunk of time spent replaying sections of the game I had just played, and died to random glitching griefers. I would recommend this game to anyone who's looking for a challenging adventure with an RPG spin. But if you don't think you have what it takes to stomach hours of replaying the same section of game over and over, every time you die, perhaps this game is not for you. If you do pick up Dark Souls, be prepared to die.
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