Dark Souls Should Let Me Stagger Guys

while i haven’t touched it in a few months, ive been playing dmc3 for the first time and it has been a good time. i think it is also recontextualising a lot of thoughts i have had about action combat, and the main one is this: i think dark souls combat sucks BUT i do not dislike the game anymore.

when i initially played the game i got the impression that the combat was the main draw of the game. i kind of saw it as more of a badge of honour than as a game to be enjoyed. oh you beat the archetypical hard game so now no one can doubt your gaming bona fides, that kind of thing. i played the giant dad build, zweihander and heavy armour while not fat rolling. it didn’t feel especially fun.

because of that i feel like i missed out on the things that make dark souls an actually interesting game. the sparse lore and interconnected world didn’t really get me but it plays into what does get me, which is the scale of the world: anor londo is not built for people your size. blighttown needs all the hastily done scaffolding to be navigable. the height of the world, and the way you can travel to its highest highs and also delve deep beneath the earth for unexplained secrets. i also think a lot of the weird multiplayer elements are really cool, especially that i had to look a lot of them up: gravelording, vagrants, miracle resonance, other weird shit i cant think of off the top of my head. it owns! i like it when games add strange things for reasons like this, stuff that doesn’t really intersect with the primary gameplay loop. maybe diversions like this are even one of games’ biggest strengths as a medium, who knows.

i don’t like the combat that much though. its good for what it is, it sets the mood and tone of the game well, but it isn’t very engaging moment-to-moment. ahead of time you pick your build, but what to do in any given fight is very clear: defend attacks using your method of choice without any variance, do attacks without any variance, repeat. kingdom hearts 2 is my only other bit of real action game knowledge, but that has a few different things, with mp/drive/item management, and multiple ways to use all of these things in most situations (summons for crowd control vs forms for more damage, for example). dmc3 has devil trigger gauge management and multiple moves per weapon, while also having out-of-battle decisions like what style you use. i don’t care specifically about styling combos, i care about having options in the moment.

i think dark souls’ marketing was awful, and its current reputation online is still awful, and responsible for the above. yes the game is “hard” compared to its action game contemporaries but the difficulty of dark souls is overstated as a selling point of it. i think joseph anderson said it best when he talked about the game treating people like a surrogate parent. a game gave them the space to persevere against something relatively difficult but fair, and now we have to live with that style of combat infecting literally everything, while also admonishing people for using mechanics other than dodging and hitting because that’s “not the real game”. you also have the games getting harder by making timings tighter without adding additional mechanics (from what i understand, i havent played ds3/elden ring) and i think that is lame as hell. maybe i will really like sekiro.

its interesting how this problem seems to reproduce itself across multiple series. dark souls’ reputation implies that the only real way to play the games is to have a big sword and roll through things, without items or spells, and that affected the way i played for the worse. i saw a video about dmc that talked about that series reputation as The Best Action Game Of All Time and how that meant doing extremely huge combo strings in midair. i realised that i had been caught off guard by that too: i was trying to play dmc3 in that way a little bit, and though i appreciated that there were enemies that i couldnt juggle forever and had to take care of, that reputation of juggling enemies in that specific way was affecting how i thought about the game and made me get it a bit less than i otherwise would. there’s more emphasis on positioning than (sorry for doing the boss baby tweet) kh2, and you have decisions to make about moves when you do them, like “do i want to do the finisher of million stab or do i want to jump cancel it?” for example. dmc3 has bosses that are fun without juggling too: the boss in chapter 13 reminds me of kh2 (sorry again) where all of your attacks get to stagger, but only if you hit them when they are done attacking, and the enemy WILL retaliate and you better be ready for it. game is good! i think i actually like action games now. its good to know that there are games that aren’t imitating the specific thing i done like about dark souls.