this was a cool experience (that im not quite done with, im partway into NG+ and im gonna do that at least twice, and then do at least one more proper run alongside bloodborne). basically had my hand held thru the entire thing, so i didn't have to suffer quite so much frustration doing things like finding bonfires and navigating the more painful areas (depths etc).
having other humans witness and acknowledge the fact that i actually learn and improve at things pretty quickly has been incredibly validating. weirdly enough, the people in my life i most associated with dark souls before this were the people who consistently made me feel stupid the most severely and often (notably, called me an idiot a lot, although one of them stopped when asked). i didn't realize that til i started writing this paragraph, but being pretty goddamn proficient in the game those people like so much is kinda vindicating/cathartic.
the last 2 sessions were both just rapidfire taking out boss after boss after boss, each one like... 3-7 attempts? a couple outliers on either end. bosses that are notoriously hard were quite manageable, which felt. good? the entire time was a balancing act between "people who know how to do this are giving me tips and advice i would never find on my own in my first run" and "i am still holding the controller and implementing those things on my own." for instance last time i suspected but did not trust that artorius could be staggered out of his power-up animation, but exploited it once someone mentioned that you can.
this time i took out manus, kalameet, and gwyn before starting NG+ and running through the asylum demon, taurus demon, bell gargoyles, capra demon and gaping dragon. the plan next time is to get through blighttown, ring the second bell, clear sen's fortress and get to anor londo cause i forgot to get priscilla's boss weapon that i want to use before i reset and need the blacksmith there to make it.
all in all, having beaten all the bosses now, none of them were really that bad. i could see manus, artorius, four kings, ornstein and smough, and others being rough on like a low-level run but... idk, i spent the decade+ since DS1's release thinking that it's just such an incredibly hard game and in truth it's just slow, clunky, and full of enough tedium that the real challenges feel more miserable than they are. i think it could stand to be faster, and smoother, and DEFINITELY to have less of The Bullshit, but it's pretty charming and i see WHY they made what they made. and as i understand, later games go sort of in that direction.
after beating artorius yesterday and beginning the run to manus, i instantly felt a wave of The Bullshit coming on with the swollen-head-guys, called it, and started again today. it's been a bad mental health day and i ended up having a breakdown partway through my stream due to some unrelated stuff, but definitely not helped by the fact that i was just brute-forcing my way through multiple distinct waves of Bullshit (swarms of enemies, mazes, weird switch-specific jank like getting hit thru fog gates). eventually i just deafened because listening to people talking was stressing me out, and Got Through It without really thinking or feeling. i considered just giving up and trying again another day, but i felt like once i got through that section i'd enjoy it again and it could go back to helping me take my mind off of the Life Stuff. which strikes me as a very dark souls problem and solution. and i was right! and i ended up just kinda strolling through the rest of the game. manus took 4 attempts. kalameet took like, 8 or 10. gwyn took 3 or 4. in NG+ the capra demon, which was the first thing that truly pissed me off in the beginning and prompted me to take the longest amount of time in between sessions in the entire run, took 3 or 4 and was so much less painful.
that's kind of the theme of NG+ it feels like. everything is less painful now. i know all the surprises and the boss patterns and i have all my broken lategame equipment so i can have a little more fun with it.
i wasn't kidding in like my first or second post about this game that this game is cool because it just asks you to keep trying and improve and it doesn't punish you or reward you for it beyond temporarily losing souls and allowing you to progress, respectively. you just get to keep trying. as a person who is not good at things the first time and who has a lot of trauma surrounding not being allowed to improve, i honestly kind of needed Something like this? it didn't have to be DS, it didn't have to be a game at all, but it was this, with my friend who cares about the intentions and messages and intricacies of soulsbornes and is nice to me and cares about me, and it's been really lovely.
when it came to Gwyn, what was going through my head consisted of 1. holy fuck this music is gorgeous, 2. holy fuck this fight is so sad, and 3. it is honestly so good for my experience of this game and all of its bullshit to end in this whimper instead of the huge difficult boss one might expect. i was ready for it to be "over," and the game knows that; the entire game's story, and particularly gwyn's, is about being ready for it to be over. and it felt really good to have that fight be where you just End It. parry, riposte, parry, riposte, with that devastating slamming sound each makes, until it's done.
the inspiration Hollow Knight (the first souls-esque game i played) took from DS is so viscerally apparent in that fight (and artorius'), though i prefer the direction HK took it in. the DLC and the fight with manus sort of serve the purpose that HKs multiple endings do, but in a less elegant and emotionally conclusive way. but i don't think dark souls really intended to have true resolution.
my last real coherent thing to say about the game itself is that it's easy. like, it's hard, but at no point is it too hard, and at no point is it actually inaccessible the way some have claimed (unless you literally do not have the motor control to time your responses to enemies which... would be a problem in basically any action game). it doesn't really tell you how to make progress, but with either persistence and awareness or a guide, it's manageable and it's fun and it's satisfying. i'm left with only a little disappointment at the end.
on more specific topics, though:
i was asked, having traversed them all now, what the most miserable overworld area to traverse. i think it's the catacombs. the depths were rough, upper blighttown was rough, those are certainly contenders. but truly, everything in between the firelink graveyard and nito's boss chamber is just a Slog. it's everything i hate about both of those areas and others, combined, with the addition of the weird giant quadrupedal skeletons in the middle and culminating in one of the shittiest boss fights that i ended up just cheesing with havel's gear. (sort of by accident? trying in earnest was boring, i tried out the havel strat and ended up just clearing it in one go with that when i'd intended to switch back to light armor)
even the catacombs weren't that bad though? hilariously, what i leaned on the most to deal with the frustration was my memory of Paper Mario as a kid, because the catacombs remind me of the area underneath the castle that you have to get through at the end to reach the final dungeon. that area frustrated me then, but i got through it on my own and it was cathartic and it helped a lot with the more recent frustration of navigating annoying enemies in a dark vertical maze.
meanwhile the worst boss was.... like i'm gonna say bed of chaos for 2 reasons. 1, it's the most tedious and it gets the cheapest and most annoying kills on you, and 2, it doesn't teach you anything. when you die you don't go "oh ok i see what i did wrong here," you just go "god damnit ok let's see if i can dodge all the bullshit this time." it just swats you into a hole. woo. but bed of chaos honestly doesn't feel like a boss? i don't want to count it as a boss.
the problem then becomes that actually all the bosses in dark souls besides that are 1. really easy, 2. inoffensive and largely forgettable, or 3. absolutely fucking sick even though they're hard. i think the answer becomes the four kings. the spacial distortion and the fact that it's really just a matter of wailing on each one before the next one starts flanking you is like. not that engaging. i didn't learn any elegant timing for dodges and pokes, i rolled when one of their arms wound up to swing and i mashed the R button. after that is the capra demon, but it just.... when you beat the capra demon the first time you pop off. you go "holy shit i did it!!" four kings, i killed them after like 5 or 6 tries and all i felt was "finally." so. capra demon's better.
after capra demon is ornstein and smough, who deserve a paragraph. they ARE dark souls. at no point was i truly mad at them, and they beat my ass into the ground 30+ times. it took 4 attempts that made it to phase 2 to beat it, and at the end i was fucking ELATED. i'm really excited to go through and beat them in the other order in NG+. they were the hardest boss By Far and i loved the whole process. they are the 3rd (or 4th) worst boss in the game and they are also the best boss in the game. that fight taught me so much about positioning, spacing, timing, stamina management, responses and punishes, and the game itself and what it wants from the player.
this has been an integral, and really the defining piece of my recent push to work at improving at things that are hard. splatoon is kind of the outlet, a lot of the motivation i've gotten from pushing through dark souls has gone into improving the more intricate skills that splatoon takes. they're honestly both extremely technical in very similar ways despite the specifics differing greatly. and the rest is going into my actual life. i've started exercising a little bit every day. i'm taking better care of my cats. i'm getting dreaded tasks done. i'm developing skills that i think will help with trying to make money off of Creating Content (gag). having a thing i do regularly where i get to be social and happy with people i like who are supportive and who get excited when i succeed that is Difficult and requires Persistence and Adaptation is helping a lot.
this makes me want to play all the games i've been intimidated by (mother 3 and TLOZ majora's mask are major examples). it's really nice to get to feel like i'm actually good at the things i thought i couldn't possibly manage. i want to keep pushing. it feels silly that video games are the medium through which i get these particular happy-brain-emotional-fulfillment chemicals but it's not that surprising.
the plan is to play the rest of them. i'm gonna finish my NG+ runs, and then it's Bloodborne, and i'll work through the rest from there. i'm very excited for sekiro. i also want to play other soulslikes e.g. code vein, lies of p. i ALSO also want to do the same kind of hand-holding-through-the-misery with hollow knight for She With Whomst I Play Dark Souls but we'll see if that's possible lmao.
there's a lot of things that various people said throughout this playthrough that i'd put at the end here if i could remember them well enough to write them down. "dark souls is a game that asks you to simply participate in what it is trying to do" is the most coherent snippet i can recall.
but failing to remember anything else completely enough, let's close with something i said and/or yelled to many, many enemies in dark souls:
"you have absolutely got to stop FUCKING SPEWING!!!"
