• he/him

Coder, pun perpetrator
Grumpiness elemental
Hyperbole abuser


Tools programmer
Writer-wannabe
Did translations once upon a time
I contain multitudes


(TurfsterNTE off Twitter)


Trans rights
Black lives matter


Be excellent to each other


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PositronicWoman
@PositronicWoman

it's ya girl Rachel S., longtime soulsborne hater. if you haven't heard of me, i used to be a media critic for Women Write About Comics before burnout and have pivoted to being a freelance writer/editor and sensitivity reader. I was the lady that consulted on Anode and Lug, trans lesbian robot characters in the IDW Transformers Lost Light comics, among other things. I've been published in an academic journal regarding transgender representation, and I've had students from around the globe write to tell me that I was cited in their college thesis. I'm not just a pretty face.

I would rather go back to michigan than another fromsoft fantasy europe, and the online assumption in certain gamer spaces that i automatically like these games as a trans woman makes me want to rip throats out with my teeth. I really thought I was done having the prickle of annoyance fill my brain like the ugliest television static in the world, but Elden Ring's expansion is coming out and I have some spleen to vent.

anyway, i'm going to attempt to write some healthy introspective criticism wherein I compare things about Dark Souls that people like to things that I like and use that to be critical in a productive fashion instead of just be a hater.


The Difficulty

The elephant in the room, the clamor of "git gud" fills any space where soulsborne fans gather. I've beaten both XCOM reboot games on classic, I've beaten both Hotline Miami games, I've beaten every robot master in the NES Mega Man games. I am too damn stubborn to give up just because of difficulty. I need to feel like I'm sinking my teeth into something.

I once had a girlfriend make me play Dark Souls 3 up to the first boss. I accidentally used all my healing flasks right before the fight and beat it anyway. In her own words: "You Hotline Miamied Dark Souls!"

Pattern recognition and memorization is not the issue.

I got jittery, twitchy hands, hereditary from my mother and exacerbated by my anxiety. A lot of people insist that accessibility and difficulty are two separate issues but in the case of the Souls games I think they're intrinsic. It's a game about reflex and managing frame counts and animations, if your reflexes are too slow you're fucked. If you can figure out the pattern but can't execute because of your hands and can't alter the game, that's accessibility. I don't know what else to tell you.

"well if they let you alter the speed they wouldnt be able to do online," they could do different lobbies for different speeds. i'm not going to insist that online is optional, it's part of the tone and removing invasions that would remove some of the ambient fear and despair that fromsoft worlds inspire. I'm not a rube. let slower reflex people match with slower reflex people. if i really wanted to bang my head against the wall until my brains spilled onto the brick, i could. if you really want to create that sense of satisfaction of overcoming difficulty, leave more room to breathe for people who can't engage on the same level.

You Died

The tedious nature of returning to your corpse and retrieving your valuables is an intended behavior that's supposed to enhance your sense of awareness. It's also a slog that punishes failure. I will admit that I have some trauma related triggers around failure, somewhere between C-PTSD and RSD. My dad was a piece of shit, and I hate feeling like part of an out group (in this case, not liking something my friends like).

Multiple critics have written at length about how souls games deaths are supposed to be slapstick and funny, the swamps and etc. It ain't funny when you're recreating The Story of Everest sketch from Mr. Show with no audience but yourself. The cleanup is part of my qualm, and in turn I would like to compare it to the elegance of Hotline Miami, and the brutal and similarly janky combat of Yakuza/Like a Dragon/Judgment.

If you get splattered in Hotline Miami, "Press R To Restart!" dances at the bottom of the screen, and with a single button press you are ready to try a floor over again in less than a second. You can take as long as you need to cackle about your macabre demise, then go with gusto back unto the breach. I have definitely gotten Red And Mad And Nude about Hotline levels (especially in 2) but it isn't a mountain hike, it's a sprint.

Meanwhile in Yakuza*, your character has weight. Your character has frame priority. The difference is that there's difficulty options to alter enemy damage, health, and aggression, and you are able to throw bicycles on the ground at your foes and suplex them while a dominatrix you've befriended earlier in the game jumps out of the background and beats up a gangster with a riding crop The game environment is so over the top and bombastic, I get to laugh outside of dying.

The Artstyle and Ambiance

This is actually a fun little anecdote. I once had a mutual refuse to believe that I thought Final Fantasy XIV had a boring, generic artstyle, posting picture after picture to refute me. When I posted environment pictures from Destiny for examples of virtual terrain that I enjoyed, you could hear the jolt of dawning realization in their brain when they said that they thought that Destiny's artstyle was generic and boring. It turns out this kind of thing is subjective, whoda thunk.

I think Dark Souls and Bloodborne's aesthetic looks like dogshit. I think it's a worse version of the European and Victorian derived fantasy that floods the market of genre media mixed with gross gore. The director of Bloodborne is a vocal Magic: the Gathering fan, and it turns out that he really likes the plane of Innistrad, Magic's gothic horror setting. Guess what gets Bloodborne comparisons every time a new set comes out in the setting?

Influence is inescapable. I had an excellent conversation with a local DJ about how formative other media is for your sense of taste, how you create things. My qualm here is media illiteracy leading to shit like "This Magic set is a Bloodborne ripoff!" or "Ultraman is an Evangelion ripoff!" If you don't know your history, where art comes from, I'm going to have a whole anatomy skeleton's worth of bones to pick with you.

Anyway, that disconnect prevents me from engaging with what fans seemingly love most about the setting. It's so boring to me, so familiar, that I am not intrigued by the mysteries of the setting, the deep lore, the connections between item descriptions and bosses or whatever the hell. Go on and cackle at me from your window about being a wanderer and stranger that doesn't know anything, you can go wallow in your hovel.

Meanwhile, over in Destiny, it's similarly familiar. It's all lost worlds inspired by Golden Age pulp sci-fi and cheapo 70s paperback covers. What's the difference here? I think it's the camraderie. You can't get hurt by your fellow players, only be helped by them in the world- you have to go out of your way into the Crucible game mode to fight other Guardians. The main story is...not great, admittedly, but the in-menu story books are easily accessible and much better written in terms of characterization, and fans organize the less accessible stuff outside of the game. Every time I tried looking into the Deep Mysteries of Dark Souls online, I just found a tangled disorganized spiderweb.

I'm not asking for all the work to be done for me, years and years of Destiny story has to have their dots connected by observant readers on their own. I just wish that the prominent sense of intrigue actually worked on me at all.

As for the gore? Probably a me problem, but there is no "Oh so true bestie" moment where I want to befriend (or fuck) the monsters in these games like so many thirsty perverts (affectionate) online. I feel no emotional connection to the forms in the game, no pity, no yearning, no satisfaction, no remorse. I can like splatter and body horror, ask me about John Carpenter, Shinya Tsukamoto, Brian Yuzna, Stuart Gordon, Albert Pyun, I can tell you what I appreciate about their filmographies and sense of aesthetic. Hell, Hotline Miami is similarly gross but I love the hell out of that.

Anyway, no moral, no real conclusion, I just needed to get that off my chest. My idle thoughts are a hurricane, and the storms scarcely cease.


Turfster
@Turfster

As a sufferer from The Claw™️— among other things, I'm also just An Old™️— I agree with the things said here, and absolutely despise every dumbfuck Git Gud Designer That Wants To Copy Soulsborne games, Because That's What Real Gamers Want™️

Also, every "This game requires a controller" is basically a big "Fuck You" for me... unless I want to Experience their "masterpiece" in blocks of 15 minutes.
This is also the reason I haven't played a lot of "classics" "everyone" played in the PS2/3 eras, because they were full of mashy "You Can Really Feel Your Character's Exertion Yourself!" twitch-reflex bullshit QTEs.

At least some games now include accessibility options to elide QTEs and all that other stupid crap.
Some games.


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in reply to @PositronicWoman's post:

Good stuff. I'm currently grappling with Returnal, another "everyone loves this but me" game, and feeling the same way.

I sometimes wonder if the intended audience for these is not necessarily players, but streamers; a game you watch, instead of play. I've heard from more than a couple folks that streamer audiences dry up when they're having an easy time. Having to taste floor over and over sucks to go through, but watching someone else do it may be a lot more amusing. Like America's Funniest Home Videos, but for people who count pixels in screenshots.

Regardless: yeah, do not like souls mechanics, and extra do not like how they spread from the Fromsoft games to stuff like Fallen Order.

I've talked about it a bit in face to face spaces, but I have the formulating theory that if I ever write the 'you are not immune to propoganda' piece on games studies the vessel I would use for it is Dark Souls, a game that convinces you it's all skill and fair as indicated by only the people who beat it being allowed to have opinions on it.

My only note - and this isnt a rebuttal so much as a tangent my brain went on!- is about the oh so true/befriending impulse- it's something I get too, but I came to it by way of monster hunter where it got all tangled up and so now it feels like the in game action of hunting and killing a monster, feels, to me, almost like playing with a friend- something I know inside and out, and can just engage in their dance, meeting their demands and coming through.

And so when I meet souls bosses like malenia, when I spend the time getting to know their attack patterns intimately and then eventually overcome- it feels like I made a friend, even as the game tells me I killed them- And that leads to one of my complaints about souls games, which is a lack of boss rematches.

The dancer in ds3 was eery and beautiful, and I'd love to fight her again without replaying the entire game up till then.