thinking again about what an incredible own goal it was that I started off streaming Dark Souls because I was like "it'll be easy engagement bait, playing something popular that I can tolerate and encouraging people to backseat me through it will be a great way to get a strong start to the channel before I switch over to playing the stuff I actually want," and then ending up getting so into it that I was actually annoyed at myself for making it a streaming game and therefore only being able to play it two days a week. even now I REALLY WANNA GO START DARK SOULS 2 RIGHT NOW AND I'M GOING TO HAVE TO WAIT THREE WEEKS??? like I was optimistic that I would enjoy it okay with some guidance, but I did not think that it would sink its hooks into me like that.
I think a big part of it was that years of counter-discourse of "actually, it's not that hard!" or "it's designed around summoning people for help!" or "winning in dark souls is about being cheap and exploiting enemy behaviour!" that I think are all well-meaning attempts to add nuance to the series reputation of being very hardcore and challenging... really kind of turned me off? Like, "get good!" is really appealing as a fantasy and I think those other things sound really boring! So I was really delighted to learn that, no, as far as the action goes, this really was in fact, a game about getting good after all. A lot of people in chat ended up using fighting game terminology when they realized that was my frame of reference and I was surprised by how much that ended up being a really great analogy: winning a fight is basically all about learning enemy hitboxes, figuring out when you're plus or minus, weighing risk/reward on block/dodge, and managing attack/block/dodge all using the same meter. It really just is about getting the download and intuitively understanding all those things! And I was really impressed that even though its approach to mechanics and interactions is very much engineered to allow extremes—there are a lot of things you can pull off that I would describe as "bullshit"—it never really feels that unsatisfying, because the boss diversity is such that you can never really lean on one trick.
For example, I learned that with enough damage, Smough was actually possible to put into a stagger loop, allowing me to skip learning to dodge a lot of his stuff. But it doesn't work on most other bosses! And even just learning that was a fun process! It's bullshit in that it elides certain mechanics, but it didn't feel "cheap" in an unsatisfying way, it felt like learning why a matchup was strong in my favour. And like... you know, it took like two hours to learn. Or Gwyn's AI being built around trying to interrupt you during an estus meaning that the best way to heal is either right after parrying (and giving up damage) or after dodging a command grab (insanely risky) does mean you're technically exploiting behaviour, but in a way that feels like a natural conclusion of the frame data rather than some gross edge case of bad math—even the cheap shit feels honest and well-earned. Sometimes a mechanic works in your favour, sometimes it works in the enemy's favour, and you just gotta work around that.
Everyone in my chat kept making fun of my build for having high damage and low health—it didn't really seem that way to me, but I'll take their word for it—but the thing was that even with a build that was supposedly busted, all the harder bosses ended up taking me at least a couple hours to get down, which is great, that's exactly what I wanted. (Although I'm sure it must have been tedious for Twitch viewers to watch me die over and over again.) And I did in fact have to learn totally new approaches for each of the tougher ones, I couldn't just coast by on build decisions. Or getting lucky, for that matter—the long boss fights with long runbacks feel like a great solution to the problem of not being sure if you actually learned something or just got lucky after mashing "retry" repeatedly while heated, because of the calming effect of the runback forcing you to take every attempt seriously. Also, you can definitely avoid summoning the whole game, and one of the best fights was a 2v1 against you just to prove it. The adventure/puzzle components DO feel very cooperative and collaborative to me and I think that helped a lot with how much I don't care about them, but as far as the action goes, it really was the satisfying "get good" solo power fantasy that the unnuanced discourse had promised after all!
guess there really was a reason why this is one of the most influential and beloved games of all time, huh. who knew. god dammit. why do I gotta make myself wait three weeks to play the next one, I fucked up