- Demon's Souls is original
- Dark Souls is the sequel to Demon's Souls
- Dark Souls 2 is original
- Bloodborne is original
- Dark Souls 3 is the sequel to Bloodborne
- Sekiro is original
- Elden Ring is the sequel to Dark Souls 2
any questions?
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in reply to @nex3's post:
Demon's Souls is the sequel to King's Field 4. Bloodborne is the sequel to Shadow Tower Abyss. Sekiro is the sequel to... uh... Armored Core?
I really want to understand this, assuming it's not a complete shitpost. What makes ER a sequel to DS2? I mean, it does have Lots of Guys™ but I'm pretty sure that's not where you were going with it.
ER harkens back to a bunch of DS2 design ideas:
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It's willing to play around with high-friction mechanics. Of course FromSoft is famous for this in general, but DS2 and ER both do this to an extent that other games seem to shy away from. Teleport-trap chests are the example I think of first, but the catacombs and especially heros' graves feel very DS2 in their sense of humor.
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It allows the player to explore in any direction from the word "go" and trusts them to understand which areas are too hard, which is the case in DS1 to some extent but was really emphasized in DS2 (which was in turn riffing on Demon Souls' more explicit hub-and-spokes structure).
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DS2 has the most complex character building of any of the prior games, which they backed off of in DS3 and especially Bloodborne and Sekiro. ER brings it back with a vengeance, not only porting power stancing from DS2 but adding customizable weapon skills as well.
Oh, that all makes total sense!
I guess I've also always felt that DS2 was the most Dark Souls of the Dark Souls games, despite a lot of its continuity being erased or rewritten in DS3. It's definitely a game that wants to be difficult and arcane but also delights in fucking with the player in extremely FromSoft ways.
I think the disconnect I had with your initial post was the difference in difficulty; DS2 is (other than, what, maybe Sekiro?) one of the most challenging offerings in the oeuvre while ER is, arguably, one of the easiest.
"Difficulty" is so hard to pin down here. DS2 SotFS at its cruelest (which is mostly to say "in the optional parts of the DLCs") has some incredibly unfair-feeling encounter design... but it's also the only game that allows you to perma-kill mobs, so there's always a way out. And on the other hand, it has probably the easiest set of bosses of any of them by any metric.
The initial slope of Sekiro's learning curve is very steep, but I think it actually gets to the point where you can comfortably win the game in NG the fastest of any of them once you get over that first hump. The deflect mechanic is extremely forgiving once you know how to use it (30 frames of perfect deflect window, and if you miss that you still do a normal block and don't take damage), and once you learn to just be aggressive all the time rather than playing it safe you can really punish most of the hardest bosses.
Then Elden Ring—while it's definitely structured to make it much more obvious that you can simply outlevel most challenges, Malenia alone is certainly the hardest boss they've ever made (especially on original patch) and the sequence of Godskin Duo into Maliketh into Elden Beast is extremely difficult for a fair number of builds. Powerful tools like Mimic Tear help mitigate this, but is that really different in substance than the mitigations available in other games like summons, buff items, and good old grinding?
All this is a tangent and it isn't to say that you're wrong—your impressions definitely line up with the broad consensus on difficulty ranking. Just that I think these games are so interested in giving each player a bespoke experience based on their own play style that absolute metrics of "difficulty" get complicated in really interesting ways.
Part of it is that I found Sekiro's combat incredibly opaque and not fun and bounced hard off the game, so I'm definitely biased.
I guess it's also unfair to say that a game is "easy" when you consider, say, Alecto, or Death Rite Bird, or Bell Bearing Hunter where you can't summon and have to just learn the sword dance. Or dealing with Preceptor Miriam. Or Gargoyles, where even with a giant bag of tricks it's a brutal fight.
In possibly the weirdest take I think of Dark Souls as original, and Dark Souls 2 as the sequel to Demon's Souls...
Most notably to me the structure of the world is very similar (a highly developed hub that leads to a few branching linear paths that you can do in any order, only for them to eventually converge into a singular linear path once you've beaten them all). They have the most similar world structure of any pair of FromSoft games, quite possibly? Whereas Dark Souls is starkly different in world structure to any other entry imo, to the extent that it just completely defines so much of the experience of that game
yeah that's true, they definitely both have a hub-and-spokes structure that the rest of the games don't
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