So since our lord & savior is around the corner, I may as well bring this up before I eventually get into it. With the release of the second game approaching, there were many people over time feeling that they just had to go back & complete Dark Souls or at least give it a try if they passed over it in the past (like myself). Kinda felt like the Ghouls & Ghosts of this generation, except nowhere near as hard since I doubt very many actually finished the original GnGs legit. While it’s to be expected, the game wasn’t as hard as I heard, but that’s what you get with expectations. It flows rather smoothly if you don’t go into the game with the wrong mindset i.e. mashing the attack button, being impatient & incredibly reckless since that sh
it will get you killed pretty damn fast. I got used to all the controls like 30 minutes in (it helped that I had played Dragon’s Dogma just before it) & while I soared right through most beginning areas, I still died a lot during those points too, and it usually came down to rushing in too fast & getting greedy with hits when it was clearly dangerous to go for it. I don’t count Hellkite though, still think he’s random as sh
it which makes getting to the sunlight altar rather luck based. Overtime a lot of things really began to p
iss me off around the mid-point & kinda went downhill from there (I just stopped acting completely around Painted World since my
favorite enemy makes its most
wonderful appearance there). At the end of the day, I still ended up liking the game. Then again, it doesn’t take much for me to like a game but it takes a lot for me to hate it, may as well go over the bigger points that annoyed me.
- Lock-on. My goodness, as I got closer to end-game, it’s flaws got far harder to ignore. Most times you can’t target something unless you’re within 5 feet of it, which kinda defeats the point of any ranged stuff. It’s perfectly okay for an OP magician to target me from a mile away in the darkness when I can’t even see the guy on screen yet though, that makes sense. Say I run up to one of those tower knights to lock-on then quickly back up, sometimes it’ll turn my back to the enemy instead of lock-on because I was apparently 2 feet too far even though the guy’s only like 10 feet away, occasionally letting them strike me from behind. A memorable example, with the channelers in Duke’s Archives. I run up the stairs towards these guys, staying just far enough that they don’t run. Guy is right in front of me yet I have to hold my shield up & click lock-on like 3 times before the game notices he’s right there. Unless the enemy is moving 2 miles an hour, actually hitting sh
it with magic is more frustrating than need be, sometimes it’ll somehow miss because an enemy was half a foot to the right, practically scraping the guy’s shoulder at best, not staying it should always hit unless clearly dodged, there’s just no excuse to miss when an enemy is running towards you in a straight line but slightly to the right. This made the bonewheel skeletons more frustrating because any spell except my homie, Homing Soulmass, would usually miss & leave me wide open to get insta-killed.
- No pause button. Not really a big complaint but I’ll put it here anyway. Say what you want but unless I’m being invaded or have other players with me in general, there’s no excuse for not being able to pause. There are times when you simply can’t stand in a corner while you quickly leave for a minute, for instance, in the middle of a boss fight when your bowels suggest you better get on that pot ASAP. There were two occasions where I had the wrong weapon equipped, but I can’t just pause, go to the menu & swap it out to my main weapon, I gotta kill everything nearby with that crap which will take 3 times longer before I can swap it out.
- Constant ambushes. Sure, they can be done well to keep you focused & all but Dark Souls abuses the hell out of this to the point I just sigh. After the first time I get caught out, fair enough, I’ll pay more attention & it’ll probably come up once or twice more at most. In DS, like a 1/3 of corners have some **** sitting there, waiting to get a free kill. Duke’s Archives was the worst when it came to this. Almost all narrow pathways & half of them had some **** standing in a corner (Once I could clearly see the guy, from my character’s viewpoint he was clearly visible & a few feet away, staring at him but couldn’t target him because I wasn’t fully round the corner, that makes total sense.) When I went down the first steps in Oolacile Township, I
knew there would be one enemy attempting to ambush me. I just knew he would be there, I was so used to random enemies camping tight corners that I started making note of spots where they could easily stick one but surprisingly didn’t.
- PvP. Not the thing itself, mind you, then again, as a sorceror who operated under “My magic won’t hit you unless you very slowly walk towards me in a straight line.” I wasn’t going to be that fond of it anyway. Second, the horrendous lag which regularly shows up. This is right before your opponent uses IT to teleport halfway across the room to lagstab you & get a free win. The amount of times duels
haven’t ended like this can be counted on one hand. The guy is half a mile away? I randomly teleport onto his sword. I clearly rolled away from a swing? Nope, get over here, lagstab for you, bit
ch. Then there’s the random invaders abusing some cheap sh
it like that one miracle that shoots shockwaves, guy was rapid cancelling it or something. Just ran up & spammed it till I died then had the nerve to bow like what he did wasn’t cheap as fu
ck. Just makes me want to avoid fighting people, period, and some of these fights take too long. In Anor Londo, was grinding out the painting guardians for my humanity counter when some guy invaded just as I sat down at Gywndolin’s bonfire. Figured he’d come to me, he didn’t so I ran up the stairs & he was waiting right there. Spent like several minutes running in circles with this guy using Pyromancy & such, I kept wondering why this NPC was more annoying to kill than the others. Eventually took him down with several soul arrows on the narrow path to the first bonfire, then only realized minutes later I was still online. They’ve apparently fixed the lag but I’ll believe it when I see it & I’d rather not even glance.
- Just gonna call it freedom. Now I know that you can physically kill enemies & use Pyromancy & spells etc. on any character, but you can’t do most of that till like 2/3’s into the game, and probably not even that if you haven’t grinded a little. Starting out with the standard hand axe, I used it for killing weak foes & saving the spells for strong enemies & bosses, and that’s about it. Yeah, you can do whatever build you wanna start with, but if I don’t like a particular play style due to environment changes, I gotta grab a ton of souls to level up my other sh
it so I have more to fall back on, or start over & choose another class. Hell, a lot of the weapons I was simply curious to try out normally required me to use like 8 soul levels to up specific stats I didn’t care too much for normally, not like I could try it out beforehand to see if it’s a weapon that‘s worth the souls. Don’t get me wrong, I like the game, I just wanted a little more to work with. I liked Dragon’s Dogma more as I could change my character class on the fly by just visiting the inn, and I could experiment a lot more without getting quickly punished for not sticking to my strengths (of course, for most of DD, the head gear with the best defensive stats was a brown sack, so yeah, didn‘t like that little bit). In order to do all that I wanted, I had to level up to like soul level 160 or so, mainly I needed far more endurance than necessary to equip Havel’s gear (which might have the highest defence in the game) & roll without his ring taking a permanent spot.
I also spent a ton of points on attunement so I could go from 6 to 9 slots & use an extra batch of great soul arrows, soul spears & homing soulmass, but after 6 slots the points needed to get more become more & more ridiculous. You can’t really tell how a weapon is gonna swing in your hands till you really try it sometimes. Going off that, the Uchigatana would have been my preferred weapon of choice since the stat requirement isn’t way too high, it swings fast, it’s damage is actually pretty good, and it can be buffed. I hate that spells like sunlight blade & crystal magic weapon seemed useless for me since they can’t be used on “special” weapons. Why the fu
ck not? The special weapons aren’t even good enough to stand on their own without that, honestly, a lot of them kinda suck since they can only go up to +5 (I assume that’s because twinkling titanite couldn’t be bought in the past. I did not know this…and it is stupid.) Actually trying out crystal magic weapon on some random sword actually made it look cool, but it apparently clashes with anything not common. Hell, as far as I know, the Uchi can only be gotten two ways, kill the first undead merchant (which I wouldn’t want to do on a first play through), or from Shiva, but only in Blighttown. Again,
why? Why not at the Forest after joining that covenant, the guy’s right there! Why does he set up shop in
Blighttown of all places? Isn’t he losing sales this way? Who the hell would
want to visit that sh
ithole other than to ring the bell? It’s pretty high on my list of places I’d rather avoid like the plague.
Great magic shield too, I wanted this on my magic list, y’know, for variety. Then I found out it sucked, looked it up, seems it only lasts like 15 seconds instead of one minute because people were apparently abusing this in PvP. Far enough, I would’ve been a reasonable person & shortened it to around 30 seconds, but 15? That makes it fu
cking useless, why must really good things get nerfed to hell instead of being balanced? So yeah, I grinded like 70 levels in the Painted World which took like 3 hours (since the grinding spot there gives like 10k souls every minute with the right gear & pyro spell) after I’d done everything expect kill Gywn, so I could run around with all the sh
it I wanted in NG+ and have more fun doing so.
Oh, and the notion that everything is fair & that anytime you die it’s always entirely your fault? Lol. Not trying to say the game has tons of BS in it, but that’s quite an exaggeration that it’s entirely fair, unless they‘ve forgotten about some of the smaller details. How random the Hellkite dragon can be? That one butcher standing on that piece of wood in the beginning of the Depths just to surprise you from behind (yeah, I saw him on NG+)? The pit with the frogs that can instant curse you if you take them lightly unless you conveniently happened to be wearing curse resist stuff (like myself)?
Most of Blighttown in general? That one lightning throwing **** to the left of a narrow path leading to the outside of Sen’s Fortress (you could say the mimic too though that catches almost everyone unless you already knew)? **** giants chucking AoE inferno boulders right after if you stop for a few moments? The infamous archers of Anor Londo? The dreaded well in the Painted World? The beginning of Tomb of the Giants? Duke’s Archives, period. Crystal Cave, period. Stray Demon, its not enough to take health from your fall, he’ll spam AoE’s with absurd hitboxes like crazy. Centipede Demon with 90% of the area covered in lava that eats through your health in seconds? The derpy octopus monsters that can break your sh
it just from touching you once?
Bed of Chaos, need I say more? While most bosses are generally fair (though you don't expect Four Kings to be a DPS race), if you need an example of luck based BS look no further than Capra Demon. Gets two annoying dogs to help him & a tiny ass room, he’d be on the same line as Pinwheel without either of these. Having a weak axe that kills dogs in two swings & no poise whatsoever, having a good shot at him required me to not get boxed in 2 seconds after walking through the door. Say what you want, MM, fu
cker was cheap.
I'm not trying to give the impression I'm whining because it was too damn hard. One of the things that made me want to finally give the game a shot was that DSP gave it another shot & beat it (with massive amounts of help from his stream chat, staying in the back while his summons did 90% of the work, being given near maxed out humanity so he could keep doing it, and being handed overpowered gear so he could tank through stuff). If he could beat it, then it can't be too hard. I didn't lie about the things I posted, sure I didn't list every death because that's a waste of time but I knew things about the game ahead of time & what mentality to have so I died far less than a new player would. When I said I beat Oreo & Smores 1st try & got hit once, I really did it (
http://newssbb.smfforfree3.com/index.php/topic,39365.msg1094871.html#msg1094871), then again, my build was perfect for that fight but I didn't set up my build for those two (honestly it was for Four Kings on NG+). I was expecting to get stomped because my spell count was low & I wasn't human but I had to obviously give it a try. Wasn't focused on specifically killing one of them, just making sure to keep an eye on them both. Considering what kind of game it is, Oreo would likely get a quick stab on me from the side if I ignored him, allowing his boy, Smores, to smack me into the ground. I only called in help ONCE, and it was purely to get Seath the Sh
ithead's tail because the **** was being a bigger prude than Priscilla & would refuse to hand it over, could've killed him without help like every other boss. Overtime, I began using the souls I had on random stuff: items I'll probably never use, random weapons & armor I don't have, just anything so I don't possibly suffer some random death & lose them all. If I was like 2k souls away from a level, I'd get them & level so I don't worry about dying, which made the last areas far less frustrating.
So yeah, I may like the game (I completed 3 playthroughs, at least) but I’m not gonna get on my knees & work my mouth like half the other fanatics. Just because you like a game doesn’t mean you should automatically write off any & all flaws, I’ve acknowledged flaws in several of the games in this topic that I liked. I’ve heard more bad things than good ones from the changes made in DkS2, though I haven’t been actively looking for them, but I won’t be too sure until its out. Oh, and Floyd, I haven’t forgotten about Thin Red Line, I’ll get back to it soon enough.
