I'm going to write about Dark Souls in this entry, writing may be a bit disjointed because my brain is mushy lately.
The first thing about Dark Souls the the character creation is awfully bad! I thought it couldn't be worse than Demon's Souls but they managed it, No Ethnic selection, poor random generator... Skin toning really hard to do. Just make some White guy and roll. One good point is the guys got some niftier hair, so I can be a jerk with the Emo Flip hair or the Curly Mullet of manliness. The classes are cooler this time as Armor looks more distinct and flashy. Body types produce nothing but ugliless and are only useful if you going for that purpose, a sane person will pick "Average" Body type because the rest is just wacky fun-house mirror versions of it.
OK, enough about that triviality to most... Dark Souls, a game with a very literal world. You see you start as an Undead in the Undead Asylum which is called UNDEAD ASYLUM are in the land of the Lords LORDRON, you then proceed to a city of the undead... UNDEAD BURG. Then you want to go to a blighted town called: BLIGHTTOWN. I feel almost weirded out when it starts using some named like "ANOR LONDO" and "LOST IZALITH"; what the hell do they mean? Should of been GIANT LAND and HELL WORLD.
The NPC's are real jokers in this game, they are all laughing at me! They say things and then they laugh! I think they are making fun of me, My character can only retaliate by slashing them to death because this is DARK SOULS and talking is for wimps and therefore never an option. You can foster some fun friendships in this game if you resist the urge to slash peoples faces. You develop a friendship with Solaire of Astora; a undead Knight (is everybody undead in this game?) Who stares at the sun for fun and will help you in a fight, A narcoleptic man in onion shaped armor called Siegmeyer who is always getting himself into trouble and will give you gifts if you get him out. If you try real hard, the undead moss selling old lady will start flirting with you and the Giant Blacksmith will start giving you philosophy lessons.
Demon's Souls was a game that is not balanced. Some people called it hard, others called it easy (because they like to sound cool). I'll sound cooler and say it's just not designed with "balance". That is to say the design model isn't like your ordinary action game or rpg where they have the intention of exactly how hard or how strong a thing is; rather they throw together a lot of parameters and content and probably have only the general idea of how it's really going to roll, Dark Souls is even *less* balanced (thus potentially harder and easier) the player are going to die a lot or dominate by figuring out the rules.
The game is monstrously epic, It just throws every damn thing it pleases at you such as a Gigantic Iron Man twice as Large as the Tower Knight with a Giant throwing 20 ton flame boulders for backup (unless you botheres shooting him in the knee 200 times to death before-hand), or a Enormous 3 tailed Immortal Dragon who breaths 1 mile radius cursed crystal breath at you. or such Backdrops as Walking along a 2 foot wide poll with Swinging guillotines while serpent men fire lightning at you from the Balconies, or Have you run through a mile of Lava inhabited by 30 Mobs of Gigantic T-Rex Legs.
Or the Giant Demon Spider Witch with no Nipples.
I had a lot of fun with this game, just like with Demon's Souls, with a different feeling and way more Armors and Weapons (And a lot more bugs because they haven't worked it all out yet). I think the appeal really is the lack of balance or sanity. I don't know if it's great game design but it is the sheer art of content and the content of that art, The thrill of the player vs the world rather than the world for the player; So few other mainstream games offer what it has.
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