Video Game Series Review - Dark Souls

Yes the stories are true. Dark Souls is as hard as people say it is. So hard that many players refuse to even play it after the first game over. Yeah its that hard. So I haven't played many of the games that FromSoftware have made, but from what I understand, they make a lot of fantasy games and many of them are great while others like Dark Souls, people just refuse to play them outright. So let's have a look at the games:

I

So all the games have a very minimalistic plot that is detailed by the NPCs you the player encounter in the game but can also be interpreted by the player as well. My interpretation of the story is that its set in a fantasy world in which you are tasked with choosing which path to go that will lead to either the age of the flame or the age of darkness. The game is hard as I said, but it encourages the player to play with caution and to learn from their mistakes such as taking alternate paths to the ones they took originally. Its pretty much a big open world game with everything you'd expect from an open world game. Unlike games that require you to consume health items as the level gradually goes down, this game let's you carry on even without consuming health items, but has you appear more hollow than before. Very interesting gameplay and all I can say is that its very hard. The minimal plot is good and allows players to decide how their story wants to go down. It's good that the developers took into account that this is a game and allows the game to tailor to the choices made by the player. It's a pain to play, but very fun once you get around its hard difficulty. 8/10
II

The game this time has a plot of some sort in which the player's character has been cursed to never die and would eventually become hollow and goes on a journey to hopefully break the curse. Bosses and enemies have the ability to destroy the character with as little as a few hits and your maximum health goes down as a result. One thing I will say about this game is that the gameplay is unforgiving. Just by the maximum health going down alone just shows how unforgiving it is. Its just as hard as the previous game was, but its not all bad. As this time, the difficulty can be altered by acquiring some items throughout the game to help the character along. In addition to that, multiplayer is now possible (having previously been limited to message sending) as other players can be summoned to one world at any given time or there can be a VS battle that results in the invasion of one player's world. The game is an improvement as far as visuals are concerned and it feels more like current gen games (at the time of writing this up). But the increased difficulty can pose a problem for many gamers, some of which may never play the game again just on the first game over. Still, I'm always up for a challenge and Dark Souls II certainly is one tough game. 8/10

III

So we now come to the concluding game of the series as well as one of a few games at E3 that no one cheered at (probably down to the difficulty of its predecessors). The story sees the flame that started the Age of Fire, dying out with the prince choosing to let it die over fulfilling his duty to keep it lit. With all this happening, it falls to the so called Ashen One to save the flame while giving the thrones back to their rightful owners. The game borrows many elements from the second game as well as the series prequel Demon Souls such as using bonfires as checkpoints, allocating weapons and other items into slots and a whole pile of other stuff. Not a big map this time, but despite that, we still get some very detailed designs instead. As the last game in the series, its nice to have a bigger variety of gameplay which makes us forget that the games have a very hard difficulty and as the so called last game, its a good way to end the series. Very packed to the brim with stuff so it will keep you occupied for a while. 8/10

Despite how hard the game are, it does have its merits when it comes to gameplay, graphics and overall design. Its good to know that there are still developers out there who consider that in a game the players should come first always. Especially when it comes to letting them play the game their way as a means to tailor to the choices they make and the style of which they play the game in. Dark Souls may be a very hard series of games to play, but I'd say that's what makes them great. 8/10