Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a 10 out of 10 game, and every game even Ocarina of time will have flaws.
I just felt some of the dungeons and repeat bosses made the game have some of that typical open world bloat.
Most of the side dungeons and stuff were fine by me, but reusing Godfrey and Astel felt lazy.
Also I don’t like Leyndell. The dungeon is perfectly fine and one of the best thematically, I just keep getting stuck running in circles after finding the church site of grace.
I liked getting lost in Leyndell, it made the thing feel massive. And also having another dungeon inside, which has another dungeon inside which seamlessly connects to another area through a hidden passage was the most DkS1 every souls game has been since DkS1
Church grace, that bit of sewer with lots of hand monsters, up a ladder, across a bridge, down the way I think might be the next turn… and hey it’s that church again. Repeat.
The actual sewers/frenzied flame proscription part was sooo good though.
And the hidden passage to that other underground area! I never did the Deeproot Depths in my playthrough for some reason… Completely missed that part, and Fia and D’s stories. Still kinda unsure what a deathroot is but the dog likes them.
Still kinda unsure what a deathroot is but the dog likes them.
It’s not exactly clear.
lore and plot spoilers:
Nearest I can tell, when Godwyn was killed his soul was annihilated while his body was left alive but tainted with the ontological force of real, actual Death that had been separated out of the fundamental rules of the world to create reincarnation and resurrection and allow for true immortality for the privileged nepo babies of the Golden Order; funeral rites were performed for him and his body was interred in the roots of the Erdtree, which normally would have led to him being reincarnated or resurrected but instead he just lay there, lifeless but alive (since his soul was gone completely, annihilated or otherwise entirely removed from the world and its rules), and tainted the roots with a new sort of paracausal force that spread out through the root network and began interrupting the cycle of reincarnation by making soulless bodies rise up and live again despite their state (and I think this entails destroying their souls as well, as Godwyn’s was, because of how this is treated as more than just defiling empty bodies but as something existentially vile).
Deathroot is the concentrated focal point of a local infection, and Gurranq was bound using the fundamental ontological rules of the world and his own nature as the fated shadow of Marika to hunt down and destroy all of the outbreaks by literally consuming it, a task which is impossible because the infection is inaccessibly deep and constantly propagating itself.
yes, every dark souls weenie will croon about the “interconnected world” but outside of DKS1 (up to anor londo, mind) that never happen, do that again
Absolutely, the interconnected world of DS1 was more of a limitation in game design than a conscious design decision.
The day I realized that the reason I fell in love with a series was something they never even intended to do is the day my heart broke.
here’s my money’s paw compromise, interconnect everything, but do it in the DKS2 style where an elevator at the top of a tower leads up into the bottom of a volcano
That could work in theory but then in DS2 you turn around to face the direction you came from before getting on the elevator and it’s a fucking wasteland covered in smoldering fires and blackened rocks as far as the eye can see which is a total mindfuck. The actual elevator itself was not really the problem I think, as little sense as it makes to begin with
Ibut they put careful effort into making something more interesting than that
But you see they didn’t. The interconnected world was due to a space limitation and not an actual design choice. That’s why not a single game after ds1 had that same quality. I’m upset that an aspect of the game I loved was completely unintentional and will never return to the series.
It’s like if Metroid only had the mapping that it did because the designer couldn’t load up more than a few rooms worth of assets at a time. Then Metroid II comes around and you realize that the cool mapping was not a deliberate design decision and feel sad.
Yeah it’s a commonly agreed point that mountaintops and consacrated snowfield should have been merged into a single area, called “the consacrated snowfield” and that it should be optional, but I guess they were going for a lofty thematic thing and they couldn’t stretch resources thaaaat much.
I think they should have worked to diversify the dungeons and other repeatables more, but they’re still really fun to do. That one teleportation dungeon was lit.
You talking about the frost snails?
I hate the chariot ones though goddamn those suck. WHY MUST I HIDE IN A HOLE LIKE THE PUSSY I AM!
I never really felt bothered by it tbh. There was enough new content coming that it never really felt bad to go through a dungeon. Kinda like chalice dungeons in Bloodeborne.
The biggest problem imo is that half of the enemies get an upgraded re-skin in another area without changing their behaviour. Things scale weird and the balance is a bit off. That’s more of a priority to me than some optional dungeons having repeat bosses.
