The Souls Series Replayed

[Silvanus]

Fuck Dark Souls 3's platinum. Fuck it in the ass.

Bloodborne is the easiest platinum.

Dark Souls 3 is the only one of the three I've platinumed, so this makes me feel a bit more accomplished.

(Reason was I played DS1 on Switch, and after completing DS2 I kind of wanted to put my head under a cold shower for a while, didn't have a second playthrough of DS2 in me).

Have got the plats for Bloodborne and Elden Ring, though. You're right that Bloodborne is an easier plat; it's the lack of covenant/PvP-reliant trophies, and the lack of collecting fecking rings.

 

[CriticalGaming]

Dark Souls 3 is the only one of the three I've platinumed, so this makes me feel a bit more accomplished.

The thing about Dark Souls 3 is the grinding required for the covenants. Outside of that, the bosses and endings are not that hard. But because the grinding is frankly stupid in that game that's why I give that one the crown. Also Midir is like the fucking worst to fight. I hate him so much, I hate that fight, and I never will do it again.

Dark Souls 2 is also a pain in the ass because that is the longest of the souls games in general. So multiple playthroughs can be annoying unless you save scum.

Elden Ring and Bloodborne are nice because they don't really ask much of you. Basically, fight all the bosses, get a couple endings, and gather all the weapons, pretty simple on both games and i wonder if that's the template From will use going forward for the achievements.

 

[CriticalGaming]

Ok so, I think you guys have talked me out of it. I am going to skip Sekiro. Mostly because I hate the combat of Sekiro. I just do. It's not something that ever clicked with me and I beat the game 3 times for the different ending back when it came out and I wanted to snap all my fucking fingers off.

So I don't wanna do it again.

Instead I'm moving onto a different project, a project that will arguably be worse than this depending on who you ask.

I will be playing through every single Final Fantasy game. From 1 to (hopefully) 16 by the time I get there. Should be a fun read along the way. Thank you everyone who replied to this thread and kept conversation going, it kept me motivated to play through these games back to back to back to back. I hope to see ya'll in what I guess will be a Final Fnatasy retrospective, a totally new an unique concept that nobody on the internet has ever done before.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

Different shields have different poise break values. Remove the meter and how will you know how many hits you can take, since every attack has different values. And shields are far from half-baked or useless in these games.

Spoiler

Speaking of trash mobs, for the umpteenth time they are by far the most optional enemies in the game. Most can simply be run past if need be. They populate the game world for lore reasons as much if not more-so than combat. Some are good for farming so it’s up to the player. The beauty of Souls games is they’re already loaded with options if people choose to look for them.

I think most people would be bored if 90% of combat was removed. It’s a character building game so not sure what else people would build characters for if they were mostly puzzle games. Could environments that size be justified or even practical to fill with puzzles? Chances are it would be a lot of empty, wasted space and they’d have to be scaled back.

You can put in animation tell at every time the shield gets a quarter way filled, there's one at the end when it's "broken". Again, people don't read what I say. When did I say shields don't work or are bad? I literally said a few posts ago that one of the reasons parries aren't worth it is because the shield is the superior option. I said shields are half-baked as in mechanically they are half-baked, not that they don't work, in fact they work too good. I built a straight dex/faith character in DS1 and I could block way more than that character had any right to be able to block.

I know you can run past trash mobs, you act like I played these games for like an hour and don't know them. But for most people playing through these games for the 1st time, you're gonna want to fight most of them to get experience/souls and it's not that great an idea to run past enemies when you don't know the areas and it's a 1st time playthrough. The majority of people don't play games more than once. And having a large percentage of the game's content being average-level content at best is good game design? Having the player have to farm is also bad game design. From came up with a great healing system needing no farming (estus flask) and then went backwards with Blooborne's blood viles and Sekiro's spirit things and probably a few others as well.

I would love a horror environmental puzzler because I've gotten bored of every game's main loop requiring combat over and over again. And if From's combat was top-tier, then there's at least a decent reason but it's not top-tier. There's not much to build character-wise in Souls, the character customization is so overplayed, you still end up doing the basically the same thing if you went Str-based or Dex-based (you block or dodge, then attack fast or slow depending on weapon probably doing basically the same DPS regardless). In fact, in Bloodborne, you can go back and forth between the two in essence with a press of a button with the trick weapons. Sure, you got magic but that's pretty half-baked and Bloodborne was wise enough to save that for 2nd+ playthroughs. Bloodborne you have to worry about stats the least of any of them because the weapon scaling damage via stats isn't nearly as important as say DS1. And DS1, you can just put an element on a weapon and bypass needing to invest in the weapon scaling stat for damage. Then what else is there to invest in stat-wise that's like some important decision, it's just increasing health or stamina or magic (if you're doing that or use fire "magic" and bypass needing stat investment), you definitely don't want to invest in resistance... Bloodborne has the least character building in a Souls game and it's still the best one so how are Souls games "character building games"?

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

The thing about Dark Souls 3 is the grinding required for the covenants. Outside of that, the bosses and endings are not that hard. But because the grinding is frankly stupid in that game that's why I give that one the crown. Also Midir is like the fucking worst to fight. I hate him so much, I hate that fight, and I never will do it again.

Dark Souls 2 is also a pain in the ass because that is the longest of the souls games in general. So multiple playthroughs can be annoying unless you save scum.

Elden Ring and Bloodborne are nice because they don't really ask much of you. Basically, fight all the bosses, get a couple endings, and gather all the weapons, pretty simple on both games and i wonder if that's the template From will use going forward for the achievements.

I got all the DS2 trophies besides a few spells and miracles that required the most grinding, and that was enough for me. It seemed like using bonfire aesthetics negated the need for NG+ for the remaining ones but not entirely certain.

Ok so, I think you guys have talked me out of it. I am going to skip Sekiro. Mostly because I hate the combat of Sekiro. I just do. It's not something that ever clicked with me and I beat the game 3 times for the different ending back when it came out and I wanted to snap all my fucking fingers off.

So I don't wanna do it again.

Instead I'm moving onto a different project, a project that will arguably be worse than this depending on who you ask.

I will be playing through every single Final Fantasy game. From 1 to (hopefully) 16 by the time I get there. Should be a fun read along the way. Thank you everyone who replied to this thread and kept conversation going, it kept me motivated to play through these games back to back to back to back. I hope to see ya'll in what I guess will be a Final Fnatasy retrospective, a totally new an unique concept that nobody on the internet has ever done before.

Pretty sure @Dalisclock did one for FF, maybe back on the v2 forum. But regardless we’d still love to read your own flavorful takes.

Anyways, didn’t you save scum the Sekiro endings? I mean, one of them needs a second playthrough but it sounds like you might’ve subjected yourself to a wee bit more torture than necessary. What was it about the combat you didn’t like, that it basically was a rhythm game?

 

[CriticalGaming]

Anyways, didn’t you save scum the Sekiro endings? I mean, one of them needs a second playthrough but it sounds like you might’ve subjected yourself to a wee bit more torture than necessary. What was it about the combat you didn’t like, that it basically was a rhythm game?

I did not save scum back when it came out. I just did NG+ runs. One of the endings is very very fast to get so i did that one last as not to suffer NG+2 that long.

The combat bothered me because it was parry or die. Plus you had to read unparryable attacks like sweeps, grabs, and thrusts, which weren't always readable in the heat of the moment and sometimes Wolf blocks a clear view of the enemy's animation so you get hit because you can't see exactly what attack is coming. I also felt like the game had no progression, the beads that increase attack don't ever feel like they matter because attacking typically isn't that important except with a couple enemies like the bulls. So the game felt the same the entire time and the combat options were so limited that it forces you to play the game a very specific way, and if you have trouble playing that specific way, then you are fucked.

I muscled through it, but I didn't enjoy hardly any of the game if I'm honest.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

You can put in animation tell at every time the shield gets a quarter way filled, there's one at the end when it's "broken". Again, people don't read what I say. When did I say shields don't work or are bad? I literally said a few posts ago that one of the reasons parries aren't worth it is because the shield is the superior option. I said shields are half-baked as in mechanically they are half-baked, not that they don't work, in fact they work too good. I built a straight dex/faith character in DS1 and I could block way more than that character had any right to be able to block.

I know you can run past trash mobs, you act like I played these games for like an hour and don't know them. But for most people playing through these games for the 1st time, you're gonna want to fight most of them to get experience/souls and it's not that great an idea to run past enemies when you don't know the areas and it's a 1st time playthrough. The majority of people don't play games more than once. And having a large percentage of the game's content being average-level content at best is good game design? Having the player have to farm is also bad game design. From came up with a great healing system needing no farming (estus flask) and then went backwards with Blooborne's blood viles and Sekiro's spirit things and probably a few others as well.

I would love a horror environmental puzzler because I've gotten bored of every game's main loop requiring combat over and over again. And if From's combat was top-tier, then there's at least a decent reason but it's not top-tier. There's not much to build character-wise in Souls, the character customization is so overplayed, you still end up doing the basically the same thing if you went Str-based or Dex-based (you block or dodge, then attack fast or slow depending on weapon probably doing basically the same DPS regardless). In fact, in Bloodborne, you can go back and forth between the two in essence with a press of a button with the trick weapons. Sure, you got magic but that's pretty half-baked and Bloodborne was wise enough to save that for 2nd+ playthroughs. Bloodborne you have to worry about stats the least of any of them because the weapon scaling damage via stats isn't nearly as important as say DS1. And DS1, you can just put an element on a weapon and bypass needing to invest in the weapon scaling stat for damage. Then what else is there to invest in stat-wise that's like some important decision, it's just increasing health or stamina or magic (if you're doing that or use fire "magic" and bypass needing stat investment), you definitely don't want to invest in resistance... Bloodborne has the least character building in a Souls game and it's still the best one so how are Souls games "character building games"?

Oh FFS…all it takes is a Google/YouTube search to realize how much character building is a part of Souls’ DNA. I never said anything about Bloodborne but even then people build to various weapon usage. Most of the other stuff was streamlined and guess what, that was also literally the biggest complaint about the game.

It feels like we’ve had arguments like this countless times and it’s gotten nowhere. Agree to disagree is really all there is left to say.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

I did not save scum back when it came out. I just did NG+ runs. One of the endings is very very fast to get so i did that one last as not to suffer NG+2 that long.

The combat bothered me because it was parry or die. Plus you had to read unparryable attacks like sweeps, grabs, and thrusts, which weren't always readable in the heat of the moment and sometimes Wolf blocks a clear view of the enemy's animation so you get hit because you can't see exactly what attack is coming. I also felt like the game had no progression, the beads that increase attack don't ever feel like they matter because attacking typically isn't that important except with a couple enemies like the bulls. So the game felt the same the entire time and the combat options were so limited that it forces you to play the game a very specific way, and if you have trouble playing that specific way, then you are fucked.

I muscled through it, but I didn't enjoy hardly any of the game if I'm honest.

Prosthetic stuff mixed it up a bit but yeah, the game was almost entirely a “live by the sword…” affair and required losing a lot of the muscle memory from SoulsBorne.

 

[Dalisclock]

Pretty sure @Dalisclock did one for FF, maybe back on the v2 forum. But regardless we’d still love to read your own flavorful takes.

I did metal gear and assassin's Creed but I'm totally down to see a FF thread.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

I did metal gear and assassin's Creed but I'm totally down to see a FF thread.

Who was it that did something for FF? Maybe I’m mistaken and you only mentioned playing some of the early ones in the “what are you playing” thread.

 

[Silvanus]

be playing through every single Final Fantasy game. From 1 to (hopefully) 16 by the time I get there. Should be a fun read along the way. Thank you everyone who replied to this thread and kept conversation going, it kept me motivated to play through these games back to back to back to back. I hope to see ya'll in what I guess will be a Final Fnatasy retrospective, a totally new an unique concept that nobody on the internet has ever done before.

Have you had a look at the pixel remasters of 1 - 4 available on Steam? I picked up FF1 not long ago, because 1 and 2 are the only mainline FF games I've never played.

Regarding your playthrough: are you including direct sequels like FFX-2 or XIII-2? What about spin off games like Dirge of Cerberus? And are you including the MMOs, XI and XIV?

 

[CriticalGaming]

Have you had a look at the pixel remasters of 1 - 4 available on Steam?

I have 1-6 pixel remasters. And actually I've never played FF6 which is like a cardnal sin for an FF fan, so this is a good chance for me to do that.

Regarding your playthrough: are you including direct sequels like FFX-2 or XIII-2?

Yes.

What about spin off games like Dirge of Cerberus?

No but mostly because it's too hard to play those games in any legit way.

And are you including the MMOs, XI and XIV?

Not on purpose. But since I actively play 14, then I might as well at least talk about that one.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

Oh FFS…all it takes is a Google/YouTube search to realize how much character building is a part of Souls’ DNA. I never said anything about Bloodborne but even then people build to various weapon usage. Most of the other stuff was streamlined and guess what, that was also literally the biggest complaint about the game.

It feels like we’ve had arguments like this countless times and it’s gotten nowhere. Agree to disagree is really all there is left to say.

You don't read what I say so we go around in circles. There is very little actual important character building in Souls, you just character build to up DPS because enemies have more health as you move along the game. Borderlands' character building is way way way more impactful and that's not even some great character building game.

 

[BrawlMan]

Oh FFS…all it takes is a Google/YouTube search to realize how much character building is a part of Souls’ DNA. I never said anything about Bloodborne but even then people build to various weapon usage. Most of the other stuff was streamlined and guess what, that was also literally the biggest complaint about the game.

It feels like we’ve had arguments like this countless times and it’s gotten nowhere. Agree to disagree is really all there is left to say.

You forget you're dealing with one of the biggest contrarian goal posters on the site. Nothing should surprise you at this point. It's why I have his ignorant self on ignore.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

You don't read what I say so we go around in circles. There is very little actual important character building in Souls, you just character build to up DPS because enemies have more health as you move along the game. Borderlands' character building is way way way more impactful and that's not even some great character building game.

In what game is it preferable to take longer to kill enemies? Maybe some action games for style points or combos, but regardless you’re always babbling about DPS like it’s some big revelation or detrimental thing.

Make no mistake, I read everything you say; I just don’t agree with much of it here. You have your own preferences which is fine, but even a simple Google search would reveal your mistake is thinking that automatically invalidates everyone else’s.

 

[Terminal Blue]

There is very little actual important character building in Souls, you just character build to up DPS because enemies have more health as you move along the game.

To be honest, if I've learned one thing playing Souls games it's that leveling for DPS is kind of bad. There's always some low-scaling, high damage option which can carry you through most of the game, and having chunky health and stamina bars will generally benefit you more, so just level to the point you can use your chosen weapon and then don't stop raising vigor and endurance until you hit the softcaps.

In fact, I think if there's an actual criticism of Souls character building, it's that there's a massive incentive to make every character the same, i.e. a knight. You start a game intending to play a magic user and, whoops, you're a knight with some bare minimum investment in intelligence. You want to do some funny meme luck build? I hope you weren't planning on using luck scaling weapons until literally the endgame because all your points are going into survivability..

This is actually something I think Elden Ring hugely improved on. There's still the basic problem that vigor is king, but endurance is now much more build specific. More importantly, there's no way to reduce scaling for more base damage, which makes damage stats actually important. Heck, I went full Arcane, blew past the softcap and I haven't regretted it, it's been extremely fun.

 

[Dalisclock]

Who was it that did something for FF? Maybe I’m mistaken and you only mentioned playing some of the early ones in the “what are you playing” thread.

No clue. I'm sure I've mentioned how I've played almost all of the early FF games a couple times but to my knowledge never really did a full discussion on any of them.

 

[Silvanus]

There is very little actual important character building in Souls, you just character build to up DPS because enemies have more health as you move along the game.

Well, there we have the source of the issue.

You built a really straightforward, basic DPS build, haven't experimented with any other way of playing, and have wrongly concluded that the gameplay is boring because of that.

Nah mate, you made a boring build.

 

[sXeth]

Well, there we have the source of the issue.

You built a really straightforward, basic DPS build, haven't experimented with any other way of playing, and have wrongly concluded that the gameplay is boring because of that.

Nah mate, you made a boring build.

I think the point he's making is there's not much option but a boring build.

Yes, you could build super-tank in Havel (or Great Bull) armour and a greatshield. So you can stand around and get hit while taking longer to kill the boss. Or a mage and just not engage with most of the mechanics at all and press R1 from outside the range of the enemies attacks.


You're not making crowd controllers, healers, summoners, or even status builds (outside of ER, and they nerfed one status and bleed is basically the boring DPS build but faster). Or a rogue using traps. Or really much of anything. You certainly aren't making charisma based characters or any of that dialog RPG type stuff.


Your options are Hit, Shoot or Block then hit, or if you're particularly inspired you can use magic to make a sword in your hnad instead of shooting but you're putting in a lot of effort to circle around back to option A.

 

[Silvanus]

You're not making crowd controllers, healers, summoners, or even status builds (outside of ER, and they nerfed one status and bleed is basically the boring DPS build but faster). Or a rogue using traps. Or really much of anything. You certainly aren't making charisma based characters or any of that dialog RPG type stuff.

Well yeah, because it's not an RPG.

Your options are Hit, Shoot or Block then hit, or if you're particularly inspired you can use magic to make a sword in your hnad instead of shooting but you're putting in a lot of effort to circle around back to option A.

Right, but that's because complexity doesn't just come from how many attacks you have. This is like saying Mario is "just jumping". Yes, but the complexity comes from the context, doesn't it?