Hey all, I just felt like talking about Dark Souls (well, all the souls games actually), and there hasn't been a front page topic about any of the Souls games in Gaming Discussion for a while so I figured "eh, why not?" and decided to make one. No really direction to this, I'll just start talking and anyone is free to steer the conversation anywhere they want and talk about anything they want, so long as it's Souls series related (hell, maybe even Bloodborne, what do I care?).
So, to start, I'm currently playing all the souls games concurrently and doing so has really made me realize some interesting things about them that I never noticed before when playing them separately.
1. The boss fights in demons souls are ass. Visually they're cool, but mechanically speaking they're kind of a joke. All of them are easy, yes even flamelurker and the maneaters. None of the bosses punish healing. If you have grass you can pretty much chomp it at any point in the fight and not worry about the boss retaliating during your healing animation. This is the second time I'm going through Demons Souls, and I have yet to die on a single boss, what's up with that? I'm running through Dark Souls 2 with a caestus only build and I died to Pursuer 6 times.
2. I really like Dark Souls 2 from a mechanical standpoint. I'm using a dual caestus build right now and it's soo much fun. I love the fact that any weapon is totally viable. Thinking about doing a ladle run after this. Whenever I was playing Dark Souls 1 I always felt like there where certain weapons that I just favored so much more than others, like certain weapons were totally unusable to me, and Dark Souls 2 doesn't feel like that at all. I feel like I can grab any weapon and use it confidently which is really cool.
3. I'm also playing through Dark Souls 1 again, though this one I'm doing much more slowly and methodically than the other 2 (partly because this is the first time I'm playing through the DLC), and I've noticed that there actually aren't very many boss fights I really like. Ornstein and Smough are obviously a standout, as are the bosses in the DLC, and gaping dragon and Quelaag are visually amazing, but a lot of the other boss fights just aren't that great. Many of them are very challenging, but part of the challenge is that the bosses are just huge and the camera doesn't like cooperating with me. It's difficult to roll an attack when you lock on to some of the bigger bosses because you end up having no idea where your character is in relation to them, and if you don't lock on you can't see some of their attacks. Wish they'd fix their camera for Bloodborne, but from the gameplay trailers it doesn't look like it.
4. The Quelagg and Najka boss fights are actually nothing alike. Quelaag and Najka have very similar visual designs, but I actually don't think they share a single attack in common. Quelaag doesn't have a tail, so Najka's tail attacks are unique to her, Quelaag doesn't have magic so Najka's magic attacks are also unique to her, and Najka can tunnel underground, which Quelaag cannot do. At the same time Quelaag has constant fire damage on her weapon, which Najka doesn't, and Quelaag has area denial with her lava, which Najka doesn't have. Hell, even their melee attacks are totally different with Quelaag using slashes and Najka favoring stabs. It actually kind of bothers me now that people complain about Najka just being Quelaag 2.0 considering they fight nothing alike.