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The lore in Dark Souls isn't just cryptic, a lot of it contradicts itself. Sometimes because of translation errors, sometimes because parts of the lore came from previous builds in the game.Dalisclock said:Johnny Novgorod said:I'd say Souls is all lore and no plot, and I'd describe it as cryptic more than anything else. It's there if you feel like fact-checking the Wikia but the gist of it is you're the Chosen One and you're saving the world by killing monsters. You get the weirdo backstory to a boss or NPC if you look really hard but nothing that matters or factors into your quest. Even if you don't fully appreciate the depth of your actions you always understand what's going on and why, unlike with say MGS, KH or a Suda game.Dirty Hipsters said:It's been 17 posts and no one mentioned the Dark Souls games?
I LOVE those games, but holy shit is the plot and lore nonsense.
Yeah, I feel much the same way. The story any Souls Game is fairly simple. It just has a lot of really cryptic background Lore which is there if you want to dig into it. You can easily go through the games without really paying attention if you wanted to and be fine. In most cases, pretty much everything already happened before you showed up. You're just cleaning up the mess.
For example in Dark Souls 1 there's a bunch of clues that Andre is Gwyn's first-born. That's because in a previous build of the game he actually was, and played a much bigger role in the plot than just being a black-smith. In the community there was this whole mystery about who Gwyn's first born was and there was never any consensus. Some people thought it was Andre, some people thought it was Solaire, and it turned out to be none of the above.
It was unclear what exactly the first born even did that got him banished. The first game says that he lost the annals of history, but that was a translation error, and what it meant to say was that he was lost TO the annals of history, meaning he and his transgression were removed from the history books so no one could know what he did. There was never meant to be an answer to what his transgression was, but because of a translation error the game accidentally had lore that wasn't supposed to be there.
Eventually Dark Souls 3 came out, and it featured Gwyn's first born and we found out that he was banished and erased from history because he sided with the dragons. That was never information that was meant to be in Dark Souls 1 though, it was a retcon. Miyazaki didn't realize that people would get so invested in the non-character of Gwyn's first born, so when he decided against making Andre the first born he never wrote a replacement, that part of the lore was never meant to be completed, but there was already so much work put into the game's areas and so much lore about the first born that it couldn't be removed. It was a scrapped story line that just ended up being in the full game because From Software didn't want to take the time to remove it.
People latched on to this lore, created this whole mystery about it, and it was just a cut story line from a previous build of the game punctuated with a translation error, but everyone still inserted it into their head-canon.
This is even more clear in Dark Souls 2 and 3, both of which had completely different stories until halfway through production. Dark Souls 2 was supposed to be all about time travel, and Dark Souls 3 was supposed to be about fighting 5 Dark Lords rather than people who previously linked the fire, and some of the lore in those games works much more coherently with the originally intended plot.