@@A_Black_Sheep94 Forgiving student loans is a terrible idea though. It basically 1.Does nothing to address the actual issue of for profit institutions and their hugely inflated prices 2. Will do nothing but embolden said institutions because they just got massive government checks for being predatory lenders and screwing over students. 3. Doesn't stop them from just immediately selling a new round of student loans with even higher interest rates. Its a smooth brained solution that appeals to people who just want to not have to pay their loans. The real solution would have to include sweeping changes to those loans in general as well as to higher education. Ideally it would also simply change the payback method, freeze interest, etc to make paying back the loans possible, as opposed to just handing out blank checks.
@@nugsboodlepoo not necessarily, it could be A minor, a greek mode or it could be in loads of keys that have sharps or flats but just not use them. I believe the song is in A minor, not sure, but it is most definitely not in C major.
"I didn't run the thing naked 6x." FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MAN, PLEASE STOP GIVING THE DARK SOULS COMMUNITY IDEAS. Great video, KBash! Glad you got around to giving this series as try :)
DS2 Vanllia is way easier imo with less enemy's also the unnerfed spells/items for example Ring of Life Protection is just amazing for casual players if you dont know what it is pretty much if you have the ring on and you die you DONT lose your souls and you dont turn hollow( i was running low on effigys so i put it on till i beat dark lurker) but the ring breaks and to repair it, it costs 3000 souls in Vanilla and in SotFS its a whopping 14000 souls to repair.... also they changed where it spawns in vanilla you get it in no-mans wharf behind a shelf you can get three per playthrough in vanilla but in SotFS you can only get one and its from Felkin the Outcast for 6000 souls and that's... all most half the game done already so whats the point you already know the game mechanics and are fairly strong/good so the ring loses even more purpose and place
Yeah, everything I've read/heard indicates Scholar of the First Sin is the harder edition (compared to vanilla). I didn't even know about the ring of life stuff, I just knew that scholar added in more enemies and more difficult enemy placements.
Yeah true, I started playing DS2 vanilla, and much later I realized there was an enhanced version SotFS. I replayed SotFS and I was like WTF? Why are there so much more enemies? They were already too many in vanilla DS2 compared to DS1. Why are many Knights of Heide sitting around? In the original, a Heide Knight was a curiosity, something you would find very rarely and decide to engage if you want, so it was great to discover one. Then, more places blocked by petrified NPCs. Why did they changed so many things? Instead of fixing the problems of the original game (mainly the awful hitboxes). And yes, if I knew about the ring from the beginning, I could have played the entire game with this ring casually, never being afraid of losing my souls, as I'd gather way more souls than needed to repair the ring. That makes me want to replay the vanilla now.
@@bugothecatplays7864 they did fix a lot of things and made aloooot of good changes that make the game way better overall bro. Sure some things are stupid but the things it improves and fixes is definitely worth it
@@darkhaven9119 I have played and finished both and currently replaying them. It doesn't seem like they ever fixed the horrible stuff like the bad hitboxes. I can't see many differences rather than adding a lot more enemies. The only good difference I remember, is you get the DLC keys at random locations, so it's more organic with the world instead of being handed to you at the beginning. What other differences? Performance? I play it on PC not PS4 so it's no different. Also the SOTFs has too much glow for my taste, I noticed replaying the vanilla how much cleaner Majula is.
pretty definitive critique considering major gameplay elements like the "disengaging from the world as a skill" bit is something I've never seen come up in talks about these game but is something so clear in highdsite. great video
Unfortunately there are only a handful of good in depth videos on DarkSouls mainly just lore videos & vaguery. Im still pissed I sat thru Noah Gervais's massive essay where said barely anything complained about his strawman of all DarkSouls players only to come around & say his pc version of git gud
@@AspiringDevil eh the Dark Souls fanbase has been insufferably smug for over a decade, I still remember the memes comparing skyrim to a childs fantasy and Dark Souls to a grizzled war veteran, even though ironically, Skyrim on Master setting is more difficult and punishing than Dark Souls is even on New Game +. People bitching about using "illigitimate" tactics; people bitching about people bitching about using "illigitimate" tactics, and now People like you bitch about People bitching about People bitching about using "illigitimate" tactics. Its hardly a "Strawman" arguement. Its an endless cycle of bitching between the casual fans and the hardcore fans, life and death, light and dark, Gatekeeping and Cope.
@@sasaki999pro sure nothing is a monolith, but that's my point. To be clear not offended Noah said something I disagree with. I'm annoyed he managed to be smug & condescending while barely talking about the games. Your are right though it is cyclical like that.
Demon souls is also the most fair souls game. No cheap fall damage kills, no bs sliding off the side of cliffs and weird surfaces, you don’t get one shotted by bosses aside from Dragon God, and no OP weapons for invaders to spill your brains out with.
It is an incredible game, I'm also glad it didn't get any sequels since I feel that would really undermine everything From did in that. Bloodborne's earlier alphas and betas were directly tied to Demon's Souls, with dialogue relating to umbasa, the soul arts, the old one, etc but I'm glad they removed those more obvious references - it let both games stand on their own.
"Nooo you cant have intentional ambiguity in your story" Chadyazaki: "I want my stories to inspire wonder to let the player use their imagination to fill in the gaps"
Hells ya, Kbash I know it means very little but you have become top 3 best channels on UA-cam in the year that I’ve found your channel. I love your style and humor, hope you keep these coming for many more years
1:39:36 no it's not, the counter argument doesn't even stand at all because people with disabilities have already beaten DS3 AND Sekiro using the Xbox disability controller, crybabies and journalists like to use disabled people as a scapegoat to justify their own failures, imagine being a fully functional adult and then equate yourself to a disabled person over a video game, as if you're ever gonna relate to what a disabled person has to go through. the second point is, disability and work hours are not the developer's problem and shouldn't be an excuse to hinder art, first of all if you don't have time to play a video game, don't play it, it's unfortunate I know but this is how life is, second of all if the producer of a product isn't deliberately catering to a specific group he doesn't have to account for them in the designing process if they choose not to, if disabled people aren't my direct market and my product isn't directly marketed towards them then I don't have to consider accessibility if I don't want to, I'm not obligated to do so. and then again, this argument doesn't even stand on 2 legs because disabled people already beat those games using "the Xobx's disability controller", you see, gaming have already accounted for disabled people a long time ago. 1:39:52 he doesn't have to stop talking, he has the right to express his own opinion, if the product doesn't suite you, don't buy it, Elden Ring already sold over 13 million copies, the precedent has been set and the case has been closed, PEOPLE WANT THESE GAMES, they enjoy them, this is exactly what they wanted from them, and the developer delivered, there was a demand and From Soft supplied and everyone was happy. btw Dark Souls 3 caps off with the Ringed City, the real ending, after you defeat Gael you get to witness the future, the end of the world you might say, in other words, you already got the ending you wanted, Miyazaki made this ending because he never intended for DS to be a trilogy, it was supposed to be a one and done kind of thing, but Bandai made it clear with DS2 "which wasn't a bad game at all btw, far from it was quite decent, and this is evident by the fact that DS3 borrows some elements from it" that they aren't having any of that and will continue the series with or without him, he made that ending to reinforce the message that he is done for good and Dark Souls is over once and for all.
I love seeing the parallells between the elements of story presented to us in the game and some of the real world influence and inspiration. The easiest example of this being that Ds3 is Miyazaki's answer to the fanbase and the powers that be, stop holding on and let something new come freely. But the one that your comment made me curious about was what parallel there might be to Pontiff Sulyvahn's basic plot and that of the fight over sequels of Dark Souls. Pontiff usurped control and led the world down a different and twisted path, the reasons behind his actions selfish and corrupting. His influence is felt even when the world moves beyond him, his artifacts strewn about and giving their own unique challenges. Perhaps this needs more thought, but I just love these games and the mythos that they contain and which surrounds them. Always another new insight to collect
1:06:44 Actually, someone modded the game to show hitboxes, and most of them are fine except for the mimic hitbox. It's the I-frames problem (Which goes away if you use your roll as a positioning tool instead of an intangibility button) And an animation queuing problem (Finishing the roll animation before starting the grab animation. it did hit you). The fume knight hitting you there is because his free arm is a hitbox as well. He literally bitch slapped you. I realize I'm probably not the only one in this comments section to bring this up.
Yup, DS2 has quite tight hitboxes It just suffers from a little bit of jank in the animations themselves, and poor player feedback unfortunately Still my favorite Souls game, even over Elden Ring
@@peterlopez2388 I'm not "knighting over the hitboxes" The hitboxes are tight. The animations are the fucked up part. Hell, you can beat some of the taller knight bosses by properly walking under their sword swings, but then you still might get hit by Phume Knight's backhand during his second phase if you circle around him too far, or go on the wrong side. I'm not here to say Elden Ring is bad, or that DS2 is even objectively better, cause it clearly isn't I just get more enjoyment out of it than Elden Ring.
love how even on points i REALLY disagree with, you manage to keep me engaged and open for changing my mind. you got some rly good points. wish you could've done this with multiplayer more in mind, since i think it really elevates the narrative stuff, but that's okay. gr8 vid as always.
The OG Demons Souls on PS3 is still my favourite Souls “experience” honestly. Meaning they improved mechanics in later games, but were never able to recapture the incredible foreboding atmosphere that Demons Souls produced. There was never anything like the prison level for example. I remember that squid faced enemy one shotting me and thinking “this is impossible, what am I supposed to do?”
I'm always torn between Demon's and DS1 being my favourite, I feel the world, story and atmosphere Demon's portrayed hits the spot for me and I enjoy how its short length gave everything a definitive beginning, middle and end. I love all of that in DS1 as well but I feel 2 and 3 undid a lot of what DS1 did so well by dragging those themes and stories out to the point where it felt extremely tired to me. That said, I do think Dark Souls 3's End of Fire ending is one of the most beautiful and emotional endings a game series could ever have so it still worked out somewhat.
original demon's souls is my favorite as well. they were also never able to capture the same feeling of tension again after demons--when you are in human form in a sticky situation, with the knowledge that if you die now, the same encounter will be more difficult the next time through.
I love the effort and class of this entire video, and in all 1:40 of it I am only left with two gripes and they're to do with the ending of DS3. I see the Lord of Cinder fight as a celebration and victory lap of all players builds in all 3 games and the ultimate test of "you VS yourself" or more exactly "you VS the incarnation of all players past and present" and that deserves to be a tough fight with varied moves you have to learn. Same with Gael being seen as the final boss of the series (last DLC boss) I also feel like the theme of the world being prolonged so much that it's all just ash by the end and the last two people on earth are you and Gael fighting over the hope of the new world (the "Dark Soul" pigment for the painted world) in the ashes of the old is insanely sick thematically. Most people see this as the true end of the series, not the prolonging the fire again schlock
Gael, Soul of cinder, Dancer, Twin princes, Friede, for me, those are some of the most memorable encounters in the whole series. And my build for my first playthrough was Ultragreatswords, don't remember having to switch to another setup. They were hard, but I managed. It's not that I want every other player to be forced to play as the devs intended, is that *I* wouldn't want those experiences to have been any different *for myself*. Good video, but I can't agree on his opinion on those bosses.
Yeah it really isnt that hard compared to some other games i have played, but i think the difficulty is perfect in most of the games (excluding ds2 lmao)
I love the Souls series for their existential themes, pondering on life, death, rebirth, and so many other amazing themes. Top that off with the visual spectacle that is the world and bosses it's a genuinely beautiful experience. Gwen's theme is something I love listening to when I'm feeling down, just something about those keys gets to me. The 'difficulty' is something I appreciate as a thematic element. Death isn't a punishment, it's an opportunity to learn, to grow, to hit rock bottom and get up again to overcome. I think that's often lost in discussion in regards to the SoulsBorne genre. Like, I just got my wife to play Elden Ring and she beat it, her first SoulsBorne experience. It was an amazing time with me coaching her and her discovering everything she wanted in this beautiful, desolate world. Of course she got angry at parts but the excitement we both felt when she beat Melania was something no other game has provided us. I'm hoping she gives the other games a go in the future.
1:40:20 The reason Souls shouldn't have an easy mode isn't elitism, at least not on the dev side. Miyazaki has talked about this: The reason there's no selection for difficulty, harder or easier, is because they want all players to experience the same thing. The same world, the same challenges. When Elden ring came out people were losing their minds over Margit, swapping stories, strategies, information about item locations, rumors, etc. They were united by a shared experience; a challenge they all had to face equally. If you add easy mode, that uniting experience vanishes. The need for learning strategies or engaging with the community vanishes. And the united experience breaks down because the margit I fought wasn't the one you did. Just as the games have ingame mechanics for helping and hindering players, the meta community is important to the devs.
Honestly speaking thats just pretentious nonsense on his part. The only time everyone has had the "same" experience is Sekiro, maybe MAYBE Bloodborne to a lesser extent. You could always summon someone better at you to beat the game for you, twink you OP late game items, and just generally approach things in such a vastly different matter that you might aswell be playing a different game. A ranged spell caster is not having a comparable experience to a melee build. A poise tank unga bunga'ing everything having filed a restraining order on the very concept of I-frames is not having the "same" experience as a dex light build relying solely on dodging for defense, nor is a greatshield/spear build glued to the L1 button spending two hours safely poking every enemy to death behind cover never taking a sliver of damage to their HP bar, or a status afflicting bow build sniping every enemy in the game with poison arrows from outside their aggro range, and the item description FOR poison arrows literally conveys that was the intention, not all challenges are faced equally. And the ones that ARE faced equally are derided as "lame gimmick fights". The Ancient Wyvern is a shared experience, Yhorm the Giant, is a shared experience, Bed of Chaos, Micolash and Dragon God are "shared experiences" everyone is forced to face these challenges equally. Nothing would fundamentally change about souls discussion if there were difficulty modes. What it is now? "Wait you beat it first try? What was your build? "Magic" "LMAO that explains it, you didnt REALLY beat it, go back to baby games like Skyrim" What it would be. "Wait you beat it first try, what was your difficulty setting?" "Medium" "LMAO that explains it, you didn't REALLY beat it, go back to baby games like skyrim" Miyazaki has no idea what he's talking about and the people quoting him are just as inept.
I think the one thing that can never be disagreed with when it comes to souls games, is that it bred a community fed upon sharing experiences. From existential themes to bleeding the framework dry of any challenge imaginable, deep unresolved mysteries and truly human characters and outcomes, and even the few glimpses into far off fantasy lands found in the scant words describing the plethora of ancient and varied artifacts littering the worlds we explore. We have all felt all of these in our own ways, and our discussion of them may go on forever. There will always be another version of the opinion that we haven't seen or heard yet, and I love that. I enjoyed your critique because of it's thorough nature, but also because it took the story of the entire series; as well, it gave me insights and ideas i haven't found in my hundreds of hours dark souls youtube obsession. I'm not a massive gamer and I like to go slow and steady (see as much of the entire game as possible); I don't even care about spoilers and watched a guide or playthrough of every single game before I even touched them myself. I've put between 600-700 hours into the fromsoft games i've played (in reality, only 3 of the 7 since Demon Souls), but I've probably seen just as much or more of them all through the eyes of tens of people. More than any games I have yet known, souls games make me feel. The final hour as I put down the last boss has become a familiar mix of triumph and sorrow. They sit with me, and I can't help but feel an itch to return to them. But for me, the near madness that consumes me, driving me to clash my will upon the puzzle that is each encounter and boss, fades away after the first completion at my own hands. And I am remembered of the final lesson given to us in Ds3, to let go when the time comes. New journeys will arrive with time, new experiences and people to share them with; old friends may rear their heads and the flame of desire might rekindle once more...
Yeah if you pursue any of the quest lines you should have an NPC summon there. Part of me feels like the spirit summons were added to EldenRing to keep people from complaining there is no npc summons.
@@schmecklin377 I should have phrased that better. I mean in previous souls games some bosses just don't have npc summons for them. So if you get stuck on 1 if those & can't play online your kinda screwed. I was trying to get at the idea having the summoning bell means when designing encounters they can trust the player has the option. This also let's npc summons be more special & significant. DS2 & DS3 had to sometimes add npc summons or even create an entire npc because an area needed to have the help option available.
You know you have a good channel when you have content that makes your viewers and subscribers alike watch your videos back to back and come back the next day. You do this kind of magic by staying true to your own design by listening to the loyal fans you find as you grow. I absolutely love your content. Stay legendary
I guess it's a testament to how different The Experience can be for different players, it was really surprising hearing you say you hated some of the fights that I absolutely adored, like Frida or slave night Gale. I even went back and beat Gail with the guts Ultra Greatsword and I thought it was one of the best fights I ever had in a game
I have this as background noise but your critiques of the ds3 bosses tells me you aren’t the target audience. You didn’t need to “compromise your gameplay style”.
I love the soundtracks you put into these videos. Mario Land 2, Tales of Arise (I think? It’s been a minute), Nier: Replicant, and Metroid Prime, let’s go. I’ve beaten Bloodborne and DS3, including all the DLC minus the very final boss for DS3’s second DLC. I’ve also done the first half or so of DS1, a bit of DS2, and the first level of Demon’s Souls 4 times. All that, and I still can’t bring myself to say I’m a fan of the series or the genre, and I wish I were. Despite all that, Dark Souls 2, for some reason, still intrigues me the most out of all the games, and I think it’s the most fascinating. Maybe it’s just because I’m a contrarian by nature, but I find myself really wanting to get good at DS2. Something about it just calls to me.
hearing just 3-4 seconds of the track cut through the vocals and being hit with music i haven't heard in nearly 20 years is definitely a trip. Super Mario Land 2 treetops.
@@Ghalion666 That's because I've never played Legend of Mana and know none of the music lol. I also only mentioned a few games I caught music from. I didn't mention songs that I knew from Final Fantasy 14, for instance.
So glad you pointed out and picked up on dark souls 3 beginning to funnel people into a specific play style. I find people don't talk about this enough. It's one of my personal biggest grips with 3 and elden ring. They force you to adapt to playing a certain way otherwise you will not have a fun time. I think this is fine with bloodborne and sekiro as it is a crafted 'play it this way or don't play this game' experience where you become the master and they are not being deceptive about what they strive to be. However, I find with 3/elden ring they give you all this choice but it is just an illusion, as 99% of items are unusable garbage. There is a set way to play and win and you will most likely not be able to achieve this with 99% of the items in the game (or play styles). I am always left feeling what's the point? Why is all this in the game if it is essentially unusable? Is it just fluff to fill the space? To give an illusion of choice? I guess it's just too hard to balance a game around thousands of variables.
I found Elden Ring a lot better about it until the late game. You can genuinely play Elden Ring with a HUGE variety of playstyles... until you get past Leyndell, then shut up and level your VIG to 50, drop that shield and learn to dodge bitch.
My first run in DS3 was rags-only DEX Caestus because I wanted to go for something strange and it was honestly ridiculously powerful against anything without Bleed. Heck, I tried a bunch of builds after that. STR/FTH Dragonslayer GreatAxe, Pure Dex Crow Quills, Pure STR Fume Ultra, etc. There's plenty of potential build variety and while not all of them are great for every situation, I'd say only thing DS3 really fucks up is shields. Magic is underwhelming, but not entirely unusable. With Elden Ring I would've only agreed with you on-release. The later patches did a lot to make other playstyles viable and nowadays you can run pretty much anything and do well. Sure, Bleed is still overwhelmingly stupid, but there's really not much you CAN'T make work with some effort now. I finished my first playthrough with ARC/FTH Dragon Incantation and since have then done STR/FTH No-Armor Beast Caestus and DEX/INT Carian-only. Game's massively fun no matter what once you embrace the bullshit.
I beat almost all of ds3 using ultra heavy weapons as soon as I got access to them, some fights like friede felt a bit rough trying to beat with vordt's great hammer but I never had to drop back to a basic sword playstyle I got to stick to my heavy swing single punish playstyle. In elden ring I spent most of the game 2 handing an uchigatana and soloed every major boss except malenia who I pulled out rivers of blood for because after 9 hours of attempts and only seeing phase 2 once I was sick.
Oh Holy shit. I literally just said to my brother before he left for work this morning that I needed my KBash fix and I got greeted with this beauty lol
I'm not too sweaty about how other people have fun in their game BUT, it kinda makes sense for the superbosses to be uh, hard. Historically, superbosses have always been an experience that is curated to make a player adapt to the challenge. What if Penance (FFX's superboss) or Yiazmat (FF12's Superboss) didn't require you to grind for literal weeks or have a meticulously crafted battle automation system. It would be a shallow, forgettable experience. They're infamous for a reason.
I totally disagree with you about Ds3 late game bosses. 1. There are so many different types of weapons that you can find in the game. 2. It's extremely easy in Ds3 to upgrade a weapon to +9, so you don't have to rely on only one. 3. It's completely normal that some Bosses counter certain weapons, in fact I think that's really important that the game forces you to adapt. 4. Learning the movesets is actually what the game expects from you and its quite fun seeing yourself improve after many deaths. 5. I think a difficulty option takes away from the experience, what I mean is that everyone who plays Ds3 has the same fights, same struggles and the same experience.
for the first curse dexperience, imagine instead of going to the bell tower , you instead go looking for the one that can cur eyou in new londo, like the merchant in the depts infroms you. Then after many deaths by ghost, you finally get to the guy, and you have no souls to remove the curse. Also, vanilla ds2 is way easier and less frustrating that sotfs, imagine overall half the enemies and ambushes in every area
thanks for the great work, as well as acknowledging demons souls of course, as although its the pillar (if not kings field, etc) of dark souls, it seems more and more people have been disregarding it recently
The amount of disrespect Demon's Souls gets is astounding. Many people act like Dark Souls is the first Souls game. Without Demon's Souls there is no Dark Souls.
I really appreciate whenever I get to see how someone else engages with these games. Been playing demons souls for the first time to complete my playthrough of every game and have been watching a bunch of stuff about souls games again. It's so interesting to me how people that came to dark souls 1 later have issues with it's speed, the parry timing, and a bunch of other things. Whereas I have had to adjust my timings every game since because they tweak it. But I can always boot up DS1 and get the parries etc down every time. It's one of those things that just feels right, once you've practiced it a few times at the start of a run you are good. This isn't a get good moment it's just me praising the game design and how consistent it is. The first thing I do every run of these games is attack the crestfallen Knight and get the parry timing back down. It pretty much locks you right there until you get it. And then you'll have it for the rest of the game, I mean all these games are rhythm games at their core. For instance my first experience in demons souls after getting to the nexus was 20 minutes of learning how strict the parry timing was on the crestfallen Knight (don't actually know his name lol). And it didn't click until the last 2 attempts. I suddenly started getting more parries and realized oh I need to be literally standing on top of them to Parry their hilt, not the blade. After I died that attempt the very next one I chained 7 parries in a row and got the dude. I let out an audible "yeah!!" As well. I know it's all time investment but that's one of those cases where it's rewarding. You invest the 10-20 minutes getting it down and now you have a tool that you can use for the rest of the game, even trivializing gwyn at the end. This is coming from the dude that 2 hands for the entire game and only pulls out a shield when it's specifically something that needs parried, I'm not even getting that much use out of it but it's great to have (especially for humanoid enemies which tend to be able to Parry you in these games).
You can also get Humanity from the baby skeletons that spawn outside of Nito's boss room and Phantoms in the DLC are an easy source. A pain to farm, but still useful.
@@anonlvl1957 No disrespect meant, but Hollows are Hollow specifically because they've lost their humanity. You have to not be reading things to come to your conclusion.
@@Cillranchello yeah but I always assumed that they lost most of thier humanity but can still have humanity that they took from somone else and there just to hollow to actually used it. There just colect it by instict Thats how my logic worked. I played dark souls 2 frist and in that game normal enemies had way hgher chance to drop humanity
I've watched the video twice now. Once when I started running demons souls remake and once when I finished. And honestly dude I just legitimately appreciate the series more and wanna play through all these games again after playing demons souls and watching this. Dark souls 2 was the only miss in the series for me, and honestly it still doesn't look like my cup of tea but I'm willing to give it another chance. I'm also wanting to go back and finish elden ring now. I uninstalled the game to make space for other games because I wasn't at a good spot in life at the time and it was showing when I was playing the game. Now I feel like I'm in the state to get through elden ring and respect it. I beat demons souls in about 20 hours for my first playthrough because I was attentive and looking out for traps and hidden enemies the whole time. This kind of zen state is the kind of thing I value in these games. Being able to make an entire mental map of everywhere you went and did, feeling like you earned every bit of it. I'm gonna get my ass handed to me on a silver platter and I'm gonna love it. Honestly hearing some of the years on these games really made me reflect and realize how much time has passed yet how I stayed behind. Because those memories of the og dark souls and really bending that game over on subsequent playthroughs still feels fresh. The utter rage of the fanbase at DS2 (though the pvp looked like a lot of fun). Hell DS3 was by far the most involved I've ever been in a souls game, I made I don't know how many characters helping friends through, just doing pvp builds and having fun invading, the eternal fight club outside pontiff's boss room. It all feels so vibrant. But it was around the time that DS3 dropped that I graduated. I got my ass handed to me in life. Spent 5 straight years high on weed to cope with minimum wage retail drudgery and ultimately became a withered husk of a person. Seeing the fact that I didn't get far in sekiro or elden ring, it's a direct side effect of how bad things were. I can look at my steam hours and see that I pretty much only had one or two games that I would play and most didn't require much skill. The fact that during this time I invested 10,000 hours into RuneScape should say all it needs to. I was lost and going through the motions. Like one of the hollowed out husks shambling through the asylum. That's not me being edgy etc, thats me being serious. If it wasn't for combat sports and manga like Baki that inspired me to get back into it I would've kept down that path. Feels good to feel in my element again. Glad to making progress instead of being in a cycle of endless stagnation
After having played all of these myself, and some of the old FromSoft games like Eternal Ring, and Otogi, my biggest concern with these games can be summed up with one phrase. "Let players have as much fun as the bosses in these games. Let us, eventually, become *a* boss ourselves."
Hey I just wanted to say I've been watching your channel for a year and a half now and I must say it has been pretty great watching your much deserved growing success. In a sub genre as saturated as the "funny gamer man talks about video games" you've managed to take a unique approach by analyzing every game as a piece of art. It's really cool how you try to find thematic value in every game no matter how little substance some of them have. It makes me appreciate games I previously didn't care about or just didn't like and helps me understand games I do like on a deeper level. So anyway you deserve every bit of success you get and I hope you continue to grow.
Wow, your critique of DS2 completely explains to me the dichotomy between people like me who prefer DS2 to the rest of the series and those who think it's the worst game in the series. I would go so far as to say DS2 is the ONLY DS game I really love. I haven't even completed DS1 or 3 Whereas I've won DS2 several times now. I found the mechanics clunky and environments confusing and mentally unmappable in 1 and 3 compared to 2. I cannot even escape the first city in DS1 without getting turned around, and cannot even outlast the spawns like I had to do at times in 2 to be able to get ahead in certain areas the first time. Minus the DLC I love everything about 2 compared to its counterparts in 1 and 3 from effigies to upgrades. (except for the seperate estus flasks for hp and mana in 3, that's a good change) But I totally agree with you about the DLC and don't even factor it into my plays. Anyway, your segment really drove home the differences and crystallized for me not only why I love 2 but who those who love the others don't love 2, and I thank you for that. Time to try some Elden Ring.
Loved it, great music choices 😉 keep doing what you do man. The moment the soul of cinder swapped to Gwyn….I’ll never forget it, what a note to go out on.
I once did a Dark Souls 1 playthrough with the idea of killing everything possible using parry. A LOT of fun imo and even when doing another run later parrying really is the fastest and easiest way to get rid of many enemies.
If it wasn’t the sheer length of the video, how the entertaining commentary kept me engaged, or the surprisingly fresh takes that did it, it was the Age of Mythology soundtrack cameo that made me instantly subscribe.
Yeah I have to agree about dark souls 2, I love that game so much, from the beggining of the game up through dranglaic castle I think dark souls 2 is a blast but I think there's a good reason I've only every fully completed the game once and I don't think I've ever completed it with the DLCs, I've done all the DLCs individually but by the time I reach them in a typical run I'm about satisfied with my run and decide that having gotten up to and through dranglaic castle is enough. Edit: I thought that dark souls 3 did supply an ending to it all? It was still ambiguous but you collect the dark soul from geals blood after he devoured the pygmies and give it to a girl who uses it to paint a new world.
doing the ringed city does not add an extra ending as in you get an extra option/cutscene after you kill the lord of cinder. It does give a narrative ending to the ashes of ariendel dlc where you can bring the pigment to the painter but again that is only a bit of extra dialogue that basically reveals nothing new and certainly not an extra cutscene
@@A_Black_Sheep94 oh wait yeah I do go beyond that, I was counting shrine of amana as part of the castle for some reaons, plus I forgot about aldias keep and draon arie which I do complete.. It's been a while. @harold veldhuizen I did say it is left ambigious but I think a lot of people kinda consider the ending of the DLC to kind of be symbolic of the ending of the series
One of the things I loved about souls 1 is when you go somewhere high and look down and realize that what you see is the actual game world. Not just some painted decoration, and the scale, and you realizing you went all that way on foot. Dark souls2 ruins that completely, which is a damn shame.
With DS3, weapons and builds got a lot of hate at release because there was a lot fewer viable or strong options. Weapon skills were cool but they couldn't compete with trick weapons from Bloodborne, and as extensions of a weapon's moveset they felt limited compared to powerstancing. There were also a lot fewer "gimmick" weapons compared to DS2 (dragon bone fist, santiers spear, Artorias sword etc), as well as fewer viable weapons for the less popular weapon types like daggers and whips. Because of the change to poise, enemy aggression, defense calculation etc. a lot of viable builds from past games also felt incredibly weak before being patched months later. Offensive faith was bad, split damage was bad, tanks were bad... it all worked out in the end, but at the time it felt like the game was screaming at you to just grab a straight sword and pump strength and dex.
This is gonna be a weird comment but you might wanna rework the thumbnail to be more colorful or something? It was very difficult to pick this out from a bunch of other videos in my recommended and I went "Yo wait new Kbash video???" because I never got a notif for it even though I'm subbed and hit the bell lol. Maybe it could help people like me find the video since youtube is so barely functional lol
1. I think this video was great. Easily one of my favorites and I'm sure I'll rewatch. Great mix of symbolic analysis, game mechanic analysis, behind the scenes dev stuff, and that special KBash flavor. 2. Phendrana Drifts kicks ass
Respect your opinion, but can't say i agree with your point about adding easy mode to the Souls series. I too feel bad for those who don't have time for this, but if that's the case, why even play Dark Souls, if you know it's a hard game that's gonna take a lot of time to beat? And no way they don't know about it, Dark Souls is infamous to all gamers thanks to its difficulty. It's a series for a very specific audience, and i don't think it's a good idea to force it to conform, so that the people whom it wasn't even designed for can play it. That's just nasty. Artists should be allowed to do whatever they want to with their work. And look where that creative freedom got Miyazaki and his studio to? Him and his studio are a household name in the gaming industry, and his games enjoy immense success and popularity, even to this day. So from that we can conclude that staying true to your creative vision will not only bring you success, but immense enjoyment to others. There are many people who say they have been "saved" by Dark Souls... and their reason often times comes from the difficulty. They say the sense of overcoming a great challenge in game gave them inspiration to do just that in real life and change it for the better. Which further reinforces my point about it being for a specific group, not the wide market. If you're not one of those people, then don't buy it. Like, why are we encouraging people to not be smart and not do research on the game they want to buy, see if it looks like it's for them or not, beyond trailers and commercials? Why are we encouraging people to mindlessly buy, and instead blame the artist for just creating? We should instead encourage those people to think, analyze, research, as i've said already. And if that person does do research, they'll discover that Dark Souls has a lot of ways to overcome the challenges. The simplest one is the Pyromancer build, in DS1 it just destroys everything. But the Intelligence build is also very powerful, with the right setup, you can melt bosses in less than 20 seconds, it's insane. And if you don't want to do it, there are many other strats to defeat bosses, the so called cheese strats. Plus summons and whatnot, which are of great help as well. Some people might take this the wrong way, like i'm gatekeeping new players, despite that not being my point at all. I'm all for helping others get into Souls, currently getting my friend into it. My point is, if you do your research, you'll find that there are a lot of ways to approach these games, at which point you will conclude that the easy mode is quite unnecessary in that case. Research is a very important skill in the modern era, and we should encourage it more, instead of putting the blame on the artist, that's my main takeaway here
To add on to this, not every game has to appeal to everyone. And part of Dark souls appeal is the way it challenges players. I wouldn't say they are hard, but they will challenge you. If you are one of those people who like story but dont have time, just youtube it. If you like the game and want to play more of it, take your time and enjoy it. It took me a whole semester to beat the first Dark souls when I was in college, and it was one of my most memorable experiences. There was another Miyazaki quote which I think is more accurate than the one about feeling satsfied after a challenge. Where he elaborates that he wants all players to have the same experience when playing the game. That's the core philosphy the games are built around. You are meant to get stuck every now and then, and lean on the community for help. Guides, summons, invasions, messages. They are all tools to show off what works and helps. The difficulty is built into the mechanics beautifully, where even players that are very bad, can grind, summon, or look up guides to get over the hump they were climbing over. If there was an easy mode, a large swath of players would just stop interacting with the game and just play that. You can't really have the same experience talking with your buddy about how hard the Slave Knight Gael fight was, but you finally beat him, but then your buddy says it was super easy because he just changed the difficulty. Adding an easy mode into these games isn't as beneficial bc player accessibility, because you are sacrificing the artistic vision. It would be like if a movie sped up it's runtime and played at 1.5x speed for people who are really busy. I also challenge that games should be beatable to be enjoyable. I've never beaten the original super mario bros, but I still love coming back to that game every now and then, because its what got me into platformers. Lots of games people don't finish, and thats ok. But a lot of people do, and those are the people who are going to keep supporting you. That's how you build an audience like Fromsoft has done over the years with these soulsborne games.
I agree with you but I have things to disagree on: the easy mode and not understanding the hate on dark souls 3 and the map. Easy mode lessens the story. The game represents the hardship of life and by making the games easy, yeah the message is lost a bit. I don't like Dark Souls 3 mainly cause the areas just look bland in terms of colors and it's not replayable for me. Dark Souls map is the best because everything connects making the world feel more real and you can do whatever boss you want, with Dark Souls 3 because it's linear, you always do the same lords of Cinders in the same order. The map makes the game feel amazing and more personal. It gives you a great feeling being in the Undead Church and taking the elevator to Firelink Shrine. Anyway I love the Souls series and it never gets old.
Awesome video, thank you for the work you put in to give all this content! One misconception I've always found interesting is that DS2 Scholar of the First Sin is thought of as the superior and less frustrating version of the game. It truly isn't from my perspective! Vanilla DS2 on PS3 does have somewhat less pretty graphics, but the enemy placements and overall level progression is SO much more enjoyable and makes way more sense. There are way less of those random petrified statue road blocks as well. I enjoy both versions of DS2, but I genuinely prefer vanilla for PS3. The enemy placements being less egregious made a huge difference (a big example for me is having far fewer of those janky Heide Knights in Heide's Tower of Flame while ALSO not having the dragon outside the Dragonslayer's arena), along with a myriad of other differences sprinkled throughout that just FEEL better than Scholar.
Great video except for one point. I feel like you don't understand the perspective of players that say you have to solo bosses to truly experience a Souls game. Using summons and ganging up on a boss with friends is fun but is completely different from the experience of banging your head against a brick wall and slowly, PAINFULLY, learning, having every aspect of a Boss's move set seared into your very soul. You can have fun, a great experience even when blasting through a Souls game with your buds but you'll miss out on the truly unique experience that Souls games offer. It's not necessary by any means but it is a fun and unique experience.
@40:26 when you said "It's not a problem, I play Ganondorf," legitimately caught me off guard and made me laugh so hard because that's how I feel when I play Ike.
Will echo a similar comment in saying that I was genuinely impressed that I heard some takes on these games' design from you that I had actually never heard elsewhere in the masses of other long-form video critiques on these games. Hats off to KBash!
It's interesting comparing the progression of the mainline Souls games to the progression of the game series it took more than a little inspiration from: Dungeons & Dragons. Demon's Souls is VERY Original D&D. With characters who aren't superheroes and enemies that are crazy deadly, necessitating the player(s) use the environment and their own wits to tackle the challenges presented. Also, lots of running away from fights you have no business facing. Demon's Souls even has one level-draining enemy, one of the more infamous hallmarks of early D&D (and which both D&D and the Souls series, probably wisely, ditched later on). Whereas by the late entries in both Souls and D&D, your characters are far stronger and more capable, and the challenges less specifically gimmicky and more combat-focused. An experienced that throws fewer curveballs, but which has refined the particular experience it's going for to an edge. Not to mention a number of quality-of-life changes: for Souls it's more frequent bonfires that you can warp in, for D&D it's more restorative rests (you can fully heal in a single night rather than 1 HP a day). Neither series has totally lost elements that made earlier installments challenging. But it's a lot more approachable. It's also worth noting that both series show the benefits of getting help. Whether that's through co-op or summoned NPCs in Souls, or with one's party members and NPC hirelings in D&D. You are not obligated to go it alone. Indeed, part of what makes us as a species so successful is our ability to engage in jolly cooperation. (Also, I do like the comparison of DS2 to a D&D campaign stitched together from many published modules. It's a comparison I've made before, and it gets to the heart of what I think is DS2's overall "vibe". It's not the grand, finely crafted D&D campaign you put loads of work into. It's the interim one between those campaigns where you just want to unwind and play a game. Or, as I like to call it, the campaign one of the players runs while the normal DM either can't run, or when they want to take a break and be a player for a while. The interim DM isn't as equipped to craft custom adventures, but they make do by using modules. And, despite everything, manage to link them together into something both workable and evocative in the end.)
Good vid. Here's some text from someone who's spent way, way, way too much time on these games. - Just so you know, SoTFS is actually NOT the easier version of DS2. When SoTFS was coming out, one of the developers (maybe even Miyazaki himself, idk, it's been like 7 years) said that the redone enemy layouts were because they knew that most of the people who'd be playing SoTFS would've already played baseline DS2, and they wanted to maintain the level of challenge for returning players while providing them a fresh experience (or at least that was the gist). As a result we get SoTFS Iron Keep, a Shrine of Amana/unpatched Lost Izalith level hellhole of pain and suffering, and a lot of the areas have just had more dudes dumped in, all because it's basically a Master Quest version that's been sold as the baseline proper experience because people complained that baseline was too easy. The ire for co-opers originates rom the olden days where people would fairly regularly come and go "Man this (thing that's hard) is so easy, you guys must suck" only to then say "Oh yeah I just summoned a guy and we kicked its ass" when asked how they handled it. Over time that morphed into what we have now, not helped by FROM continually making invading harder for invaders by forcing them into gank squads more often than not, and the introduction of ways to bypass co-op level restrictions meaning said helpers often have end-game builds regardless of what stage of the game the invader happens to be at. DS3 making you feel like you're forced to go dodge then counter (preferably with a moderately fast weapon at the slowest) is a response to player's positive reception to Bloodborne's faster, more streamlined combat, and negative reception to DS2 "slowing down" from DS1 (it's actually not slower most of the time, faster startups + longer recovery times means you have more dead time between actions even though the overall speed is very similar, so it ends up feeling both stiff and smooth). DS3 in many ways is just BB wearing DS1's skin, and as a result it has a lot of new problems that FROM haven't figured out yet even though ER's taken some steps towards it (though ER still had to universally increase the speed of colossal weapons after launch because even though ER's slower than DS3, it was still just a bit too fast to actually let the slowest weapons have consistently safe counter windows).
Think I'd have to disagree on Nameless King, Soul of Cinder, Sister Friede and Gael forcing you to play a certain way. I just recently finished Elden Ring a second time, which led me to play through Dark Souls 3 again. I ran a strength build, mostly used only the Executioner's Greatsword, Zweihandler, and Black Knight Sword, which aren't light weapons by any means and beat these bosses without compromising my build once. The only time I respec'd and tried different weapons and completely different weapons, or miracles and sorcery was against Midir who I still haven't killed.
technically, farron greatsword's weapon art is actually parry, not the cool combo. the cool combo is its dual wield move, since it's a dual wielding weapon (greatsword in one hand, dagger in the other). not that it matters though, it's a cool weapon and that's what counts.
What I like about this video is not only is he taking time to literally cut out all the bullshit and to the point but also the Nier OST in the background you cheeky bastard KBash
"the people who'd be furious about forgiven student loans" wait so you're talking about most everyone?! You know what a loan is right? Loan forgiveness just incentivizes irresponsibility, and punishes people who actually paid them off
Was looking for this comment. About 6 months ago I dropped about 8k paying off all my loans in one lump sum. I scraped and clawed and saved and sacrificed to get that money. Now I find out I wouldn't have had to do that if I had just waited for a handout. And considering the money I recently saved could have been added to that 8k to entirely pay off the price of the used car I just had to recently finance because my old one suddenly decided to croak completely on me, my ass is now doubly chapped.
The only reason the “let the artist create his vision” works in dark souls, is because without the way it’s put together, the game would fall apart. An easy mode isn’t required, not everyone needs to play these games, if you don’t have time for it you make a big boy decision and watch UA-cam vids on it and play something more up your alley. Time has nothing to do with it, I’ve got plenty of full time job buddies that are obsessed with fucking final fantasy and play DND games every weekend. If you can’t dedicate the time don’t play the fucking game, holy shit. People that think the entire game’s design should be uprooted for “accessibility” are just as entitled as the dickheads gatekeeping a game that isn’t really that difficult if you don’t play how they tell you to.
42:57 OH MY GOD IS THAT AGE OF MYTHOLOGY MUSIC I HEAR????? Jesus KBash you have to be some kind of kindred spirit putting in f-zero gx and AOM music in your vids. Fucking love it. Keep up the amazing work.
After having played Dark Souls 2 vanilla and Dark Souls 2 SotFS a couple times each, I would consider SotFS to be my least favorite experience of the franchise. I am happy to never touch that game again. Vanilla just really does it for me, it feels more well-rounded than the alternative, and it felt weird to return to it and actually find myself loving the game after only touching SotFS for a few years out of ease-of-access. Wild realization, but I'm glad I had it.
So SotFS is NOT the easier version; its more like the remix hard mode in a lot of places from the original. I know a lot of people who jump from DkS2 to SotFS thinking its a good upgrade to the challenge, and a newcomers who find it really cheap. But yeah; they actively made certain sections of the game harder, removed some good item purchasables, and added enemies to places they were nowhere near before.
I personally found it easier than the OG, but I could be skewed by knowing the ADP secret by that point. I actually kind of hate DS2, both versions. Funny how KBash stole footage from Mauler's video series replying to HBomberGuy's condescending-ass DS2 video. That was Fortea, who streamed DS2 along with Mauler and Metal. Fun watches
I love watching people play these games for the first time. As a 10-year longtime fan of the series, it’s like watching the new guy at a job get his ass kicked by it when you’ve been doin’ it for a so long it’s just second nature to you lol
I always see a lot of hate towards the "You didn't really beat the game unless you did x" people, but I've been a part of the community since ds2, and I've never seen anyone say that unironically. Am I going crazy? Do these people even exist, or did everyone just suddenly decide to bully a strawman that isn't real?
I think that strawman is made from people making fun of players who use meta weapons from UA-cam guides. Like how r.o.b. Went from no one using it to everyone forgetting the night and flame sword and becoming a bleed build in one patch. And there's also people who say using a summon takes away from boss fights sense it takes agro away from you. Obviously people don't like hearing that so this strawman gets created in response.
If you really want to suffer in Dark Souls 1. Play it without the patches. A few infamous issues were the stacking of curse so your hp would continually halve, and the anor londo archers were positioned differently to always have a shot on you when you got to the Silver knight on the right.
Jesus man, what an absolute monster of a video. Don't ever let anybody say Kbash don't put forth work. I too have an avid and invigorated love for dark/high fantasy and ARPG's so you'd think I would've tried out the Souls series by now but the relentless difficulty they're notorious for has kept me away all these years. I know expressing dislike or the very least, disinterest in a game or series of them because of the difficulty in question is practically a cliché at this point but I can't help it. I know what I like and what I don't. That said, I'd be lying if I claimed I weren't considering giving Elden Ring a shot. I think that's largely due to the fact that the common consensus about that one is that it's a great jumping on point for the uninaugurated. Only one way to find out I suppose. Great video man. Between this and the TWEWY video from a few weeks ago you really killed it this month.
This is why I love souls games… so chalked full of secrets and things to figure out. I’ve beaten demons souls 4x now (twice on ps3 and twice on ps5) and I can’t recall the cling ring or using the thief ring against those damned mantas. Lol I’m glad you started with demons souls because for the longest people thought dark souls was the progenitor of all these souls games. You should take it a step further back and give a retrospective of demons souls’ forefather series, Kingsfield, the one that started it all
When you mention that this game is from 2011 and that it still feels relevant, I think about how much the soul and politics of Berserk (started in 1988) make their way into the Souls games. I love how life influences art and how that art then helps shape the creations of those who engage with it
Overall enjoyed the critique, but I just don’t understand the whole easy mode thing. You even said yourself that you can make the game easy with summons. It’s a 6 year old game it shouldn’t be an argument anymore when Miyazaki has stated he has no desire to add one.
I agree. There are so many RPGs out there that can be played with easy difficulties, let the Souls game be hard. As much as he talked about the gaps between the story and gameplay not making things coherent, being able to stroll through the games despite the story, mood and context being about the struggle, that would be the gap in story logic that would make no sense. Many other reasons why the games shouldn't have easy difficulty
@@Khtras I can add to this. I hate multiple difficulty options in lots of RPG's because it just results in lopsided experiences. Easy mode can feel like for babies sometimes. Normal difficulty in some games is perfect. Some games it's still to easy. Then some games have hard modes, or multiple hard modes that equate to the A.I. will do broken amounts of damage, and the game will be playable for only masochists. More often not, sliders are just afterthoughts that aren't properly balanced, and sometimes change the intended feeling of encoutners or gameplay. Desigining a game where the difficulty can be fine tuned by the player in the soulsborne games has been one of Fromsoft's smartest decisions. It ensures you are getting what the developer intends is acceptable for the player, and let's them figure out if they want to challenge themselves to make it harder(challenge runs), or if they need a helping hand(summons).
The way I beat the capra demon the first time, was I went somewhere else and took some armour that let me resist staggering, then just unga bunga the dogs as fast as physically possible. I legit have no idea how I was actually supposed to beat him but I'll take it :)
FR I still had to look up how to do it and just cheesed it like most online say to do, feels like such a dice roll, but hearing other ways people tackle it is a fascinating part of the community and seeing new ways to get around problems
im at the beginning of the video bro and yeah demon's souls is the coziest game i've played tbh. the music, story, characters and the world is just flat out mysterious. the art direction and everything that is jank and original about this game is 10/10. my favorite out of all the games and my top 2
I have been wanting you to do one of these games for so long now, it blows my mind you attempted all of them at once wtf you must've fried over this can't wait to watch it after work
Hmmm. Well I probably would've felt the same way about DS2 if I was playing it for work. As a Souls diehard I found this video unsatisfying in some ways, and I would've expected someone who clearly reveres Bloodborne to have more knowledge of the Souls games. I know, I know I'm just a pants-shitter bragging that I have more time than you, but I wish you would've addressed the evolution of the various games' highly crunchy poise/hyperarmor systems, from DS1's 5 second poise timer to DS2's more complex poise and DS3's stripped down system which makes every enemy recoil from even slight hits, unless their hyperarmor is kicking in. I hope you'll address that stuff if you talk about Elden Ring eventually because I think it's one of the key factors. I also really wish you had engaged with the multiplayer systems, although I can obviously see why you didn't between time constraints and the servers being temporarily shut down on most platforms (permanenently in the case of DeS). I wish you hadn't been so intent on sticking with the longsword. Also, Gael didn't force you to change your "build" because a Greatsword isn't a build, and any build that can use the Farron Greatsword effectively can use straight swords or any fast weapon without respeccing. Your critical view of the overall gameplay design of the games was appreciated, but I felt that with each subsequent game you reviewed in the series, your criticism became less insightful. When you said DS3 was the first game you played in the series, I wasn't surprised, because your views are very typical of people who started with DS3. I think it might've been better for you as a critic if you had started with DS3 and gone backwards. That's a really good tip I picked up from a very smart critic: reading or watching a series in reverse order can allow you to see its progression more clearly. As a content creator, I know how easy it must be for you to engage various pre-existing discourses around the games, like the "difficulty" discourse and the "DS3 story is an uninpsired rehash of the earlier games" discourse, but I think it would've been more productive to ignore them. You almost took it in an interesting direction by referring to DS3 as a concession to the publisher, but you didn't take that thought to its logical conclusion. Fortunately, there's still time for you to do so if you review Elden Ring. Really, I just wish you had given DS2 a fair shake. There's a reason so many of us diehards think it's the most replayable. But, to be fair, I certainly didn't give it a fair shake on MY first few playthroughs. Between the obvious visual downgrade (which you could've talked about much more) and the, shall we say, more deliberate controls, it's a much harder pill to swallow but it's ultimately extremely rewarding. It was the PvP game in the series, though, and most players have obviously moved on. Alright, as a Souls freak I've said my peace, gonna go change my diaper now ☺️
not about shit on your critique. Hell So tired right now finish reading it isnt in my wheelhouse. but i got to ask isnt what your addressing or at the very least wishing was addressed, the membrane that seperates a gamer from a souls-hard fan? And also Similar to what exists between a casual gamer and a gamer? And like that isnt what you describe, what differs between generating interest and scarring them off? So provided my hunch is correct. how could our bestest soyboy go into greater detail without doing just that?, both to the game and his video to a lesser extent. dont those thing have to be experianced to be appreciated? that said thats a real positive passion you got yourself there. Somebody calls you toxic dont take no shit.
@@cannibaletiquette5038 Thanks. I guess I would've liked him to try making an invasion build in each game, but doing that would take, at a minimum, 5 hours in DS1 and 10 hours in DS2 and DS3, so I get it, time constraints, but you can learn soo much about so many elements of the design by invading. The devs even try to ease you in to the multiplayer in each game via various encounters with player-type enemies, the Black Eye Orb invasion of Lautrec in DS1 for instance, which introduces you to the asymmetrical nature of invasions and the need to fight "guerilla-style," or the Maldron encounters in DS2 which hint at the potentially complex social interactions that can happen in an invasion when someone pretends to be friendly or decides to grief. We can infer from the way multiplayer works in Elden Ring that it was changed late in development so that you can only be invaded during co-op (or by using the Taunter's Tongue to lure in invaders). Most likely this is a change driven by market research which likely indicates that invasions filter out quite a few players, too many for BandaiNamco's liking. But I suspect that, for every player that quits the game after a frustrating invasion, there's another player who is instantly minted into a lover of Souls invasions. That's what happened to me; I found it so exhilarating to have another player somewhere in the level, plotting to kill me, that I was hooked. I became an invader for life. And I really don't think you have a complete picture of these games if you don't engage with the multiplayer. I'm sure if KBash tried the multiplayer he would see a whole new perspective on the buildmaking, the level design, even the menu design (and lack of a pause button), it's all oriented around the multiplayer.
40:00 the key to parrying is you need to bitch slap your opponent's weapon hand at the start of their swing rather than trying to catch them when they hit you; one of my friends explained that to me and my parry:fail rate went from like 2% to 60%. Highly recommend giving it a try, whoever sees this. Oh also a great strat for the taurus demon is to climb the stairs, stand on the archway, wait for the dogs to come, then when they're down you have a lil face-to-face with mr. cow.
God, I remember the first DS being so jarring and unique, that I just refused to do anything that wasn’t hitting or dodging. Tomb of Giants was forced raw, no torch and Jesus. I don’t know what the place really looks like, but I could still easily traverse through to the boss in 10 attempts top and at the time I could do it without even looking, probably since there wasn’t mich to see. Except the edge. When it’s too late to dodge the cliff.
The directors for Dark Souls 2 were also the people who were in charge of King's Field back in the day. I recommend giving that series a try, mostly because you will immediately understand why DS2 is the way that it is.
44:49 - "imagine getting to the tomb of giants having never found a light source" oh, oh, I watched an LP where that happened, only the guy *DID* have a torch in his inventory, he just didn't notice, so he wandered through the dark without any light, one hour episode per day, for a week. and got through. and fought Nito. and _then_ found the torch in his inventory. no matter how painful you think it is to go through, it is so, so much worse watching someone go through that without being able to help them.
against all odds I'm hoping someone can help me here; I'm looking for the song that's starts playing around the 1:08:12 timestamp. Maybe I'm just finding the wrong versions or there's some quirk in the editing but none of the songs listed in the description match it and it sounds unbelievably familiar but I can't place it or find it so here's hoping someone recognizes it.
"Their bloodline is weak, and they will not leave a mark on history." HOLY shit I spat out my tea
This and "Die mad." hit so hard
He's not wrong
I was about to say, thats pretty much how everyone feels when dealing with those people.
@@A_Black_Sheep94 Forgiving student loans is a terrible idea though. It basically
1.Does nothing to address the actual issue of for profit institutions and their hugely inflated prices
2. Will do nothing but embolden said institutions because they just got massive government checks for being predatory lenders and screwing over students.
3. Doesn't stop them from just immediately selling a new round of student loans with even higher interest rates.
Its a smooth brained solution that appeals to people who just want to not have to pay their loans. The real solution would have to include sweeping changes to those loans in general as well as to higher education. Ideally it would also simply change the payback method, freeze interest, etc to make paying back the loans possible, as opposed to just handing out blank checks.
@@Audiodump ...p...pardon?
Fun fact: Gwyn's theme uses only the white keys on the piano. Even the guy's music is trying desperately to keep darkness at bay.
That's...really fuckin depressing
That's just called the C major scale.
@@nugsboodlepoo not necessarily, it could be A minor, a greek mode or it could be in loads of keys that have sharps or flats but just not use them. I believe the song is in A minor, not sure, but it is most definitely not in C major.
@@07lpp It is A minor as you said. (A, C, E).
Soul of Cinder's 2nd Phase takes Gywn's melody and works it into D minor.
Gwyn was racist, dam
"I didn't run the thing naked 6x."
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MAN, PLEASE STOP GIVING THE DARK SOULS COMMUNITY IDEAS.
Great video, KBash! Glad you got around to giving this series as try :)
Oh wow it's Lemon
Can’t wait for the salt and sacrifice sextuple nude run
Lemon ya heard it play all the dark souls game trilogy naked (without any equipment consumables are okay)
"Else you find yourself fucking around in a find out economy" I died 💀💀
Came to the comments as soon as I heard it! 😂😂😭
DS2 Vanllia is way easier imo with less enemy's also the unnerfed spells/items for example Ring of Life Protection is just amazing for casual players if you dont know what it is pretty much if you have the ring on and you die you DONT lose your souls and you dont turn hollow( i was running low on effigys so i put it on till i beat dark lurker) but the ring breaks and to repair it, it costs 3000 souls in Vanilla and in SotFS its a whopping 14000 souls to repair.... also they changed where it spawns in vanilla you get it in no-mans wharf behind a shelf you can get three per playthrough in vanilla but in SotFS you can only get one and its from Felkin the Outcast for 6000 souls and that's... all most half the game done already so whats the point you already know the game mechanics and are fairly strong/good so the ring loses even more purpose and place
Yeah, everything I've read/heard indicates Scholar of the First Sin is the harder edition (compared to vanilla). I didn't even know about the ring of life stuff, I just knew that scholar added in more enemies and more difficult enemy placements.
Yup, vanilla is easier and much better
Yeah true, I started playing DS2 vanilla, and much later I realized there was an enhanced version SotFS. I replayed SotFS and I was like WTF? Why are there so much more enemies? They were already too many in vanilla DS2 compared to DS1. Why are many Knights of Heide sitting around? In the original, a Heide Knight was a curiosity, something you would find very rarely and decide to engage if you want, so it was great to discover one. Then, more places blocked by petrified NPCs. Why did they changed so many things? Instead of fixing the problems of the original game (mainly the awful hitboxes). And yes, if I knew about the ring from the beginning, I could have played the entire game with this ring casually, never being afraid of losing my souls, as I'd gather way more souls than needed to repair the ring. That makes me want to replay the vanilla now.
@@bugothecatplays7864 they did fix a lot of things and made aloooot of good changes that make the game way better overall bro. Sure some things are stupid but the things it improves and fixes is definitely worth it
@@darkhaven9119 I have played and finished both and currently replaying them. It doesn't seem like they ever fixed the horrible stuff like the bad hitboxes. I can't see many differences rather than adding a lot more enemies. The only good difference I remember, is you get the DLC keys at random locations, so it's more organic with the world instead of being handed to you at the beginning. What other differences? Performance? I play it on PC not PS4 so it's no different. Also the SOTFs has too much glow for my taste, I noticed replaying the vanilla how much cleaner Majula is.
Most relatable part of the video, KBash sitting on 23 half moon grass....I swear I'll use them someday
I was spamming strong grass late game lol they were so heavy sitting in my inventory that I used them just to get rid of them lol
pretty definitive critique considering major gameplay elements like the "disengaging from the world as a skill" bit is something I've never seen come up in talks about these game but is something so clear in highdsite. great video
Unfortunately there are only a handful of good in depth videos on DarkSouls mainly just lore videos & vaguery. Im still pissed I sat thru Noah Gervais's massive essay where said barely anything complained about his strawman of all DarkSouls players only to come around & say his pc version of git gud
@@AspiringDevil eh the Dark Souls fanbase has been insufferably smug for over a decade, I still remember the memes comparing skyrim to a childs fantasy and Dark Souls to a grizzled war veteran, even though ironically, Skyrim on Master setting is more difficult and punishing than Dark Souls is even on New Game +.
People bitching about using "illigitimate" tactics; people bitching about people bitching about using "illigitimate" tactics, and now People like you bitch about People bitching about People bitching about using "illigitimate" tactics. Its hardly a "Strawman" arguement.
Its an endless cycle of bitching between the casual fans and the hardcore fans, life and death, light and dark, Gatekeeping and Cope.
@@sasaki999pro sure nothing is a monolith, but that's my point.
To be clear not offended Noah said something I disagree with. I'm annoyed he managed to be smug & condescending while barely talking about the games.
Your are right though it is cyclical like that.
@@sasaki999pro the problem with skyrim is that it's purely stats based, legendary is difficult for all the wrong reasons.
@@sasaki999pro i must have played the wrong skyrim. The Ai is still kinda bad and easy to exploit. just give or take more or less dmg.
“Whatever souls you ferry back home to channel into yourself nobody can touch those”
False King Allant: Hold my Soulbrandt
Demons souls is honestly my coziest souls experience due to how short and simple (yet experimental) it is. Honestly just an amazing game
mine too
agree
Demon souls is also the most fair souls game. No cheap fall damage kills, no bs sliding off the side of cliffs and weird surfaces, you don’t get one shotted by bosses aside from Dragon God, and no OP weapons for invaders to spill your brains out with.
It is an incredible game, I'm also glad it didn't get any sequels since I feel that would really undermine everything From did in that. Bloodborne's earlier alphas and betas were directly tied to Demon's Souls, with dialogue relating to umbasa, the soul arts, the old one, etc but I'm glad they removed those more obvious references - it let both games stand on their own.
totally agree, Demon's is the most fun to go back to imo
"Nooo you cant have intentional ambiguity in your story"
Chadyazaki: "I want my stories to inspire wonder to let the player use their imagination to fill in the gaps"
Hells ya, Kbash I know it means very little but you have become top 3 best channels on UA-cam in the year that I’ve found your channel. I love your style and humor, hope you keep these coming for many more years
1:39:36 no it's not, the counter argument doesn't even stand at all because people with disabilities have already beaten DS3 AND Sekiro using the Xbox disability controller, crybabies and journalists like to use disabled people as a scapegoat to justify their own failures, imagine being a fully functional adult and then equate yourself to a disabled person over a video game, as if you're ever gonna relate to what a disabled person has to go through.
the second point is, disability and work hours are not the developer's problem and shouldn't be an excuse to hinder art, first of all if you don't have time to play a video game, don't play it, it's unfortunate I know but this is how life is, second of all if the producer of a product isn't deliberately catering to a specific group he doesn't have to account for them in the designing process if they choose not to, if disabled people aren't my direct market and my product isn't directly marketed towards them then I don't have to consider accessibility if I don't want to, I'm not obligated to do so.
and then again, this argument doesn't even stand on 2 legs because disabled people already beat those games using "the Xobx's disability controller", you see, gaming have already accounted for disabled people a long time ago.
1:39:52 he doesn't have to stop talking, he has the right to express his own opinion, if the product doesn't suite you, don't buy it, Elden Ring already sold over 13 million copies, the precedent has been set and the case has been closed, PEOPLE WANT THESE GAMES, they enjoy them, this is exactly what they wanted from them, and the developer delivered, there was a demand and From Soft supplied and everyone was happy.
btw Dark Souls 3 caps off with the Ringed City, the real ending, after you defeat Gael you get to witness the future, the end of the world you might say, in other words, you already got the ending you wanted, Miyazaki made this ending because he never intended for DS to be a trilogy, it was supposed to be a one and done kind of thing, but Bandai made it clear with DS2 "which wasn't a bad game at all btw, far from it was quite decent, and this is evident by the fact that DS3 borrows some elements from it" that they aren't having any of that and will continue the series with or without him, he made that ending to reinforce the message that he is done for good and Dark Souls is over once and for all.
I love seeing the parallells between the elements of story presented to us in the game and some of the real world influence and inspiration. The easiest example of this being that Ds3 is Miyazaki's answer to the fanbase and the powers that be, stop holding on and let something new come freely. But the one that your comment made me curious about was what parallel there might be to Pontiff Sulyvahn's basic plot and that of the fight over sequels of Dark Souls. Pontiff usurped control and led the world down a different and twisted path, the reasons behind his actions selfish and corrupting. His influence is felt even when the world moves beyond him, his artifacts strewn about and giving their own unique challenges. Perhaps this needs more thought, but I just love these games and the mythos that they contain and which surrounds them. Always another new insight to collect
1:06:44 Actually, someone modded the game to show hitboxes, and most of them are fine except for the mimic hitbox. It's the I-frames problem (Which goes away if you use your roll as a positioning tool instead of an intangibility button) And an animation queuing problem (Finishing the roll animation before starting the grab animation. it did hit you).
The fume knight hitting you there is because his free arm is a hitbox as well. He literally bitch slapped you.
I realize I'm probably not the only one in this comments section to bring this up.
Yup, DS2 has quite tight hitboxes
It just suffers from a little bit of jank in the animations themselves, and poor player feedback unfortunately
Still my favorite Souls game, even over Elden Ring
“Still my favorite Souls game, even over Elden Ring”
That explains the knighting for the trash HB.
@@peterlopez2388 I'm not "knighting over the hitboxes"
The hitboxes are tight. The animations are the fucked up part. Hell, you can beat some of the taller knight bosses by properly walking under their sword swings, but then you still might get hit by Phume Knight's backhand during his second phase if you circle around him too far, or go on the wrong side.
I'm not here to say Elden Ring is bad, or that DS2 is even objectively better, cause it clearly isn't
I just get more enjoyment out of it than Elden Ring.
@@perryborn2777 one example of an actually bad hit box is smelter demons sword, the hit box is two or three times the size it should be.
So somebody can fix it?
love how even on points i REALLY disagree with, you manage to keep me engaged and open for changing my mind. you got some rly good points. wish you could've done this with multiplayer more in mind, since i think it really elevates the narrative stuff, but that's okay. gr8 vid as always.
The OG Demons Souls on PS3 is still my favourite Souls “experience” honestly. Meaning they improved mechanics in later games, but were never able to recapture the incredible foreboding atmosphere that Demons Souls produced. There was never anything like the prison level for example. I remember that squid faced enemy one shotting me and thinking “this is impossible, what am I supposed to do?”
I'm always torn between Demon's and DS1 being my favourite, I feel the world, story and atmosphere Demon's portrayed hits the spot for me and I enjoy how its short length gave everything a definitive beginning, middle and end. I love all of that in DS1 as well but I feel 2 and 3 undid a lot of what DS1 did so well by dragging those themes and stories out to the point where it felt extremely tired to me. That said, I do think Dark Souls 3's End of Fire ending is one of the most beautiful and emotional endings a game series could ever have so it still worked out somewhat.
original demon's souls is my favorite as well. they were also never able to capture the same feeling of tension again after demons--when you are in human form in a sticky situation, with the knowledge that if you die now, the same encounter will be more difficult the next time through.
yes.. the og ps3 Demons Souls nack in the day is the only one I have beaten out of these games, it was an experience I will never forget..
Bro there's nothing like coming back to the Nexus after Astraea. Especially if she was one of your last archdemons. There's something uncanny about it
OG demon souls is my favorite of the Souls Saga. Though, I hate the world Eye mechanic with every fiber of my being
I love the effort and class of this entire video, and in all 1:40 of it I am only left with two gripes and they're to do with the ending of DS3.
I see the Lord of Cinder fight as a celebration and victory lap of all players builds in all 3 games and the ultimate test of "you VS yourself" or more exactly "you VS the incarnation of all players past and present" and that deserves to be a tough fight with varied moves you have to learn. Same with Gael being seen as the final boss of the series (last DLC boss)
I also feel like the theme of the world being prolonged so much that it's all just ash by the end and the last two people on earth are you and Gael fighting over the hope of the new world (the "Dark Soul" pigment for the painted world) in the ashes of the old is insanely sick thematically. Most people see this as the true end of the series, not the prolonging the fire again schlock
Gael, Soul of cinder, Dancer, Twin princes, Friede, for me, those are some of the most memorable encounters in the whole series. And my build for my first playthrough was Ultragreatswords, don't remember having to switch to another setup. They were hard, but I managed. It's not that I want every other player to be forced to play as the devs intended, is that *I* wouldn't want those experiences to have been any different *for myself*. Good video, but I can't agree on his opinion on those bosses.
Man, I just play Dark Souls because I like fine-tuned action RPGs lol, none of this "IT'S SO HARD IT'LL MAKE YOU BREAK YOUR CONTROLLER"
Yeah it really isnt that hard compared to some other games i have played, but i think the difficulty is perfect in most of the games (excluding ds2 lmao)
I love the Souls series for their existential themes, pondering on life, death, rebirth, and so many other amazing themes. Top that off with the visual spectacle that is the world and bosses it's a genuinely beautiful experience. Gwen's theme is something I love listening to when I'm feeling down, just something about those keys gets to me. The 'difficulty' is something I appreciate as a thematic element. Death isn't a punishment, it's an opportunity to learn, to grow, to hit rock bottom and get up again to overcome. I think that's often lost in discussion in regards to the SoulsBorne genre. Like, I just got my wife to play Elden Ring and she beat it, her first SoulsBorne experience. It was an amazing time with me coaching her and her discovering everything she wanted in this beautiful, desolate world. Of course she got angry at parts but the excitement we both felt when she beat Melania was something no other game has provided us. I'm hoping she gives the other games a go in the future.
Like the fact that basic enemies die in 2 hits where so many action RPGs take a button mash to kill the basic shmuck
Nothing says "fine tuned" like ghosts who can phase thru walls and weapons but cant be rolled thru, or poison darts that cant be blocked.
@@halowillneverbegoodagain1868 Yup!
1:40:20
The reason Souls shouldn't have an easy mode isn't elitism, at least not on the dev side. Miyazaki has talked about this: The reason there's no selection for difficulty, harder or easier, is because they want all players to experience the same thing. The same world, the same challenges. When Elden ring came out people were losing their minds over Margit, swapping stories, strategies, information about item locations, rumors, etc. They were united by a shared experience; a challenge they all had to face equally. If you add easy mode, that uniting experience vanishes. The need for learning strategies or engaging with the community vanishes. And the united experience breaks down because the margit I fought wasn't the one you did. Just as the games have ingame mechanics for helping and hindering players, the meta community is important to the devs.
the other best example of this is malenia and correlation of this is the birth of let me solo her
@@Omega77232 Very true. You don't get that modern legend in a world where you can switch the game to "very easy"
Generally it is so stupid to reduce it to elitism, so fucking shallow
Honestly speaking thats just pretentious nonsense on his part. The only time everyone has had the "same" experience is Sekiro, maybe MAYBE Bloodborne to a lesser extent. You could always summon someone better at you to beat the game for you, twink you OP late game items, and just generally approach things in such a vastly different matter that you might aswell be playing a different game. A ranged spell caster is not having a comparable experience to a melee build.
A poise tank unga bunga'ing everything having filed a restraining order on the very concept of I-frames is not having the "same" experience as a dex light build relying solely on dodging for defense, nor is a greatshield/spear build glued to the L1 button spending two hours safely poking every enemy to death behind cover never taking a sliver of damage to their HP bar, or a status afflicting bow build sniping every enemy in the game with poison arrows from outside their aggro range, and the item description FOR poison arrows literally conveys that was the intention, not all challenges are faced equally. And the ones that ARE faced equally are derided as "lame gimmick fights". The Ancient Wyvern is a shared experience, Yhorm the Giant, is a shared experience, Bed of Chaos, Micolash and Dragon God are "shared experiences" everyone is forced to face these challenges equally. Nothing would fundamentally change about souls discussion if there were difficulty modes.
What it is now?
"Wait you beat it first try? What was your build?
"Magic"
"LMAO that explains it, you didnt REALLY beat it, go back to baby games like Skyrim"
What it would be.
"Wait you beat it first try, what was your difficulty setting?"
"Medium"
"LMAO that explains it, you didn't REALLY beat it, go back to baby games like skyrim"
Miyazaki has no idea what he's talking about and the people quoting him are just as inept.
@@sasaki999pro What an incredibly long way to say you don't care about artistic integrity and just want an easy mode.
I think the one thing that can never be disagreed with when it comes to souls games, is that it bred a community fed upon sharing experiences. From existential themes to bleeding the framework dry of any challenge imaginable, deep unresolved mysteries and truly human characters and outcomes, and even the few glimpses into far off fantasy lands found in the scant words describing the plethora of ancient and varied artifacts littering the worlds we explore. We have all felt all of these in our own ways, and our discussion of them may go on forever. There will always be another version of the opinion that we haven't seen or heard yet, and I love that. I enjoyed your critique because of it's thorough nature, but also because it took the story of the entire series; as well, it gave me insights and ideas i haven't found in my hundreds of hours dark souls youtube obsession. I'm not a massive gamer and I like to go slow and steady (see as much of the entire game as possible); I don't even care about spoilers and watched a guide or playthrough of every single game before I even touched them myself. I've put between 600-700 hours into the fromsoft games i've played (in reality, only 3 of the 7 since Demon Souls), but I've probably seen just as much or more of them all through the eyes of tens of people. More than any games I have yet known, souls games make me feel. The final hour as I put down the last boss has become a familiar mix of triumph and sorrow. They sit with me, and I can't help but feel an itch to return to them. But for me, the near madness that consumes me, driving me to clash my will upon the puzzle that is each encounter and boss, fades away after the first completion at my own hands. And I am remembered of the final lesson given to us in Ds3, to let go when the time comes. New journeys will arrive with time, new experiences and people to share them with; old friends may rear their heads and the flame of desire might rekindle once more...
You can summon for the soul of cinder by the way, it's a questline thing though
Yeah if you pursue any of the quest lines you should have an NPC summon there.
Part of me feels like the spirit summons were added to EldenRing to keep people from complaining there is no npc summons.
@@AspiringDevilbut there are npc summons
@@schmecklin377 I should have phrased that better. I mean in previous souls games some bosses just don't have npc summons for them. So if you get stuck on 1 if those & can't play online your kinda screwed.
I was trying to get at the idea having the summoning bell means when designing encounters they can trust the player has the option.
This also let's npc summons be more special & significant. DS2 & DS3 had to sometimes add npc summons or even create an entire npc because an area needed to have the help option available.
You know you have a good channel when you have content that makes your viewers and subscribers alike watch your videos back to back and come back the next day. You do this kind of magic by staying true to your own design by listening to the loyal fans you find as you grow. I absolutely love your content. Stay legendary
I guess it's a testament to how different The Experience can be for different players, it was really surprising hearing you say you hated some of the fights that I absolutely adored, like Frida or slave night Gale. I even went back and beat Gail with the guts Ultra Greatsword and I thought it was one of the best fights I ever had in a game
That's the only weapon I use in souls games, except Bloodborne because Bloodborne doesn't have it, so I used the Hunters Axe.
I have this as background noise but your critiques of the ds3 bosses tells me you aren’t the target audience. You didn’t need to “compromise your gameplay style”.
I love the soundtracks you put into these videos. Mario Land 2, Tales of Arise (I think? It’s been a minute), Nier: Replicant, and Metroid Prime, let’s go.
I’ve beaten Bloodborne and DS3, including all the DLC minus the very final boss for DS3’s second DLC. I’ve also done the first half or so of DS1, a bit of DS2, and the first level of Demon’s Souls 4 times. All that, and I still can’t bring myself to say I’m a fan of the series or the genre, and I wish I were. Despite all that, Dark Souls 2, for some reason, still intrigues me the most out of all the games, and I think it’s the most fascinating. Maybe it’s just because I’m a contrarian by nature, but I find myself really wanting to get good at DS2. Something about it just calls to me.
hearing just 3-4 seconds of the track cut through the vocals and being hit with music i haven't heard in nearly 20 years is definitely a trip. Super Mario Land 2 treetops.
You didnt mention legend of mana. Im only 2/3rds thru the video and IIRC he used LoM music 4 times already.
@@Ghalion666 That's because I've never played Legend of Mana and know none of the music lol. I also only mentioned a few games I caught music from. I didn't mention songs that I knew from Final Fantasy 14, for instance.
So glad you pointed out and picked up on dark souls 3 beginning to funnel people into a specific play style. I find people don't talk about this enough.
It's one of my personal biggest grips with 3 and elden ring. They force you to adapt to playing a certain way otherwise you will not have a fun time. I think this is fine with bloodborne and sekiro as it is a crafted 'play it this way or don't play this game' experience where you become the master and they are not being deceptive about what they strive to be.
However, I find with 3/elden ring they give you all this choice but it is just an illusion, as 99% of items are unusable garbage. There is a set way to play and win and you will most likely not be able to achieve this with 99% of the items in the game (or play styles).
I am always left feeling what's the point? Why is all this in the game if it is essentially unusable? Is it just fluff to fill the space? To give an illusion of choice?
I guess it's just too hard to balance a game around thousands of variables.
I found Elden Ring a lot better about it until the late game. You can genuinely play Elden Ring with a HUGE variety of playstyles... until you get past Leyndell, then shut up and level your VIG to 50, drop that shield and learn to dodge bitch.
i disagree about elden ring, not everything should be as powerful as a bleed build.
My first run in DS3 was rags-only DEX Caestus because I wanted to go for something strange and it was honestly ridiculously powerful against anything without Bleed.
Heck, I tried a bunch of builds after that. STR/FTH Dragonslayer GreatAxe, Pure Dex Crow Quills, Pure STR Fume Ultra, etc. There's plenty of potential build variety and while not all of them are great for every situation, I'd say only thing DS3 really fucks up is shields. Magic is underwhelming, but not entirely unusable.
With Elden Ring I would've only agreed with you on-release. The later patches did a lot to make other playstyles viable and nowadays you can run pretty much anything and do well. Sure, Bleed is still overwhelmingly stupid, but there's really not much you CAN'T make work with some effort now. I finished my first playthrough with ARC/FTH Dragon Incantation and since have then done STR/FTH No-Armor Beast Caestus and DEX/INT Carian-only. Game's massively fun no matter what once you embrace the bullshit.
I beat almost all of ds3 using ultra heavy weapons as soon as I got access to them, some fights like friede felt a bit rough trying to beat with vordt's great hammer but I never had to drop back to a basic sword playstyle I got to stick to my heavy swing single punish playstyle. In elden ring I spent most of the game 2 handing an uchigatana and soloed every major boss except malenia who I pulled out rivers of blood for because after 9 hours of attempts and only seeing phase 2 once I was sick.
Oh Holy shit. I literally just said to my brother before he left for work this morning that I needed my KBash fix and I got greeted with this beauty lol
I'm not too sweaty about how other people have fun in their game BUT, it kinda makes sense for the superbosses to be uh, hard. Historically, superbosses have always been an experience that is curated to make a player adapt to the challenge. What if Penance (FFX's superboss) or Yiazmat (FF12's Superboss) didn't require you to grind for literal weeks or have a meticulously crafted battle automation system. It would be a shallow, forgettable experience. They're infamous for a reason.
I totally disagree with you about Ds3 late game bosses.
1. There are so many different types of weapons that you can find in the game.
2. It's extremely easy in Ds3 to upgrade a weapon to +9, so you don't have to rely on only one.
3. It's completely normal that some Bosses counter certain weapons, in fact I think that's really important that the game forces you to adapt.
4. Learning the movesets is actually what the game expects from you and its quite fun seeing yourself improve after many deaths.
5. I think a difficulty option takes away from the experience, what I mean is that everyone who plays Ds3 has the same fights, same struggles and the same experience.
for the first curse dexperience, imagine instead of going to the bell tower , you instead go looking for the one that can cur eyou in new londo, like the merchant in the depts infroms you. Then after many deaths by ghost, you finally get to the guy, and you have no souls to remove the curse. Also, vanilla ds2 is way easier and less frustrating that sotfs, imagine overall half the enemies and ambushes in every area
thanks for the great work, as well as acknowledging demons souls of course, as although its the pillar (if not kings field, etc) of dark souls, it seems more and more people have been disregarding it recently
The amount of disrespect Demon's Souls gets is astounding. Many people act like Dark Souls is the first Souls game. Without Demon's Souls there is no Dark Souls.
My reaction to seeing the thumbnail was "he did it! Kbash did it!"
I really appreciate whenever I get to see how someone else engages with these games. Been playing demons souls for the first time to complete my playthrough of every game and have been watching a bunch of stuff about souls games again. It's so interesting to me how people that came to dark souls 1 later have issues with it's speed, the parry timing, and a bunch of other things. Whereas I have had to adjust my timings every game since because they tweak it. But I can always boot up DS1 and get the parries etc down every time. It's one of those things that just feels right, once you've practiced it a few times at the start of a run you are good. This isn't a get good moment it's just me praising the game design and how consistent it is. The first thing I do every run of these games is attack the crestfallen Knight and get the parry timing back down. It pretty much locks you right there until you get it. And then you'll have it for the rest of the game, I mean all these games are rhythm games at their core.
For instance my first experience in demons souls after getting to the nexus was 20 minutes of learning how strict the parry timing was on the crestfallen Knight (don't actually know his name lol). And it didn't click until the last 2 attempts. I suddenly started getting more parries and realized oh I need to be literally standing on top of them to Parry their hilt, not the blade. After I died that attempt the very next one I chained 7 parries in a row and got the dude. I let out an audible "yeah!!" As well.
I know it's all time investment but that's one of those cases where it's rewarding. You invest the 10-20 minutes getting it down and now you have a tool that you can use for the rest of the game, even trivializing gwyn at the end. This is coming from the dude that 2 hands for the entire game and only pulls out a shield when it's specifically something that needs parried, I'm not even getting that much use out of it but it's great to have (especially for humanoid enemies which tend to be able to Parry you in these games).
53:21 you can farm the rats in the Depths for Humanity. It's not limited, but it is kind of a chore to farm.
True
But how are you supossed to know that
I would assume humanity would mostly drop from human hollows not fucking rats xd
You can also get Humanity from the baby skeletons that spawn outside of Nito's boss room and Phantoms in the DLC are an easy source.
A pain to farm, but still useful.
@@anonlvl1957 No disrespect meant, but Hollows are Hollow specifically because they've lost their humanity. You have to not be reading things to come to your conclusion.
@@Cillranchello yeah but I always assumed that they lost most of thier humanity but can still have humanity that they took from somone else and there just to hollow to actually used it. There just colect it by instict
Thats how my logic worked.
I played dark souls 2 frist and in that game normal enemies had way hgher chance to drop humanity
Scholar of the first sin is actually the harder version of ds2, vanilla is easier overall
I've watched the video twice now. Once when I started running demons souls remake and once when I finished. And honestly dude I just legitimately appreciate the series more and wanna play through all these games again after playing demons souls and watching this. Dark souls 2 was the only miss in the series for me, and honestly it still doesn't look like my cup of tea but I'm willing to give it another chance.
I'm also wanting to go back and finish elden ring now. I uninstalled the game to make space for other games because I wasn't at a good spot in life at the time and it was showing when I was playing the game. Now I feel like I'm in the state to get through elden ring and respect it. I beat demons souls in about 20 hours for my first playthrough because I was attentive and looking out for traps and hidden enemies the whole time. This kind of zen state is the kind of thing I value in these games. Being able to make an entire mental map of everywhere you went and did, feeling like you earned every bit of it.
I'm gonna get my ass handed to me on a silver platter and I'm gonna love it. Honestly hearing some of the years on these games really made me reflect and realize how much time has passed yet how I stayed behind.
Because those memories of the og dark souls and really bending that game over on subsequent playthroughs still feels fresh. The utter rage of the fanbase at DS2 (though the pvp looked like a lot of fun). Hell DS3 was by far the most involved I've ever been in a souls game, I made I don't know how many characters helping friends through, just doing pvp builds and having fun invading, the eternal fight club outside pontiff's boss room. It all feels so vibrant.
But it was around the time that DS3 dropped that I graduated. I got my ass handed to me in life. Spent 5 straight years high on weed to cope with minimum wage retail drudgery and ultimately became a withered husk of a person. Seeing the fact that I didn't get far in sekiro or elden ring, it's a direct side effect of how bad things were. I can look at my steam hours and see that I pretty much only had one or two games that I would play and most didn't require much skill. The fact that during this time I invested 10,000 hours into RuneScape should say all it needs to. I was lost and going through the motions. Like one of the hollowed out husks shambling through the asylum. That's not me being edgy etc, thats me being serious. If it wasn't for combat sports and manga like Baki that inspired me to get back into it I would've kept down that path.
Feels good to feel in my element again. Glad to making progress instead of being in a cycle of endless stagnation
After having played all of these myself, and some of the old FromSoft games like Eternal Ring, and Otogi, my biggest concern with these games can be summed up with one phrase.
"Let players have as much fun as the bosses in these games. Let us, eventually, become *a* boss ourselves."
Hey I just wanted to say I've been watching your channel for a year and a half now and I must say it has been pretty great watching your much deserved growing success. In a sub genre as saturated as the "funny gamer man talks about video games" you've managed to take a unique approach by analyzing every game as a piece of art. It's really cool how you try to find thematic value in every game no matter how little substance some of them have. It makes me appreciate games I previously didn't care about or just didn't like and helps me understand games I do like on a deeper level. So anyway you deserve every bit of success you get and I hope you continue to grow.
Also this is the best thumbnail you've done yet
Wow, your critique of DS2 completely explains to me the dichotomy between people like me who prefer DS2 to the rest of the series and those who think it's the worst game in the series. I would go so far as to say DS2 is the ONLY DS game I really love. I haven't even completed DS1 or 3 Whereas I've won DS2 several times now. I found the mechanics clunky and environments confusing and mentally unmappable in 1 and 3 compared to 2. I cannot even escape the first city in DS1 without getting turned around, and cannot even outlast the spawns like I had to do at times in 2 to be able to get ahead in certain areas the first time. Minus the DLC I love everything about 2 compared to its counterparts in 1 and 3 from effigies to upgrades. (except for the seperate estus flasks for hp and mana in 3, that's a good change) But I totally agree with you about the DLC and don't even factor it into my plays.
Anyway, your segment really drove home the differences and crystallized for me not only why I love 2 but who those who love the others don't love 2, and I thank you for that. Time to try some Elden Ring.
best souls 2
There's just something about your format that suits really well the franchise. Amazing vid' as usual. B)
Loved it, great music choices 😉 keep doing what you do man.
The moment the soul of cinder swapped to Gwyn….I’ll never forget it, what a note to go out on.
Mf, parry is literally the most useful option in DS1, it's super OP only if you're good at it, it's super OP because it's hard to do. That's it.
I once did a Dark Souls 1 playthrough with the idea of killing everything possible using parry.
A LOT of fun imo and even when doing another run later parrying really is the fastest and easiest way to get rid of many enemies.
If it wasn’t the sheer length of the video, how the entertaining commentary kept me engaged, or the surprisingly fresh takes that did it, it was the Age of Mythology soundtrack cameo that made me instantly subscribe.
I'm subscribing just because of your choice in background music. I heard Age of Mythology and Tressa's theme from Octopath!
Yeah I have to agree about dark souls 2, I love that game so much, from the beggining of the game up through dranglaic castle I think dark souls 2 is a blast but I think there's a good reason I've only every fully completed the game once and I don't think I've ever completed it with the DLCs, I've done all the DLCs individually but by the time I reach them in a typical run I'm about satisfied with my run and decide that having gotten up to and through dranglaic castle is enough.
Edit: I thought that dark souls 3 did supply an ending to it all? It was still ambiguous but you collect the dark soul from geals blood after he devoured the pygmies and give it to a girl who uses it to paint a new world.
Drangleic is the halfway point of them game not even counting the DLC...
doing the ringed city does not add an extra ending as in you get an extra option/cutscene after you kill the lord of cinder.
It does give a narrative ending to the ashes of ariendel dlc where you can bring the pigment to the painter but again that is only a bit of extra dialogue that basically reveals nothing new and certainly not an extra cutscene
@@A_Black_Sheep94 oh wait yeah I do go beyond that, I was counting shrine of amana as part of the castle for some reaons, plus I forgot about aldias keep and draon arie which I do complete..
It's been a while.
@harold veldhuizen I did say it is left ambigious but I think a lot of people kinda consider the ending of the DLC to kind of be symbolic of the ending of the series
One of the things I loved about souls 1 is when you go somewhere high and look down and realize that what you see is the actual game world. Not just some painted decoration, and the scale, and you realizing you went all that way on foot.
Dark souls2 ruins that completely, which is a damn shame.
@@Ghalion666 Wrong, Drangleic castle, Forest of Fallen Giants, and Iron keep just off the top of my head.
Fuck yes, can't wait to watch this. Thank you for bringing quality content as always KBash!
With DS3, weapons and builds got a lot of hate at release because there was a lot fewer viable or strong options. Weapon skills were cool but they couldn't compete with trick weapons from Bloodborne, and as extensions of a weapon's moveset they felt limited compared to powerstancing. There were also a lot fewer "gimmick" weapons compared to DS2 (dragon bone fist, santiers spear, Artorias sword etc), as well as fewer viable weapons for the less popular weapon types like daggers and whips.
Because of the change to poise, enemy aggression, defense calculation etc. a lot of viable builds from past games also felt incredibly weak before being patched months later. Offensive faith was bad, split damage was bad, tanks were bad... it all worked out in the end, but at the time it felt like the game was screaming at you to just grab a straight sword and pump strength and dex.
This is gonna be a weird comment but you might wanna rework the thumbnail to be more colorful or something? It was very difficult to pick this out from a bunch of other videos in my recommended and I went "Yo wait new Kbash video???" because I never got a notif for it even though I'm subbed and hit the bell lol. Maybe it could help people like me find the video since youtube is so barely functional lol
1. I think this video was great. Easily one of my favorites and I'm sure I'll rewatch. Great mix of symbolic analysis, game mechanic analysis, behind the scenes dev stuff, and that special KBash flavor.
2. Phendrana Drifts kicks ass
Respect your opinion, but can't say i agree with your point about adding easy mode to the Souls series. I too feel bad for those who don't have time for this, but if that's the case, why even play Dark Souls, if you know it's a hard game that's gonna take a lot of time to beat? And no way they don't know about it, Dark Souls is infamous to all gamers thanks to its difficulty. It's a series for a very specific audience, and i don't think it's a good idea to force it to conform, so that the people whom it wasn't even designed for can play it. That's just nasty. Artists should be allowed to do whatever they want to with their work. And look where that creative freedom got Miyazaki and his studio to? Him and his studio are a household name in the gaming industry, and his games enjoy immense success and popularity, even to this day. So from that we can conclude that staying true to your creative vision will not only bring you success, but immense enjoyment to others. There are many people who say they have been "saved" by Dark Souls... and their reason often times comes from the difficulty. They say the sense of overcoming a great challenge in game gave them inspiration to do just that in real life and change it for the better. Which further reinforces my point about it being for a specific group, not the wide market. If you're not one of those people, then don't buy it. Like, why are we encouraging people to not be smart and not do research on the game they want to buy, see if it looks like it's for them or not, beyond trailers and commercials? Why are we encouraging people to mindlessly buy, and instead blame the artist for just creating? We should instead encourage those people to think, analyze, research, as i've said already. And if that person does do research, they'll discover that Dark Souls has a lot of ways to overcome the challenges. The simplest one is the Pyromancer build, in DS1 it just destroys everything. But the Intelligence build is also very powerful, with the right setup, you can melt bosses in less than 20 seconds, it's insane. And if you don't want to do it, there are many other strats to defeat bosses, the so called cheese strats. Plus summons and whatnot, which are of great help as well.
Some people might take this the wrong way, like i'm gatekeeping new players, despite that not being my point at all. I'm all for helping others get into Souls, currently getting my friend into it. My point is, if you do your research, you'll find that there are a lot of ways to approach these games, at which point you will conclude that the easy mode is quite unnecessary in that case. Research is a very important skill in the modern era, and we should encourage it more, instead of putting the blame on the artist, that's my main takeaway here
To add on to this, not every game has to appeal to everyone. And part of Dark souls appeal is the way it challenges players. I wouldn't say they are hard, but they will challenge you. If you are one of those people who like story but dont have time, just youtube it. If you like the game and want to play more of it, take your time and enjoy it. It took me a whole semester to beat the first Dark souls when I was in college, and it was one of my most memorable experiences.
There was another Miyazaki quote which I think is more accurate than the one about feeling satsfied after a challenge. Where he elaborates that he wants all players to have the same experience when playing the game. That's the core philosphy the games are built around. You are meant to get stuck every now and then, and lean on the community for help. Guides, summons, invasions, messages. They are all tools to show off what works and helps. The difficulty is built into the mechanics beautifully, where even players that are very bad, can grind, summon, or look up guides to get over the hump they were climbing over.
If there was an easy mode, a large swath of players would just stop interacting with the game and just play that. You can't really have the same experience talking with your buddy about how hard the Slave Knight Gael fight was, but you finally beat him, but then your buddy says it was super easy because he just changed the difficulty. Adding an easy mode into these games isn't as beneficial bc player accessibility, because you are sacrificing the artistic vision. It would be like if a movie sped up it's runtime and played at 1.5x speed for people who are really busy.
I also challenge that games should be beatable to be enjoyable. I've never beaten the original super mario bros, but I still love coming back to that game every now and then, because its what got me into platformers. Lots of games people don't finish, and thats ok. But a lot of people do, and those are the people who are going to keep supporting you. That's how you build an audience like Fromsoft has done over the years with these soulsborne games.
DS3 feels like how I remember DS1 playing, but then I go back and DS1 feels like I'm underwater
Thanks for using FFT music it made me feel safe
I agree with you but I have things to disagree on: the easy mode and not understanding the hate on dark souls 3 and the map. Easy mode lessens the story. The game represents the hardship of life and by making the games easy, yeah the message is lost a bit. I don't like Dark Souls 3 mainly cause the areas just look bland in terms of colors and it's not replayable for me. Dark Souls map is the best because everything connects making the world feel more real and you can do whatever boss you want, with Dark Souls 3 because it's linear, you always do the same lords of Cinders in the same order. The map makes the game feel amazing and more personal. It gives you a great feeling being in the Undead Church and taking the elevator to Firelink Shrine. Anyway I love the Souls series and it never gets old.
My guy really shit on the gael fight 💀
Awesome video, thank you for the work you put in to give all this content!
One misconception I've always found interesting is that DS2 Scholar of the First Sin is thought of as the superior and less frustrating version of the game. It truly isn't from my perspective!
Vanilla DS2 on PS3 does have somewhat less pretty graphics, but the enemy placements and overall level progression is SO much more enjoyable and makes way more sense. There are way less of those random petrified statue road blocks as well.
I enjoy both versions of DS2, but I genuinely prefer vanilla for PS3. The enemy placements being less egregious made a huge difference (a big example for me is having far fewer of those janky Heide Knights in Heide's Tower of Flame while ALSO not having the dragon outside the Dragonslayer's arena), along with a myriad of other differences sprinkled throughout that just FEEL better than Scholar.
Great video except for one point. I feel like you don't understand the perspective of players that say you have to solo bosses to truly experience a Souls game. Using summons and ganging up on a boss with friends is fun but is completely different from the experience of banging your head against a brick wall and slowly, PAINFULLY, learning, having every aspect of a Boss's move set seared into your very soul. You can have fun, a great experience even when blasting through a Souls game with your buds but you'll miss out on the truly unique experience that Souls games offer. It's not necessary by any means but it is a fun and unique experience.
The point is, you can do those things without telling people they're "playing wrong." or missing something.
@40:26 when you said "It's not a problem, I play Ganondorf," legitimately caught me off guard and made me laugh so hard because that's how I feel when I play Ike.
Will echo a similar comment in saying that I was genuinely impressed that I heard some takes on these games' design from you that I had actually never heard elsewhere in the masses of other long-form video critiques on these games. Hats off to KBash!
It's interesting comparing the progression of the mainline Souls games to the progression of the game series it took more than a little inspiration from: Dungeons & Dragons.
Demon's Souls is VERY Original D&D. With characters who aren't superheroes and enemies that are crazy deadly, necessitating the player(s) use the environment and their own wits to tackle the challenges presented. Also, lots of running away from fights you have no business facing. Demon's Souls even has one level-draining enemy, one of the more infamous hallmarks of early D&D (and which both D&D and the Souls series, probably wisely, ditched later on).
Whereas by the late entries in both Souls and D&D, your characters are far stronger and more capable, and the challenges less specifically gimmicky and more combat-focused. An experienced that throws fewer curveballs, but which has refined the particular experience it's going for to an edge. Not to mention a number of quality-of-life changes: for Souls it's more frequent bonfires that you can warp in, for D&D it's more restorative rests (you can fully heal in a single night rather than 1 HP a day). Neither series has totally lost elements that made earlier installments challenging. But it's a lot more approachable.
It's also worth noting that both series show the benefits of getting help. Whether that's through co-op or summoned NPCs in Souls, or with one's party members and NPC hirelings in D&D. You are not obligated to go it alone. Indeed, part of what makes us as a species so successful is our ability to engage in jolly cooperation.
(Also, I do like the comparison of DS2 to a D&D campaign stitched together from many published modules. It's a comparison I've made before, and it gets to the heart of what I think is DS2's overall "vibe". It's not the grand, finely crafted D&D campaign you put loads of work into. It's the interim one between those campaigns where you just want to unwind and play a game. Or, as I like to call it, the campaign one of the players runs while the normal DM either can't run, or when they want to take a break and be a player for a while. The interim DM isn't as equipped to craft custom adventures, but they make do by using modules. And, despite everything, manage to link them together into something both workable and evocative in the end.)
Good vid. Here's some text from someone who's spent way, way, way too much time on these games.
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Just so you know, SoTFS is actually NOT the easier version of DS2. When SoTFS was coming out, one of the developers (maybe even Miyazaki himself, idk, it's been like 7 years) said that the redone enemy layouts were because they knew that most of the people who'd be playing SoTFS would've already played baseline DS2, and they wanted to maintain the level of challenge for returning players while providing them a fresh experience (or at least that was the gist). As a result we get SoTFS Iron Keep, a Shrine of Amana/unpatched Lost Izalith level hellhole of pain and suffering, and a lot of the areas have just had more dudes dumped in, all because it's basically a Master Quest version that's been sold as the baseline proper experience because people complained that baseline was too easy.
The ire for co-opers originates rom the olden days where people would fairly regularly come and go "Man this (thing that's hard) is so easy, you guys must suck" only to then say "Oh yeah I just summoned a guy and we kicked its ass" when asked how they handled it. Over time that morphed into what we have now, not helped by FROM continually making invading harder for invaders by forcing them into gank squads more often than not, and the introduction of ways to bypass co-op level restrictions meaning said helpers often have end-game builds regardless of what stage of the game the invader happens to be at.
DS3 making you feel like you're forced to go dodge then counter (preferably with a moderately fast weapon at the slowest) is a response to player's positive reception to Bloodborne's faster, more streamlined combat, and negative reception to DS2 "slowing down" from DS1 (it's actually not slower most of the time, faster startups + longer recovery times means you have more dead time between actions even though the overall speed is very similar, so it ends up feeling both stiff and smooth). DS3 in many ways is just BB wearing DS1's skin, and as a result it has a lot of new problems that FROM haven't figured out yet even though ER's taken some steps towards it (though ER still had to universally increase the speed of colossal weapons after launch because even though ER's slower than DS3, it was still just a bit too fast to actually let the slowest weapons have consistently safe counter windows).
Think I'd have to disagree on Nameless King, Soul of Cinder, Sister Friede and Gael forcing you to play a certain way.
I just recently finished Elden Ring a second time, which led me to play through Dark Souls 3 again.
I ran a strength build, mostly used only the Executioner's Greatsword, Zweihandler, and Black Knight Sword, which aren't light weapons by any means and beat these bosses without compromising my build once.
The only time I respec'd and tried different weapons and completely different weapons, or miracles and sorcery was against Midir who I still haven't killed.
technically, farron greatsword's weapon art is actually parry, not the cool combo. the cool combo is its dual wield move, since it's a dual wielding weapon (greatsword in one hand, dagger in the other).
not that it matters though, it's a cool weapon and that's what counts.
What I like about this video is not only is he taking time to literally cut out all the bullshit and to the point but also the Nier OST in the background you cheeky bastard KBash
Love the low key nods to Final Fantasy Tactics and Octopath Traveler in the music of your videos.
Omg you used the Phendrana Drifts score during the DS2 section. I love it.
I have faith this will be one of my favorite Souls videos.
"the people who'd be furious about forgiven student loans" wait so you're talking about most everyone?! You know what a loan is right? Loan forgiveness just incentivizes irresponsibility, and punishes people who actually paid them off
Was looking for this comment. About 6 months ago I dropped about 8k paying off all my loans in one lump sum. I scraped and clawed and saved and sacrificed to get that money. Now I find out I wouldn't have had to do that if I had just waited for a handout. And considering the money I recently saved could have been added to that 8k to entirely pay off the price of the used car I just had to recently finance because my old one suddenly decided to croak completely on me, my ass is now doubly chapped.
The only reason the “let the artist create his vision” works in dark souls, is because without the way it’s put together, the game would fall apart. An easy mode isn’t required, not everyone needs to play these games, if you don’t have time for it you make a big boy decision and watch UA-cam vids on it and play something more up your alley. Time has nothing to do with it, I’ve got plenty of full time job buddies that are obsessed with fucking final fantasy and play DND games every weekend. If you can’t dedicate the time don’t play the fucking game, holy shit.
People that think the entire game’s design should be uprooted for “accessibility” are just as entitled as the dickheads gatekeeping a game that isn’t really that difficult if you don’t play how they tell you to.
For the love of all that is holy its not complicated just level adaptability in DS2 to like 20-30 it will save you from so many problems
42:57 OH MY GOD IS THAT AGE OF MYTHOLOGY MUSIC I HEAR????? Jesus KBash you have to be some kind of kindred spirit putting in f-zero gx and AOM music in your vids. Fucking love it. Keep up the amazing work.
After having played Dark Souls 2 vanilla and Dark Souls 2 SotFS a couple times each, I would consider SotFS to be my least favorite experience of the franchise. I am happy to never touch that game again. Vanilla just really does it for me, it feels more well-rounded than the alternative, and it felt weird to return to it and actually find myself loving the game after only touching SotFS for a few years out of ease-of-access. Wild realization, but I'm glad I had it.
Scholar is genuinely bad and probably turned way more people off of DS2 than the original release of it ever did.
So SotFS is NOT the easier version; its more like the remix hard mode in a lot of places from the original. I know a lot of people who jump from DkS2 to SotFS thinking its a good upgrade to the challenge, and a newcomers who find it really cheap. But yeah; they actively made certain sections of the game harder, removed some good item purchasables, and added enemies to places they were nowhere near before.
I personally found it easier than the OG, but I could be skewed by knowing the ADP secret by that point. I actually kind of hate DS2, both versions. Funny how KBash stole footage from Mauler's video series replying to HBomberGuy's condescending-ass DS2 video. That was Fortea, who streamed DS2 along with Mauler and Metal. Fun watches
Vanilla offline shrine of Amana is cursed
I love watching people play these games for the first time. As a 10-year longtime fan of the series, it’s like watching the new guy at a job get his ass kicked by it when you’ve been doin’ it for a so long it’s just second nature to you lol
I always see a lot of hate towards the "You didn't really beat the game unless you did x" people, but I've been a part of the community since ds2, and I've never seen anyone say that unironically. Am I going crazy? Do these people even exist, or did everyone just suddenly decide to bully a strawman that isn't real?
I think that strawman is made from people making fun of players who use meta weapons from UA-cam guides. Like how r.o.b. Went from no one using it to everyone forgetting the night and flame sword and becoming a bleed build in one patch. And there's also people who say using a summon takes away from boss fights sense it takes agro away from you. Obviously people don't like hearing that so this strawman gets created in response.
you writing style is so unique and suits you so well. really appreciate your work, you're good at this man. much love ❤
1:11:21 actually, Scholar of the First Sin is *much* harder than the base game.
The base game is handedly the easiest of the series.
Alright KBash. I hear your Seafront Village theme and your Battle on the Bridge. I hear your choices and I respect you for them.
If you really want to suffer in Dark Souls 1. Play it without the patches. A few infamous issues were the stacking of curse so your hp would continually halve, and the anor londo archers were positioned differently to always have a shot on you when you got to the Silver knight on the right.
The metroid prime music is a cool touch lol. I love that soundtrack SO much.
Jesus man, what an absolute monster of a video. Don't ever let anybody say Kbash don't put forth work. I too have an avid and invigorated love for dark/high fantasy and ARPG's so you'd think I would've tried out the Souls series by now but the relentless difficulty they're notorious for has kept me away all these years. I know expressing dislike or the very least, disinterest in a game or series of them because of the difficulty in question is practically a cliché at this point but I can't help it. I know what I like and what I don't. That said, I'd be lying if I claimed I weren't considering giving Elden Ring a shot. I think that's largely due to the fact that the common consensus about that one is that it's a great jumping on point for the uninaugurated. Only one way to find out I suppose. Great video man. Between this and the TWEWY video from a few weeks ago you really killed it this month.
This is why I love souls games… so chalked full of secrets and things to figure out. I’ve beaten demons souls 4x now (twice on ps3 and twice on ps5) and I can’t recall the cling ring or using the thief ring against those damned mantas. Lol
I’m glad you started with demons souls because for the longest people thought dark souls was the progenitor of all these souls games. You should take it a step further back and give a retrospective of demons souls’ forefather series, Kingsfield, the one that started it all
When you mention that this game is from 2011 and that it still feels relevant, I think about how much the soul and politics of Berserk (started in 1988) make their way into the Souls games. I love how life influences art and how that art then helps shape the creations of those who engage with it
THANK YOU for mentioning Otagi. Nobody ever gives it it’s due
Overall enjoyed the critique, but I just don’t understand the whole easy mode thing. You even said yourself that you can make the game easy with summons. It’s a 6 year old game it shouldn’t be an argument anymore when Miyazaki has stated he has no desire to add one.
I agree. There are so many RPGs out there that can be played with easy difficulties, let the Souls game be hard. As much as he talked about the gaps between the story and gameplay not making things coherent, being able to stroll through the games despite the story, mood and context being about the struggle, that would be the gap in story logic that would make no sense.
Many other reasons why the games shouldn't have easy difficulty
@@Khtras I can add to this. I hate multiple difficulty options in lots of RPG's because it just results in lopsided experiences. Easy mode can feel like for babies sometimes. Normal difficulty in some games is perfect. Some games it's still to easy. Then some games have hard modes, or multiple hard modes that equate to the A.I. will do broken amounts of damage, and the game will be playable for only masochists. More often not, sliders are just afterthoughts that aren't properly balanced, and sometimes change the intended feeling of encoutners or gameplay. Desigining a game where the difficulty can be fine tuned by the player in the soulsborne games has been one of Fromsoft's smartest decisions. It ensures you are getting what the developer intends is acceptable for the player, and let's them figure out if they want to challenge themselves to make it harder(challenge runs), or if they need a helping hand(summons).
Dude for a nearly 2 hour video the editing here is insane, very entertaining!
This is the Dark Souls of KBash videos
The way I beat the capra demon the first time, was I went somewhere else and took some armour that let me resist staggering, then just unga bunga the dogs as fast as physically possible. I legit have no idea how I was actually supposed to beat him but I'll take it :)
FR I still had to look up how to do it and just cheesed it like most online say to do, feels like such a dice roll, but hearing other ways people tackle it is a fascinating part of the community and seeing new ways to get around problems
Keep up the work man. I always give a hell yeah when I see a new video popup.
im at the beginning of the video bro and yeah demon's souls is the coziest game i've played tbh. the music, story, characters and the world is just flat out mysterious. the art direction and everything that is jank and original about this game is 10/10. my favorite out of all the games and my top 2
I have been wanting you to do one of these games for so long now, it blows my mind you attempted all of them at once wtf you must've fried over this can't wait to watch it after work
Hmmm. Well I probably would've felt the same way about DS2 if I was playing it for work. As a Souls diehard I found this video unsatisfying in some ways, and I would've expected someone who clearly reveres Bloodborne to have more knowledge of the Souls games. I know, I know I'm just a pants-shitter bragging that I have more time than you, but I wish you would've addressed the evolution of the various games' highly crunchy poise/hyperarmor systems, from DS1's 5 second poise timer to DS2's more complex poise and DS3's stripped down system which makes every enemy recoil from even slight hits, unless their hyperarmor is kicking in. I hope you'll address that stuff if you talk about Elden Ring eventually because I think it's one of the key factors.
I also really wish you had engaged with the multiplayer systems, although I can obviously see why you didn't between time constraints and the servers being temporarily shut down on most platforms (permanenently in the case of DeS). I wish you hadn't been so intent on sticking with the longsword. Also, Gael didn't force you to change your "build" because a Greatsword isn't a build, and any build that can use the Farron Greatsword effectively can use straight swords or any fast weapon without respeccing.
Your critical view of the overall gameplay design of the games was appreciated, but I felt that with each subsequent game you reviewed in the series, your criticism became less insightful. When you said DS3 was the first game you played in the series, I wasn't surprised, because your views are very typical of people who started with DS3. I think it might've been better for you as a critic if you had started with DS3 and gone backwards. That's a really good tip I picked up from a very smart critic: reading or watching a series in reverse order can allow you to see its progression more clearly.
As a content creator, I know how easy it must be for you to engage various pre-existing discourses around the games, like the "difficulty" discourse and the "DS3 story is an uninpsired rehash of the earlier games" discourse, but I think it would've been more productive to ignore them. You almost took it in an interesting direction by referring to DS3 as a concession to the publisher, but you didn't take that thought to its logical conclusion. Fortunately, there's still time for you to do so if you review Elden Ring.
Really, I just wish you had given DS2 a fair shake. There's a reason so many of us diehards think it's the most replayable. But, to be fair, I certainly didn't give it a fair shake on MY first few playthroughs. Between the obvious visual downgrade (which you could've talked about much more) and the, shall we say, more deliberate controls, it's a much harder pill to swallow but it's ultimately extremely rewarding. It was the PvP game in the series, though, and most players have obviously moved on.
Alright, as a Souls freak I've said my peace, gonna go change my diaper now ☺️
not about shit on your critique. Hell So tired right now finish reading it isnt in my wheelhouse. but i got to ask isnt what your addressing or at the very least wishing was addressed, the membrane that seperates a gamer from a souls-hard fan? And also Similar to what exists between a casual gamer and a gamer?
And like that isnt what you describe, what differs between generating interest and scarring them off?
So provided my hunch is correct. how could our bestest soyboy go into greater detail without doing just that?, both to the game and his video to a lesser extent. dont those thing have to be experianced to be appreciated?
that said thats a real positive passion you got yourself there. Somebody calls you toxic dont take no shit.
@@cannibaletiquette5038 Thanks. I guess I would've liked him to try making an invasion build in each game, but doing that would take, at a minimum, 5 hours in DS1 and 10 hours in DS2 and DS3, so I get it, time constraints, but you can learn soo much about so many elements of the design by invading. The devs even try to ease you in to the multiplayer in each game via various encounters with player-type enemies, the Black Eye Orb invasion of Lautrec in DS1 for instance, which introduces you to the asymmetrical nature of invasions and the need to fight "guerilla-style," or the Maldron encounters in DS2 which hint at the potentially complex social interactions that can happen in an invasion when someone pretends to be friendly or decides to grief.
We can infer from the way multiplayer works in Elden Ring that it was changed late in development so that you can only be invaded during co-op (or by using the Taunter's Tongue to lure in invaders). Most likely this is a change driven by market research which likely indicates that invasions filter out quite a few players, too many for BandaiNamco's liking. But I suspect that, for every player that quits the game after a frustrating invasion, there's another player who is instantly minted into a lover of Souls invasions. That's what happened to me; I found it so exhilarating to have another player somewhere in the level, plotting to kill me, that I was hooked. I became an invader for life. And I really don't think you have a complete picture of these games if you don't engage with the multiplayer. I'm sure if KBash tried the multiplayer he would see a whole new perspective on the buildmaking, the level design, even the menu design (and lack of a pause button), it's all oriented around the multiplayer.
Yeah, there's definitely a lot to the games that didn't even get a passing mention here, especially Dark Souls 2.
40:00 the key to parrying is you need to bitch slap your opponent's weapon hand at the start of their swing rather than trying to catch them when they hit you; one of my friends explained that to me and my parry:fail rate went from like 2% to 60%. Highly recommend giving it a try, whoever sees this. Oh also a great strat for the taurus demon is to climb the stairs, stand on the archway, wait for the dogs to come, then when they're down you have a lil face-to-face with mr. cow.
Nice music selection! Ico, Chrono Cross, FF Tactics, Metroid Prime, Fable...
God, I remember the first DS being so jarring and unique, that I just refused to do anything that wasn’t hitting or dodging. Tomb of Giants was forced raw, no torch and Jesus. I don’t know what the place really looks like, but I could still easily traverse through to the boss in 10 attempts top and at the time I could do it without even looking, probably since there wasn’t mich to see. Except the edge. When it’s too late to dodge the cliff.
13:20 That is also in the Elden Ring main menu soundtrack. I don't see many people talking about it.
5:02 That is sacrilege, sir. How fucking dare you?
The directors for Dark Souls 2 were also the people who were in charge of King's Field back in the day. I recommend giving that series a try, mostly because you will immediately understand why DS2 is the way that it is.
44:49 - "imagine getting to the tomb of giants having never found a light source" oh, oh, I watched an LP where that happened, only the guy *DID* have a torch in his inventory, he just didn't notice, so he wandered through the dark without any light, one hour episode per day, for a week. and got through. and fought Nito. and _then_ found the torch in his inventory.
no matter how painful you think it is to go through, it is so, so much worse watching someone go through that without being able to help them.
Really cool coming back to watch this and everytime I do, there’s an extra 5K views
against all odds I'm hoping someone can help me here; I'm looking for the song that's starts playing around the 1:08:12 timestamp. Maybe I'm just finding the wrong versions or there's some quirk in the editing but none of the songs listed in the description match it and it sounds unbelievably familiar but I can't place it or find it so here's hoping someone recognizes it.
I just played through these games for the first time so it is really fun to see kbash do a video on them! Thanks kbash