Dark Souls III

Here’s another super late review. The lateness is due to both the diluting of fan-boying and actually taking the time to finish the game with at least one play through before giving it a final score (no, this isn’t something we do for every game, but Dark Souls holds a very special place in our hearts).

Dark Souls III is the fourth installment in the Souls series. The first Souls game is Demon Souls (2009), the second is Dark Souls (2011), followed by Dark Souls II (2014), followed by a remastering of the game with tons of additional content in the PS4 release of Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin (2015). Finally, we reach the culmination of these glorious gaming titles with the highly praised Dark Souls III.

The Souls series has always offered a challenging experience even to the most seasoned of gamers. Their gameplay is unforgiving and punishing, their world is soaked in despair, and the number of time you die in the game is astronomically high. Dark Souls III delivers on all of these classic traits with unflinching resolve. The developers, From Software, understands the game they are making, they understand the gamers that are going to play the game, and they know how to please those gamers...and that is through killing them over and over again.

GAMEPLAY

The gameplay of Dark Souls III the embodiment of refinement at its best. Player movement is based on the type of character build you decide to create, meaning if you wear light armor and wield a short sword and buckler you move much faster and can roll much farther than say someone in thick plate armor wielding a great hammer and a tower shield. This makes for a very wide variety of gameplay options with movement alone, whether you are fast or slow dictates a surprisingly large amount of my decisions in that game. Do I engage this enemy? Depends, am I fast? No. Are they fast? Yes. Maybe it’s better to leave this undead fiend for a later time when I’m more confident in my abilities. Or maybe I engage anyways and get completely destroyed triggering those menacing red letters that so often read “YOU DIED”, much like receiving a test back from a teacher and they not only put a -1 next to every question you got wrong but circled the giant “F” that they enjoyed writing.

Player movement aside, the combat as a whole is much more satisfying to learn and explore. There is such a variety of armor and weapons that I find myself experimenting with them all to find the perfect build for my character. I always begin my Souls game as a Knight Class and I level up my Strength and Faith attributes allowing for me to wield a greatsword and tower shield and cast miracles. This is a pretty easy class to jump into and allows me to really just hack and slash my way through. Though as the game progressed and I began trying out new things I discovered myself wearing nothing but robes and rather than a greatsword and tower shield I had a normal longsword and a medium shield. This build was much faster and had weaker albiet faster attacks, allowing me to move in and away from my enemies much faster than I normally would.

The combat against enemies controlled via AI is great and dandy (in its own grueling and punishing kind of way), but as soon as you step into the ring of PVP with the myriad of invasions you are tackling a whole separate beast. The Souls series PVP has always had issues from Dark Souls’ backstabbing and hitbox issues to Dark Souls II invasion covenants and hitbox issues to Dark Souls III carrying on the hitbox issues….damn hit boxes. Part of the issue is simply players internet connection and servers. You are interacting with players from who knows where in the world, some times you’ll be paired with someone on the opposite side of the planet, and guess what, their internet and your might not play nicely together. That being said, it’s still indescribably frustrating to battle around these network issues. Despite their scourge, I doubt they’ll get fixed any time soon.

Outside of combat the game hosts an impressive open world with some of the most visually pleasing environments I’ve gorged my eyes with in a long time, especially for a game of this scale and scope. Dark Souls had some of the most impressive level design in my books, I instantly fell in love with the verticality of the first game and it was highly rewarding whenever I discovered a shortcut between their all too rare bonfires. Dark Souls II had a much more horizontal level design which worked out very well, though I feel this dampened the effectiveness of the short cuts. In addition, in Dark Souls II there was a big issue with the distances between iconic locations being deceitfully large. I would stare off a mountain and see in the distant fog a massive broken tower, but in reality that tower was actually about two minutes away when it should have taken longer to travel that far. Dark Souls III nails their scale. There are multiple spots where you can see distant places and the in-game time it takes to travel said distance is appropriate, or at least, feels appropriate. Not only that, but Dark Souls III has a good distribution of both horizontal and vertical level design resulting in me feeling like I was constantly moving as I progressed from one area to the next. The short cuts in Dark Souls III are also very well placed and very rewarding to discover.

Now, Dark Souls III does suffer the plight of an old enemy, the forever feared framerate plunge. Okay, so Dark Souls III’s framerate doesn’t “plunge” necessarily, it does take a dive here and there though. On occasion I’ll be fighting some baddies and all of a sudden I go from 30fps to about 25fps. Though I can’t say i noticed it go much lower than that. The framerate never hindered me or resulted in my losing of a fight, so I didn’t see it as a huge issue. This could be a result of me trudging through the 10fps that was Blighttown in Dark Souls.

NARRATIVE

There really isn’t a whole lot I can say here without spoiling the game's story. What I can say is that the narrative of Dark Souls III takes everything the first and second Dark Souls games build up to and ties it all up in a pretty little package. The game's story eluded my understanding for quick some time, then upon reaching the ending of the game everything kind of just clicked. There are locations you visit in the game that hint at a much bigger picture, and upon talking with some key NPC’s and performing some key side quests the whole narrative falls together very well. Hopefully you beat the game and experience the story to its fullest, because it does a very good job highlighting big events from the first and second game and placing them in context. That’s all I can say without spoilers, sorry folks.

In lieu of additional story info, I’ll mention that the music in this game is outstanding. The game came with the soundtrack on a separate disk which is kind of unique from my experience. The music is great, and the fact that they don’t make you buy it is pretty neat, brownie points for From Software.

CONCLUSIONS

Dark Souls III takes everything its precursors did and does it much better. The extensive variety of combat styles by character build impresses and the game's world is expansive and beautiful in its bleak and broken aesthetic. Forgivable framerate issues and the classic PVP garbage are the only cons for this game, and they pale in comparison to the innumerable pros.

FINAL SCORE

90/100