Critique - Dark Souls Template PDF

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Dark Souls Narrative Review for Game Writing...

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Game Narrative Review ====================

Your name (one name, please): Derrick Kraft Your school: Sheridan College Your email: [email protected] Month/Year you submitted this review: December 2018 ====================

Game Title: Dark Souls: Platform: PC, Xbox 360 & One, Playstation 3 & 4, Nintendo Switch Genre: Action-RPG Release Date: September 22, 2011 Developer: FromSoftware Publisher: Namco Bandai Games Creative Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Overview Dark Souls has one of the richest stories I’ve ever experienced in a game. Due to that fact I’m about to tell you the entire thing as fast as I can: In Dark Souls’ creation mythos, the beginning of the world was shrouded in fog and ruled by the Everlasting Dragons. They simply existed, not alive, not dead. This was known as the age of ancients. Without explanation the first flame appeared, with it came the idea of disparity. While the age of ancients was neutral and unchanging, there were now contradictory forces in the world; heat and cold, light and dark, life and death. Deep below the surface of the world, a race of beings came into contact with the fire. From within the flame, three beings found immensely powerful souls known as Lordsouls. Nito, the First of the Dead logically had the Soul of Death. The Soul of Life was found by the Witch of Izaleth and her Daughters of Chaos. Lastly, the Soul of Light was found by Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight. A fourth Lordsoul was discovered later by the Furtive Pygmy, the Ancestor of Mankind. This was the Dark Soul, which humanity became descendants of. The furtive pygmy then hid it away and kept it secret. With the power of the souls, the Lord's rose up to fight the everlasting Dragons. The fight was hopeless until Seath the Scaleless betrayed the dragons revealing their scales as the source of their immortality, likely out of jealousy. This allowed them to win the war, ushering in the age of fire. Eventually, the fire began fade. Fearing the age of darkness, the growing power of, humanity, and the prophesied dark lord who would be born among them Gwyn Sacrificed himself to artificially rekindle the flame. This took a toll on humanity in the form of a curse known as the dark sign, a burning mark that doomed the dead to lose a part of their soul upon every death which was now no longer permanent. Eventually this turns every cursed one hollow, a mindless wandering husk. This is where the player joins the story. The fire is dwindling again and you are the chosen undead who must rekindle it. You fight through the decayed land of Lordran which used to be Gwyns Kingdom. You fight many enemies, notably hollows, Gwyns army of

knights, and Manus, Father of the Abyss who may or may not be the Furtive Pygmy. After collecting the Lordsouls you become powerful enough to face Gwyn himself at the Kiln of the First Flame now known as Gwyn, Lord of Cinder. Here the player is presented with a choice. Rekindle the flame and again continue the age of fire, or turn your back on the fire and become the prophesied dark lord who ushers in the age of darkness. But plot twist: it doesn’t matter. Rekindling the flame is a temporary solution, it will fade again which will bring back the undead curse starting the cycle over again. If you turn your back on the fire, you usher in the age the darkness, but the ashes will smoulder and eventually re-ignite when a new chosen undead rekindles the flame which restarts the cycle over again forever and ever.

Characters Player - The players character. In true RPG fashion, you are given the freedom to create your own character. The character can range from a steadfast knight to an agile mage or even a knight-mage or maybe rogue-mage. How about a rogue-cleric? Point is you get total freedom to be whatever you want no matter what starting “class” you choose. The character is a blank slate and is meant for the player to project themselves onto as they develop into a champion throughout the game. The players objective is to defeat the four lords and rekindle the flame to extend the age of fire. Gwyn - This is arguably the main antagonist of the game, though he is a morally good individual, his actions are what created the endless cycle of the flame burning out and having to be rekindled. Which also brought along the curse of the Darksign. Basically Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight, was a good guy who defeated the everlasting dragons. But then he grew afraid of humanity and the age of darkness so he did something impulsive that trapped the world in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. Now known as Gwyn, Lord of Cinder

Breakdown Now you know the entire lore of Darksouls. What’s wonderful about it isn’t necessarily that it has such a fleshed out and interesting universe, but more the fact that what I just said was an insane amount to hear right? Surely more than a game could present you on your own. At least through one or two playthroughs. No, Dark Souls tells you vague bits and pieces and leaves the rest up to you. The game opens with a cutscene that mentions a few things but then some knight rescues you from the prison cell you all the sudden are in. You fight through the prison and suddenly Mr. Friendly Knight is dying and a giant-butt demon is going to sit on you. You slay the butt-demon and leave to find a cliff that leads to nowhere. Suddenly a crow… or maybe raven? Grabs you and takes you off to nowhere. Fade in, you’re somewhere new entirely and another random knight is telling you that you have to ring two bells in two different places. Then with no other help, you’re left to your own adventures and curiosity. But this is perfect, because it leaves you with an amazing sense of wonder. It won’t be long until you’re finding treasure with weird names in this world full of interesting enemies and environments. If you decide to investigate further, you will find item descriptions that point to a deeper lore through vague clues. Regardless of this sense of wonder, you will still be very confused, even by the end of the game most players will be deeply satisfied with the gameplay experience and themselves for triumphing over all the

baddies, though still thoroughly confused on the story or what the intro cutscene meant. I know that personally I’ve played the game for hundreds of hours and yet still had to resort to research in order to form a coherent plot. But this isn’t necessarilly a flaw of the game, because the game has created a dedicated community of fans that work diligently to piece together what little information is given. There are entire youtube channels dedicated to telling stories from the game with creative flare, and in order to understand everything about the story so I could shorten it, I had to watch countless videos, one of which was 50 minutes long, that just discussed the story. Aside from the community piecing together the story elements, they actually help create stories too, which brings me to my strongest element.

Strongest Element Dark Souls’ strongest feature without a doubt is the focus on emergent narrative. Once you leave the prison, your blank slate character is free to go wherever they want. If you’re like me, then the first time you ended up going to the graveyard and got thoroughly destroyed.Throughout the game the plot uses an accordian structure for its objectives where you first have one: Escape the prison. Then the game opens up allowing you to choose between going to fight the gargoyles, or taking a trip down to blighttown and fighting Quelaag. The game then gives you another linear objective of fighting Ornstein and Smaug which despite the name is only one boss fight. This lets the player know they’re on the right track. This continues throughout the game opening up again to choose which Lord you want to kill first then finally closing off for the final encounter with Gwyn. This style of storytelling is fantastic because coupled with the emphasis on playing how you want, it lets the player roleplay the way they want while still feeling a sense of progression through a story. The game also has a community based combat mechanic where players and drop in to other players worlds as either allies or even enemies. This works beautifully to create unique encounters that could only happen through the actions of real humans playing the game.

Unsuccessful Element Despite everything I love about this game it does have flaws. In fact, It’s greatest strength may also be it’s weakness. It took alot of research to get to this level of understanding of the dark souls lore but most people have lives and aren’t doing school assignments. If someone were to pick this game up and beat it without going down the rabbit hole of item descriptions like I did many times before taking an interest. It’s likely that the rich and thought out lore of the game will go completely unnoticed.

Highlight The best singular moment in Dark Souls without a doubt is the encounter with Sif if you fight him after beating the dlc. In the DLC you free Sif from Lord Artorias and then he recognises you when you come to fight. Reluctantly he still has to fight and this moment was just so fantastic to discover after playing the game many times before with Sif just being a random giant dog.

Critical Reception Unfortunately I actually couldn’t find any reviews from sources that carry any weight that chose to talk about the story, or anything about it. IGN’s review was basically just comparing everything about it to demon souls, and came close when talking about the environments, but overall missed the mark. Anywhere else was the same story. https://ca.ign.com/articles/2011/09/30/dark-souls-review

Lessons • Biggest thing we can learn from this game is that you don’t have to tell the player everything about the world right away. Look how long it took me to do that earlier. The players are capable of uncovering the story on their own and in this case it built an entire community around itself. • Next Lesson is that maybe you shouldn’t take the first lesson so far as to make the story unapproachable. It’s a genuine shame that the majority of people who play this masterpiece will never discover the lore, or even reach a point where they care to try.

Summation I think this game deserved this analysis simply for the fact that this fantastic story is being missed by a lot of people and it should serve as a warning for us future developers not to make our games stories too hidden. Other games have tried a similar approach to this and failed because the game play made it feel more like a chore than an adventure. My closing statements are that everyone should play dark souls because everyone will have a different experience and I think that is fantastic....