My favorite story to illustrate Miyazaki's singular vision for the games in the series was how he built the world of Lordran from the original Dark Souls. It's hard to quantify one person's influence in an industry as collaborative as gaming, but Miyazaki's hand is so visible in the design of the Souls games, longtime players can almost feel him watching overhead like a meeker version of Majora's Mask's moon. This is perhaps thanks to the return of series creator Hidetaka Miyazaki, who took the second Dark Souls off to complete Bloodborne, and returned only for this final entry. For a fantasy land of impossible monsters and molten gods, its world also feels coherent, like it's been lived in and imbued with its own secret history.įor a fantasy land, Dark Souls' world feels coherent

It lifts elements wholesale from its predecessors, including characters like Andre the blacksmith, but its combat feels crisper, more varied, and after spiritual successor Bloodborne did away with shields, less reliant on cowering behind a giant plank of wood. In the five years between Dark Souls I and Dark Souls III, the series' complex mythology has already been explored, producing so many theories that Dark Souls historians have had time to become orthodox, revisionist, and post-modern in their thinking.īut while Dark Souls III doesn't have as much mystery, it does still have the Dark Souls magic. There's been a sequel since then, a good attempt to capture the magic of its predecessor that didn't quite succeed - Dark Souls II was purely expansive where Dark Souls I was intricate, and was often obtuse where its forerunner was arcane. The third Dark Souls game, which launched this week on PC, Xbox One, and PS4, can't keep that same mystery. I felt like the first living person to set foot inside its tombs and dungeons in generations the first to contend with the legions of things that lived in its dark. Without the game's innovative messaging system - internet-connected players can leave glowing orange notes for each other that shine between worlds - Dark Souls felt impossibly mysterious, less like a game I was playing and more like a real ancient world that I'd uncovered. I actually reviewed Dark Souls, playing it a month before its online options were turned on, and a month before any guides arrived on the internet. But it was with 2011's Dark Souls that I fell in love. I was fascinated by its world, the muted browns and sick greens of a ruined medieval land, inhabited by mournful monsters and alien shapes out of Germanic nightmares and horror manga. I imported Demon's Souls, the series' predecessor, from South Korea after I read a glowing review of a weird, difficult, but incredibly rewarding combat RPG online. It's taken me a few years, but I'm comfortable calling the Dark Souls games my favorite of all time.

Games like dark souls 3 environmemt