After playing Dark Souls, I was unsure about progressing to 3. While I could see why the original is such a classic, I found far too much of the game a massive annoyance to think of it in a positive light. But I heard that 3 had fewer of these annoying parts, so I decided to give it a shot, and I’m glad I did because Dark Souls 3 is truly an improvement in every measurable aspect.
Dark Souls 3 is like the child of Dark Souls 1 and a real video game. It’s infinitely less annoying and much more playable, but it also feels like it lost a little something by being more normal.
Dark Souls 1 is aggressively annoying, I said in my video about it that I don’t know who would want to make a game like this. But at the same time, there was some purity about it that is lost in Dark Souls 3. It felt like a child raised by wolves, wild and impossible to integrate with real people, and Dark Souls 3 feels like the same child, but they’ve spent about 10 years telling it about societal expectations and taxes and stuff.
But a lot of the good stuff from DS is still in 3, and it adds a lot more of its own fun. The variety of locations, enemies, weapons, armour and items rival most open-world RPGs, despite the fact that the game is surprisingly linear. It’s genuinely a great-looking game, the combat is improved, and the bosses are (usually) more interesting, even if that does mean some are impressively difficult, at least solo. And both 1 & 3 were able to put me into a mode where I felt just right, the difficulty was perfect, the area was fun to explore, and I just couldn’t stop playing, I had to get to the next bonfire. That just happened a lot more in 3 and 1.
All in all, I could tell the difference in the way I felt when the game ended. For DS1, I was relieved it was all over. For DS3, I immediately went and beat the areas and bosses I missed, because I was confident they wouldn’t make me want to jump into a ravine. Dark Souls 1 is a special game, but thankfully, Dark Souls 3 is a good game.
