Dark Souls 3 Review

It’s quite a feat when you think about it. Dark Souls made dying in a game not only just ok but somehow fun. The Souls series represents a fundamental shift in modern games where difficulty is cool again, and death is not the end but the beginning. You are expected to die. You are thrown into the meat grinder and given the tools to succeed, but only after you’ve been chewed up and spit out a few times will you successfully use those tools.

Most people freely became masochists when Dark Souls arrived on the scene, much in part due to its break out of the obscurity Demons’ Souls enjoyed. Not long after the Souls series entered the fray, many games have cropped up in the wake of its popularity, often being referred to as “souls-like.” While some enjoyed a mild success, the Souls franchise was still the place to be whenever the next one came around. Demons’ Souls was good, and Dark Souls was great, but unfortunately, Dark Souls 2 fell out of the hands of the man responsible for the series, Hidetake Miyazaki, and just didn’t deliver quite the same experience. Luckily for pretty much everyone involved, Miyazaki was at the helm once more for Dark Souls 3 – the game he proclaimed would be the one to cap the series. The question then became will Dark Souls 3 deliver a masterful ending to a now storied franchise?

Dark Souls III represents a distillation of lessons learned from just about every game that came before it, including the wildly well-received Bloodborne. There is a really good chance that if there is something you enjoyed most about any of those games, it made its way into Dark Souls III. Similarly, if there was something you loathed from any of those games it was likely left on the cutting room floor. Even for a jaded asshole like me, it is hard to fault Dark Souls III in any major way. Now that might make the rest of this review moot for some, but I’ll try and be a bit more in-depth than that.

Press the go button and you are treated to a phenomenal cutscene that gives you the bones of the story you’ll be taking part in. You begin as usual, choosing your character and class, possibly even taking the time to make your character look almost like a passable human being in the process. For anyone who has enjoyed one or more Souls games, you’ll know that your starting class only determines the difficulty or lack thereof in the early game as you’ll be crafting your own brand of crazy that’ll work one way or another in the late game. From there, you’re tossed into the world with little else and start your journey.

The basic story here is similar to the other games in the series, especially the original Dark Souls. You are essentially tasked with the usual challenge of kindling the flame or putting it out after generally hacking and slashing your way through several bigger, nastier individuals than yourself. Coincidentally you are introduced to most of these adversaries in the epic opening cutscene, so you have a very vague idea of what you’re up against. From there, most of the story is filled in the usual way of the franchise. You’ll get tidbits from NPCs, things you see around the world, and perhaps most directly, in the descriptions of items you collect.

Some people, myself included, have found the plot delivery in the series to be a bit too hidden – a bit too obnoxious in its prideful Easter egg hunt. While this hasn’t done a complete 180 from previous titles, Dark Souls III is the closest we’ve got to being served what I’d deem a reasonable level of plot. You don’t necessarily have to do backflips to get a solid grasp on what’s happening around you and why you’re killing everything that moves. I’m going to give credit to Bloodborne for this one, as it too was a step in the right direction from games previous. Furthermore, the story that you are directly and indirectly given is rich and intriguing. This is the level of world detail and lore that we got in Dark Souls and Bloodborne but missed out on in Dark Souls II.

While it doesn’t answer every question the series has presented over the years it certainly covers a lot of them, and honestly, a little mystery is always good for a story. I am quite certain that fans will be picking Dark Souls III apart for a long while, cross referencing things from the previous titles that they know and perhaps didn’t previously know, to unlock as many of the Soul’s franchise secrets as possible. For me while I appreciate the level of world detail and lore put into the franchise, it leans a little too hard on the unknown to make it intriguing but regardless of how I feel it’s still one of the best video game worlds ever created.

Visually, Dark Souls III is beautiful. This is especially appreciated given what most games have to go through to run well on PC and consoles. The art style is unmistakably Dark Souls and it’s never looked better. Bloodborne excited me for what Dark Souls III could be graphically and it delivered. The level of detail is quite astonishing, especially in the character and enemy designs. It’s almost a shame that you rarely get the chance to enjoy a lot of the work done up close as you’re usually too busy killing them or trying not to be killed by them. I played on the PC and it ran quite smoothly with no real issues. From those I’ve talked to who own it on consoles, it seems to hold up reasonably well without too many hitches. Generally, it runs as well as Bloodborne did on the PS4 which is to say it’s more than serviceable. Honestly, Dark Souls III while not being some sort of technical powerhouse, is one of the prettiest games I’ve played in a couple of years.

For as pretty a game as Dark Souls III is, it would be far less impactful without the outstanding soundtrack throughout. The music has always been a strong point in the series but I believe Dark Souls III wields by far the most masterful soundtrack of all. It grasps you from the start screen to the ending credits with sweeping and haunting orchestral pieces that give depth and emotion to its world. Boss fights that are almost always great are often made phenomenal by the individual pieces that play to your success or failure. I can’t think of a single way in which Dark Souls III could have been scored more aptly and remarkably.

I suppose ultimately, the Dark Souls games are judged most harshly for their difficulty, their boss fights, and by proxy their controls. The series has been a bit of a rollercoaster regarding pretty much all of these things. Demons’ Souls was brutal in its toughness, its controls solid but at times unwieldy, and its bosses acceptably varied. Dark Souls was equal in toughness (though for different reasons than its predecessor), refined the controls but still needed more tweaking, and perhaps if you included the DLC, has the best bosses in the series. Dark Souls II was by and large an easier time even if you accounted for having experience should you have played Dark Souls. It was also arguably the most broken of the series, often resulting in needless frustration for the player, and unfortunately was home to the most one-note boss roster. As you might imagine after having seen the progression across the series in other aspects, Dark Souls III goes a long way in making up for Dark Souls II and presents some of the best the series has to offer.

Even with experience in your corner, Dark Souls III can be punishing which is welcomed. Unlike in Dark Souls II, the difficulty isn’t just in getting to a boss. Instead, there’s a nice balance in difficulty from your point A to point B travels and the bosses you’ll face. The bosses are also properly varied with few that can be beaten with the same tactics over and over. You are likely to be caught off guard most when bosses start changing their attack tempos, making your muscle memory far less useful. There is also a great deal of baked-in tactics you can use to dismantle bosses, though they are rarely a necessity for ultimate victory.

Honestly what downsides there are to be found mechanically with Dark Souls III are arguably subjective at best. For myself, I have openly loathed the supposed purposeful inclusion of action queuing. If you don’t know what I mean, let me give you an example. You’re up against an enemy and you know from experience that once it starts a certain attack you want to dodge twice consecutively and attack once. You begin your sequence and unfortunately, after second roll you don’t quite get the timing right and you are thrown to the ground by your enemy. After what can be a few seconds of recovery and your standing animation finishes, the game initiates your attack that you had originally wanted to use almost 5 seconds ago. Doing so you leave yourself unintentionally wide open for another full-on hit from the enemy. In the case of a boss, many of them only require two hits before you are killed, and there is the issue.

This is intentional to reduce button mashing though I feel that’s a pretty bad argument for its inclusion. I can appreciate the need for something that resembles this system to make some of those super frame-tight timings work, but it’s janky and results in many unearned deaths. Perhaps more frustrating is when the queue gets confused and adds an action you never pressed. The most common example I came across was when I would queue more than two attacks in a string before a roll. Instead of say, three attacks and a roll, it would have me swing four times and then roll, or in rarer cases swing five times and no roll at all (even with stamina to spare). This isn’t something unique to Dark Souls III, mind you. I’ve played and completed all three Souls games and Bloodborne, only having not played Demons’ Souls and I experienced this in all of them. It’s one of the few things that got to me when playing the games. Not everyone feels this way about the system so you can take my words with a grain of salt but it was a source of more than one grain of salt for me.

One part of the Souls series that has always seemed strange to me is the multiplayer. I never personally understood the necessity of such a thing beyond the summoning mechanic for bosses and general assistance. Invasions by players always ended up making my experience more grating than gratifying and so I usually ended up playing offline altogether. As such I am not a particularly great judge for this feature, though I have friends who are deeply rooted in it. From what I’ve been told, Dark Souls III presents a more stable, but still unbalanced experience for multiplayer. For better or worse I feel this is representative of the balance challenges presented when dealing with a game so built around single-player challenge. Regardless, if you were a fan in the past of the feature it seems to be just as good or better in Dark Souls III. You can essentially play through much of the game in a pseudo-cooperative nature, which again I imagine will please a number of people. If you’re new to the series, I recommend trying the online play to see if it fits your preferred experience as many people I know found it made the game that much better. If you don’t end up being a fan, you can turn it off at any time which is great.

Dark Souls III is an honest, experienced conclusion to a loved franchise. It is a culmination of the best from each game that came before it, and that’s about all you could hope for. If you were hoping to have all of your questions openly answered come the end of the game you may be disappointed, but somehow it’s unlikely to surprise you either. There are things people have grown to expect in the Dark Souls series and they are here on display, in all their glory. You will be engrossed in its beautifully crafted, eerie world, and drawn in by its haunting musical scores. You will be faced with many challenges and many questions of which not all will be outwardly answered. You will die. You will overcome, then you’ll die some more – and you’ll love it because it’s Dark Souls.