Because of this, it feels immensely rewarding when you overcome such overwhelming odds. Everything in this world is bigger than you and can crush you in an instant. As the player, you don’t feel powerful, you feel insignificant. The world is also bleak, harsh, and dangerous. When you first play the original Dark Souls, the world is interconnected and massive, crawling with enemies and teaming with areas to explore and items to discover. What sets them apart from other games isn’t just the difficulty, but rather the minimalistic approach to guiding the player, and the vastness of the detailed worlds in which the games take place. I think it’s safe to say that I’m pretty experienced when it comes to the Souls games. In the past two years, I’ve invested at least 300 hours in the Souls games, and I recently bought a PlayStation 4 primarily so that I could play the PlayStation exclusive Bloodborne, which is also a Souls game but with a different setting and story. I then played Dark Souls 2, and then Dark Souls 1 and 3 again multiple times. Hungry for more Souls, I went back and played the original Dark Souls, this time playing through the whole thing and beating it faster than I did Dark Souls 3. After some learning, I quickly fell in love with Dark Souls 3, and it is now in my top 5 greatest games of all time. Though I was still hesitant, under peer pressure and some considerable hype, I caved and bought the game. I didn’t touch another Souls game until 2016 when Dark Souls 3 was released. I had also convinced myself that the game was simply unstylish and had clunky mechanics that made the difficulty artificial (I still think the game is a little clunky even now). Each enemy felt like a major threat, and the bosses were massively intimidating. I first picked up the original Dark Souls in 2014, and after struggling through only the first fourth of the game, I quit in a fit of rage. I’m going to be discussing what exactly “The Dark Souls Effect” is, its upsides and drawbacks, and how it will impact the future of gaming. This is all related to something I like to call, “The Dark Souls Effect”. In the case of Dark Souls though, the comparisons have been blown out of proportion to the point where anything even remotely difficult will be compared to Dark Souls. Drawing comparison to a more popular property makes it easier for companies to convey what they want people to think of their properties. It’s not a foreign concept, as movies pitched to studios have often been described as “it’s Die Hard meets Lord of the Rings” or “ Star Wars meets Titanic”.
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The only “ Dark Souls of” anything is Dark Souls itself, however, due to the breakout popularity of the Souls franchise, game developers and journalists have resorted to drawing comparisons between their properties and the Souls games. It’s obvious that these comparisons are rather exaggerated, and Dark Souls, as well as the other Souls games developed by FromSoftware, are unique.
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For example, Cuphead is “The Dark Souls of two-dimensional side-scroller platforming games” or Thumper is “The Dark Souls of rhythm games”. Due to the design, style, and especially the intense difficulty, there has been a recent trend in gaming where a game is referred to as “ Souls-like” or “The Dark Souls of…”. It is specifically known for its difficulty, vague instructions, and complex storytelling that must be pieced together through the environment and through objects and descriptions within the game. The game continues the design and gameplay of its spiritual predecessor, Demon’s Souls. Dark Souls is a 2011 role-playing video game developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco.