Dark Souls is like any great piece of art. Anyone can see at a glance how polished it is.
However, with time, engagement and effort, it yields itself as a remarkably complex work.
It is something you learn to love slowly.
Dark Souls does not need to tout its wares, but they are there, going very deep for those who wish to look.
As we played through Dark Souls, it continually grew in stature.
At first, it was a game bought on the back of a cool advert with an exceptional song.
It ended... as something peerless.
At the moment the character was lifted into Anor Londo after Sen's Fortress, a thought came unbidden:
this is the greatest video game of all time.
This automatic thought was at first uncomfortable.
If it were true, all the treasured games of the past, despite the loyalty and nostalgia we had for them, would now be relegated to second place, and beyond.
But we knew it then, as we know it now. Dark Souls is the greatest.
We believe there is a reason for the supremacy of Dark Souls.
The cause we believe is a philosophy: the Philosophy of Dark Souls.
It runs through every part of the game, through its creation, its gameplay, and its lore. Everything is linked by this philosophy.
Dark Souls captured our minds. Let's look at how.
The three foundations of the Dark Souls philosophy are: the lot disguised as little, the reach for perfection and emotional impact.
The first is what many call the "less is more" philosophy.
However, as Dark Souls does so much, and it's so expansive, perhaps this phrase is not quite right.
Dark Souls certainly doesn't do a little, and there is certainly not less content present than in other games.
Instead, it is that it does a great deal, but at first glance it seems like little.
The lot disguised as a little.
The Lore would have taken more planning, thought and inspiration than triple that done for most Triple-A games, whose plots are mundane and back of a napkin complex.
Yet it has often been said that the game can be played to completion without the story even beginning to emerge to the player.
This is true, because the lot is disguised as little.
You have to look.
The reach for perfection is the striving undergone in the creation,
the approach that the player must adopt in the attempt to complete the game,
and the work required to understand a Lore that can never be understood to completion.
The reach for perfection is an effort undergone by every player and, when playing Dark Souls, you have to reach, or else, start again.
Emotional connection is the emotion that motivated and inspired the creation.
The emotional connection the design of the game has built to elicit, and the emotions drawn from the lore.
It is rare that a work of fiction can produce emotions so intense that they rival reality, but Dark Souls does so.
Let's go first to the beginnings of this masterpiece: the creation of Dark Souls.
Before even the first character designs or concrete plot creation, there was an attitude, a philosophy to the undertaken.
An approach that is the hallmark of From Software.
It was view to perfection, the highest returns possible, even if they are diminishing returns.
The reach for perfection and, ultimately, something to be proud of.
The philosophy of the creation of Dark Souls is glaringly obvious from the result, without needing to hear from the creators themselves.
It is apparent throughout all the refinement, the gorgeous balance of every aspect.
Barring a few examples which I'm sure they regret deeply. Attention to detail and deep thoughts hit you everywhere you look.
The breath of an enemy around the corner, the noise of a shield, a perfect execution from mind to gameplay.
If we do look to the creators, we find they worked through the night on tiny aspects no one would notice at first.
Refining and discussing roles of characters, to ensure a universe that feels real, even if no one ever discovered these character's roles.
This is the reach for perfection.
A lot disguised as little is also clear throughout the work. Miyazaki sent back overwrought designs.
Many weapons were created with philosophical concepts, such as "make a weapon you would trust your life with".
The artworks have far more behind them than appears.
Armour designs are not only things of tremendous beauty, but implicitly hint at characters' histories.
Once again, it is the hand of mastery, the great deal done in apparently little.
The fiendishly complex, disguised in a mask of simplicity.
Finally, we have emotional impact.
For inspiration, and the creative process, emotions are vital.
Just reflect for a moment.
How could you push yourself to reach for perfection, to complete a game like Dark Souls without the motivations of powerful emotions.
The emotional commitment to polish gameplay to such a point, to make the game feel so raw, must have been powerful.
These emotions lead to the obsession with refinement in Dark Souls.
Reflect, too, on the emotions required to inspire such touching, tragic stories.
They must have been intense.
The revisions and rejections of Design Works by the team,
the emotional instructions for certain designs, and the emotions the creators feel towards the finished product are a testament to the emotional investment throughout the creation.
The Design Works interview show us that they wanted to be proud of the result of all their effort.
They certainly deserve to be.
Next, let us look at the philosophy of the player's experience, and the philosophy the player must have, or acquire, to complete the game, or even progress.
It is, of course, a reflection of the philosophy in the creation.
Gameplay rewards the simple player, the wise player.
Overdo it, try to be too good, step out of the confidence level at any point, and you will be punished.
Achieve greatness through simplicity.
Do simple fundamentals well, not complex things adequately, to achieve great results.
To be a Dark Souls master, you must wield great complexity with simplicity.
Once you begin down this path, the game becomes harder and harder. You must continually strive for perfection.
Improve your character, your timing, your focus. Practice. Do not give up.
All of it is about mastery, and a striving for perfection in and of itself.
After all, the game does not end with any special reward. We improve and strive for the journey of it.
Both of these aspects are driven by the intense emotion we experience at the hands of the game.
For us, the game was almost too hard at first.
Having not played Demon's Souls at all, even getting out of the Asylum was a challenge.
But there was another problem.
We decided to start with the Deprived character.
At the game's release, at least on the European version, the game had a bug.
The Deprived character picked up the Broken Straight Sword, but at the point where the Club should be, was... nothing.
So we had to get out of the Asylum with only a Broken Straight Sword.
As novices, to any From Soft game.
Quite the challenge.
However, it is a testament to Dark Souls that simple trial-and-error learning, the combat against the Hollows in the Asylum, afforded several hours of entertainment.
Feeling emotion, your vulnerability, the feel of the shield, the bang of a missed sword. All of this was enough.
Learning layered slowly, with time the parry was discovered.
Slowly, the attacks of the Hollows were learnt.
All of this slow, painstaking but fair learning afforded enough entertainment to not throw the game away as "too hard".
This is a testament to how refined, how balanced, how accurate and how just goddamn satisfying the gameplay is in Dark Souls.
You really feel you are there, that your back is exposed if you roll the wrong way, that a hair's breadth mistake will do you in.
In our experience, no other game achieves quite this feeling of having skin in the game, of being right there.
Eventually, after a long time, a knight dropped his sword,
and then, having perfected the parry, and now turbocharged with, well, you know, an actual weapon, we were through the trial by fire and ready to rock.
But this is what Dark Souls does. It teaches you with carrot and stick, but with a lot of stick, and damn good carrot.
It's "work hard, play hard", it's not for wimps.
This is the emotional impact, and the truest hit of frustrations and anger and eventual relief and success are so intense that no one can forget certain Dark Souls moments.
They're burnt into the memory.
Everything, from the combat to the lore, rewards the seeker.
It pays out for your effort, your search, your determination.
Just as the gameplay can be no fun, so too can the story pass you by unless you focus.
You reap what you sow in Dark Souls.
This goes from the creative process, when Miyazaki and his team would not compromise on design until it was right,
to the gameplay,
and, to the lore.
Just as with our experience, you get out what you put in.
On the emotional connection in Dark Souls, it is also worth examining the lot disguised as little, and reach for perfection behind these emotions.
These are not by accident.
There is a great deal of psychology laced into Dark Souls.
The movements and timings of enemies are thought down to be perfect pacing.
The deliberately random timing, ensuring it is hard for the human mind to learn and integrate, layered into the enemy's attacks.
There are a low number of enemy types in each area, so we have a strong memory of certain enemies, but we can also hold their attributes and attacks in our short-term memory.
The Pavlov-dog style pairing of sounds with events worked to create heightened emotions.
Who can forget the comfort of the sound of a bonfire, recorded to perfection.
Or the fear coming with the sound of Andre of Astora's hammer, the sound of a weapon, when we were feeling so vulnerable on that first playthrough.
And, of course, the taunting noise of the "You died" screen.
The life-filling screen of the bonfire, and the dark-faded image of death is no different to the carefully-chosen sounds,
highly associated and correlated with the emotions they intend to produce.
Deliberate uniqueness is another method used to create strong emotional impact.
Solaire or Siegmeyer are memorable through their unique garb, their individual dialogue and the timber of their voices echoing within their helmets.
Dark Souls strives to be unique as a whole, but also throughout its parts.
It strives to be memorable.
The delineation of areas adds further to this effect.
The Crystal Caves, the Darkroot Basin, Blighttown, Izalith, the Painted World.
We are certainly in the same universe, but our memories latch on to these areas as "totally different".
Dark Souls forces us to remember areas through repetition and emotional engagement, cornerstones of learning.
But also through vivid differentiation on our available senses: sight and sound.
Emotional impact was not achieved by accident.
Now, let us look for the Dark Souls philosophy in the lore.
Miyazaki, as a child, read western fantasy books but, because of his limited English, he had to fill in gaps in the story.
The plot, the dialogue, the relations between characters. A great of deal of this had to be supplemented by his imagination.
He found that this lead to a richer experience, and was instrumental in his approach to Dark Souls and its lore philosophy.
In a sense, this is the reaching for perfection.
To understand the lore, you must work, think, explore, discover, invent, use logic and imagination.
However, many misinterpret these deliberate gaps in providing information as being equivalent to Dark Souls having a subjective story.
The belief is that, because the story is not provided explicitly and is made deliberately ambiguous by the creators, there is no absolute truth to the lore,
as if they made it as a "read into what you like" project.
This argument has flawed reasoning, and also ignores the approach of the Dark Souls' creators in every other aspect of the game.
It also lacks an understanding of the creative process itself when applied to fiction.
Let us go back to the inspiration of this sort of opaque storytelling, which has to be filled in or worked out by the reader or player.
The inspiration was a western fantasy book.
The story of these western fantasy books are non-ambiguous. They are concrete.
It was Miyazaki's english which lead to the incomplete retrieval of this story.
This can be replicated, by giving incomplete information in any story, such as Dark Souls.
However, the root story must be tangible, otherwise the whole process falls down.
Let us emphasise this again.
Miyazaki was inspired by the guesswork, an attempted filling-in of a concrete, objective story, from which he drew only limited information.
He was not inspired by a work with ambiguous, subjective story.
This is added to by the fact that, to make a body of lore, you cannot have ambiguities with so many intersecting item descriptions and dialogues.
This creates what every fiction creator of any form know is all too easy to do when desperately trying not to:
the plot hole.
An internal inconsistency, which could not happen in reality.
But, what is remarkable about Dark Souls is: there are no plot holes.
With so many characters, times, dialogues, items, motivations and histories, not once is there a single incompatible line of dialogue or item description.
With so many objective aspects in dialogue and item descriptions, to make a work of ambiguity, not create a single inconsistency, would be a feat of probability amounting to a miracle.
So, no, Dark Souls lore interpretation is not all equal.
And it is not the story that is right for you.
There is an objective history to the world that the creators have thought through.
Just look at the evidence of that own work. The care and attention is ubiquitous.
Before even designing the world, they discussed in-depth the role of the Four Kings.
They workshopped the individual motivations of characters.
This is not something done with the intention of "leave it a mess, and I'm sure someone will fill in the story".
That would simply yield, yeah, you guessed it, a mess.
Dark Souls' lore is an objective layer that the creators are likely to never reveal the truth of, but it does exist.
There may be gaps we can never fill, but the truth is known by the creators.
It is though there are a string of numbers From Software created, but they removed some of the sequence.
You can try and guess the missing numbers from the pattern.
We may never precisely know the answer, but From Software knows.
Or, at least, a subset of them do.
In addition, upon close examination, the evidence is often so conclusive, so objective, that it forces one to accept certain conclusions.
For example, the Souls community has, for a long time, erroneously believed that demons were created after the Witch of Izalith was engulfed by the Chaos Flame.
But the Demon's Catalyst, incontrovertibly, tells us that the Demon Firesage existed before the Witch was engulfed.
Quite quickly, through the form of objective evidence, cross-referenced, we are forced to accept many non-subjective, non-ambiguous truths.
This amount of objective, logical evidence, without a single disagreement amongst it, is evidence of either objective lore,
or, of From Software creating one of the most complex, coherent lores in video games of all time, by blind luck.
The odds of which, I will not estimate, but the number of zeros would probably take me longer to say than the Timeline episode was.
The emotional impact of the lore is unquestionably strong.
After all the work to figure the story out, the impact of revealing tragedies that you passed by is quite something.
The stories are poignant, touching and almost universally deeply sad.
Even our story can pass us by, whether we have been manipulated all along, whether we are heroic or cruel, or simply pointless.
All of these stories are scattered around us, and we almost missed them.
Yet, having found them, they stay with us.
The lore also possesses "the lot disguised as little" more than any other aspect of the game.
Let's merely look at the Great Hollow and Ash Lake.
Behind two hidden walls and chests, lie a root to the earth.
Here you can find Crystal Lizards, rings, a dragon, or perhaps not, and the evidence of an old cult.
And, perhaps, implications into much more.
It seems like little more than a hole and a sandbank, and yet there is more implicit lore than perhaps any other area and, more than the community yet knows.
Dark Souls still has a lot of lore to give, and it's been in plain sight.
And what Ash Lake has to say, is going to be part of the video that we are more excited for than any yet.
For Dark Souls is the Great Hollow. It is the double-hidden wall leading to great depth.
You have to work, and think, to uncover its mysteries.
It is the Ash Lake, where there is so little, and yet, so much.
We've all died so often and yet come back for more.
It's as if Dark Souls has received all the player's deaths as sacrifices, blood offerings to strengthen it.
The hardship, the challenge, the reward...
The nail-biting realness of Dark Souls is why Dark Souls hasn't died.
This longevity is a direct result of the philosophy that permeates every aspect of it.
So, next time you die, reflects that, in a way, you are offering yourself up to the god of video games.
