Warning wall of Unadulterated Fanboy Orgasmic Hyperbole follows:
Holy Shit this game is fucking beautiful, it's literally a pinnacle in the field of game design. Not just in terms of art, music, and story for games but just the way the systems are made and how it takes the players interaction with the game into account.
Not just all the intense and varied combat situations and ways it challenges you from everything like the way it forces you to make difficult choices about how you equip your character, allot skills and stats that have legitimate consequences on your game experience. The way the player action system is constructed with hitboxes, branching attack animations, stuff like invincibility frames, ranges of moves, character movement speed and options. The enemy AI is kind of mechanical in a lot of cases but they can both play it to their advantage and hide really well to make you forget that you're actually fighting an AI sometimes some boss enemies even have player character levels of care given to their animations, the bosses can be kinda wonky when they're running into the slightly too small arenas and stuff, but even the invading phantoms kind of fight you like real people and you're not quite sure who you're dealing with at times.
I just spent like what feels like at least 6 hours grinding to beat Pontiff Sulyvahn over the last two days and as I've been thinking about it deconstructing what was going to be my strategy to beat it. My goal in these games is to beat all the bosses solo without co-op help and this boss became a real roadblock for me, and I realized how much like a fighting game it was, I was worrying about things like chip damage, guarding, dodging, parrying and whiff punishment. I was struggling with it for hours until I walked away from it for a few hours then I came back and beat him on the second try after almost dying on the run up to the boss lol It was an epic fight too it lasted at least 5 minutes and I almost died going in too hard trying to get the kill when I was completely out of estus with the boss at like 20% at the end but I clutched it out. I want to use the word transcendent to describe how it felt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm0srA2Hrkg
Like the fact that the combat system is that deep in a fucking JRPG is literally mind blowing. There's nothing else quite like it, I think DS3 might be the closest thing to actually playing D&D out there for a single player experience. This is what the original Castlevania games set out to become.
This game might literally be the most beautiful piece of art I've ever seen in my life. Just listening to this beautful music looking through menus, all this Gothic architecture, art, music, and storytelling it just executes on everything at such a high level. This game deserves a round of applause from the video game playing public, because holy shit they knocked it out of the park.
You could make the argument that they've been kinda making the same game for awhile now even starting back from King's Field, but it's not it's different. They took everything they learned and executed on every aspect to perfection. It's the elusive 10/10. They broke down the formula after years and years of hard work and refining it and made this beautiful work of perfection, like Tetris, like SMB 1-1, like SF2, MGS, and SC:BW.
I always think of Bloodborne as a beautifully hand-crafted swiss made watch.
Dark Souls 3 is like the video game equivalent of something like the Duomo in Florence.
This game is a religious experience, I'm not even joking. If you're someone who likes video games even a little bit you owe it to yourself to play this game. This is the the most perfect Video Game to make the games as art argument that's ever existed imo. The lore that borrows classic elements yet manages to be unique enough to grab people's interest and it's predominantly interwoven into the games item descriptions of all things.
The quests with the NPCs usually have only one or two ways they can come to a conclusion, but sometimes they simply don't conclude. That's kind of an outcome as well, like your path with this npc you ran into never crossed again and you don't know what happened after that. The things that trigger these events are really easy to miss, it kind of fosters the player storytelling aspect of it, there's a kind of arcane system that governs how the npc stuff plays out, sometimes you'll miss a chance to talk to them because you went to a couple locations in ways that the quest didn't allow for maybe it would break or idk they just planned it like that?
It does horror really well, for a video game the way they get you to fear for the life of your player character. Each character creates a character from some templates before starting by creating an appearance for them, in a way you're forming an attachment with your avatar, creating their appearance and equipping them with weapons and armor as you progress through the game. There's areas in this game I've been too scared to explore. There are areas in Dark Souls that you will want to avoid like it's on the wrong side of the tracks in Southside Chicago. For me it's that area in the catacombs where they have that crypt you go down where they have all the torches and those fucked up insect/mollusk beastman type enemies with the spear/shield combo and poison spells, there's this nasty fucking Pyromancer beast enemy that's chucking plasma at me the second I come down those stairs past a group of giant rats and there's a pathway right before the sewer looking area with the poison spitting bullfrog/cockatrice bastards I ran past all that shit trying to get this Red Knight motherfucker with the dragon bone smasher who had been holding my 12k souls hostage from me trying to get whatever he's got to drop and I never managed to take him down. I wanted to snipe his ass from the bridge because I could take out the Black Knight guarding it but it was like he knew I was about to cheese him and he was nowhere to be seen, so I gave up after I lost my souls and went on to the next area.
The designs of a lot of the non-humanoid monsters are simply horrifying too. I'm not going into detail but there's at least one or two monsters in every Dark Souls game and Noped the fuck out and there's no shortage in DS3 either. Even stuff like just Dogs are terrifying, they aren't much of a threat but they tend to jump out barking at you and can overwhelm you if you catch the attention of two or more at the same time. Fromsoft has the scariest dogs in video games period, maybe even among horror genre works in general.
Here's a specific example of the storytelling through the game's actual level design. At the Lake with the Giant Enemy Crabs after the Road to Sacrifices bonfire, on the right side of the area there's a little bank you can walk on that's above water and there's flower blossoms that have fallen on the ground. If you look in the distance you can see a line where there are no flower blossoms, so you follow it and it leads you from the base of this tree at the near end of the area, past these creepy coral bug critters who had been in previous dark souls games, while introducing you to a new enemy type that's chained to a crucifix before it leads you to a gate to another side area that's guarded by this weird little poison barnacle/bug enemy next to a tree, but you run up to kill the bug with one swipe and you wakeup the Crucified feral zombie creature chilling behind the tree who's just hidden out of view, until the moment you run up on that little smoke bug. I played through that area before a few times before but I just replayed it because I needed a refresher on how it went, and I actually got surprised even though I knew it was coming panicked and died to the enemy, I still need to go back to collect my souls LoL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49mg9mdV264
It's no accident that this game is this good. The team that came together to design and create this game is brilliant and you can really tell how much thought was put into the game's design. Even when they're playing around with the tilesets that look like they were leftovers from the Chalice Dungeons in Bloodborne, the way they put the puzzle pieces together with stuff like enemy placement is thoughtful and they play with enemy locations and ambushes in varied ways. And the way enemies react and are grouped together to challenge the player are different enough to keep them interesting, some enemies will be a challenge, some will not attack and die from you accidentally passing wind on them. Sometimes they'll put another environmental element against you like how instead of just walking dumbly toward you constantly, sometimes they'll sit back and attack with spells or ranged and try to zone you out, some enemies will scream at you and go through some terrifying transformation and come running for your ass lol
I have no idea how far I am (I have 2 of 5 thrones filled I guess you might say) but right now I feel like this game is the GOAT. I'm really looking forward to seeing what else the game has to offer because I hear it keeps getting better as it goes on.
