I Beat the Dark Souls Trilogy and All I Made Was This Lousy Video Essay

not a fan of the first 30 minutes complaining about "the way people talk about dark souls" so much. who cares.

The first time I attempted a souls game was actually when DS1 was free with Xbox live gold, way back years ago. I gave up on it almost instantly. Fast forward years later, DS3 was about to release and it looked incredible, I wanted to be a part of that story. So, I made it a personal goal to finish the first 2. I'm glad I did, because they have become my all time favorite game series. If anyone here hasn't tried them yet, give it a shot, and if you fail, keep trying until you find something that works, or someone to help. It's worth it.

Amazing video as always Noah. As a fellow stoner i feel you, this type of game can be challenging, even though though by looking at your footage i now feel like a god with these games.

Anyway i'm curious since you're american, how do you and for the matter most people consume weed over there? I guess joints mixed with tobacco are less popular than in europe. I recently switched to vaping instead of smoking and now i finally feel the drive to play elden ring which was just sitting in my steam library at like 8 hours played for a year and a half.

Soulslike are hassle when you smoke joints regularly, you can't really play more than 2 hours without getting stressed and wanting a smoke, but right after a joint you're so much less focused that you perform way worse and can't play properly. With vape it hits diffrent, being less intoxicated my performance doesn't drop as much and the ritual is so much faster i can do it while i level up lmao.

Anyway just a weird tangent i wanted to share.

oh man it pains me that u see the beauty in details and implications of ds1 and 2 but almost refuse to see it in ds3

I hope you play Demon's Souls some day. RPCS3 plays it nicely, if you don't have/feel like getting a PS3 or PS5.

Killer video

Still the best Dark Souls video of all time.

I've been watching your videos for years, but now YT is preventing adblockers from working and making YT customer services even worse; in short I will be quitting YT and unsubscribe from every one using ads.

The intro bumper for this one is absolutely sublime, I just love the execution of it so much. Haven't even watched the piece yet, just wanted to share that!

I thoroughly enjoyed your opinions of difficulty. I'm really just an observer of dark souls. I tried the first one and ironically it's the world rather than the fights I just dont have time for.

There's one small blindspot in your examination of this trilogy, and particularly Dark Souls 3 as a summation of everything that came before it - it seems you didn't play the actual first game of this lineage, Demon's Souls? I hope you'll do a playthrough of that (especially since it's been remastered for ps5) and do a video on it

This series wasn't created in a vacuum, you have succinctly contextualised and encapsulated the exact intentions of the developers, Did you win? Did you learn? Did you feel it? Never allow anyone to gatekeep these games, dying builds character. No one says "Great accomplishment circumnavigating the globe, but it's only REAL circumnavigation if you're blindfolded". Exceptional work, carry on. Safe journeys. ❤😊

>"analysis video"
>is just a summary

I had NO IDEA about the adaptability/agility thing in dark souls 2. I went into it right after playing the first game and, like you predicted, I quit because it felt unbelievably punishing and unfair for a reason I couldn't quite pin down.

I'm actually pretty excited to take another look at DS2 now that I know about that hidden iframe mechanic!

Does he talk about the Manus fight somewhere? Not sure if I missed a section or something... It's such a thematically satisfying conclusion to the DLC and I was really looking forward to hearing about his experience with it

I love this guy, he sounds like some kind of mix between Raycevik and PlagueOfGripes and is interesting.

Great video. Also yeah fuck Fume knight. I had a similar experience and also it's a game I think is better than credited.

Your statements about reactions and animations apply to AC6

There's no way this guy uses a shield

Stop pronouncing attribute wrong

Id care more about this if you didnt keep strawmaning the easy mode argument, as youve already said it exists by leveling by items and by summons, the formula doesn't need anything as direct unsubtle and satisfaction robbing as an easy mode. Midwit gamejurno take imo

"Fun" fact: the GOTY edition of Dark Souls II is also subtitled as "Scholar of The First Sin", not just the remixed version. Imagine the confusion when I bought for PS3 the GOTY edition and expecting the changes for the "Scholar of The First Sin" and seeing none of them. I thought they applied to the previous generation consoles too. Even more confusion would ensue online discussing the game. "What do you mean I'm not playing SOTFS? It says so right on the PS3 case I have here... Wait, what? So the changes are only for current gen? That explains a lot."

Egmar's Portal of Refreshing.

“For me, I took the game at its word when it said Victory Achieved” single greatest own to pretentious git gudders. Its a game its supposed to be fun. I love noah.

I'm sure someone else already brought it up but there is actually 4 endings. The fourth one is where you just take the flame from the firekeeper. I always wondered what that meant.

I know this is dumb but i had to drop the video cause the way you were mispronunciating most name in DS 1 was just giving me anxiety for whatever reason, i'm sorry.

You keep saying that nothing is explained, or that no backstory or history is mentioned or even hinted at, but that just shows how little effort you actually put into any of this. Every single piece of armor, every shield, every weapon has an item description, and if you read them, and pay attention to what's going on in the game, and the dialogue of the NPCs (this includes the stuff they might say when not talking to you) you can have a pretty decent understanding of the story behind the world. Even more so if you pay attention to the artwork, and the designs, and the sculptures throughout.

The princes aren't Lord's of cinder. Lord's of cinder have already linked the fire. Aldritch, yhorm, the abyss watchers, and ludleth are all different lords from different times. The princes have never linked the first flame.

I don't think you're in a position to criticize anyone about not putting effort into anything when you've not only shown that you're perfectly willing to cheese the majority the game, and have said that you wouldn't even have continued playing any of them if you weren't being paid to do so. Holy shit, talk about a complete lack of self awareness.

I wish the Abyss Watchers were a bit harder. They stagger so easily that they really should've had more hp and do more damage. Too easy to stun lock and remove half a health bar in one go.

Not true about the princes. The younger one is perfectly vulnerable to damage while on his brother's back if you can hit him. I find the farron greatsword achieves this very well.

So you got gud. That's exactly what happened, and it's what we all do. Getting good doesn't mean minmaxing a melee build and learning exactly which frames to dodge or parry in, learning every single move a boss does and the exact timing of every single attack. It means finding something that works for you. If sitting back and spamming spells at enemies is how you like to play, that's how you play. If you dance with the boss, countering each other's moves and playing on a knifes edge, that's how you play. Yes, personally i think using summons cheapens the combat experience, more so when it's another player. You experienced that when you didn't really get to fight ornstein and smough. But that's what makes gamers so diverse. Some of us have a certain "code of ethics" that we play by, some win by any means necessary.

You had so much gripe with "git gud" and yet you described your journey that ended with you "got gud".

I'm rewatching this after playing Armored Core 6, and I think your notations about difficulty and the unique, atomized difficulty adjusted by your build has been a humbling reality check. I was starting to get unreasonably haughty about mech builds and what weapons people chose to clear bosses in AC6. I'd forgotten the thesis you'd put forward when I first watched this Dark Souls essay, let alone how it applies to Armored Core 6. It's been a good reality check for me.

Man these newer comments are just proving why souls fans are the worst lmao

I dont think power corrupts, I know power REVEALS the truth of what someone will do what they are capable of, for weal or woe

this video is so good that Ive watched it all while disagreeing entirely with your take on ds2 and ds3 execution and still had a great time

Noah im still trying to figure out how you beat three souls games without knowing you could upgrade weapons...

I love this video so much.

the ceaseless discharge section is simply not true- asserting that you somehow 'know' that running away is the 'right' way to defeat the boss, while asserting that whoever just fights the boss in a regular, reactionary way is stubborn while ridiculously over exaggerating the difficulty of one of the easiest bosses in the game is a poor argument for sure. really good vid tho

edit: the fume knight saga makes me feel so bad for you. you bashed your head against a wall for 8 hours only to reject actually learning the boss mechanics ( for the sake of making a point??) and just to wait for a summon to prevail. i have nothing against summoning players or npcs, but why do you and so many others like you have against simply learning game mechanics and learning boss movesets, similarly to the you took the time and were rewarded against gael (albeit you didn't learn his mechanics, but at least you learnt an interesting and key word rewarding way of defeating him, unlike fume knight or ornstein and smough)? . it's refreshing to see a genuinely introspective vid from someone new/ outside of the souls series, but you're genuinely missing out on what myself and many others consider to be the best or at least one of the best parts of fromsoft games: the bosses and their mechanics, the moment to moment combat. no hate at all but i'm confused as to why you berate the toxic, yes, community of souls games, but then take that same elitist attitude in regard to ur playstyle?

also side note you take such massive issue with the 'git gud' stuff but you do git gud throughout ur playthroughs. git gud (while you are absolutely correct in that 90% of people who say that don't have any good intent & are just stroking their own egos) refers to not only getting better mechanically in combat i.e. learning attack windows, reflexes, movesets, dogde timings etcc, but improving awareness of environments and resources which you have done and have recognised doing i.e. realising elemental weaknesses, the aforementioned ceaseless discharge thing etc.

if you do the dlc first and beat it and help good boy sif first and then fight him later he will know who you are and howl

Just here to leave another positive comment. I love this and the Elden Ring, Sekiro, and Bloodborne videos so much. The best I business writing about my favorite games and yet, the chuds still were loud enough to break through to Noah. How saddening.

"The only thing the Fume Knight is weak to is patience."

This is why I love you! Damn, what a beautiful sentence