It’s Hater Week here in Aftermath and I have volunteered to defend Soulsgames because I am a masochist. I’m not going to defend the genre writ large because, with the exception of Lies of P, most companies that are not FromSoft suck at making them. I’m just gonna defend the games that FromSoftware makes because those are the ones I love, respect, and know better than half of my relatives.
🤝
This is a companion piece to Luke’s ‘I’m just not into Souls games, I’m being tested enough as it is’
Luke is offering the point to my counterpoint in this argument because Soulsgames are the most anti-Luke shit I could possibly imagine. I know Luke very well, having worked with him for over a decade, and he dislikes needless, sadistic pain in his games. He likes games about football and sicknasty (but not scary) shooters but also grand, slow moving strategy games named some shit like 1215: Britannia Abostum where you look at a big map for several hours. He plays games for “fun.” It’s not that he does not like difficulty, he’s just got a family and solar panels and shit to do like run a website. He has come to the quite rational realization that we have a limited time on this earth and there are better things to do than having a fastball lobbed at your nuts. Many people are like this; they tried these games and simply cannot be bothered, and I respect that in the deepest pit of my being.
I, on the other hand, love being hounded like an escaped convict by my games. I have come to the conclusion that life and to some extent comedy are defined by suffering and that there is a purifying element to earning a win. I want the most fucked-up creature a Japanese fantasy illustrator can conjure to ruin my entire day. I want the most cryptic, unknowable secrets and the most counterintuitive game mechanics humanly possible. I want stories with no happy endings in a world full of pain where you have to read like 500 item descriptions to figure out what the hell is going on.
The simple fact is that nobody does it like FromSoftware. They are some of the hardest working people in the business and somehow stagger their projects so they’re giving fans red meat on average once every other year. In a world where much of the industry is having difficulty capturing that old magic, From’s transformation from the developers of Steel Battalion: Heavy Armorto this has been nothing short of astounding.
A good portion of this is that they have endlessly and smartly upcycled selected assets and animations for over a decade. You will see an ancestral moose boss in Elden Ring, be stunned by it, and then only realize years later that it has the same animation as a reindeer enemy in the most wretched runback in history from Dark Souls II: Crown Of The Ivory King.They are so good and efficient at reusing stuff that they have escalated it to a form of high comedy, and even when it gets long in the tooth, the results are difficult to dispute. Nightreign is basically what happens when you give a newish director a game and a bunch of assets and tell them to go absolutely nutty stapling them together. It’s a lean game that turnsElden Ring inside out and is one of the single most interesting multiplayer games in years as a result. While many other companies have become trapped in development Samsara through no fault of their own, FromSoftware feels like it is constantly building on its previous successes.
The stories themselves usually revolve around a continued perpetual cycle of suffering. They’re oblique and disquieting, grand fantasy worlds with impossible geometry and old deities that work by not having to explain themselves overtly, a rarity when most games simply don’t have that latitude. Part of this is that From is on an incredible winning streak, and the other part is that they have cultivated an audience willing to meet them halfway, or at least watch a lot of YouTube videos. The success of Souls games are as much a story of their audience as the games themselves.
Despite the trite git gud stereotype, I do not find Souls fans condescending to other people except other Souls fans or themselves. These games are hostile by nature, but something the player chooses to engage with, and you can put the controller down at any moment. If anything, the meme I think of more often is “Don’t Give Up, Skeleton!”, an online affirmation that players would put in front of skeletons they found in the environment. Despite the dour backdrop, there is an indefatigable energy that radiates from these spaces. It is the spirit of jolly cooperation, the feeling of truly earning something, of killing a death god with strangers only to have them Y-Pose and drop carved wooden orbs on the ground that shout “VERY GOOD.”
It also cannot be stressed enough how endlessly funny the games are. Half of this is the perpetual upping of sheer creative malice — transforming basic enemy placement into a batsu game. They’ll drop wolves on you from the sky like paratroopers just to fuck with you. No reveal has ever made me shout “are you fucking kidding me?” like phase two of the Guardian Ape in Sekiro. There’s a high fantasy Bugs Bunny bit in practically every room, and your ass is Elmer Fudd.
In addition to From’s own comic creativity, there is the seemingly infinite capacity of the player base itself to construct elaborate bits. This week I got raided by a person in Dark Souls 2 named IFIGHTWITHYOURWEAPON, who respectfully walked up to me, switched to the weapon I had equipped, methodically kicked my ass, then respectfully bowed as I died. I gotta give them credit, that is fantastic nominative determinism.
More than anything I’m just shocked at how gargantuan these games have become given what they are. It’s kinda like when you realize One Piece is the best selling manga in history despite being inscrutable to outsiders, clearing well over 1100 chapters and featuring some of the most bizarre character designs I’ve ever seen. In the case of Souls games this feels like a function of few games hitting quite like that anymore. To play them feels like you are briefly living in an alternate timeline where the difficulty curve did not taper as games expanded their audience. Sometimes it feels like there is very little mystery in modern games, and yet Souls games have the capacity to surprise you for years. Nothing is quite like what FromSoftware has built, but I also fully respect anyone who simply cannot be bothered.
