This is a followup to @SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net ‘s recent thread for completeness’ sake.
I’ll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre… in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of “doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book” puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
I wish FromSoft games had a story mode or something so people could still experience the world without dealing with the bullshit. Now, I love the bullshit (mostly) and I think it’s a really good, clever game that rewards you for paying attention, but I won’t deny that losing a bunch of souls because you died to something stupid is extremely demoralizing. I have no doubt there’s a bunch of people who would really enjoy the world of Dark Souls if they could just experience it in a more friendly way.
I think this is exactly where people differ in relation to Fromsoft games, and it’s really a coin toss… you either find this kind of bullshit all-my-souls-gone moment demoralizing and frustrating, or you go “ahh fuck! well, let’s try again” and carry on… I’m happy that I happen to be in the latter category, as it turns out, and find it immensely enjoyable even when I get fucked over by the game lol
For some reason I’m more willing to put up with grueling gameplay in Armored Core games than Shadow Dark Demon Prepare To Die Blood Brace Belden Bing games.
EDIT: I sinned against the holy Shadow Dark Demon Prepare To Die Blood Brace Belden Bing by making a reference to a marketing campaign in the joke name I used to summarize 3+ games
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I don’t give them as much of a pass as you say. I want Armored Core games to have difficulty sliders and accessibility options.
I suppose the aesthetic difference is grimdark quasi medieval schlock is tiresome to me and big flying robot go brrrrr.
I am not mad about it. It’s just eye rolling marketing I poked mild fun at, and poking fun at the game’s marketing clearly upset you so you reacted to that with directed hostility toward me for most of your reply.
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Almost nothing good tends to come after an opener like that, especially when it’s video game related.
Over a video game. Over poking fun at some goofy marketing.
Over a video game. Over poking fun at some goofy marketing.
You’re being a living stereotype of a toxic Souls/Blood/Brace Belden Bing fan. Look at the wall of text you just put up.
I didn’t actually state that much dislike for the games directly at all (I liked the Dark Souls series more than Elden Ring, and I did like those somewhat), but because I poked fun at a marketing gimmick, here’s your wall of text.
What you just did is old fashioned standard toxic fandom cringe.
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I don’t think it’s a good take you’ve just used one minority groups struggle to justify undermining another by tacitly enabling their content and normalisation because “my mission”.
It’s gross. Randomly brought up out of nowhere to defend a fromsoftware game of all things.
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Have you tried Synthetik? It’s full of difficulty sliders.
So I mostly don’t want to reply to the vitriol beyond what I already have, but by most reasonable understandings of grimdark, I would contend that the Soulsborne games aren’t particularly grimdark. They are a little tonally and very aesthetically dark most of the time, but that’s not what grimdark is. Grimdark is Guts dragging himself over broken glass for months trying to protect Casca from the demons that they both attract and not even being able to sleep more often than like once a week because there’s always some fucking phantom sneaking up trying to eat their souls or something. Grimdark is oriented around animosity and squalor as much as powerlessness and morbidness.
Yes, I did use Berserk as a contrasting example.
Dark Souls is extremely gothic in its writing in the sense that it’s perpetually mournful of basically everything in the world because the world is already mostly dead and the rest of it is dying. You can say that’s tedious or tacky or whatever and that’s fine, I’m not telling you to like it, but it has a very different tone from what “grimdark” suggests. If most of Dark Souls was like Blight Town, you’d have a good case, but most of the time you’re in ruins or natural environments fighting off echoes of the past while reading epitaphs. On a story level, the struggle isn’t dedicated opponents or even really your own weakness nearly so much as it is the entropy of the universe.
Yes, the intro cutscene to DS2 is in many respects grimdark. Go look at another one, literally any of the other ones.
Okay Bloodborne is, well, ironically less gothic in the sense I described but it’s oriented around cosmic horror, the “grimdark” is mostly a veneer that you get baited on before the werewolves start having 4 mouths and tentacles. It is very blood blood nightmare blood though, but the “nightmare” part is pretty cool
I’m not really disagreeing with you there. I used broad strokes outside of the lines and I know it.
Again, as I said elsewhere, I actually enjoyed the Dark Souls games somewhat, including the atmosphere and themes of an old world refusing to die and a new world that is scary and new trying to emerge from it, but less so Elden Ring (which I argue, and you can disagree, was more into the “grimdark” aesthetic even if not technically precisely hitting all its checkmarks, especially the backstories of numerous opponents). My main issue is with the toxic side of the fandom overall of the subgenre and its many associated titles, where even bringing up the silly marketing edge in “Prepare To Die” can result in walls of text and personal attacks.
I don’t really know what to think of Elden Ring tbh. I don’t think it’s a very good game, but I think the relationship between society and cosmology in it is actually really cool (at least sometimes) and way more than I can remember seeing from basically any other game.* I also really like the cult that seems to be based on idealizing achieving immortality by reversing death, where normally the body is destroyed and the soul persists, by having the soul destroyed and the body persisting, turning the subject into kind of vegetative post-human (and maybe sort of a god?)
idk, it has a lot of stuff in it that is baffling but makes just enough sense to be interesting, which is just what I like compared to the common fantasy route of, if not being hopelessly paint-by-numbers, doing imaginary particle physics for no reason, like the cosmological equivalent of GoT politics where there is a lot of information but very little of it means anything at all in terms of themes or expressing ideas external to the text.
Elden Ring is way higher fantasy than the previous games (following the trend of escalation), which makes it harder to categorize as grimdark fantasy is usually very deliberately low fantasy for obvious reasons, but idk.
*There are interesting text-dumps in Elder Scrolls books, but that stuff almost never appears anywhere in the actual game, whereas it actually does factor into Elden Ring at least a bit (especially the endings)
Fine, I’ll say grimdark signifiers if not a technical adherence to some academic definition, like “hehe this guy strung up and he ate poop thrown at him” details.
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After that massive wall of text you just posted on the other comment chain, yes, you do seem pretty mad that I made fun of that silly “prepare to die” marketing gimmick.
Then stop living up to the stereotypes of a toxic fan. Full stop.
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Disengage.
I think that’s just watching lore videos on YouTube