Mechanical Evaluation 1: Dark Souls Combat Part 1

I used to play shooters almost exclusively. In fact, my brother and I once noticed that out of our selection of 15 PS3 games, 3 or 4 did not have any firearms on the front cover.  This seems pretty typical of the times, with shooters making up 21.2% of all video games sold in the U.S. in 2012 . Shooters were only beat by action games, ahead by a margin of 1.1%.

Then, something wonderful happened. Spring 2012, a good friend of mine introduced me to a dark, disturbing, death-filled cesspool of suffering known as Dark Souls.Chris Urie of Arcade Sushi put it this way: "The design Lordran (the game's setting) is a work of sheer, dark, mind-bending brilliance. It is a painting with pixels. Intersecting circles. The world of Dark Souls is like a Venn diagram in three dimensions where character, philosophy, and design all intersect."

Retrieved from Arcadesushi.com

In my first experiences with Dark Souls, I only noticed sword, pain, and my face intersecting. But with more time to study its intricacy, how can one deny that video games have an important place in future storytelling?

Anyway, learning through death after brutal, bloody death was painful, I knew from the beginning that it was a fair game, and could feel that these deaths were warranted by the errors I was working on fixing. (Good attribution, right guys?) 

Additionally, this was exactly the right kind of challenge for me: I was always drawn to shooters because of their status as the quintessential test of skill, requiring an engaging blend of mental agility, hand-eye coordination, and a bit of strategy, for optimal results. Since I have always had such a penchant for testing this skill-set and combat readiness, (and a romantic's appreciation for knightly, stabby combat.) which it corresponds to, the move to Dark Souls, (which does all of this in a way that, to me, deeper and more interesting than a shooter,) was rapturous for me.

That covers my reason for picking up Dark Souls, so next post, I will begin to give more detail on the ways the combat system is so engrossing to me.

Thanks for reading! 
-Kenny White
PSN: Fatalis_Veritas