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S2 Ep98: Dark Souls III
76 Plays6 years ago
FULL SPOILERS: Dark Souls III
Join us for the episode that has been three years coming...Dark Souls III.
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
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Join us for the episode that has been three years coming...Dark Souls III.
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Banter
00:00:02
Speaker
I believe. I feel the scent of ash upon thee. Thou art the one of whom Uncle Gail spoke. The one to show me flame.
00:00:55
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going, Dave? I don't know. Um, I just wanted to lean into my mic for that good audio quality of my own confusion. Just real serious.
00:01:14
Speaker
I don't know. I can't think of like funny things anymore. It's not like a funny mood typically, unless it's self-deprecating that I'm like firing at all cylinders. I love it. It's like, uh, start analyzing our own traits and you're like, there's so much comedic ammunition. Also, I feel terrible about myself, but that's, uh, that's life and our, uh, our generation, you know?
00:01:39
Speaker
Yeah, I say that, but there are definitely people who are like they see the world significantly different or less cynically than I do in some ways. And they're just like like my wife, for instance, she's super happy, joyful, bubbly. I can't relate. Yeah, she's kind of a C word, you know, where she is compassionate, compassionate, curious, because she's a very friendly, outgoing person.
00:02:10
Speaker
But that's no reason not to keep recording the podcast. So we'll pump one more out here. You physically can't stop us. Right. People have tried. People have tried. Could you not? No. No, I can't not. That's actually the most common request we get at the Gmail address is just like, could you just stop recording episodes?
00:02:36
Speaker
What's funny is it's like people could not listen, right? Like they could choose not to actually unsubscribe on Spotify or whatever. But instead, no, they read and they're like, it's imperative that you just stop recording episodes. Me not listening is not enough. That's a podcast distancing. Don't listen to it. Don't link it to your friends. Be careful what media sources you go to.
00:03:03
Speaker
That would make a great joke. Just the anti-share at the end. Unsubscribe. Dislike this. Maybe we can see if our followers really get behind what we say. If we actually ask them to stop listening. If we see a dip in the numbers. I'm concerned. I'm very concerned. A final dip. It goes to zero and it never goes back up.
00:03:30
Speaker
It's a final blip on the heart monitor. Yeah, it's just a beep. But hopefully you guys like this episode because it's going to be a long one. This is what, three, four hours plan, something like that.
Dark Souls Series Discussion
00:03:44
Speaker
Yeah, it's like two Joe Rogan podcasts mushed together when I have plans. I actually just have the audio over to Joe Rogan podcast, so we'll sign up now. This has been a very long awaited, though.
00:04:00
Speaker
Yeah. Um, we specifically did not record this one. Let's never talk about the name of the episode. We specifically waited to record this one because we realized that we were doing essentially one a year. Yeah. So we wanted to space it out to be impactful. And we screwed up with Sekiro because I remember like when we signed the contract and blood back when we started, we're like, all right.
00:04:23
Speaker
We will record the podcast until we run out from soft games. And it's just like, oof, it's a lot of impetus here, a lot of impetus.
00:04:33
Speaker
Jokes on them, gonna go back to Demon's Souls. Oh my gosh. Please, please no. Please no. Don't write in, don't request anything. No. But yeah, this one's Dark Souls 3. The third game. Hell fucking yeah. In the Dark Souls series. Spoilers. The best game in the Dark Souls series.
00:04:57
Speaker
Yeah, I fully stand by that. I have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to say, no, one is actually. But the thing is, one has a lot of nostalgia with it. And as much as I loved the design and how it set the stage for what I know of FromSoft stuff and what to expect, it's clunky as fuck. And Dark Souls 3 is smooth as butter in comparison.
00:05:25
Speaker
You can tell how smooth it is because you can roll for days. That is one of the dinks kind of against PVP is I'm going to go hit that guy and you just see them keep rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling. It never stops. Yeah. Yeah, they they really evolved in their knowledge of the kinds of games they wanted to make over the series and reacted to fan feedback. So like Dark Souls one you mentioned.
00:05:54
Speaker
brings us in and has a lot of clunky features, but really cool ideas no one else is playing with. It's timeless for that. Dark Souls 2 was the second one in the series. I appreciate Dark Souls 2 for a lot of reasons, but it's hard to weight it against 1 and 3 for core gameplay. But they learned a lot. They learned a lot from 1 and they learned a lot from 2.
00:06:24
Speaker
And they learned a lot from Bloodborne and they put it all together in three. Yeah. Um, three does not feel as slow as any of the other games, which I assume is what you were implying with the, the Bloodborne. It just.
00:06:43
Speaker
It rewards you for knowing the actual skill sets, the move sets. Um, and also like every time you do an attack or a roll, it's not punishing you as heavily with your stamina. Yeah. But because it gives you more of like these, these freedoms of options, we're not being punished as hard. They're like the bosses though. They have been able to kind of upgrade their capabilities as well as far as move sets.
00:07:11
Speaker
Cause if you had somebody like Dancer in Dark Souls 1, there's no fucking way. There's no way.
00:07:19
Speaker
It's like just to compare the two games, like you mentioned, Dancer, Amazing in Dark Souls 3, Moonlight Butterfly in Dark Souls 1, you know, like there's a huge improvement in the bosses, you know, across the series. But yeah, so some of the notable differences, I mean, the core gameplay still definitely Dark Souls. Gear rings, optional faith, sorceries, weapons.
00:07:49
Speaker
exploring, finding bonfires, getting two levels, beating bosses. That's all there. Oh, I'm glad they didn't remove all of those. Just to establish for the listeners base features. So you can go back and listen to our other episodes. Most of the things will still apply, but it's very fast. Stamina regenerates really fast. You can cancel out.
00:08:12
Speaker
of some attacks that there's no way one would let you cancel out of. That's the biggest difference for me. It's like if you swung your sword in one, you were in the animation for like the entire swing and then you moving your sword back down to your side. You had the input lag. Whereas if I'm rolling around with Uchikatana in three, I can do like a forward slash with my R1 and then kind of input like roll immediately after. Yeah.
00:08:41
Speaker
now you can just cancel out you can like dodge back do all this nonsense and um it's it's really fast but even though it's maybe less faithful to like night v night combat which was more of what one was doing um
00:08:59
Speaker
It makes the game more fun when it's played like that. And that's the reason a lot of people love Bloodborne for how hyper aggressive it is. I think the same reason a lot of people love three. You can react to things much faster.
00:09:16
Speaker
I gotta say, like with all things, I usually kind of start sword and board. I like to be the meat pie that kind of goes out and does things. It's very physical and can tank a lot of damage. But as soon as they remove my shield in Bloodborne,
00:09:32
Speaker
And they're like, hey, you could parry. I was like, I'm not learning that. And then I just forced myself to become aggressive and learn my ranges. Yeah. Bloodborne definitely pushes aggression even harder than Dark Souls 3 does just because of the
00:09:52
Speaker
I can't remember the name of the mechanic, the Reclaim or whatever. You get health back if you attack an enemy right after they've hurt you. I just call it shitty life steal, honestly. Yeah, you can get the health back. So just like relentless aggression and dodges is all you need.
00:10:08
Speaker
And Dark Souls 3, definitely not that fast, but still really freaking fast. We played through some of this co-op as well. We are filthy casuals. We are absolutely filthy. But to be fair, this is probably my third time playing the game. Yeah. I don't know, probably three or four.
00:10:33
Speaker
Yeah.
Dark Souls 3 Mechanics and Builds
00:10:34
Speaker
So every time I do like a FromSoft game, I always like to start out with like a, it's solo, it's just me. And then afterwards might go back and dick around. Like I really enjoyed going back from my multiplayer Sekiro runs, doing a lot of online co-op there. That was a good time. So it was good to do that in Dark Souls 3 as well. Wait, wait, wait, wait. What? What?
00:10:58
Speaker
Objection. No, that's wrong. Yeah, there's no multiplayer in Sekiro. But one of the reasons we appreciate, so a lot of times when we go back and play these games, we do run through co-op. And co-oping in one, you had to install a mod, like the DS fix mod, basically to make it reliable, because that was all peer to peer nonsense.
00:11:21
Speaker
Co-op in two, you had to equip rings to make it more likely to see each other. You had to pick the same God, right?
00:11:30
Speaker
Yeah. The other key thing there is in one and two, you had just two ring slots, you know, one per hand. I would call them bracelets at that point, but Dark Souls, you can be the bling, bling, ring king with up to four rings, which is pretty nice. Yeah. And you don't have to use one of them for co-op.
00:11:51
Speaker
Dark Souls 2 also had a soul memory feature, which is controversial to say the least, where as you gathered souls by killing enemies, bosses, whatever, that was always tracked. Every soul you accumulated was tracked. And if you didn't spend those on level ups and you lost them all, eventually your soul memory could be so far off from your co-op ally that you couldn't co-op anymore.
00:12:14
Speaker
What were you playing on your own? You can't have friends. Yeah. It was meant to avoid, like, griefing people going through the whole game, joining invasion covenants, coming back to the starter level at level four and being like, hey, welcome to the game, flaming longsword, or lightning or whatever. But Dark Souls 3 just gave up on that. They're just like, hey, if you want to play with a friend,
00:12:41
Speaker
you can use a password. And if you have the same password as another user, you will have no problem finding each other's signs because they show up real fast. And it doesn't matter how far apart your characters are, you'll always be able to play together. Yeah, it was super convenient in comparison. Another convenience of co-op while we're on the subject is
00:13:06
Speaker
Jake could join my game or I could join his and we'd be friendly phantoms. So like, let's say we beat the Boston Jake's game. We'd have to go back to my game and do it, right. Summon him in, et cetera, et cetera. Um, also like Jake can throw me like some token items. Yeah. Like, uh, like you gave me some embers.
00:13:26
Speaker
Yeah, I kept trying to give you embers, but you're like, no, I've got someone sitting here. I always had embers. There was a couple of this is all leading up to things crafted resources, but you had to have them. This is all leading up to, you can also give people weapons. True.
00:13:45
Speaker
So Jake, who had played ahead of me a little bit, because when Jake's into something, he's into it. So he was playing a lot more, and I was diversifying my bonds game-wise. He said, oh, I can take your weapon. And since you don't have this gem to enhance your weapon, to be off of a specific type of stat scaling, I can do it for you. Make it sharp. OK. Yeah, yeah, cool. Sharp. And go in decks, whatever. Let's do it.
00:14:13
Speaker
So I give it to him, comes back and he's like, Hey, here's that thing. Jake, I don't see the item. Jake, did you drop it? He's like, yeah, I dropped it right here. So Jake, nice man that he is, also had apparently upgraded my weapon, increasing its stats by giving it like a level boost. But because it was higher than the highest level of item that I had given him, I couldn't pick it up.
00:14:42
Speaker
Yeah, I trimmed his armor then traded it back to him in the wilderness. Yeah.
00:14:51
Speaker
What's great is that that happened only one time we learned from our mistake. Is that right, Jake? Yeah, that was that was it. I didn't make any more mistakes like that. And I didn't end the game with like five Uchi Katanas in my inventory. It was I think I had to wait for you by the input. The first time was funny. The second time was like, Jake's definitely fucking with me. No, I'm just that bad at this. I accidentally upgraded the second one. That wasn't intentional.
00:15:18
Speaker
That was a good laugh though. I did get my weapon back and I was a swole dex boy. Forced you to diversify your kit for a bit. You couldn't use the Uchi Katana for the entire game. I think I use like a whip or something. I'm like, yes, this is me now. That is a long fall from the Uchi to the whip.
00:15:39
Speaker
Oh, she doesn't have whip range, Jake. Come on. I'd be Valentine up on those enemies. If range is everything, you should just go crossbow though. Alas, I would need ammo, but I could kill any dragon. That's true. Yeah, they have some limitations on trading for that to keep people from twinking too hard.
00:16:05
Speaker
Should we define Twinking? No, we're going to let people think it's a gay thing, we'll move on. Yeah, the one thing I appreciate about Dark Souls is if you played the full series, all of the, they reuse, this sounds lazy, they reuse items, weapons.
00:16:24
Speaker
Um, and most of the time the move sets are very similar to previous entries. Um, and the infusions are like similar and like there's variation, but if you're really comfortable with like claymore or longsword or Uchikatana, um, it remains, it usually remains, um, very familiar, um, through the series.
00:16:47
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't really strike that diversity between games for weapons specifically because it's kind of like, hey, here's how characters operate as far as a lot of the spells as well will carry over with some additions being added. Yeah. But if you're like, this is the one thing I like in Dark Souls 1, can I do in Dark Souls 2?
00:17:08
Speaker
Yeah. Yes. The environment is going to change. The enemies are going to change. But you can still use that same toolset to approach that issue, which is nice. Yeah. They do actually like the availability of certain items varies through the series. But Uchikatana, which he used for this playthrough, is really available super early in one, like first area. You just have to be a heartless killer.
00:17:32
Speaker
Also available in three in the first area. True. You just have to be a Heartless Killer. And also good. Yes. Or cheesy. Yeah. Get the guy off the ledge. Where did you go this time around?
00:17:47
Speaker
I was trying to remember. So eventually I... Did you go Faith? This was, it was a Faith slash quality build. So I got Strength up to 24, Dex up to I think 16, and I used a Lothric Knight Greatsword as soon as I could get one.
00:18:06
Speaker
I gotta say the one thing about great swords is if you hit somebody, you see it. A lot of attacks are just like batter attacks where you're just like, welcome to the sky. You'll be up here. Did you have a shield? That was cute. Yeah. To be fair, it's like it's the most telegraphed of attacks. So for PvP, not as reliable.
00:18:32
Speaker
But if you space it out for an enemy, they're fucked. Yeah. One thing I noticed, um, uh, you talked, you mentioned PvP. I, anytime that I was, uh, invert, which is like PvP able state, um, I was pretty engaged in like a multiplayer. Didn't matter whether it was like a week night, the weekend, like people are still playing Dark Souls three. Um, and it's been like.
00:18:59
Speaker
Oh, I thought you meant like a week night. Oh, oh, right. And then you're making a joke off medieval. I should have. I should have. But yeah, it was very just a lot of player based along. Yeah. Tons of invaders and stuff like that. I had one one time I and I invaded a guy.
00:19:23
Speaker
Because you can actually get the red eye orb stupid easy compared to Dark Souls 1, which requires you to basically either look it up or have already beaten the game once to figure it out. But I had the eye and I was doing some co-op and stuff and I was like, oh, take a break and do a little PvP.
00:19:44
Speaker
fought a guy, lost, went back to doing the co-op thing with SunBru helping people with bosses. And the same guy that had beaten me in PVP summoned me in and we ended up beating the boss together. And then I just spammed out this, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And he spammed out, thank you, thank you, thank you.
00:20:07
Speaker
And then like right before it faded, I just paused for a second. I was like, thank you. And then it disconnected and I'm like, yeah. Oh my God. I love little things like that.
00:20:19
Speaker
I think I've mentioned this in the past, but I love the Dark Souls community. I love it so much because there's outside of like, let's say forum posts and maybe setting up discords and stuff and like connecting outside of the game, there's not really a lot of ways to communicate in the game. So it comes down to like those carving stones to do little emotes or gestures. They're just little things you pick up. But one of the things I love about the community in that same regard is fight clubs.
00:20:49
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I have never been to a fight club outside of Dark Souls 3 because it was right after Pont of Sullivan. Sullivan? Sullivan, yeah. Poncel. Poncel, yeah. Poncel.
00:21:06
Speaker
It's like right after that boss fight, there's like a decent little circular arena. So a lot of people kind of set up camp there, summon in some of their own friends, and then also use an item to allow other phantoms to join. Yeah. So I joined one of these.
00:21:23
Speaker
I think accidentally I was just trying out invading because I'm not an aggressive person. I don't want to join people's games to fuck them up. Right. Now I do. Bloodlust. Bloodlust. I saw like a guy sitting up top and like two people next to him and then I saw one guy in the circle and I'm like, oh, this is an arena because like nobody attacked me when I came in and I kind of understood to go into there
00:21:51
Speaker
And you do like a gesture at the guy and then you fight each other. Yeah. And then I think I won my first fight and then like somebody else came in to fight me and I died after a couple. But again, no words exchanged. There was just an understanding. And that was so cool to me. No, it's freaking great. That's one of the red sign soapstone. It's necessary for that. And you can use that even after you've beaten the boss.
00:22:18
Speaker
which basically I think it's the only one you can still use after the boss is dead in the host world. So people use that for fight clubs all the time. And the host usually is unharmed. It's just invaders because red phantoms, red sign phantoms can fight other red sign phantoms. So it's just invaders fighting invaders and no one's bothering the host, but it's just a fight club because if the host dies, everyone gets sent back and that's the end of the fight club. So why would you do that? There are rules. Yeah. Um,
00:22:47
Speaker
One of the things I like about this one actually is if you... One, it's super easy to switch covenants. They're just like items you equip in the covenant slot. You don't have to abandon another covenant. You can join everyone. But a side effect of that is you can be a sunbro, Warrior of Sunlight covenant. And then if you invade or you get pulled into another world as a red phantom,
00:23:16
Speaker
You don't show up as just a red phantom. You have the gold outline and then a red aura around it. And it looks freaking metal. It's great. Solaire would be so disappointed in me.
00:23:32
Speaker
No, it gives you flexibility too for a certain point in the game in the Deacons of the Deep in the church. Yeah. There is Rosaria, who you can go and talk to her. And I think you have to exchange vertebra shackles or... Yeah, it's the... Was it Fingers? Fingers of Rosaria is the name of the covenant.
00:23:58
Speaker
What you can get from doing their quest stuff and you just can get some passively too. But you can exchange those and be like, hey, I've been going a swole strength boy, but I want to try out decks or luck or just maybe go magic or like sorceries, something like that. You can completely reallocate all your stats and you can do that up to five times. Which is crazy. Whereas in Dark Souls one and two, you're like,
00:24:24
Speaker
Oh, I can grind out some levels and maybe try and put points in. You could do it in two, but it wasn't as convenient. You had to get the, um, it was like an orb or transfusion stone or something like that. It was a consumable item and they were super rare. Um, it's really easy to get pale tongues in this, even if you're not part of Rosaria's fingers. I always feel like they seed each covenant item a little bit, which is nice.
00:24:51
Speaker
Yeah, you can actually farm. It's funny because in three, you can actually farm all of the covenant consumables like necessary to turn in. So even the PvP ones, you could just fight NPCs and grab them. It's not as efficient as just joining a fight club.
00:25:10
Speaker
But it's funny because they're like, hey, in case multiplayer dies, people could still progress in this covenant because they could like farm the NPCs. But it's the one that has really popular multiplayer. So it's actually it's hilarious. The normal way you get the sunlight tokens for warriors of sunlight is you help someone else beat a boss.
00:25:36
Speaker
Or if you beat a boss with a sun bro in the room, you also get a token. It's the friendship, jolly cooperation.
00:25:46
Speaker
But if you invade is a red gold phantom, you're warrior of sunlight and you invade a host and you kill the host, you get a sunlight token. I don't know why. If there is a sun, bro, and something happens, sunlight can occur. Right. It checks out. Doesn't matter as long as we praise the sun. I can't say I have really dabbled too much in the covenants.
00:26:16
Speaker
I think I did Sentinels of Blue a little bit. Yeah. Or one of like the Farron Woods types where you're protecting a region. Watchdogs. Yeah. Watchdogs of Farron, is it in this one? Yeah. Like Watchdogs of Farron or something like that. Which is kind of cool.
00:26:33
Speaker
It becomes like a, hey, you're on my turf type thing. Yeah. So you can just get summoned in to try and kill somebody, minding their own business, just playing through an area. Um, but you're one of the defenders of that area. You also got a hundred percent. It is watchdog safari.
00:26:50
Speaker
I'm never wrong. There's two, I think there's, there's three of those in total, three area defense covenants in this. There's actually, there was more covenants in two, but a lot of them are just like really specific, like the belfry gargoyles covenant where it's just like, Hey, are you up on the roof? If so, we're going to pile on. Yeah. And that was literally all they did.
00:27:16
Speaker
In this one there was a Watch Dogs Affair and Aldrich Faithful, which you're guaranteed to get jumped by as soon as you finish beating the Fanta. Yes. And Spears of the Church from the last DLC. I gotta say that was probably the most boring.
00:27:34
Speaker
the spirit of the church. I mean, it's very specific. It was kind of cool because that one was tied in with the boss fight. Yeah. But we should talk about some of the bosses. We should talk about some
Boss Battles Analysis
00:27:45
Speaker
of the bosses. This game does have bosses. Dark Souls 3 has a very rich lore, very rich areas, very cool enemies, which we're not going to cover all of them. But some of the set pieces throughout these areas are the bosses. Yes. It's kind of like the metric for can you get to the next area, aka a boss.
00:28:04
Speaker
The, uh, the, the first boss. So this is, this is kind of a callback. I'm trying to remember if it was necessary in two. I don't think so. Um, one and three are both, uh, games where you have a, um, a gatekeeper boss. You have to beat in order to progress out of the first area. Yeah. I don't think it exists in two. It was just one and three. Um, and, uh, so you wake up in cemetery of Ash.
00:28:32
Speaker
Just like next to a coffin, you're like, Oh, time to be undead. Guess I'm, guess I'm Ash. Um, go through the tutorial and then I'm going to let you decide how, how we're going to pronounce this guy's name for the duration of the episode. I have always called him Iudex Gundyr. Iudex Gundyr. I like it. It sounds like a Gundam weapon. That's, that's kind of why Iudex Gundyr.
00:29:01
Speaker
Yeah. But after you go through this tutorial, they can remind you, like, hey, here's how you do plunging attacks. Here's how you kick people in the butt. Here's how you attack. Here's how you block. They're like, hey, go pull that thing out of that guy. And you do. But if you play video games, you have a pretty good idea that this guy's going to animate.
00:29:22
Speaker
And he does, and he's this giant plated knight with a halberd. So you fight him a little bit, you get his health down to about half, and then some Bible black stuff starts happening, and he gets this giant black swampy monstrous growth on, let's say 70% of his body, and it changes up his move set.
00:29:48
Speaker
And you kind of panic. So a lot of people will die to the first boss a couple of times because I didn't know that was coming. He has Las Plagas from Resident Evil. It's 100% exactly that. It's just the plague creatures that are created in Resident Evil.
00:30:06
Speaker
Yeah, you know what's funny the first time I fought this guy is that he's like in this kneeling position till you pull out the sword that's on him. But I didn't realize what I like the sword I pulled out of him was the sword you have to stick into the bonfire. Yep. So I was just like, what am I what am I supposed to do after I got past that part? He's awesome, by the way. I struggled with him so much the first time I played until like I got back into the Dark Souls.
00:30:35
Speaker
Yeah, he's kind of like the initial check, as we were saying. But it's a good example of, hey, an animation is coming. Oh, I'll dodge. It's like my animation was not done. Finish his animation, attack comes out. So it's one of those like, I'm going to hit you and you start rolling and then the attack comes. And by then you've already committed. Once you know the timings, it's like the fight's done. That's the one mechanic you have to know for him. It's just dodge timings.
00:31:02
Speaker
Yeah. It's also a test of, did you pick Deprived as your starter class? If so, remake. If you pick Knight, you're probably okay. You can just face tank this guy more or less. Not 100%. It helps. Definitely helped. I picked Knight, the most recent playthrough. Knight, I think that feel is really easy to pick up if you're newer to the series. Yeah, we had
00:31:31
Speaker
I think my impression was that strength was probably the easiest to get into in three. Although after talking to some people, they say Dex is also pretty starter friendly. You can definitely go Dex in three. This definitely was technically challenged. I'm going to hit that guy. It's either I'm going to hit him once for a lot of damage or hit him a lot of times for a little bit of damage.
00:31:57
Speaker
Yeah, if you're coming from Bloodborne, I'd definitely recommend Dex. Just like get super fast, get the wood grain ring, roll for days. That's the obscure, I think. Are there people above me? Probably. I'm just hearing a weird squeak. Yeah, there's ghosts in the attic. Oh, no.
00:32:18
Speaker
You get a ghost in the attic the second boss. I wanted to mention though, it's really cool. You ignite the, I guess it's the second bonfire with the coiled sword from. That fire that you joined. Gundyr, yeah. Yes, yes, yes. And there's all these like thrones about and there's the, the,
00:32:43
Speaker
I almost said fire linker. That's not correct. Um, fire keeper. Uh, and it's really freaking awesome. As far as the central location, it's my favorite in the series. Um, and all of the NPCs that you rescue or like bring back and find the fact that they're all there in this really, really accessible space is just nice.
00:33:10
Speaker
versus other games you're like where's tim runs to the other side of like the main hove tim there you are thank god uh i want to sell these two items okay i gotta go back to john to buy items john
00:33:27
Speaker
It's always hilarious to me, though, whenever you find someone who's suspended in a cage somewhere and you find the key for the cage, you open the cage and the person's like, I will meet you back at town or whatever. And Dark Souls 1 and 2, the NPC kind of just stuck around. And Dark Souls 3 specifically, they actually teleport. There's a fading animation and they do a magical warp. I'm just sitting here looking at the cage
00:33:53
Speaker
I'm like, what did I do here? If you could leave at any point, what did I do here? I didn't want a common loss, I was invited. NPC as well, the rules of it. Yeah, the rules of vampires. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
00:34:17
Speaker
That also gives you warp as soon as you get that first bonfire. This is following in the trend of two and that they're just like, instead of the Lord vessel thing from one, just warp as much as you want. We're never going to keep you from doing that now.
00:34:30
Speaker
I think part of that too is they kind of departed from having this very intricate, overlapping level design, which I know is something that's highly praised in one and for good reason. But other things for like in two and three, the levels are more disjointed and don't necessarily all connect to each other. So it's easier to say, hey, you want to get back to there? You can warp.
00:34:54
Speaker
What's funny is I actually find two the most confusing, even though you can physically run everywhere. I find it really confusing. I don't know why spatially. I think it's just because the paths between areas tend to extend a lot. But in three, you literally, once you reach that first bonfire, you have to warp to the next location, to the high wall. There's no other way to get there. And as soon as you're done with that area,
00:35:23
Speaker
you get carried to the next area. There's actually fewer connected pieces, but it confuses me less than two did. Which I find funny. One thing that's nice in three is a lot of times we were in a given area. You can look off in the distance and see another area. Yes, that's true. They brought that back from one. Yeah, I really do like that. It feels more connected. I'm also like, what's that shit? Can I go there? And it kind of like builds my anticipation as I progressed through the game.
00:35:52
Speaker
But I know you wanted to talk about the boss of Highwall. A little bit. The dancer. Yes. If I had, it's fine. So second boss, we don't need to hit all of these unnecessarily even in order. But Vort of Boreal Valley.
00:36:12
Speaker
Well, it's Boreal Valley. Don't worry, we'll get to it. We will get there actually. But he's like this giant, literally thick boy. The man is all like, man? The thing is all kind of like hips and thighs and legs. And it's always kind of like hunched over. It has like this big mace.
00:36:35
Speaker
and we'll do these decently telegraphed attacks and the strategies usually stay behind and spank him in the ass, which works for a lot of bosses. That's a good default to open with. But once it gets to Vort's rage state, you hear this howl and he's charging across this arena and then also has a freeze breath attack.
00:37:01
Speaker
Yeah, he introduces Frostbite, which I think is exclusive. I'm pretty sure that's exclusive to three. That's their new element. Yeah, it functions similar to curse, right? Yeah, it like produces your, well, depends on which curse. Dark Souls 1 curse killed you. Like outright killed you. Dark Souls 2 curse, I think halved your health. Something like that. And then
00:37:25
Speaker
I guess it works, at least in my recollection, it doesn't work like curse. But apparently it works versus bosses. There are weapons that have frostbite you can use, like the erythyl rapier you can find, rapier, divine rapier.
00:37:42
Speaker
And apparently bosses are actually a lot of them are vulnerable to it. Now, I don't know what they do if they have less stamina. This is all theoretical conjecture. They just stop attacking. You're like, I'm tired. I'm done. I'm done. But yeah, he's he's a really interesting boss and he's one of a set of like themed bosses that are all like the Knights of the Pontiff because he gave them all rings and deformed them. The Dancer is the other one.
00:38:10
Speaker
Dancer is way better though. I feel everyone is thematically amazing. Yes, I hate this Boston. It's one of my favorites. Yeah, that's I think everything that boat that's because the dancer is kind of challenging.
00:38:26
Speaker
Yeah. She has really good AOE coverage for a lot of things with like grabs, 10 hit combos and other things. But the whole time the flow of the fight is very much like a dance. So you have to kind of like learn the rhythmic timings and just kind of work with her movement. Yeah. She's all like flowing sweeps and she's got this like veil and a very ethereal look and is super live.
00:38:58
Speaker
And you either like, you have to run away at certain parts, dash out to avoid constant swings and know when there's a vulnerable moment, you can jump in and do some damage. It just feels, it feels so good for
00:39:12
Speaker
The pacing and I'm so bad at that fight like I I think I tried to cheese it a little bit early like I tried to get in there and because The reason I joke and they brought her up at the same time as abort is because you can kill an NPC who will eventually die anyways in order to fight the dancer And you can do this before you fight for it. Yes
00:39:36
Speaker
But you don't have health at this point in the game, so Dancer's a bad time. But one thing you can do to kind of cheese that whole interaction. So initially I was talking about getting the Uchikatana. There is a master, a sword master you can kill to get it. If you kill him,
00:39:54
Speaker
He can be a summon for the Vort fight. Instead, don't fight Vort, go fight Dancer and have him as your summon. He doesn't deal a whole lot of damage, but boy does he take some hits. So you can kind of have him be like the chump block and you can do that fight super early.
00:40:12
Speaker
Yeah, the NPCs are like, a lot of them are really hardy in three. And I think the multiplayer rules are still in fact, if you have an NPC, like the boss has more health, but sometimes it's worth it, especially if you're, um, you're not the tank. It gives you a tank.
00:40:28
Speaker
Tank is very appreciated in those fights. But yeah, she's really interesting. Came back to her later because she was blocking the path to my sword. My build was hidden, you know, I couldn't get it and complete it until like halfway through the game. You're good at planning ahead for like, I want this item. Where's this item? And then makes like a tree of like, I need to do all these things. Yeah, exactly.
00:40:53
Speaker
I'm like, oh, a new shiny item. God damn. It's a fun game for that, though. Like you can use anything, any. Well, some weapons are viable. I'd say half the weapons are probably technically punch a boss to death. I don't encourage it. The unarmed. And this is actually hilarious. That's one of the. They have like fist knuckles, weapons type things because there's a video, right? One of the.
00:41:23
Speaker
one of the series that young Maestro did was on unarmed, one of his fighters. Wasn't it Karate? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was trying to get out of Maestro. Anyway, I was thinking of Inferno plus is one punch man. Oh yeah. But that's different. Yeah. Um,
00:41:47
Speaker
But yeah, after beating Vort, you go to Undead Settlement. There's a bunch of stuff there. Who cares about it? We'll skip over some of these areas unless there's something that really stands out there that's really cool. I'd say if there's a certain area you really liked or a boss you really liked, you should probably hit that up. The essential thing here is the cursor I did Greatwood, which is a fight nobody really
00:42:17
Speaker
It's like a Metroid boss, right? Shoot the weak points, but you don't have a gun. It's like, go hit the weak points, but don't get slapped by a giant ant. Yes, a fat, very fat ant. But the reason you do it is because you get the transposing kill, which is basically the thing that lets you turn boss souls into usable items, spells, rings, all that stuff.
00:42:40
Speaker
And there's a lot of cool stuff in there. Like, I haven't explored nearly as much as I should because usually I'm like, what's the damage compared to my weapon? Nah, nah, I don't need it. Yeah. But sometimes they'll have literally the boss's weapon, which might have like a unique move set. Cough, cough, the Biswatches. Yes. Oh my gosh, Biswatches.
00:43:04
Speaker
Speaking of, why not cover Abyss Watchers? They're out there in Fair and Deep, which is the Swamp level, which every Dark Souls game has to have. I know we're literally going through fast, but I wanted to share one aside thing for Swamp. There's weapon arts, which is like a special uses your blue meter, your mana, essentially in this.
00:43:27
Speaker
and the dagger has a weapon art where you do a little dash forward. A little dash forward, you just like jump forward. And you can use it regardless of whether you have any blue meter or not, you'll always be able to do the weapon art. And if you just spam this move, you can just dash through the swamp.
00:43:45
Speaker
Huh. So it's like a decent distance on the dash? Yeah, it doesn't matter whether you're in water or not. It always moves you forward basically a little bit slower than a full run. But it's amazing in the swamp. This is advice for the listeners. I might have to go back and try that because
00:44:03
Speaker
Does it even work for deep swamp? Yeah. Any, any water at all. You just go. Hello. Yeah. It's amazing. You just turn into like, it's a really funny kind of shuffling animation too. You can imagine somebody like crouching low with a dagger in their hand and like trying to circle around on somebody, but that's great. But yeah, this watches.
00:44:25
Speaker
Abyss Watchers is a really cool boss fight because you're not fighting one thing. Anything you have multiple, it gets pretty interesting. I'll be fighting one Abyss Watcher.
00:44:37
Speaker
but they're fighting each other at the same time. And then another Biz Watcher comes in. So you're fighting multiple dudes. Yeah. The psychology of it's meant to ramp up, too, because the first one is a one-on-one. And you're like, I could take this guy. He has very low poise. You can stagger him. You can backstab him. Then another one comes up. You're like, what the fuck? Yeah, then it's too. It's really hard to sustain. Then you just try to fight for your life.
00:45:03
Speaker
Then you get boy number three. And boy number three is the red-eye boy. Yeah. All of his attacks are roughly the same moveset, but are better and have fire and leave trails. Yeah. There have been times where I've gone to like, oh, I'm going to backstab this guy, but he does this like full overhand slash that comes back a little bit. Thanks for the hit boxes, Sakurai. And then I can backstab him because I get flinched.
00:45:30
Speaker
Yeah, but it's just such a cool boss fight and the red-eyed guy is the guy that like assists you too And killing the other ones off which is just really cool. He's the only fight I think He's the only fight other than like Iron Tarkas and the Dark Souls series Where you can kind of to a certain extent sit back and watch your buddy beat it for you Yeah, but in this one is he's also the boss
00:45:56
Speaker
And they all share health. So as they're wailing on each other, boss's health is going down. You can just survive. If you don't attack, you can get through phase one and into that fire phase you were talking about. He's so cool. This watch is also just notorious. Artorias, anything with Artorias is awesome. I'm edgy. It's okay.
00:46:18
Speaker
Etchi. Anybody who has like one, one big one handed sword and they're like, this will be enough. Right. His other arm is broken in that fight. This is Dark Souls one. His other arm is broken and he's kicking my butt. And that's his good arm. Yeah. Oh my gosh. So freaking good. So yeah, they, Abyss Watchers are amazing and I use their armor for most of the game because it's relatively light and it provides good protection.
00:46:47
Speaker
And it looks stylish as hell. So much so. It's bloodborne armor, actually. Like it totally looks like it has that vibe. Straps and leather and all that stuff. Whoa, anyway. Deacons of the Deep was OK.
00:47:06
Speaker
Doesn't cause me more trouble this time. The boss fight becomes very AOE heavy because you're literally fighting a congregation, not like Dark Souls 2, get out of here. But they'll keep summoning and more guys and you have to hit the guy who's glowing and that will transfer every so often.
00:47:24
Speaker
Yeah. And then they start to channel like this giant death spell, which will curse you, which as we said, curse will just kill you. So you really have to work on your DPS and like focusing down stuff. But if you have big swings or big AOE magic, very helpful.
00:47:40
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't have AoE when I first attempted this and then I came back with some other weapons. I'm like, oh, this is much better. Also, Ring of the Evil Eye gives you health whenever you kill things. That's pretty good when you're just like slaying thousands of priests. And Hollow Slayer, Greatsword, also really good. Gives you health whenever you kill things.
00:48:02
Speaker
There's a couple of weapons like that here. I'm a sippy cup like a plebeian. And that channel, you can interrupt it. The massive channel is like four different priests all funneling dark energy into it. And so if you hit any one of them, it'll break the channel. But if you had to run away and hide, it goes through walls. It's like you're going to have a bad time.
00:48:28
Speaker
Yeah, having this one guitar did not assist me, did not behoove me in this run. Deacons is interesting, though. I'm not. I don't think I'm a huge fan of the the gang fights, but no. Getting through the catacombs of Karthus again, just, you know, more catacombs. Same thing as those catacombs. You always need to. Is that skeleton dead? Good. Oh, no. There's always a man. There's always the catacombs of Karthus.
00:48:58
Speaker
But no, Wolnir is easily one of the coolest fights. Oh, yeah. Because it's one. The animation for it is you go up and touch a cup. Don't ever touch the cup. Don't touch the cup. And like black smoke spills out of this fairly small room. But then you're in this kind of dark abyss. You realize there's a bit of ground under you at like a slope and then you see
00:49:24
Speaker
There's one item for starting the fight too. You have to run up and grab an item too before you see anything else there. What items do you have to grab after the smoke? I can't remember what it actually is that you pick up. It's something not too important, but as soon as you pick up the item,
00:49:40
Speaker
Then you see yeah fucking highlord warner who is a gigantic skeleton. He has a crown Two glowing bracelets. It's kind of like the old nintendo fights or old Game fights in general, which is these big fucking hands you're watching out for
00:49:56
Speaker
Yeah. So it's a cool thing of like keeping your distance and going in. But then you're in the abyss basically, right? Yeah, you can't run too far back or obviously into him would be bad. But if you do run away from him, he starts like crawling up towards you, which is spooky. It's very spooky. Sometimes he'll crawl anyways. And if you get underneath him, everything is like chest height and down is death. Like it's just.
00:50:26
Speaker
tons of health, death, darkness, death. So you have to...
00:50:33
Speaker
fight him kind of on his own terms. He starts summoning skeletons also because he's a jerk. But I mean, they die. They do die. Because he does like these decently big AOEs where he'll take up a sword, plunge it into the ground, big magic AOE, and a skeleton's like, I didn't see that coming. I'm like, sorry, sorry, sorry, you're dead. Should have called that one. Watch out. Oh, you're fine. Yeah, you break his, you can do damage to him normally, but if you break his bracelets, he takes tons of damage.
00:51:03
Speaker
And if you break both, it's an instant kill. The bracelets are holy and they're where it's keeping him from falling to the abyss. So he actually slides down away from you. It's so good. Yeah. They have a lot of good boss theming.
00:51:20
Speaker
So it's a unique boss fight. That's nothing I like about Dark Souls is there's very few boss fights from like, oh, it's kind of just like that other one. Occasionally, like in every Dark Souls game, there's gonna be like a big demon fight. We're like, yeah, I get it. And you know what to do. But the other ones you're like, what's happening? And I like to see those changes and be challenged by them.
00:51:44
Speaker
Speaking of challenging fights, Jorm the Giant is not one of them. No. So I have a note here that he's kind of like a gimmick boss fight. He has a stupid amount of health.
00:52:01
Speaker
Yeah, and you can fight him down, but he has really obvious telegraph moves. And if you use the one weapon special art where they provide you the weapon, it's like, what, four hits, five hits? Yeah, it's something really stupid. The Storm Ruler is the sword. It's actually like, I think it's a great sword, but it has really low stat requirement and actually also trash damage. It's meant just for this gimmick.
00:52:29
Speaker
It is up near his throne, though. This guy's a giant with a crown. He's one of the Lords of Sender, which we haven't talked about, but that's fine. He's figured out when you play the game. Don't worry. Yeah. I mean, this is all motivation for you guys. Get back in there.
00:52:44
Speaker
Yeah, it's 100% a gimmick fight. If you don't do that, it takes forever to beat him. Just ask Zero Lenny, right? But yeah, he's interesting. I played with an NPC. There's a lot of NPC quests I don't want to talk about at all because they're cool and they sort of don't matter, but they're some of the best the series I think has to offer.
00:53:08
Speaker
And this is where the Onion Knight quest culminates. He helps you fight his old friend Jorm and he has his own Storm Ruler and he makes the fight stupid easy because he can win it on his own. Yeah. You can literally sit back or you can like alternate Storm Rulers to keep him just staggered. It's silly. Yeah. What else do we have here? We have Aldrich. Aldrich is there. He's in an interesting location.
Significant Locations and Lore
00:53:37
Speaker
Yeah, Aldrich is in Anor Londo of all places. Dark Souls 3 original location. Yeah, so as we know with Dark Souls series, you are kind of split between time and time will and worlds kind of overlap on each other.
00:53:58
Speaker
So just interesting to go back to Anor Landa, which was a very iconic place in Dark Souls 1 for the bullshit archer situation, the really cool castle sunset design, and then the big boys themselves. The archers aren't as bad this time though. Oh dear god no.
00:54:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think I remember when we got to Anor Londo when we were all kind of playing through this and we're just like the first time that pops up was such a like mind-blowing moment. I think I messaged you on Discord. I'm like, yo, hit me up in like 10 minutes because I think I was like, I was slightly ahead of you. I was like, let me know what you think. And you're like, dude, I'm like, he's not what I saw. We're good.
00:54:44
Speaker
And the way they get around with this, we're talking about how they have all the same weapons. There's a lot of items that are legitimately like they reference lore from Dark Souls 1 because they're all in this multiverse thing. It's just like, oh yeah, it's just a different world. I didn't put together the pieces, but Dark Souls 3 actually
00:55:04
Speaker
takes place in the future after Dark Souls 1 in the same location. And that was the reveal that like blew my mind. So the other tie in with that is Aldrich looks specifically like another character from Dark Souls 1. One of the Gwyns. Gwyndolin. Yep. Dark Moon Gwyndolin. Like a pandolin. So Aldrich is kind of like a demon worm creature.
00:55:32
Speaker
Yeah, and he kind of ate Darkmoon Gwyndolin. And so this top half looks like Darkmoon Gwyndolin and is like casting magic and spells, but it's also this giant slug. Yeah, he got the title Devourer of Gods, which, you know, that's pretty metal, I guess. That's pretty metal.
00:55:54
Speaker
Last time, just Dave Devour of cheesesteaks. That's still pretty good though. I'll take it. Yeah. He's an interesting fight. It's a pain. The only notable spell is his magical arrows, which are always, always the worst.
00:56:11
Speaker
Yeah, they kind of just shoot from the sky and track you. So if you ever stop running, you're probably dead. It's actually a harder fight for magic users to deal with. Usually they can cheese out a lot of bosses, but this guy is resistant and he punishes people that are stationary. So what if we didn't? Yeah.
00:56:31
Speaker
It's also a fun fight because if you're following Anri's storyline, which I don't want to really get into, although if you, yeah, for the NPC stuff, Anri has reason to fight this guy. Anri's always the opposite.
00:56:46
Speaker
gender or whatever your character is, opposite sex or whatever your character is. So if you're male, she's female. If you're female, she's male. He's male. I was waiting for that. But anyways, if you follow the quest all the way up to this point, there's a sign next to a little glowing orb to light the way. And if you use that, you get summoned into their world and help them beat the boss.
00:57:14
Speaker
I always like that, yeah. It's so cool.
00:57:17
Speaker
And so you can actually practice fighting the boss. Because if you die, it just kicks you back to your sign. Because the summon, if you're at a summon, you don't tend to lose things in Dark Souls. No, you don't get penalized for that. So if you die, you go right back exactly to her sign. You're just like, all right, well, I'll just use it again. Try again. But yeah, it's a really, really cool fight. And has a bunch of lore implications that you can go to Vaadi for.
00:57:48
Speaker
body for almost all lore, especially about Vore Aldrich, the power of gods. Yeah, there's some other there's a couple cool ones. I don't want to hit on too many of these, but one of the locations is Untended Graves. That was another scare, like mind screwy moment because it's it's the same area as where you start the game, but it's super, super dark.
00:58:17
Speaker
And the boss is just a much more capable Gundyr. What's his name in this one? Champion Gundyr. Champion. Yeah. Yeah. It's a... I don't think this one transforms. No. But his movesets are not as telegraphed. They're not really big and slow. He's a legit fighty boy.
00:58:46
Speaker
And I think this area is actually something they haven't really done too much in the series, where it's kind of like reality adjacent to the normal timeline that you're in. So Untended Graves is a world where he was chosen to be Ash, but he awoke too late and the fire faded, which is really interesting. And if you find the firekeeper's eyes in this location, that leads to a different ending, where you screw everything over.
00:59:18
Speaker
Yeah, I never really went with him.
00:59:22
Speaker
No, I think I did go evil almost every single time. It wasn't evil to me. It's a game. I just, I like having that option where it's not, you go through a game and you get the same ending cutscene that everybody does. Cause you do have the choices along the way for how is this outcome going to be? And there's so many NPC storylines you can interact with, which could play a part in that honorees being one of them. Um, I just liked that you.
00:59:52
Speaker
have the option versus being forced into one. So in your playthroughs here, did you ever get one of the endings other than linking the fire?
01:00:06
Speaker
Snuffing the fire. Snuffing the fire? OK. So that could have actually been, there's a couple, I mean, most of the other ones are snuffing the fire in one way or another. But we should talk about the final boss before we talk about the endings.
01:00:24
Speaker
Because you have to get all of these Lord souls together, right? Similar deal to Dark Souls 1 actually. It's the same story. You're getting the Lord souls together. Getting the boys. Cracking the clothing up with the boys. Put all their ashes, get the bonfire active and it'll teleport you to
01:00:52
Speaker
What is basically like one of the ends of time? Yeah, it's the killing of the first flame. Yeah. How do you feel about this boss? So it's not my favorite fight wise, but design wise, it's really cool because you already have the sun that's kind of bleeding out. Yeah.
01:01:16
Speaker
You have like that dark sign up in the sky and then you essentially go into this giant kiln. And it's like kind of like an arena of broken bodies and there is like a small bonfire and the soul of cinder kind of gets up and looks at you and you start this fight.
01:01:38
Speaker
And what's really cool is he switches between these different combat styles. And you're like, that seems all right, guy. So you have to learn how to do it a little bit. But it's kind of meant to represent all of the other people who have gone through their different paths, their different stories, their different play styles for how they either lit the fire or snuffed it out.
01:02:04
Speaker
And then in a second phase, it kind of reminds me of who's that? Oh, Gwyn, Lord of Cinder. Like it's verbatim, the exact same moveset. I don't recall the music changes as well, does it? Yeah, it does. Yeah. Gwyn's theme comes in. It's a, it's, I get, I'm literally getting tingles now talking about it and thinking about it. It was really cool. And the first time it happened, it was so good. I agree. He's probably not.
01:02:31
Speaker
He may be the most memorable boss, but he's probably not the most fun. He's not that hard compared to any other bosses. He's not super difficult or super intricate in design. It's more of his implication and the fight itself. It's a hundred percent. Just every other time that you've been
01:02:50
Speaker
you're fighting one of the inheritors of the flame, the Lord of Sender. It's always just like an NPC, right? And in this one, you fully get the weight of, no, this is every single person who's being Dark Souls. Just the representation of all of them. I'm like, man, there's some serious togetherness going on right now. And I feel it. It's really freaking cool.
01:03:20
Speaker
Yeah, it was a nice end to Dark Souls 3. It's kind of like that can also be me, right? And somebody else's boss. Essentially the end of every player's journey. Yeah.
01:03:34
Speaker
is being that boss slash beating that boss. Yeah. It's, it's, it's the full, it's closing the loop. That's, I think, I think you put it the right way at the end of everybody's journey. And so you can, you can choose to after having beaten the boss, um, uh, ignite the flame.
01:03:54
Speaker
Or, based off of some other choices, there's actually way more endings in this one than any other Dark Souls game. You can go through Anri's storyline and follow the Path of Dark, which is always at war with fire in the Dark Souls series, and usurp the flame.
01:04:15
Speaker
Basically, steal it and snuff it more or less to become the new Dark Lord, which is maybe even too edgy for me. Well, Age of Dark is not necessarily synonymous with Age of Man, right? It's just the absence of fire? Yeah. Although dark and the philosophy of Dark Souls, darkness and mankind and humanity in particular, humanity and dark are very closely related.
01:04:44
Speaker
Most obviously, if you go back to Dark Souls 1 in Oolacil, that was unkempt humanity. That was humanity running rampant. And it was just monstrosities out the wazoo.
01:05:02
Speaker
So that was the usurpation of fire. There's the end of fire, which is if you gave the fire keeper the fire keeper's eyes. And there's some really cool dialogue where she's like, why did you give me this knowledge? She sees the end of fire, which is something she can't usually comprehend because of her role. And she's like, do you seriously want me to do this? Do you seriously want me to end the fire? And she'll take the fire to herself.
01:05:32
Speaker
and claim the fire instead of you.
01:05:36
Speaker
And then there's a moment. There's like five seconds, I think, after she takes the fire, where it switches from a cutscene back to playable gameplay, and you can kill her in those five seconds or do nothing. That's fine. Which one did you do, Jake? I did both, different playthroughs. But if you let her keep it, it's the end of fire.
01:06:01
Speaker
And if you kill her, it's the unkindled ending, which I don't quite remember what happens there. But I love when games do that, though, where it's like, hey, cut scene. By the way, the fire is fading. The screen's growing dark. You have control again. What do you do? That's really cool. Because if you'd let the screen go dark, done. Credits.
01:06:23
Speaker
I wish Dark Souls would just give me a dialogue box at the end saying, hey, did you enjoy playing Dark Souls? Which ending would you like? Right. Let me delete my save to make the final encounter easier for everybody else. That's a different game. Oh, no.
01:06:42
Speaker
We'll get there someday, right? But I was I was happy when I think this was 2016 or something like that when it first came out.
DLCs and Game Conclusion
01:06:51
Speaker
I was happy with this ending. And then the DLC just fully closed the book for me and put a nice bow on it.
01:07:01
Speaker
Yeah. And there are a lot of DLCs that I played with games. You're like, what the fuck was that? Where it seemed like an extra five minutes that they wanted to tack on and like, yeah, you wanted 10 of my dollars. Okay. They kind of just duct tape something to the main experience. And I just, there you go. Here's a side quest.
01:07:20
Speaker
It's not really my jam. But I mean, with these DLCs on top of this, the painted world of Ariandel is super cool in design. Makes me like birds a whole lot less. The accordions or whatever. And the fucking flies. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Not my jam. Find a nice place to rest.
01:07:43
Speaker
But that has probably one of my favorite boss fights because it's just so fucking cool. Is it the actual, the final boss fight? Or is it the guy and the wolf? Nope.
01:08:01
Speaker
It's the actual boss fight. Yeah. Sister Frida and father Ariandel, right? Yeah. Because it's like you fight one and then you fight both and then you fight both? Yeah. You fight one again, but she's super saiyan. Yeah.
01:08:21
Speaker
They really do a lot with it each time. Because for me, I can't necessarily easily conceptualize, hey, what would be a really cool universe to put the player in that's going to be new and different, but also still ties into Dark Souls lore. They're like, hey, remember the Painted World from Dark Souls 1? What if there was another Painted World? How about that? And you get to explore this whole other
01:08:45
Speaker
sub-dimension essentially and I just really like what they do with it and how it actually ties into the story as well. I think the Painted World's probably my favorite Mario level. Big cast on the painting. Mama me! As your meteorologist.
01:09:09
Speaker
So yeah, this is all the TLDR of the Painted World, which I love. And the story goes through Painted World and the Ringed City, but you are being led by Slave Knight Gale, who throws you into Painted World. Well, he pulls you in. He doesn't throw you in. I was still on Mario. By having you touch a piece of fabric that is from that world.
01:09:33
Speaker
which actually still matches Dark Souls 1. You found the doll, which is from the world, so it pulls you in. But he wants you to get this little girl, teach her... Well, not get the little girl. Find this little girl, show her fire, which is necessary to destroy the Painted World so it can be remade, because right now it's decaying.
01:09:55
Speaker
But Father Ariandel, Sister Frieda, they don't want that. They see the end of what is and kind of kind of like it's almost a analogy for the Dark Souls series and From Soft being stuck in that series. I think I think it's not it's not a stretch, I think, to make that comparison.
01:10:22
Speaker
No, I think they were looking to kind of tie it off. I mean, obviously they weren't done making games in general or souls like games because there was secular afterwards, but I think they're willing to kind of put the bow on Dark Souls as a series. Say, hey, this has been good. We'll still do another DLC after this one, but then we're done. Yeah.
01:10:46
Speaker
Yeah, it's really cool. It's an awesome boss fight. It's one of the very few phase boss fights in the game that has more than two phases. I actually can't think of any others off the top of my head. Pretty sure this is it. It's the only three phaser.
01:11:05
Speaker
And it's, it's tough. Like it has different mechanics in each one, different things to watch out for. And it also feels like, it feels like a bloodborne duel is what it feels like when you're fighting Sister Frieda.
01:11:20
Speaker
Because she's all, you better dodge this or it's over. And you're like, I better dodge this or it's over. Yeah. I know in my first playthrough, I was going very much a great sword. So she would initially, in phase one, there's a move where she will turn invisible and like move. Yeah. Reposition. But you can like see footsteps where like there's a slight indication. So you can hear it too.
01:11:47
Speaker
a weapon slash for where she was going to be. I was like, yep, got it. Bam. To be fair, this is like on the 35th time when I was making the attempts where I was like, all right, I know phase one. Yeah. And then phase two, Father Ariandar, who's just in the back the whole time. He's more of a- In a chair. Kind of a giant, right? Yeah, he's definitely a giant.
01:12:06
Speaker
Yeah, but he's just like sitting in a chair and he has like this giant stone bowl, which is like a little killing just on his lap. He's tied to the chair and he like drags, smashes the kiln towards you trying to get to you. Yeah, in phase two, he kind of like break. He's like, I'm not sitting down.
01:12:22
Speaker
Not taking the sitting down. But yeah, he's throwing hot coals everywhere and molten lava is splashing out of the thing as he's smashing it towards you and using it to propel himself forward. Also, she's attacking you at the same time.
01:12:40
Speaker
Yeah, she has, um, the only mercy they have for that fight is in phase two. If she's at long range, she'll prefer to do the, um, the ice splash, like line attacks of frostbite. Um, which is only, it's a pain if you don't see it coming. Otherwise you can avoid it, but that allows you to get some hits on Ariandel. Um, if he's on his own and it is recommended to take him out, I think before her.
01:13:05
Speaker
because otherwise he's just going to barrel through and coat everything in fire. That's going to be a bad time. Yeah. But that was really solid DLC. Phase 3 is Black Flame, Frida, which is just, again, so good. And scythes. I'm done. I'm done. But scythes. I'm forever a scythe dude. I had a scythe playthrough in Dark Souls 3 in there. The freaking fun. Scythes are just thematically cool. It's also good for me to say thematically.
01:13:35
Speaker
The only downside to scythes is the poise break critical stab. You stab the whole scythe through their body and that doesn't make any sense. At no point does that make sense. Yeah, it doesn't. But yeah, that's the first DLC is you getting the little girl up to the attic and the second DLC is following slave night gale to
01:13:59
Speaker
what is ultimately the end of the world to figure out what he's up to. And there's a princess and there's an egg and there's some time travel and a bunch of crazy stuff happens. There's these preachers that are like, let the feast begin. And I'm like, what are you talking about? It's little bugs, but
01:14:25
Speaker
Ultimately, there's the boss fight with Gale after he has consumed the Dark Soul from the pygmies, which were referenced in the opening cinematic of Dark Souls 1. Yeah, literally full conclusion.
01:14:43
Speaker
Do you remember the Gale fight? I do remember the Gale fight. So everything in the Dark Souls 3 DLC for Ringed City, a lot of the weapons and things happening in it were much more
01:14:58
Speaker
anime, to say the least. We're just like, what the fucking shit? It just becomes very intense very quickly. So Slave Night Gale has a repeater crossbow that he can use. He has, he's like a super buff version of the Gale you saw previously. Yeah. He still has Knight Armor. Evelyn, I think is the repeater. Evelyn, Evelyn, one of those.
01:15:21
Speaker
I don't remember if I ever crafted it actually. Yeah. This is really cool. He has a broken sword, but not a short broken sword. Yeah. It's a wrong sword, but it's kind of like snapped in half.
01:15:34
Speaker
But he has a lot of great combos are very quick. Yeah, he air juggles you. Yeah, this is anime now. This is anime. He has his first phase. He's a little slower. You can dodge some of his stuff. It's a little more predictable.
01:15:51
Speaker
His second phase, Blood of the Dark Soul, like seeps out of his body or whatever from one of your cuts, goes on his sword, which lights it on fire. As it does? As it does. And he's like, ah, this is the blood of the, is this the blood of the Dark Soul? And, or Power of the Dark Soul. And then he goes full anime. His cape does damage to you in the second phase.
01:16:16
Speaker
like as an after image to his attacks. He'll swing his sword and his cape will fly behind it and hurt you. It's like, it's, it's not, it's been in a good way. I really liked that fight and kind of in the same way at the end of Dark Souls one, you're kind of going to like an ashen hollowed out. You're going to the kiln to fight. Yeah.
01:16:40
Speaker
Excuse me, Gwyn. Yeah. In the same way, when you come to this end of time, you're going on these sandy dunes, you see these destroyed buildings, you scream these damn dirty apes, and then you find him at the end of time. And the screen actually zooms in. There's a cutscene when you arrive and it's like, hey, oh no, it zooms out.
01:17:04
Speaker
shows you the decrepit princess with a broken egg because you've been warped to the end of time. And then it zooms out all the way and you just see ash for miles and miles and nothing but ruins. And it's it's so good. It's such a good scene.
01:17:24
Speaker
Why do you guys listen to us play it? I feel like our podcast recap of something is always going to be a very shitty representation to the actual thing. Because a lot of this is us recanting, regaling these stories from we played through Dark Souls 1, we've watched videos about it, played through Dark Souls 2.
01:17:47
Speaker
And it's been like an ongoing thing. Sort of like to finally see the culmination of the series come together. This is like this is like a child, right? Like this is what someone who's not going to have for someone who's not going to have kids beating Dark Souls 3 is like, ah, they've grown up. They've graduated. Oh, you're saying it's like this is a major life event for me. It's like watching them grow up.
01:18:10
Speaker
Yes, because you said, oh, it's like a child. It's like beating. I'm like, where's this going? But yeah, if you are the other nice thing not to harp too much on the gale fight, he has a lightning move where he calls lightning from the sky. And this is this is dirty. This is dirty from the game the first time. But later I was assaulted by all of these like red spirits that fly at you as a projectile. I was like, how in the world am I supposed to dodge that? Where do I know where this come from?
01:18:39
Speaker
like side of the screen nonsense, eventually I found out where the lightning strikes is where these red spirits spawn. And so it's not an immediate attack. Yes. And I was like, my God, like, what are you doing, game? What are you doing? And he also has tons of health. You can't choose him down. You have to just get in a couple hits and actually learn the fight.
01:19:05
Speaker
It's almost impossible to chill, to cheese this guy unless you go really out of your way for it. So it feels good. Yeah. But I feel like all bosses, it feels good to beat them the non cheesy way. I don't think you can summon people for it either. No, I don't think so. I think it's a straight up one-on-one Dark Souls to the end. Actually the end of Dark Souls fight until you beat them. You get the Dark Soul.
01:19:35
Speaker
Which is kind of a big deal. It's actually just an achievement on Steam for me. And if you return all the way back to the painter and the painted world, you can give it to her. And she can paint a new world with the Dark Soul. With the Dark Soul. It's also good. It really is.
01:20:00
Speaker
It's a game that is a game series in general. That's like just so steeped with lore. A lot of it is like through minor dialogues and item descriptions, which is why I have the compendium that I need to read through. But I just can't keep you from buying compendiums, can I? Shut up, Jacob. That was a dota joke. Got to meet the quota.
01:20:24
Speaker
Quota for Dota. That's our next segment we're working on right now. If we have time, we'll put it in after this. Looks at the clock already. I mean, it's been like four hours, but I'll see if I can cut this down to like an hour 30. Yeah, just take out the Joe Rogan sections. We'll be all right.
01:20:47
Speaker
So Dark Souls 3, I still stand by as being the best iteration of Dark Souls and also it has the DLCs as a part of it in my book. So having that all together, it easily kicks the ass of one and two. And especially if you've played one and two, you can appreciate three all that much more.
01:21:07
Speaker
Yeah. It's probably one of my top five favorite games of all time. Dark Souls three. It is crack. Every time I go to play it, that is a week just gone. Goodbye week. So yeah, there's so many cool enemies, areas, boss fights and other things that
01:21:31
Speaker
Literally, it would take us five hours to cover all of them. Right. And it did. Right. But you guys won't hear all of it. Post cut. If you would like to hear the full episode, please subscribe to our Patreon. Right. At giveusmoney.com. Don't go there. I thought domain trees. And we won't get the money. As always, if you'd like to record five hours of content for something else, you could do that if you want.
01:22:03
Speaker
by sending in your request to soapstonepodcast at gmail.com or you can join the discussion on Facebook at facebook.com slash soapstone podcast might kind of be pointless since, you know, we've completed it. We're done. You know, we're good. But you could say that you were following the whole time. Maybe we wouldn't notice. As always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night. Champion of Ash.
01:22:31
Speaker
to the true heir, let him grant death to the old gods of Lordran, deliverers of the first flame.