Demon’s Souls is an insanely well-executed ”prototype” of what would come after. In some cases I think it’s the best Souls game but it’s clear they were still finding their footing.
Dark Souls 1 is such a humble colossus, and the droll takes on how its very presence shook the very core of a safe and sterile AAA game industry all hold merit. It did everything it wanted to do right, even if it’s rushed near the later third. An extremely tight dungeon crawler with a mind-boggling amount of variety and player expression, with gameplay and immersion first and foremost.
Dark Souls 2 is ”they failed, but tried”. It explores and iterates upon several ideas from the first game in interesting ways, but it didn’t work all the time, and a wonky development and the downgrade really hampered the outward quality of the game, so it’s a roller coaster of excellent dungeon crawling and pure jank.
For Dark Souls 3, they didn’t try at all. They over-course-corrected so ridiculously hard that it has absolutely zero unique identity. There is nothing about this game that makes it stand out, other than that it was the first next-gen FromSoftware game to have 60fps so it felt smooth.
It’s a gray, ugly, boring, soulless mess of a game that’s afraid to do anything new and relies on the success of DS1 WAY too hard.
