Dhruin
SasqWatch
Edge posts an interesting article in rebuttal to a piece at Slate. A few days back Slate published Dark Night (After Night After Night) of the Soul, asking "is a 100-hour video game ever worthwhile"? A snip:
Edge responds with Long Live the Long RPG:
More information.
Dark Souls, a medieval fantasy game, was one of the best-reviewed titles of 2011. It was given perfect scores by the Telegraph, 1Up.com, and GamePro, and was named as “game of the year” in Slate's year-end “Gaming Club” by Michael Abbott and Tom Bissell. What happens in Dark Souls? You control a reanimated soul trapped in a violent purgatory. To escape you must seek out and kill phantasmagoric demons waiting in the distant corners of the world, thus proving your worth to the primordial snake gods who keep watch over the place.
In more than twice the time it would take to read Tolstoy's historical fiction, Dark Souls leaves one's head overflowing with useless junk like the difference in attack stats between a Great Axe with a fire bonus versus a Great Axe with a divine bonus. These bits of occult nonsense don't have an internal logic. In one early section, you'll fight a pair of gargoyles who live perched high up on a bell tower in a castle. These gargoyles, you discover, are especially vulnerable to lightning damage. Why a creature that lives on the medieval equivalent of a lightning rod should be vulnerable to lightning damage is not explained. Every victory in the game is built on a similarly dumbfounding bit of nonlogic.
Edge responds with Long Live the Long RPG:
I see two core arguments in Thomsen’s piece: 1) games are capable of offering their audience gratification, but ought to be enjoyed in moderation so as not to distract from more enriching artistic works and real-world pursuits, and 2) Dark Souls is an evocative, handsome and needlessly stubborn piece of game design that outstays its welcome by taxing players with dozens of hours of stultifying trial-and-error. I’ll start by countering the larger assertion and then seek to address some of the specific complaints levelled at Dark Souls.
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