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After seven long years, Hollow Knight: Silksong released and
people could finally play itcrashed Steam for several hours after which people could finally play it.You'll remember that Dark Souls (2011) started a storm of Dark Souls buts -- Dark Souls but Scifi, Dark Souls but Roguelike, Dark Souls but Cooking Mama, etc. Of these, to my knowledge, the only pure success was Hollow Knight. (But Metroidvania.) It captured Dark Souls 1's best feature, which was a feeling of going on an expedition into the deep unknown, with no idea how to get back home. Likewise in Hollow Knight, very commonly players clear the game's tutorial zone and end up falling into a late game spiders' nest a hundred miles underground. Or swim through a hole in wall, but get lost in a complex sewer system with an abandoned city underneath. Or mess around platforming and find a secret level hidden above the cliffs of the starter village. The story, vibe, and lore were also very Dark Souls, although this is mostly because Hollow Knight just plain ripped it off.
Five hours in, I'm enjoying myself but I'm disappointed. It's ironically the exact same disappointment of Dark Souls 2. Silksong is much more linear and railroaded; the difficulty, even in these early areas, is a step up from the original, and this is mainly accomplished but lower player health, higher enemy health, and the liberal use of gank squads. And I suspect Silksong won't pull off a nifty meta-narrative like DS2 did, or at least not with such gravitas or panache.
We'll see if the game opens up once I reach the citadel, or once I finally get a freaking health or damage upgrade. Anyone else playing this? (Or any other Soulslike or Metroidvania, I guess)
Please elaborate.
Oh boy. The following are all spoilers. Although the Dark Souls series never makes these things explicit, discovering them is the marrow of DS1 and DS2. I recommend these games in part for their story, but I'm not going to turn a Motte comment into a CIA document. Read at your own risk.
Dark Souls is set in a kingdom named Lordran, and Dark Souls II in one named Drangleic. They're far away: "if the first game was set in the North Pole, the second would be in the South Pole". Both kingdoms are in a Cormac McCarthy The Road state of social collapse and imminent human extinction. All characters are slowly going mad as they lose hope. The vast majority are already mad ('hollow') and form the bulk of enemies you fight. The games hint, if you pay attention to their death sounds and what makes them respawn, that hollows are 'player characters', so to speak, who unplugged the controller, abandoned the game, and turned into mobs. And ALL player characters of Dark Souls do eventually turn into mobs. The games diegetically loop back to New Game+, so no one ever "beats" Dark Souls, strictly speaking. Whenever you stop, you stop. The "Age of Fire" ends, and the "Age of Dark" begins, though the in-game lore never explains what these terms mean.
All this is an analogy for nihilism in our garden-variety IRL life. Dark Souls games pose the question: Is fighting entropy worth it?
Do you remember when I said DS1 and DS2 are set in different places? I lied. Or Director Tomohiro Shibuya lied in that interview anyway. Once you actually play Dark Souls II, you'll find heaps of evidence that Drangleic is actually Lordran, except tens of thousands or even millions of years later. Most locations of the first game are all accessible, but buried underground, and so worn with age it's hard to tell what you're looking at. First game items can be found as artifacts: the Holy Grail equivalent of DS1, the Lordvessel, is in a trash heap in the basement of the starter village. Characters frequently remark on "countless kingdoms rising and falling on this very spot".
(Side tangent: 2014 was the first time I encountered NPCs in the real world, though I didn't have the vocabulary for them at the time. Debates raged online for the first year after DS2 on Drangleic vs Lordran. One side said "Here is a mountain of evidence Lordran is Drangleic", the other side said "An authority figure said Drangleic is not Lordran, and Trust The Experts, case closed". Fun times.)
Everything in DS2, even the story, is a cheap knockoff of DS1, being repeated over and over and over again. There is an Age of Fire running out, yielding to an Age of Dark. In one sense, DS2 is making another analogy about nihilism and entropy. In another sense, DS2 is talking about video game sequels.
Dark Souls 1 was a smash hit. What's more, beyond commercial success, it became perhaps the Most Admired Game Of All Time. What Ocarina of Time was in 2010, Dark Souls became in 2011. What's more, the premise and ending of DS1 made even the idea of a sequel artistic sacrilege. That hopeless, but nevertheless beautiful descent in the Heat Death of the Universe — and I won't even spoil the way DS1 punctuates that at the ending — did not brook a direct sequel. But because video game franchises, FromSoft did indeed have to make a sequel to a game about the End of the Universe.
This crass act is a bit like taking mom out of her coffin, mummifying her, and using her body as a carnival prop.
Dark Souls II a game about being forced to go through the motions of something degrading that you hate. Like making a cynical sequel to a story that conclusively finished. Over the course of the game, you forget why you're even doing what you're doing, just like the ugly crone in the opening cinematic promised. Of course, it's not "just" about video game sequels, but that's part of it.
Thanks for the detailed explanation!
Now please explain how DS3 fits into that narrative framework.
It doesn't. Dark Souls meant and intended one thing at release. Then they had to make another game, so they brainstormed a sequel, which retroactively changed the meaning of the original. And then they made another sequel, which retroactively changed the meaning of the last two games, again. And so on and so on.
This is why "canon" arguments when it comes to stories that were not planned in advance are stupid. Obviously, in Star Wars: A New Hope as of 1977, Darth Vader is a low level mook and the republic collapsed in distant history. Now, when I watch it again in 2025, should I view it through the hermeneutic that Darth Vader is actually Vice-President of the Empire and the Republic fell 19 years ago? Of course not. Those retcons were made for the artistic convenience of later films.
It's generally valuable to analyze movies or games on their own, in light of what preceded them at the time of release.
He's referred to as "Lord Vader", and recognized immediately by an imperial senator.
Later, he's on board the singular imperial superweapon in a top-level strategy meeting with less than a dozen participants. He does obey a command from one of the other participants, but the command is "stop choking that high-level general", everybody watches for a while first before anyone dares give the command, and Vader still faces no consequences for the incident; Tarkin even goes back to addressing him as "Lord Vader" immediately afterward. Out of context, the impression the movie gives is that Vader is basically the third in command of the Empire after Tarkin. With "it was only 30 years after WWII" context, Vader seems to be the head of the sort of personally-loyal private forces that fascist dictators develop alongside existing traditional armies, with perhaps less nominal power but with more real power.
This was probably technically a retcon - there's some bit of dialogue in the novelization about multiple Emperors and their increasing corruption over time - but the bits needing to be retconned never made it into the movie.
In the movie, the Emperor dissolves the senate in the middle of the plot. Not long prior, Leia is invoking the Senate as a moral authority and the villains are taking it seriously enough as a practical authority that Vader decides it'll be easier to pretend Leia died than to admit she's imprisoned. This is perhaps compatible with the Senate being just an old Imperial-Rome-style facade that hasn't had real power in centuries, but from the film alone the retcon is the most parsimonious interpretation - they spell out right in dialogue that everyone still takes the senate seriously, and that the imperials get rid of it as soon as they think they've got the centralized military power to ignore any backlash.
The phrase in the final draft of the script was "right hand of the Emperor". To be fair, this never made it into the movie, and could have ended up in the same wastebin as "Journal of the Whills" without too much hassle.
Star Wars, even if you only consider the first movie vs later films (and not the others or the shows or the entirely waste-binned Expanded Universe), has some seriously retconned ideas! These just aren't the best examples.
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DS3 is when you say ‘fuck it, this is definitely the last one but we can at least do it well’, and you get back the reluctant Lords of Cinder (Miyazaki-san and the team who worked on Bloodborne) and squeeze out whatever is left for one last hurrah.
It’s the end of Dark Souls but you feel that something new will come along one day and that’s enough to lift your spirits a bit…
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