I’m not getting into difficulty discourse because I don’t want to get caught up in a hellstorm of online bullshit, but Dark Souls is fun when you’re absurdly broken and powerful, steamrolling the bosses, and one-shotting the Gargoyles. Get fucked you axe-wielding stone pieces of shit. I’m gonna ring that bell and I’m gonna do it in style and when I’m done ringing that bell in style, I’m gonna go slap Nito around like he’s a wet fish on dry land.
My first playthrough of Dark Souls was blood, sweat, and tears. I got myself a Drake Sword like the sweaty scrub I am, went right to the Depths, and learned real quick what being cursed is. As if the Gaping Dragon wasn’t annoying as is, now I have half my health bar? And then Blighttown?! Miyazaki you bloody sadist. But I persevered, beat the game, beat the game again, beat it again, and each time I learned something - I learned how to break Dark Souls more and more. Now I can get through it in only four bosses. Take that, Miyazaki.
Learning how to break a game is the best way to get intimate with it. I feel so close to Dark Souls because I know it better than I know myself. You can go to Andre the Blacksmith, glitch the camera, and walk right through Sen’s pearly gates without so much as touching a boss. And away we go to the big Iron Golem, pumpkin and all. Then we’re at Anor Londo, fighting Ornstein and Smough with a toothpick and a gritty can-do attitude. I’m screwed, but I got here early. With Dick and Dom down, I can place the Lordvessel and load glitch through the door to Gwyn and voila, I’ve beaten the game in four bosses. Who needs the lord souls and all that other crap? Not this guy.
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Okay, that’s all a bit harder than Dark Souls usually is. If anything, it’s borderline speedrunning, but when you’re running for the plat and need to get to NG+++ because you fucked up somewhere, it’s good to know the game so well that you can skip a good chunk of it. Because let’s face it, who the hell wants to fight the Bed of Chaos again and again and again? Nobody. If you say you like that boss, you’re a liar. But you can break the game in fun ways too, like getting a Great Scythe +10 before you fight a single boss.
Take a trip to the Catacombs, run past everything, get the Scythe, scour for titanite across Lordran, return to the Catacombs and meet the skeleton blacksmith who sounds like a 12-year-old Russian on Xbox Live, and there you have it. Not one boss fought. Now everything is much, much easier, and all it took was a little grease to oil the wheels. Or maybe you wanna duplicate souls to get to level 300 so your damage catapults into the stratosphere. In a game with limitless replay value as-is, having all these bugs and broken strats to make things that much easier just makes it that much more fun.
I went through the hardships, I ‘got gud’ as the online kids like to say, and now Dark Souls is a sandbox to push to its limits. It’s nice to rush the Painted World and get the Bloodshield or trick the Taurus Demon into plunging off the bridge like the dumb goat he is. It’s reclaiming a bit of that lost willpower with each death I took in the cramped room with the Capra Demon and his two dogs. Again, if you say you liked that boss, you’re lying. Nobody does. I doubt Miyazaki does.
Dark Souls is a tough game, but it’s a game you can learn the ins and outs of. It’s not so much skill as it is memory and at a certain point, there’s nothing left to remember but these roundabout ways to get broken early or to push through the games’ walls literally and metaphorically. All these years later, I’m still finding fun ways to run through Dark Souls, to beat the game, and few of them involve doing it the right or intended way.