Dark Souls is one of the most important and powerful games ever made. Switch is the least pleasant place to play it. It works—this is still Dark Souls and Dark Souls is still very good—but sacrifices in presentation and control scream inferiority next to original and Remastered editions of the same game.
Dark Souls changed everything.
FromSoftware’s magnum opus seized upon a dormant, collective urge to challenge adversity with perseverance. When it was released in 2011, near the apex of the last console generation, gaming was in a comfortable malaise. Modern Warfare 3, Uncharted 3, The Elder Scrolls V, Battlefield 3, Skyward Sword; a deluge of sequels were logical moves, but none created a persuasive step forward. Dark Souls’ idiosyncrasies took a fearless leap in more dangerous direction. Seven years later, its impact is more evident across a spectrum of gaming than many of its contemporaries.
At its most basic level, Dark Souls behaved like a mid-aughts action role-playing game. Having selected one of ten nebulous classes, your cursed undead was then deposited in the crumbling empire of Lordran. Threats were everywhere you looked and each one guarded the possibility of acquiring a valuable item or better piece of equipment. Health and stamina are precious resources, with the former refreshed by consumables and the latter governing offensive and defensive character action. Players creeped through tricky environments, battled a diverse set of preparatory opponents, and engaged in climactic, menacing boss battles.
Souls were the titular hook. Killing enemies rewarded the player with souls, a currency that could be gathered and deposited to increase your character’s level and raise one of nine stats. It could also be spent as actual currency at item shops. Dying not only resulted in the loss of souls, but the complete repopulation of all non-boss enemies. This could be devastating. The spot where you perished, however, would leave a bloodstain that contained every soul you just lost. All you had to do was make it back there alive. Dark Souls used bloodstains as a signature under the balance of risk and reward.
Dark Souls excelled at managing a cycle of fear and confidence. Coming to terms with its lumbering, deliberate combat mechanics instilled a sense of courage. Immediately falling to a skeleton, the easiest opponent in the game, took it away. Figuring out a boss’ attack pattern raised morale to a critical level, only to be lost to ego when you gambled with one extra attack. Dark Souls’ primary lesson was the expense of patience; either test a sequence so many times you memorize every detail or act with conscious sensitivity toward a hostile environment. Both were acceptable paths forward.
This exacting sentiment was often translated (with eye-rolling help from marketing departments) as crushing difficulty. Prepare to Die Edition was even added to Dark Souls’ initial PC release. While it was true that Dark Souls delighted in punishment, it didn’t come at the cost of morale or instruction. Difficulty is a false identity. Dark Souls is always trying to teach its next lesson and it demands the player learn every single one in order to effectively move forward. Your weapons can break, your existence can be damned by a curse, and you may lose thousands of souls on some foolish endeavor, but you’re never truly beaten. Endurance and tenacity (and YouTube) can always create another path.
Dark Souls didn’t connect with everyone. To some, it felt like that scene in Snatch were Boris timidly walked around with a bag over his head before being eviscerated by a car full of idiots. To others, it was like being the unfortunate kid in Battle Royale who was expected to combat his gun-wielding opponents with a trash can lid. Other people like Dark Souls for both of those reasons, enjoying its pervasive sensation of anxiety. Between focus testing’s compulsory dilution of artistic intent and the universal softening of difficulty, a game that played for keeps was a valued novelty, especially in 2011. Dark Souls, because of its flaws, was synonymous with purity.
Despair wasn’t without the opportunity for comfort; Dark Souls also changed the way games examine multiplayer. Leaving cobbled-together messages on the ground—usually for good, sometimes for evil—provided a light in the darkness. Likewise, viewing ghosts that relived the deaths of other players warned of Dark Souls’ more devious hazards. Summoning a friend or two for help, assuming you had the required resources, could break the game. You know what, though? It doesn’t matter. It created a way forward and Dark Souls is never one to judge a method of progress.
Dark Souls also changed the way we think about skill progression and the investment of time. By 2011, Call of Duty 4’s lingering influence shifted character development to bigger numbers and better options. Empowering the avatar was a higher priority than developing the player. While Dark Souls had tangible player levels and stat boosts, skilled play (as evident by the lunatics who refuse to acquire levels or any equipment) could viably topple almost every obstacle. Repeatedly dying to the same boss for an hour created no objective progress, but, behind the scenes of your brain, it was an investment in personal skill. Dark Souls is not interested in superficial measurement.
As much as Dark Souls accomplished, it wasn’t without its faults. Lost Izalith’s cumbersome pathfinding and stunted enemies felt unfinished and remain a dreadful experience. Blighttown was synonymous with crippling performance issues. “If you die, it’s your fault,” Dark Souls’ endearing mantra, was not always true; the game had plenty of cheap shots from unpredictable sources. Regarding its exalted boss line-up, Pinwheel’s gimmicks weakened his formidable posture and Bed of Chaos’ focus on hurried navigation highlighted Dark Souls’ inadequate platforming mechanics. Dark Souls remains one of the most important and singular games of the last generation, but dismissing its imperfections is equivalent to denial.
Divorced of its contributions to the medium, Dark Souls’ individual moments are sources of solitary celebration. Stepping into Anor Londo for the first time was akin to going to sleep at the dump and waking up in paradise. The Ornstein and Smough fight was a divine breaking point widely acknowledged as the game’s pivotal boss battle. Enduring the claustrophobic hell of Blighttown, learning how to deal with ghosts in New Londo Ruins, figuring out (perhaps accidentally) you can kill shop keepers, entering the Painted World of Ariamis, realizing that Gwyn can be easily parried—these are all classic moments from an unassuming experience. Dark Souls’ momentum persisted and escalated outside of its commitment to innovation.
Of course, Demon’s Souls’ heralds had already been howling Dark Souls’ virtues for two years. 2009’s PlayStation 3 exclusive (handled by Atlus in North America; even Sony had no faith in Souls’ worldwide appeal) introduced many of the concepts upon which Dark Souls built its empire. Ten starting classes, souls as currency, respawning enemies, a proto-hollowing mechanic, climactic boss fights, dark fantasy themes, isolated multiplayer — Demon’s Souls did the heavy lifting for some of Dark Souls’ most recognizable ideas. Dark Souls, however, performed most of these actions better and dropped Demon’s Souls’ more arcane mechanics (like the World Tendency) and limitations (like linear levels) in the pursuit of more open progress. Essentially, due to a shift in publishing duties from Sony to Namco Bandai, Dark Souls could identify as both revision and novelty.
Dark Souls’ influence may have been its most powerful asset. While it lead to two direct sequels, and the very Souls inspired Bloodborne, it inspired dozens of others. Shovel Knight’s ode to Zelda and Duck Tales is complimented with Souls-like loot recovery. Hollow Knight and Salt and Sanctuary surface Dark Souls’ connections to Metroid and Castlevania. The Witcher 3, God of War, and Destiny’s designers have directly stated Souls’ influence while The Surge, Nioh, and Lords of the Fallen are unabashed odes to Dark Souls’ greatest ideals. In gaming communities and culture, labeling a word “the Dark Souls of _______” is so frequent it’s insufferable.
Dark Souls’ worth to the last console generation is at the highest possible tier. It’s as valuable as Wii Sports and Minecraft’s paths to accessibility, Call of Duty 4’s groundwork in persistent multiplayer, Red Dead Redemption’s responsive open world, Portal’s testament to the power of writing, Fallout 3’s laissez-faire approach to narrative and empowerment, and Mass Effect’s commitment to genre storytelling. Dark Souls may not have entered the mainstream as effectively, but its influence was equally profound across a spectrum of gaming.
Dark Souls, as Dark Souls Remastered, is on Switch now. Whereas last spring’s Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC versions of Dark Souls Remastered were ported by QLOC, the Switch version was ported by Virtuos. The former saw the benefit of 1800p resolution (on PS4 Pro and Xbox One X consoles), targets of sixty frames-per-second, and better lighting among other improvements. The Switch version has none of these things and substantially less care than the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 editions from 2011. It is portable, and this is the compromise.
The Switch version’s audio delivery is going to raise eyebrows. Nothing seemed amiss when I began Dark Souls Remastered in handheld mode. When I dropped it on my television and flipped on my moderately powerful soundbar (yeah, I know), I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was like there was a level of static laced inside the sound effects and the music, rendering the audio output close to the 32kbps audio files I was stealing in 1999. For whatever reason Dark Souls Remastered’s sound files have been horribly compressed and spread across the entire experience. I suppose you could get used to this, but, even as someone who isn’t typically conscious of audio quality, this deficiency was alarming.
Obviously it isn’t going to look as nice. At first glance it was slightly muddy, frame-y, and felt near the quality of Dark Souls original release. Flipping between my PlayStation 4 Pro running Dark Souls Remastered and the Switch running Dark Souls Remastered painted a grim picture. The latter looked like it was in slow motion, but this is usually the case when your eyes go straight from 60fps to 30fps. The Switch version held 30, though, and only dipped when bosses consumed the screen with activity or crowds of monsters punished my poor play.
I didn’t have a great time in handheld mode, either. Dark Souls isn’t especially suited to a 6.2 inch screen, and trying to decipher tells in enemy patterns or details in the environment was a challenge for my 35-year-old eyes. The Joy-Con were also ineffective in providing adequate control, although I am sure this would have gotten better had I stuck with it and not thrown it out to my television. Neither the Joy-Con and the Pro Controller could be remapped, not addressing that weird disconnect between using A and B to natively confirm items on Nintendo platforms.
Much of this was expected and some of it wasn’t. No one believed the Switch’s presentation was going to challenge a PS4 Pro or an Xbox One X, but few assumed it would fall below the last generation in general performance. It is portable, however, and neatly adapts to 2018’s gaming paradigm in ways its competition can’t. The worst version of Dark Souls, in the eyes of many, is better than a majority of existing games on the same platform. It’s an option and it exists. The suspicion that it could have been better, unfortunately, will be difficult to shake away.
