The Blind Leading the Blinded: On Dark Souls and Elden Ring

02 Oct, 2026

The lede's buried deep on this one, sorry in advance.

Why the Fuck Did I Play These?

FOMO? I'm not sure, frankly. I think my history with these games goes something like this: my friend Keys played them a lot, and initially just talked about enjoying them, as our other friend Pontifus and I both kind of made annoyed sounds in our throats. Then Pontifus and his brother both began playing them, and streaming via Discord. At the same time, I owned Dark Souls 3, as Keys had bought it for me, intending for us to use a mod to play the entire game cooperatively. This didn't happen, due to our divergent schedules; the game was, however, sitting in my Steam library. So I installed it.

This is actually skipping a step. I initially bought Dark Souls: Prepare to Die on Steam before any of this. I hated it. It was simple, in this case. I hate the default controls, and this edition did not allow me to rebind the buttons. So I didn't play it.

Yes, I'll get to this later, I know it's probably going to be the thing I say that weirds people out the most.

So. I played DS3. I began to try to learn the game by just repeatedly fighting the dudes at the beginning of the castle, and just could not get better at the combat. So I quit.

Years later, when the aforementioned Renaissance of People Playing Fromsoft Games in Chat happened, Keys bought me a copy of Elden Ring, with the plan that we would use a mod to play the game cooperatively. This time it happened. I enjoyed myself well enough. I don't recall any longer what feature of the game I was commenting on, just as we left the tutorial area, but Keys's response was "Elden Ring loves you." That is meant in contrast to the DS series, which decidedly, in comparison, does not.

I began to play Elden Ring on my own, with different builds. And yes, I'll get to builds in their own section, too. I got very far, on my own -- deep into the DLC. Actually, I accidentally skipped a bunch of bosses and nearly got into the last section, a problem Keys pointed out to me.

At some point in this I got bored of Elden Ring. There's too much identical, uninteresting shit in there you kind of need to do, is the issue. So I started playing DS3 again, as Pontifus had been complaining about similar issues. At this point, I was pretty decent at the combat (I am told playing Elden Ring as a pure Dex character is weird, at least for the first time solo), so I got into it much more quickly. Finishing it, I went on to DS1.

I should say, here, that I was so furious with the Nameless King and the boss I call Piggyback Rides (the two princes), that I immediately uninstalled the game upon linking the flame. I did not do any of the Ringed City dlc. So that's how I began 1.

One was... different. It's tighter in terms of pacing and space, but the buttons don't feel as good to touch. The boss designs are mainly more interesting, both to look at and to fight, but some of the gimmicks, such as the Bed of Chaos and the Four Kings, are just stupid.

OK. Then I played Lies of P, which is, in every way that matters, better than every one of these. The plot, characters, setting, and combat are all better. I will accept arguments that the boss design is not as good, but not arguments that the boss design is bad.

I played Lies of P NG+.

And then an idea entered me and would not let go. "Maybe NG+ in Dark Souls would be fun?"

I reinstalled them.

I finished Elden Ring. Did DS1 NG+. Did Elden Ring NG+. Did most of the Ringed City dlc in DS3, then did NG+. And here we are, now. I clearly have enjoyed these games enough to keep playing them, but most of the time, most of what I think of them is a mixture of disgust and regret for things that were almost good. So what in the hell? Note: I did not play Dark Souls 2. I may do so in the future, but I was putting this post off enough as it was. I did kind of enjoy the NG+ process. Most of all the games were easier, for the simple reason that I had max level weapons and flasks. It's somewhat rare to die in between bosses when you have a ton of extra health flasks to spare and your weapon will reliably two shot everything. I tried to change up my weapons, but without changing my character's build, I couldn't get anything up to snuff, really.

Characters and Builds

Every character I make is named Hondor, because it's the first ridiculous set of syllables that sprang to mind when faced with the character creator -- a thing I simply do not care about in these games, because I will be wearing a helmet at all times.

Generally, Hondor as a character, insofar as I roleplay her at all, is as baffled by the plot as I am. In-character statements, made while streaming, are usually vehicles for commenting on how stupid the plot is. "Wait, why are you trusting me to do this again? What's this for? Who are you? Man, I'm not from here, what the fuck are you talking about? I just got here, why are we fighting? I don't want to fight you, can't we talk about this? Shit, dude, I walked through your door and you immediately stabbed me with a spear, what did I fucking do to you?" I bet you'll never guess which boss the last one was for.

My builds have been all over the place. I began, in ER, with a magic user, while Keys tanked everything on the planet. It was interesting, seeing this slide happen. Keys commented on it. I used to need to rush forward to even get involved in some of the fights, because, even with a new character, Keys could just crush everything quickly. Eventually, he started to comment that before he could do much of anything, enemies were dead, because I was blasting them from a distance. I have since played single player with an INT character, and that holds true, so that's one fun thing they manage to put into the game's progression.

I've done straight DEX, a choice that apparently indicates I'm a lunatic. I understand, in retrospect, because the games are all like 10x easier if you can BONK, which is to say, break someone's poise. My current INT character used the Morningstar until Pontifus told me about the Great Stars. Ice and Bleed together are chef's kiss, baybeee.

that DEX character mained the Antspur Rapier and the Rivers of Blood, as one does.

I did a Faith/STR build that was my NG+ savior. That enormous hammer with the special counterattack you get in the DLC, I have no idea what it's called, that fucking thing whips ass, especially if you shove Lion's Claw on it.

In DS1/3 I got the most out of heavier weapons, though in 3, in regular game, I had to switch away from my baby, the Greataxe, back to my old friend the Claymore, to beat the Piggyback Rides. The axe just doesn't have any fucking reach.

I do think this digression into my builds reveals something unpleasant about the game. You can do any build, use any weapon, but also fuck off no you can't. You must bonk. ER especially loves to litter the world with moments where there's a guy, and then, you won't believe it, there's another guy. But they're spaced exactly far enough apart that the second one will only aggro onto you when you fight the first one. So the bonk crit animation is necessary, to make sure you don't get the shit kicked out of you by Guy 2 while you're busy murdering Guy 1. And sure you could memorize where those guys are -- and I have, in my many cases -- but come the fuck on.

Setting (1)

Famously, the stories of these games are told mainly in item descriptions, which is bad. I will not be taking comments on this portion of things, that's a shitty way to do this. I should not need to read the bottom of my drugstore receipt to understand what that guy who just tried to kill me in the parking lot was after. I mainly did not read item descriptions, because despite this project I set myself, I also have shit to do. I mostly don't read shit like this in games across the board, to be clear, it's not that I set out to ruin my DS experience. Just about the only things, in my adult life, that I have found interesting enough to "delve into," in games, are the terminal flavor texts in Fallout. I don't read the books in Skyrim. I touch them so I get any possible stat increases and then I drop them in the floor. I have, lately, begun to ignore audio logs, even though they're performance as well as writing. I have only one life to live (at least, this one, that's interested in video games). I also hate Worldbuilding ™, and mostly this shit is that.

Everyone has rightly begun to point out the "writing" in Braid is bad, in part, because it's totally sectioned off from the gameplay, and yet no one has apparently noticed that when DS delivers all its background and character information via item description, it's the same mechanism. I bring up Braid because it's a similar situation too because you kind of need to know this shit to know what the fuck is going on. You can play both games without reading the text. Ask me how I know? But things are going to make less sense.

Not that... Not that, once you pay attention, DS is much better.

Setting (2)

All right, so, the actual setting. In a generic fantasy land, things are Bad, and things used to be Better. You should try to make things Better again, by doing this bullshit fantasy thing (non-judgmental). People don't want you to do the BFT thing though. Some of them think they should do it. Some of them are crouching on a pile of bodies and that's somehow the thing that makes them happy I guess.

So original it isn't. But that's fine! I was going to write, here, a joke about how it would be ok if it were the stuff painted on the side of the van owned by a metalhead in the late 70s, but honestly that would be so much better. Can you imagine Dark Souls but with colors?

What is the BFT? Well, in DS itself, it's a fire, perhaps The Fire, and as it dies out, everything goes to shit. But wait! Moral complexity is a must in video games these days! Have you seen what Bioware did? We need some of that shit! So maybe it's actually bad to do the good thing, and you should do the bad thing instead, because that's actually good! Fuck everyone over to serve yourself, and in so doing, buy into the nonsensical arguments that a big snake makes about free will or something. This is just as nonsensical as the arguments in favor of saving the fire, so the decision is truly up to you. And in both games, the endings are functionally identical! ER's endings are also mostly identical, except the one about the developers' waifu.

This is one of the actual things that tells me there is very little interest in what we, for lack of a better term, call the "story" of a game. In Dark Souls 3 you must go through the most ridiculous set of opaque actions I have seen in a game to get the "dark" ending and it's... just the same ending, but the color gradients change? I know some different business happens with the character herself, but they functionally don't exist in this game, they aren't a person, they're an avatar I use to swing weapons at dudes. So to me, I am being genuine when I say the endings are the same thing. They're the same picture.

Now, Elden Ring! What if all the above was true, but it was a tree, not a fire. But we set it on fire, so we get the same throughline of incredibly meaningful symbolism. You know... Fire is... hot.

Elden Ring is better about delivering actual characters and story to the player. But not by all that much. If you play like a normal person who doesn't keep a wiki open at all times on your second monitor, every single character plot will die mid-stream and you will not know why.

Off the top of my head here, Nepheli's plot will die when you can't find the Albinauric village because it's designed to be impossible to see from the ground. Alexander's plot will peter out either because you never just so happened to hear him when he's stuck the first time or you never found him in the lava lake because there's no reason to wade into that lake in the first place -- he's around a corner, you can't see him from the tiny arena in which you fight the local boss. The whole plot with D and Fia is... imagine me sucking my teeth while I look off to the right, it's what I just did while trying to figure out what to put on the end of that sentence. It's the one I pursued for NG+, and I have done it 2 or 3 times at this point, and I still can't tell you a lot about it. Fia fucks dead people to bring them back to life, I get that, and she wants to do that with one of the dead gods. Sure, fine. D's part in all of this is... less than clear. And to be clear myself, I was reading relevant item descriptions as well as wiki articles here, because I wanted to see if there was any way to make any of the plotlines in this game stick.

Oh, while I'm at it, Ranni is clearly the developers' favorite character,¹ and yes, I did her ending the first time.

Look, like I said, the plot can be generic, or even kind of nonsensical. That's fine. But it has to be present with me while playing in some way. I need to have taken on the motivation of helping a character, or something. I don't even know why my character would be doing any of the shit to become Elden Lord. It's never mentioned, in any way, why anyone would want to become the new Elden Lord. Have you seen the last one? that shit seems to suck, as it so happens.

Ranni

OK. So. The developers have a best girl, and they are not subtle about it. Look back over the plot, from the position of having finished it, and you will not be able to explain why Ranni shows up to help out a nameless Tarnished who just ate shit fighting a dude made of too many limbs (and probably a man on a large horse, if you're new here). I've done this shit four or five times now and I cannot tell you why that happens.

The Ranni plot is fine! It's perfectly OK. But the reason I'm breaking this out separately is that the developers break their own rules about storytelling and game flow to make you interact with Ranni. The way she shows up at the beginning is an example of this, but Melina does that too. What I mean is that at a certain point, if you continue to do Ranni's questline, you are locked into it. You cannot go anywhere else, do anything else, until you basically complete the rest of it. They never do that.

Let that sit for now, but eventually I want to get to some other ways they break their own structural rules; I argue that it reveals some broader systemic problems we've got going on here.

The Controls

The default controls suck. I'd say I'm sorry but I'm not. Main buttons, meat and potato buttons, should never be on the shoulders. The face buttons are where attacks go. I tried. I played the fucking first pc edition of DS1, and I literally couldn't kill a skeleton because the buttons make no sense.

Millions of people appear to have played these games without button rebinding so whatever, sure. But the fact that the first DS didn't allow button rebinding at all, using a very nonstandard layout, tells me about Fromsoft, and how they just don't give a shit about their players.

The diehards amongst you may be scratching your heads, given that I know from personal experience that diehards will refer to light attack as "R1" and not, you know, "attack." Assume a Playstation controller. I'll do Elden Ring, as it finally added a fucking JUMP BUTTON.

Attack: Square Heavy Attack: Triangle Dodge/Run: Circle Jump: X Use Item: R1 Interact: R2 Use Weapon Ability: L1 Use Left Hand Weapon/Spell/Shield: L2

Also, Fromsoft, the jump button could also just interact with things. That's a thing games can do. They've been doing it for a long time now.

Combat, or, Actually Touching the Buttons

I keep playing these fucking things. Touching the buttons feels good. Now that the buttons are in the right places (as much as they can be with the overall decisions Fromsoft made, see above), I enjoy dodging big swords and swinging my mace into faces. It's great.

However. I'm going to lump the general level design in here, because all I have to say about it, really, is in relation to combat. The camera fucking sucks. Fuck you it does. I don't need to be so close to the back of Hondor's head that I can't see enemies sometimes whenever I raise my wand to cast a spell. The camera does not need to zoom in even further if I back into a wall.

The single thing I shout, most often, when playing these games, is "I need to see!"

This is the lede. Welcome to the thesis statement. Fromsoft blinds the player. At every turn, they use everything from bad camera movement to literal tricks to make sure the player cannot see what is happening. This does not create a sense of mystery. This creates a sense of the developers enjoying the thought that players are going to fall into that pit and die because it was literally impossible to see it. They'll avoid it next time, won't they? Hee hee hee.

You know the evil shit cities do now where they make useless park benches because an unhoused person might get to sleep on them at night if they were normal? That's caused hostile architecture, and I have begun referring to what Fromsoft is doing here as "hostile game design."

The functional Thing of the game would not be changed if the camera were further back or if walls because translucent when the camera butted against them. The challenge of learning enemy timing, the limits of your movesets, and the resources you've garnered would not lessen in any way.

And they know this. I think these games are badly made in a lot of ways, but I think they're intentionally bad. Because after DS1, Fromsoft will move the camera sometimes. They design something that would be virtually impossible within the confines of their camera rules, so they just cheat. The camera zooms out some. Elden Ring does this often enough it feels like a yoyo, in the right circumstances.

Lock On Targeting

You know that thing Nintendo basically solved in the nineteen hundred and nineties? Fromsoft is bad at it. The lock on targeting will end for no reason. I don't mean the shit I disagree with but looks like a system, like when 1/3 of an enemy goes behind a wall and the targeting gives up because you probably would have forgotten they were there. I mean that I have seen, with witnesses, the lock on just fail in an empty room with nothing happening, because fuck the player. I have lost count of the number of times I've lost lock on in the Smaug and Ornstein, attorneys at law fight.

Elden Ring figured out ways to make it even worse. Not only will the lock on just stop sometimes, it will also punish you for using it. ER has a high number of enemies that will fuck you up by just flying around and taking away your moment to moment sense of the arena. And then they will do that over lava or pits. Yeah, maybe I once rolled off the cliff to my death fighting the Gaping Dragon, but that was once. I can't tell you how many times I've died to the lava dragons in ER because they stand up like they're at the doctor's office for their checkup and suddenly I can't see shit. ER is filled with moments like that, where, because of the way the camera and lock-on are designed, I can't see shit.

The Theme

So they blind us. And also -- are you already thinking about it? -- also, they sure seem to like to blind their characters, especially the generically pretty, personality-free women.

I'm not going to look this up. DS1 has the fire maiden with no tongue, which is not the same but is close enough to bear mentioning. DS3 has the Shrine Keeper herself blinded, with a significant point of one ending being finding her new eyes. Elden Ring has two women who look just like her, one of whom is a doomed waif and the other a pilgrim devouring the eyes of fanatics so she can find the end of the world. Hell, Elden Ring doubles down, with all the magic users wearing marble busts over their heads, with no visible eye holes I've ever been able to find.

This is clearly a thing for them. This isn't even a bad thing! They should have a thing. They almost have a theme! They don't', but they almost do.

I'm pretty sure the general response to this is that the game is about making choices without being able to know the outcome, and everything is a mystery from the state of the world to the results of the endings. Fuck that. I don't demand answers. I am probably not interested in their answers, because interviews have revealed they have them (the devs once confirmed their "canon" ending for DS1 is that you don't link the fire, and Solaire linked it, leading to it being up and running for the rest of the games).

But, first, this shit doesn't contribute to the imagery of blinding, specifically because the player character isn't the one who's blinded. It's all the (mostly generically hot) women. Now, Hondor is both a woman and a lesbian, she has nothing against hot women. Her entire motivation in pretty much every run is to help the cute dumbass who gives her Torrent, because in this hellhole, Torrent is my bestie and she facilitated that. But for fuck's sake, Fromsoft. I guess they don't usually peddle the kind of toxic trope of a woman could be raped over here, you should care about that -- startling, really, because they sopped up the last remaining shred of juice in George Martin for this shit.² So I have to give them that at least. I'm sure someone is going to chime in with something I missed. Do, by the way, but I'll just be even more disappointed in them.

The Thematically Appropriate Wet Fart of an Ending

Look, I don't know. I kind of like these games. They are not the fucking sanctified reliquary of Good Modern Game Design like the sickos think. They're fine. Lies of P ran circles around them. I wish they had more color, more variety. I wish they didn't relegate all the women to the kind of thing a shitty pulp writer would do with their women circa 1936. I wish the one theme they almost had went somewhere. I definitely wish they weren't hostile to the player.

It's jank. Jank is neither good nor bad. But it is janky. We need more janky games. We need more janky games made by big studios. But don't piss in my cup and tell me it's lemonade.

#Dark Souls #Elden Ring #Lies of P #fromsoft #games #video games