Email: The value of Dark Souls

Hi Malstrom,

Regarding your comments on Dark Souls for Switch, if there’s going to be a Souls game on the Switch, there’s really no choice other than Dark Souls 1. Demon’s Souls and Bloodbourne were partially developed by Sony, so they are locked to Playstation platforms for the foreseeable future. Apparently Dark Souls 2 was a bit of a disappointment (I’ve never played it, but that’s what I’ve heard). And DS3 is probably too new to be easy to port to the Switch any time soon.

As for whether any Souls game is worth being on the Switch at all, I’d say yes. Thanks to a heads up from a helpful emailer of yours, I played some Demon’s Souls before the multiplayer servers shut down a little while ago. It had been a long time since I played it last, and though I still love that game, playing it after so long made me realize that the difficulty the game has is the kind of difficulty that doesn’t respect your time. I’m at a boss that can easily kill you by knocking you off a narrow bridge; that wouldn’t be too much of a problem if dying didn’t send you back to a checkpoint that’s a 5-10 minute walk back to the boss. And that made me realize that the reason I haven’t played that game in so long is because unless you have a good chunk of time to dedicate to it, it’s entirely possible not to make much progress in an average play session, unless you’re a high school student with a lot of time on your hands (as I was when the game first came out).

I have Dark Souls 1 on PS3 in my backlog, but to be honest I don’t think I could ever make much progress in it, as I don’t have as much time for time-demanding single-player video games as I used to. But the Switch version is extremely enticing for me, as I take the subway (or as I call it lately, the Zelda tunnel) to & from work every day where I can easily see myself playing it at a leisurely pace. Even the demanding nature of the game isn’t that much of a dealbreaker given that I have plenty of commute time to sink into it. I’m sure I’m not the only one who sees certain kinds of games as “more playable” when they become portable. And the fact that this plain ol’ Dark Souls 1 means that it’s a tried-and-true game with a great reputation. If it were a new Souls game exclusively for Switch, it might have had the feeling of a gimped “portable version” game like what graced the PSP every so often instead of the “real” version of the game.

Just some food for thought. Keep up the great work.

it’s entirely possible not to make much progress in an average play session, unless you’re a high school student with a lot of time on your hands (as I was when the game first came out).

Damn, I’m old. Did you know I still have an Atari 2600 backlog? Hey! Anyone want to play some Mazecraze?

Above: Mazecraze! Fuck, yeah!

So by putting a game on a portable makes these longer games easier to digest? This might help explain BoW “Wow!”‘s success. Skyrim and Xenoblade 2 are also not short games.

I’m so old that when I think of portable games, I think of SHORT because the game screen is so tiring to look at after a while (Oh, original Gameboy, ooohhhhhh).