Game of the Year: Dark Souls 3

Image copyright From Software and Namco Bandai

Like it was going to be anything else.  Sure, Ashes of Ariandel was kind of lame, but that doesn’t mean that Dark Souls 3 isn’t easily the best game of the year.  It’s the second time in as many years that I’ve had to revise my top 10 games of all time because of a brand new game.  Just as Metal Gear Solid 5 pushed forward military stealth games, Dark Souls 3 pushed forward action RPGs.

There’s very little to say here that I haven’t said already in my three Game Anatomy write ups without repeating myself, but the quality of this game cannot be overstated.  Dark Souls 3 is not only my favorite game of the year, it’s my favorite game in the series.  I’ve tried to get into every Souls game, all the way back to Demon’s Souls, and it’s always been a series I can understand and appreciate, but never liked.  I found them to be slow, sort of tedious, and something I desperately wanted to love and enjoy and couldn’t.  I got the furthest into Dark Souls, but then we got 3 and it gave it what I felt the series was missing.

It’s not just the extra speed, but that’s a big factor in why I enjoyed this game in the series more than the others.  What Dark Souls 3 does is that it perfects everything that the series does well at, and manages to make a lot of the more ambitious parts of the series that never quite worked out actually work out.  All in all, it’s the best version of Dark Souls, and that really is all that’s needed to make it Game of the Year.

Dark Souls is the essence of action RPGs.  It’s like Zelda, in a lot of ways, where it’s just one guy against the whole world, out to kill all sorts of giant bad guys, an army of the undead and make it through by the skin of your teeth.  There are a lot of games that do this, but Dark Souls makes it visceral.  Dark Souls is the game where it really does come down to a do or die battle.  Sure, after a couple of hours, the regular enemies are mostly fodder for experience points, but the bosses are some of the biggest and most brutal in the series.  It’s kind of like the old 16 bit games, where giant, screen filling bosses that challenge the player to push themselves past their own limits and become better is the selling point.

That, also, is one of the reasons why it’s the best game of the year.  One thing I do miss about games is when the developers would embrace that they were making a game, and that design and development was more important than story or cutscenes.  Don’t get me wrong, I love story, and I feel like games really need to improve there, but there is something pure about how games were made in the pre-seventh generation console era, and Dark Souls shows that the ideals of the seventh and eighth generation console games can be done with the design sensibilities from before that era, provided that the developers aren’t just failed movie directors who hate the medium they’re working on.  Dark Souls isn’t the only game to focus on design over making a shitty movie this year, in fact almost every game on the list this year focused on being good at everything, including design and working their story into the medium, it’s just that Dark Souls did it better than anything.

Also, nothing quite matches beating a guy called Aldrich, Devourer of the Gods on your first try, even if I really kind of credit my success to watching Arin Hanson fail over and over on him on Game Grumps.