The Travels of an Undead
The story of Dark Souls goes far deeper than most games of its genre. There are people who devote their time just to decipher what the developers had created. The game beings with you, being the chosen undead, getting thrown into the under city, which is practically a prison for the darned. You find a key in the cellar, and the tutorial begins, and your story of your choosing commences. The basis is that there used to be a sun, until the God destroyed it to bring back everyone who had died. In doing so, the world was sent into eternal darkness, and your goal is to rekindle the bonfire, and bring back the sun. On your journey you meet many people who wish to assist you, and those who wish to stop your progress any way they can.

Dark Souls is one of the most enticing games that I have played. It is an immensely underrated game, in fact, it is known by a small amount of gamers. It was created by a large company, “Bandai Namco Games”. It is an action role-playing game, with an addition to multiplayer capabilities. It has progression, adventure, action, and a darn good story.
The game is very replayable due to its New Game Plus feature, which allows the player to replay the game multiple times. This allows the player to raise the difficulty, and lets the player go through multiple different storylines, instead of the one they had chosen the first time around. In one go around, a player could choose to be a Dark Wraith, someone who steals souls from other players to sacrifice for more power. The player could also choose to side with The Way of the Sun, who is a clan of heroes who assist other players defeat bosses. Since there are nine different covenants the player can choose, there are nine different ways to beat the game. A covenant is similar to a cult, where it’s a group of people fighting for the same cause, against other covenants. With the New Game Plus, it keeps the game challenging, so the game never gets stale. Because there is a role playing aspect of the game, the player can choose to kill every human they see, or help them and they will become a merchant or ally throughout the story.
Dark Souls also is very advanced in its graphics. It details everything, each weapon and piece of armor is decorated uniquely. The game is so graphically detailed that sometimes the console version of the game stutters and freezes up. Due to the capabilities of Windows ™ computers, it can run much smoother on a computer rather than an X Box or PlayStation. However, the Windows version of this game was ported very poorly. The multiplayer of the windows version of Dark Souls is almost a downfall due to its inconsistency and lack of support. A player could wait two hours before they are matched with a friend. In my case, I had to wait almost three hours to get into my friend’s game with my brother. For the X Box and PlayStation version of the game, the multiplayer works fine, but the gameplay is just hindered by the stuttering of the console.
The game has multiple aspects to change the experience, one of which being the customizability of the actual character. Someone can play the game as a bulky, heavy lifting, two handed fighter to smash and slash through his opponents. They could also spend all of their talent points into dexterity and dual wield swords or use a bow and arrow. The player can choose
to be a magic user, and cast fire balls and crystal lasers using his intellect, or enchant his weapon to deal a massive amount of damage. On top of just the build of the character, the player can upgrade his armor to increase his defenses, or upgrade his weapons to add lightning or fire damage on hit. Since there are multiple bosses in this game, each having different strengths and weaknesses, the player must be malleable enough to change to the boss, and strong enough to defeat the boss before it defeats the player.
Unlike most games, Dark Souls has no pause feature, so the game is always going, unless the computer or console is off. This means as long as the character meets the requirements; they could be raided by another play at any moment in the game. This adds on difficulty to the game, because a player could be slaying undead scum one moment, and be killed the next by another player in a moment’s notice. Due to the skill cap of this game, you could be matched up with either a newbie, or a guy who has beat the game ten times, and stand little to no chance against him. Since there are so many different combinations of gear people can acquire, there can be nearly an infinite amount of builds you could verse, and each one has its weakness you would have to find to defeat your opponent.