Episode 50: Dark Souls

Retro Spectives

Patrick and James have a problem. Almost every single episode, they’ve brought up Dark Souls. Level design? Not as good as Dark Souls. Combat System? Not as good as Dark Souls. Even when they’re playing racing games like F-Zero GX or 2D platformers like Cave Story, the comparisons still come thick and fast.

So, for this very special 50th episode of the podcast, we’ve decided to review and discuss Dark Souls, the yardstick by which we’ve praised and criticised so many other games. The impact that Dark Souls had on the video game industry as a whole cannot be questioned. From Software went from the weird Armored Core guys to one of the most prominent video game companies today. But is Dark Souls still fun to play today? Or has it’s darksign been eclipsed by the many Souls-likes that have come in its wake?

On this episode, we discuss:

• In what way does Dark Souls tell its story? Does Dark Souls even have a substantive story to engage with? Or is it all just a mess of vague ancient myths and legends?
• What’s so special about Dark Souls’ level design? Are a few shortcuts really that special, or has the value of helix level design been blown out of proportion?
• Dark Souls is supposedly an action-rpg. But where on the line between those two disparate ideas does it truly lie? Is Dark Souls a mechanical, action filled experience? Or a methodical and deep role-playing game?

We answer these questions and many more on the 50th episode of the Retro Spectives Podcast!

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Intro Music: KieLoBot - Tanzen K

Outro Music: Rockit Maxx - One point to another

Dark Souls OST: Motoi Sakuraba

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Was there a part of Dark Souls that we didn’t praise enough? Are you one of those dirty Dark Souls 2 apologists that we keep ragging on? Are you secretly hoping we never talk about this game ever again? We would love to hear what you have to say on our

community text based discord server!