Dark Souls Changed My Life

I wanted to write about something and I'm tired of politics for the time being, so I figured I would do something a bit more personal.

Dark Souls is a three part series created by developer FromSoftware, headed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, a man who has established himself in the poison swamps of modern game design as a monolithic figure. His creation of Dark Souls has not only helped myself, but possibly millions of people through extraordinarily difficult circumstances by providing a medium in which delicate balances are masterfully executed in the realms of combat, and a unique form of environment based, convoluted storytelling on everything from love, betrayal, loyalty, friendships, sacrifice, life, death, struggle, perseverance and success.

I'm not exactly sure what the point of this essay is. I know the title makes an obvious point, but even now, after multiple trips through the harrowing, dark and miserable worlds that the Dark Souls universe take place in, I still feel like I haven't exactly been able to nail down how this series has had such a profound impact on my perceptions of not just myself, but approaching and actively participating in the world around me. This will be a form of me trying to work all that out.

For this reason, this essay may come off as a bit disjointed. I'm still in the process of trying to figure out the nature of this games impact. If I'm being completely honest, I'm not sure I'll ever understand how a video game, a goddamn video game, has helped me to teach myself extremely crucial lessons about failure, persistence and patience, that I had apparently not picked up anywhere else in the real world. Not just for the world at large, but for affording a certain someone the luxury of accepting that growth requires time, patience, and a willingness to adapt to changing circumstances against your own willingness to accept them.

It's me, I'm that someone. I hate change. Well, I used too. I used to hate a lot of things. I still kind of do, but a lot of that internal anger and discontent with the world takes on a different meaning now. Things that used to bother me, and I mean really bother me, about myself, my capabilities, how others perceive me, my overall value in the world, my inability to control things, my inability to accept that there are things that can't be changed, are all still there.

Dark Souls didn't cure my depression, it didn't fix my problems, it didn't hand me any tangible things I can use to beat back these feelings of insignificance I've struggled with my whole life. It didn't pay my debts, it didn't undo all the trauma, it didn't fix my car...

Dark Souls gave me the confidence to believe that I, myself, can do all these things.

Something that I never, ever believed I could do.

How could a fictional world, created using strings of 1's and 0's that create polygons on a screen, depicting some of the most horrifying monsters existing in the most morbid environments, create such a strong internal sense of self?

A few years ago now, I was completely and utterly unfamiliar with the world of Dark Souls.

As far as I knew, it was an overly difficult game designed for masochists. Who, for reasons I could never understand, would spend hours and days and weeks of their time dying over and over and over. The entire concept of the game itself felt alien to me, aren't video games designed to be beaten? Aren't I supposed to be able to turn the game on, turn my brain off, and exist in a digital world where I am automatically the champion that brushes challenges off their shoulder? Life is hard already, I'm tired from working so much, tired from all the emotional regulation on a daily basis, how could anyone love a game where success feels all but impossible? There is no map to reference, no fun little icons popping up to indicate where you are supposed to go next, or what you are supposed to do, every enemy you encounter is a hundred times stronger and faster than you are, and every character you encounter (that isn't trying to kill you) will only speak to you in weird riddles that you legitimately can't get them to repeat if you missed what they said the first time.

Almost every second of existing in the Dark Souls universe genuinely makes you feel like your being punished for even trying. You get punished for dying, you get punished for innocuous mistakes, you get punished so relentlessly, so brutally, so consistently.

And then, after all that, you find the goddamn boss room.

It really is just an unrelenting, non-stop, beat down.

It's fun. I swear to god.

Born Again Loser

I have seen this image more times than I have seen my biological father.

My first journey into the Souls universe started at a particularly turbulent part of my life. It was mid-covid pandemic, and I hadn't been working for awhile. By this point, I'd had a work from home job that I hardly considered an actual job, so I technically was working, but nothing about the job itself gave me any sense of actually accomplishing anything. Outside of that, I was just purely lost. Lost in life, lost in purpose, lost in meaning. I had no idea what I was doing. I still kind of don't, but by this point in time, I was essentially flying by the seat of my pants. I saw the original release trailer for a new game that was coming out called "Elden Ring", which was created by the same company and in the same vein and spirit as Dark Souls, and the trailer had me so enamored by the art style that I told myself I was going to learn enough about the mechanics of FromSoft games to be able to have an enjoyable experience with Elden Ring. So, I went onto the Steam store and I bought Dark Souls III.

For a little while, off and on, I would dabble with the game. Much of it frustrated me.

"I seriously don't have a map? How do I know where I'm going? What's the story? Why does my character exist?"

Roughly an hour and an embarrassing number of deaths later, I'd simply turn the game off.

Why bother? I play video games to relax, and the last thing I'm getting out of this game is relaxation. I cannot take my eyes off the screen for even a millisecond without risking death, I quite literally can't even pause the goddamn game because there is no pause function that allows you to breath for a second. It's been hours and hours that I've been plugging away at this, and for some reason the game hasn't told me that I am a hero yet. What gives? I want to be the hero. I've been beating up the bad guys, I'd been doing all the right things as far as I could tell, but I couldn't manage to get anywhere. The game must just be broken or something. This shit is stupid, I'm going to move on to something else that rewards me for simply existing. So I did that. I uninstalled Dark Souls III and spent my time playing games that held my hand through the experience, that made sure I knew that my time was truly being valued, games that made me feel like a big special man. A big, special, influential world changer. It was great fun to pretend, for a little while. After all, thats why video games exist. It's a nice little escape from the haunting reality that absolutely nothing in your life is in your control. I certainly didnt spend my hard earned money to be challenged by a bunch of fictional characters, I want to dominate this world, and be revered. Since there doesn't seem to be any actionable way to navigate my life, I refuse the idea that I can't become God inside of a fictional universe.

If I'm not God, the game must be broken.

Fast forward a little bit.

Without going into detail, around this time I would experience one of the most traumatic events of my entire adult life. I was paralyzed. I felt nothing. It was a sense of betrayal I wouldn't wish on the worst person on earth. I saw things no one should ever see, I felt things nobody should ever feel. For as long as I had been alive up until that point, I had never felt so hollow. This was a period of pain and confusion and hopelessness and despair and just all of the worst aspects of the human experience, shrinking any and all concept of personal value, or worthiness, down to a dried up, cracking ex-puddle on the floor.

Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, became frozen in time. I don't really have much memory of what I was doing, or how I reacted. There are holes in walls and unhinged doors and uneven floorboards that paint a pretty clear picture, but I couldn't give you the play by play if someone had a gun to my head.

I do remember one thing, though. One thing I did, amidst all the internal chaos that was translating into actionable violence, that kept my unstable and frankly out of control ass planted firmly in a chair: I downloaded Dark Souls III. Again.

Fuck it, right? How could the hardest video game I have ever tried to play measure up to the most fucked up real life shit I have ever seen? There's no way. I need a distraction anyways. So off I went, into the fictional Dark Souls universe of terribleness and confusion and death.

For weeks, I hydrated with Bud Light, and I fucking died. Over and over and over. I was making progress, but still wasn't sure if I had even really learned anything. It didn't matter, the bosses I had met so far weren't as bad as I thought they would be, and for the most part I seemed to be making my way through this universe without having to put any real thought into what I was doing. I didn't understand the story, I had no idea what the characters were talking about, and my main strategy was to use a big shield to block every hit until it was time for me to throw my own swings. I was pretty sure I had figured this game out.

For all intents and purposes, the Souls universe was providing the escape that I was looking for. Up to that point, I was able to do what I felt I could do to skirt around the rules of this difficult game and get it to call me a champion.

And then I met her.

And she changed me.

The Dancer Of The Boreal Valley

I fear no man.

This is no man.

As I said before, up until meeting this lady, I was essentially navigating through this nightmare world by cutting corners. Taking just about every cheap win I could take, learning only enough about the mechanics of the game itself to get a passable defeat. Essentially, I was determined to force this notoriously difficult game to allow me through to the end.

After all, that's why they made the game right? To beat it, and see the end? How hard could it realistically be? What other reason, besides defeating the bad guys and being crowned the champion, would this game exist for anyways? So, after some cheap moves to navigate around the guards that are protecting the entrance to the chapel in which the Dancer resides, I was introduced for the first time.

Just another Dark Souls boss. I've already beaten a few of these. Bring it on. I entered the arena and she descended from the ceiling with a Lovecraftian like slither. She stood miles taller than my character, and unleashed a scream that probably pierced the in-game sound barrier. I was ready to win.

Man. I was so fucking naive.

Hours passed. Then days. Then weeks. Beer cans were everywhere. That feeling I had been chasing, of escaping into a world that would simply let me win, was gone. It was replaced by frustration, confusion, genuine disdain for FromSoftware, conversations with myself about how this was utterly fucking pointless and I apparently was just too stupid to understand why I was being stonewalled so hard by this crazy bitch. I would stroll my character into her boss room and just simply stand still, allowing her to relentlessly destroy me, as I had hit a point where I was completely and utterly out of ideas on how to beat her. I had no idea why I kept trying, I'm not even sure if "trying" is the right word for it, as it eventually got to a point where she'd kill me and I'd just laugh hysterically like an insane mental patient. I tried everything. Literally, everything. Nothing worked. No matter how close I got, no matter how many times I had convinced myself in what seemed to be her final moments, that I finally managed to circumvent the difficulty and force this game to crown me the king without having to do any king shit, she killed me. She killed me over and over and over and over and over. She would kill me and keep swinging her swords at my dead body. She would kill me when I was already dead. She would bring me back to life just to kill me again.

It was relentless. It was brutal. It was such consistent punishment with no explanation why.

So, I stopped. Uninstalled. Threw the controller at the wall and gave up. But something else happened.

I could not stop thinking about her.

It drove me insane. What was I doing wrong? There's no fucking way this is this hard. When I look it up online, I see people posting that they thought she was really easy. What the fuck? Am I retarded? I must be. People think this boss is easy? I'm pretty goddamn sure the game is just cheating, either that or the game just hates me personally. That must be it.

I'm not God yet. The game must be broken.

The Hardest Boss in Dark Souls is You.

"We are amidst strange beings, in a strange land, with heroes; centuries old, phasing in and out. There's no telling how long our worlds will remain in contact..." - Solaire of Astoria

If you've made it this far, you have probably noticed a trend in the way that I describe how I was attempting to make my way through Dark Souls.

Cheaply.

I wanted to say that I outsmarted the hard game. All of my frustrations with Dark Souls were placed solely on the game itself. The mechanics were bad, the game was unfair, it was too hard, it was just hard for the sake of being hard. The idea that insurmountable difficulty could exist within a medium that, as far as I knew, only existed to satiate my desires was ludicrous to me. Satiating my immediate desires that I can't achieve in my real life is why video games exist for christ sakes.

So, I started over. Completely. No more cheap shots. I am going to learn how this game works. I began the entire game over, from the start, with the intention of defeating The Dancer of the Boreal Valley. I was determined to learn from my mistakes, even though I had no idea what mistakes I even made in the first place. I didn't care about those mistakes anymore, I didn't care about the relentless punishment, I didn't care about the feelings of insignificance, I only cared about one thing: Defeating the Dancer. I needed it. I had no idea why I was so infatuated with the idea when I had a litany of other much easier games to play, but I could not get her out of my mind. I needed her soul. There was something about this fight, about this boss, that nobody in my real life knew I was fighting, that I had to conquer. And after hours and days of drudging through the swamps and castles and dilapidated infrastructure of the Dark Souls universe, I finally found myself facing the doors of the home of the Dancer of the Boreal Valley. Again.

This time, though, was different. Not because I was playing with a different character, but there was something different about myself: my attitude towards the fight. I was determined to win, and also determined to not let the inevitable losses get to me. I have a goal, and I am going to achieve it. I am going to defeat The Dancer of the Boreal Valley.

And then, I did.

Oh my god. I finally did it. I beat her. It was one of the most relieving feelings I have ever experienced. I laughed, I cried, I sent screenshots to my friends, I stared at my monitor in utter disbelief that I was looking at the soul of the Dancer Of The Boreal Valley. I just could not believe it. I finally did it. Holy shit.

Then, it hit me. Like a goddamn semi-truck.

My character didn't grow, or change, in order to meet the tall demands of the Dancer.

I did.

It was either give up, or adapt. Without really even knowing what choice I was making, I chose to adapt. She presented to me insurmountable, impossible hurdles. Broke me all the way down. But I kept coming back. Kept trying. Kept dying. Kept failing.

Until I succeeded.

It was only once, but I only needed to defeat her once. Suddenly, all of the frustration and self doubt and self debasement, and the long arduous battles of internal failure, were no longer feelings that were defined as ethereal faults in my character. I saw them as hurdles that I was able to overcome in order to achieve a stated goal.

The Dancer of the Boreal Valley, and her unwillingness to allow me to pass by her throne without learning how to defeat her in good faith, made me do something I have never done.

She made me believe in myself.

Until I had met the Dancer, I was under the impression that life is supposed to be easy. Why do all these bad things keep happening to me? I keep trying, and I keep failing. There's no map, there's no fun little icons telling me where I am supposed to go next and what I am supposed to do, every person I encounter seems to be a hundred times stronger and faster and smarter than me, and every person I meet that isn't trying to take advantage of me, seems to only speak in archaic riddles that I can't seem to get them to repeat if I missed it the first time.

Almost every second of existing in this life feels like you are being punished for even trying.

But persistence, patience, and allowing yourself the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them, translates punishment into valuable life lessons.

Dark Souls has taught me that punishment isn't always punishing. Sometimes, being confused and lost and hopeless is just what you have to be for a little while. Sometimes, a complete and total lack of direction and purpose is what is needed to give birth to true direction and purpose. The difference between the former and the latter, is how you define your personal relationships with failure, and persistence, that create the difference between insurmountable hurdles in life stopping you, and those same hurdles changing you.

Dark Souls changed my life for the better, by forcing me to challenge myself when I already felt defeated. For daring me to find purpose where I was convinced there couldn't be any. For forcing me to come to grips with myself, rather than continue to blame others for my lack of progress.

Don't you dare go hollow.