Dark Souls is Like an NES Game

James Margaris has penned what I believe is a very persuasive piece over at Gamasutra that argues that Dark Souls is a sincere throwaback to the NES era of console gaming. Margaris points to the lack of dedicated traversal mechanics as one of many telltale signs:

NES games often lacked dedicated traversal verbs or traversal that was mutually exclusive with combat. In Super Mario Brothers you traverse by jumping – that’s also how you attack and dodge. There’s no dedicated traversal mode (I’ll ignore water levels) in which the buttons do something different than they normally do.

Modern games are a very different story. In a realistic presentation normal humans jumping 25 feet onto floating platforms looks a little odd. So in the service of fidelity and realism in modern games traversal is about climbing nets and ropes, sliding down things, clinging to ledges, playing elaborate “hoisting yourself up” animations, etc.

When you jump onto a ledge your hands are free. When you climb up a ledge your hands are occupied. As such modern games with traversal usually lock out normal combat during traversal sections. In God of War while your feet are planted you have access to an elaborate combo system; when you’re climbing a net you have access to two attacks, one of which is basically useless compared to the other and neither of which is at all satisfying to use. While traversing a rope you can kick people or grab them and toss them off, with a system that has none of the depth or fun of standard combat. In some games you can’t attack at all while traversing, while in others you can but the action is perfunctory.

In Dark Souls there’s no dedicated traversal action besides using ladders, which is infrequent. Beyond that traversing is just walking / running / falling / jumping, not context-sensitive animations or a different verb set. While there is navigation and exploration there isn’t much traversal in the modern sense. Similarly there are few enemies you’re required to defeat and few arena battles. Eschewing arena-style layouts, Dark Souls combat areas are not distinct from traversal areas – combat takes place in all sorts of differently-shaped environments as you wander through them.

The first time you encounter a Black Knight in Dark Souls it’s likely the one in Undead Burg. You can walk right by if you want. If you choose to fight the fight is awkward, taking place in a narrow corridor with no room to dodge. If you lure it out beyond that there are stairs, and beyond that a small area with a rooftop. If you want to lure the Black Knight to an open combat space you have to travel quite far, past nearest bonfire. (I’m not sure if it will even follow you that far) Similarly, the second Black Knight (in Undead Parish I believe) is on a small circular landing at the top of a spiral staircase. Fighting here is just as awkward – the space is small and you can fall onto the stairs. If you try to lead the Knight into an open space you hit either a dead end or a room full of enemies.

At the end of the game you fight a variety of Black Knights again. This time you fight them one at a time in open space. It’s not hard. (Even Jeff Green had more trouble falling off the stairs leading up to the enemies than fighting them) It’s almost as if the point of this section is to reveal to the player the trick that’s been played on them – that the difficulty of Black Knights was always an illusion. Their patterns aren’t complicated, they aren’t clever or particularly fast. They were hard only because you were scared, because they surprised you and ran up to you while you were walking along a narrow ledge, set upon you right after you dropped down into a small room, or chased you around while other enemies fired arrows at you. At the end of the game they’re just Goombas in open space. They only functioned as competent enemies in the context of other enemies and an environmental layout that played to their strengths. (If only we could fight the Capra Demon again in a large arena instead of a studio apartment)