Game Review (2025 September)

Dark Souls: Remastered (as "DSR" afterwards) was released in 2018, a remastered version of the first game in FromSoftware's Dark Souls series. I spent 170+ hours on DSR in 2023, played till the middle of my third playthrough and then stopped with Steam achievements 41/41 in a legit way.

DSR is obviously not an easy game, but not as challenging as what I expected. The top challenges are learning the system and memorising the maps. Without any guides, the first playthrough with all those first-time kills or traps is almost guaranteed to suck. However, once having all those information in head, DSR suddenly becomes bland and boring. Information asymmetry, the only reason DSR can "pretend" to be a hardcore game.

Surprisingly, most BOSSes in DSR are pretty lenient, when comparing to the disgusting maps and ridiculous mobs. As an ARPG, DSR gives players a great variety of options to play with. While I believe players in general do prefer this kind of flexibility, I am a minority on the opposite end: I enjoy fewer options, so that I am forced to train, learn and grow up during the actual fights. ARPGs like DSR encourage players to spend more time on exploration or preparation than the actual fights. The problem is, once you figure out some official cheats like tank builds with high poise or Dark Bead in DSR, the game suddenly becomes an unfamiliar thing and you have to make a serious decision yourself:

• Cheese the game from now on in an easy but boring way, without any real challenges?

• Or ban those overpowered strategies and put yourself in a limited and restricted situation?

Read all the available guides, learn all the useful knowledge and exploit the most powerful strategies. If a game is still challenging to some extent after all these, that is hardcore for me. Do games like that exist? Of course, but not many, the reason of why great hardcore games are precious. That said, comparing to those real hardcore games like Sekiro, DSR is pretty much a joke. Putting DSR in the bin of hardcore games, is a disgrace.

The only tasks that I still remember as challenging in DSR till this day, slab farming and tail cutting. The drop rates of slabs are set to some ridiculous low numbers, which can drive you crazy if you want to get one from a mob, a great activity to waste some of your spare time. And there are only around 7 cases where you can cut a tail and get an item. Most are fair, atrocious ones like Black Dragon Kalameet are purely nasty designs. A hard challenge is not equivalent to a great challenge, Kalameet is such an excellent example.

Before starting DSR, I planned to complete the Dark Souls trilogy. After finishing DSR, the plan was discarded and so as Elden Ring. This kind of ARPGs is not designed for players like me, so finishing DSR 41/41 is more than enough.