So, the day after I announce to myself and the gaping black void that is the internet that I'll try to resurrect a February blog-a-day, I skip the first day. In fairness, I got sick yesterday and could only muster sitting on the couch for several hours before going to bed.
This is ironic, actually.
The real reason I'm doing this is because Demon's Souls --maybe the best video game of the last ten years-- will have its servers shut off on February 28. I have an intense personal connection to this game, and while it will still be playable in an offline capacity after the end of this month, it will be a different, almost hollow experience. Effectively, Demon's Souls will be a husk of its former self; it's ability to connect to other players for eerie, otherwordly multiplayer opportunities stripped away will lobotomize it. I have been contracted by USGamer.net (a website I contribute to and that you should read) to witness the surgery.
Like all articles I write on the internet for money, I began to have a small panic attack about it. I've written a lot about this game in the past as well as its successors, and a whole lot of other people have done the same. Demon's, and especially its follow up, Dark Souls, were born into a screaming YouTube age where whole careers have been made out of people dissecting them, and it's hard at this stage to have something new to add. I could rehash a terrible year of my life and how I used the game as a perverse coping mechanism, but that's already been done, too. But I have things in me about this video game that need to get out, even though I'm having a little trouble finding them at what is now its twilight.
I have concluded, then, that we're going to find them together.
DAY 1 (February 1, 2018):
It has been more than five years, or maybe more, since I've played this game, which is a realization that came to me early in the morning before I would have a chance to sit down and play it. To some, and definitely when I try to look back on it, five years is no time at all. In video game release terms, though, five years is more like ten. Three Dark Souls and a Bloodborne later, I was wondering yesterday morning how much I would recollect about DS. There was a time that I literally knew the game backward; I played it once this way just to see every level from every angle. But after doing the same with the first two Dark Souls games (plus, you know, playing other video games because that's my thing), I had both a lingering fear and childish delight that maybe I won't be coming back to it from scratch, but I won't recall as much as I would have a year or two or three ago.
So, I began to plan ahead, but without spending the morning looking through wikis or message boards. What build should I make for my character? Most playthroughs for me were hybrid melee concoctions, so should I branch out? What about an archer? A priest? Will I have enough time to finish the game in the month that I have with fewer and fewer hours in the day? I can't mess with that when I have a deadline looming. I decide to compromise, then: I only played a magic build once, but I'm too much of a chicken to start with the mage class. I chose to start with the royalty class (essentially, the game's only sort of "easy" mode).
This was only the first of many small-potatoes agonies, though. While it's the first time I've played the game in years, it will likely be the last time I play it ever. It needed to be momentous, almost monolithic. As the only game in the series that had gender-specific equipment, I wondered if I should make an avatar that resembled me physically --a bald, blue-eyed man with an athletic physique-- or should I take a more feminine course to enjoy the few advantages the game will offer me? Feeling the crunch of time as I nursed my illness on the couch, I chose the latter. But it got worse when I was instructed to choose my character's name, which gave me actual pause.
Choosing the name of an on-screen avatar is not the sort of thing to make a person pensively stare at a wall for close to ten minutes in total silence. Typically, it barely registers as an afterthought for me. I could go the wacky, funny route, my "Doc Brown"s and "Butfface Magoo"s running around and terrorizing hapless demons and crazed soldiers in the Boletarian Palace with reckless, fluid impunity. On the other hand, there have been times when I realize that names have been effectively meaningless as a practice. I am the title-free savior of this wretched Northern kingdom, strolling in and out of tunnels and mines dishing out the kind of No-Name justice that would make Clint Eastwood blush. But this time, this final stretch, needed to mean something. I need to capture that finality. I settle on "Dynamite Step," the title of the last Twilight Singer's record. She ventured into the colorless fog, and I played through the tutorial.
This is my fifth PlayStation 3, I think. Over the course of the last decade or so, these small supercomputers had a habit of dying in my home. This is something that has always bothered me, as you might guess. I tend to take care of my belongings, and I fucking babied these things over the years, but foul luck or cosmic injustice decided that they needed to die at my feet every other year or so. This meant that saved data is long gone for old characters (the first one died before my buying into PS+ and cloud saves), which meant that the game was going to force me through the tutorial, which can normally be skipped. I didn't mind, though. The mechanics of a Souls game is branded onto my inner being now, but I don't think I've gone through the trouble of letting the game teach me how it worked or watch the brief intro story sequence since my early days with it. It felt right to start from the beginning, this joke of an opening area. I even tried my hand at killing the Vanguard Demon at the end. That didn't turn out how I wanted, though, and I was really getting the sense that I was right to be concerned. Going through the game again after all of these was going to be a rough ride, and I would see that no matter how much I may have loved this game, and how much it helped me through the hard times, Demon's Souls knows no loyalty.
Turns out, I was wrong all along. We'll talk about that tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment