Let's do this. We're gonna read from the Bible, as it were.
Wow, the channel really pivoted, huh?
You like that? Let's fall for our Presbyterians. Where can I find.
Oh, boy.
All right. Chapter one, the Story of Dark Souls. Story of Dark Souls series is taught through the act of playing the game. The players affecting the ancient worlds then venture into and must watch carefully for clues to their origins and history. This chapter will collect, actually, this podcast will collect many of these clues and arrange them into a linear story separated from the experience of playing. This mostly acts as a history lesson, but like all history, some details are clearer than others, and much of it is open to interpretation. Jake, what exactly is the souls like?
Today on.
Don'T fat roll over the intro.
Pay attention.
Hello and welcome one and all, to another Friday night as Jake and I sit down to talk, press b to cancel. That's right, presbyter, cancel your favorite podcast to fat roll to. Well, at least to try and talk about difficult games with. Here to talk difficult games with me is one of my closest and greatest canadian friends, sick. Jake, how are you, sir? You're wearing a beanie. And I have a fan. What is going on right now? Dude?
You've been saying, oh, it's 85, 90 degrees today in my part of the US, and I'm like, it's 55 degrees up here in Canada. It's. It's freezing today.
That's celsius, by the way. So we're all dying up here.
Yeah, I mean, it's been. It's been mild all week, so I shouldn't complain. But today has been a little bit chilly. So, yeah, I'm wearing a beanie because I'm in a basement and it's cold.
I am sweating my hat off. It's. It is rough up here, but it's fine because it is the first glimpse of summer coming it over. You know what else is a good glimpse? Let's talk Soulsborne games. Let's talk difficulty. Let's get into the madness that is one of the greatest, most talked about, most controversial, ly discussed game series that's out there. Soulsborne games. Soulsborne will include dark souls one through three, bloodborne. Some spicing of Sekiro. It counts. It's in there.
It counts, right? Yeah.
And of course, Jake, in my favorite game of all time, Elden Ring will probably be spashing as well. But we will mostly hover around a lot of the Dark Souls slash demon souls discussion because that is the basis of.
Of what?
A souls born game basically comes out to. So I guess we start off with the question, what do we think? As I said in our opening line, a lot of this will be open to interpretation. We won't be talking about the stories or the in depths this, or the jokes about the lore within the. Within the items and all the people that you talk to. If you want that, go buy this book, because there's plenty of information in there about that. But what we are going to talk about are basically what makes a Soulsborne game a Soulsborne game. We talk about all kinds of different clones, remnant, lies of P, even Tunic has been brought up in discussions with things that we've done in the past as it being a souls like kind of game. So, Jake, what do you think your definition of a souls born, souls like game is?
Don't ask me. I was gonna ask you. So. And I. That's what I want to do in this episode. I want to define what this actually is, because it's. It's bigger than fromsoft now. It's not just from soft. They clearly invented this genre, but I want to find what makes it this, because this is what, 20 years from now, kids are gonna be like, oh, I'm playing metrovanias. Oh, no, I like Soulsvanias, or soul souls likes or whatever it is.
Soulsvania is a new word we've. We found today, as a matter of fact.
Yeah, thanks.
Fired up, apparently. It exists.
Yeah, but it's. It's. It's like that, right? Like, there's people today who are of a certain age range where they'll say the term metroidvania, but they don't know what Metroid or Castlevania is referring to. Like, it's kind of. It transcended the original origin of that genre's name, and I think that's what's gonna happen with souls likes. But I do want to find what it means because there's a couple games that I've played that I think might qualify, but I'm not sure. So maybe I'm going to start with souls. Like, has to be a game that is animation dependent, right? Where it's combat heavy, and the combat is tied really, really tightly to the animations, where you have to do an attack. It carries through an animation, and then you attack again. You may have combos and whatnot involved in your combat. You may have blocking and rolling, but you're at the mercy of the animations before you can act again. Do you agree with that one?
I could see some of that being a thing. But I, my personal basis on the idea of what a Souls born game is, and this is, this is root foundation, I think. And again, if anybody's out there listening to us, they want to have a discussion about us and what they think Soulsbornes are like or what their opinion is, please come and find us. On Discord. Please come and find us@pressbetocancel.com. Talk to us about that there. I know we're going to have a lot of varying differentiations between our ideas of it, but what I personally think that a soulsborne or souls like game would consider is a game that is at a difficulty scale that cannot be scaled, it cannot be changed. You cannot change it from easy, hard, or medium. It is the scale it's going to be at, and you just do your best to try and get through it. But with there not being a scalable difficulty, there are patterns that are within the game that you can learn that will help you achieve whatever it is you're trying to achieve, where, where hidden enemies are at, boss fights that have the same kind of mechanics where, you know, there's either a long attack or short attack. And then the ability to iframe, fat roll, dodge roll, fat roll is something will probably bring up this entire episode, obviously. But you can use, you can use high frames to get out of attack. And it's the same thing, like Jake said about an animation that allows you to get away from something that you can dive out. Now, originally, when you play Dark Souls one, even demon souls, the original demon souls, and ps three, the rolling was there, but the shield was more useful than actually rolling out of the way. So actually having a defense was better for you. Then later on, when they started doing bloodborne, then they kind of took that, that shield away. They actually give you a joke shield. It's an Easter egg shield in Bloodborne. That's completely useless. But the Dodge roll became a bigger thing. Beyond that.
Bloodborne was no shield, but you had parrying, basically. Parrying was king in that game. I think similar with Sekiro is the same thing as parrying was king. Yes. And then I think the later Dark Souls had both. You could be a shield user or parry if you, if you wanted to.
Right.
Okay, so you. Okay, so I'm gonna go back on what you said. You said difficulty, you cannot scale. I'm with you there. Hard as hell, right? Sinisters in chat and he mentions also, you know, when you die, you loot, you lose something in your progression. Like you, you're still progressing through the game, but you lose something you gained in that run.
I think that's very kind of that, that roguelike, rogue element to it of losing everything you work for and then.
The learning of patterns and whatnot to kind of suit the environment. I agree with you there. And then I'm saying animation dependent combat with those, in those criteria in mind is monster Hunter not a souls like, because, hear me out, because it's very animation dependent. It's faster. It's faster, but it's definitely animation dependent. It's definitely a hard game. It can be hard game. And where you, you're rewarded for learning the patterns of the monsters you're hunting. Right. They all have a number of attacks. You have to learn the strategies of beating the monster. If you die, you don't really get the items from the monster. So that's, that's the whole progression in Monster Hunter is you kill monsters, get ingredients, upgrade your armor, but if you die during a run, you basically get nothing but scraps, really. So you're losing progression. There's no other monsters on the map. It's just one big, well, you know, okay, there is some monsters on the map, but they're nothing. It's the big, it's the big boss battles you're doing. It's basically a souls, like Monster Hunter world.
Monster Hunter world. You can run into two monsters at the same time. I've seen them duke it out together.
That's true. Yeah, that's true.
But.
So in that case, do we consider Monster Hunter souls? Like.
I would argue against that because I think the environment of the game itself sets it up for its own, its own kind of, I don't want to use the word story, but its own kind of difficulty and direction. When playing any of the souls games that I've played, the world is almost harder than the bosses you run into. So it's like overcoming the challenge to get to the challenge to overcome that, if that makes sense. With Monster Hunter world, you kind of just run around and gather whatever items you need, and you don't really. I don't worry in Monster Hunter world that I'm going to get killed by a random buffalo running through or whatever the, whatever those creatures are called. I worry about fighting the monster, and that's the big, that's the big bad. That's the big fight, right? Like, you're not going to get taken out by the pterodactyls that are flying around. You might, if you're fighting the monster and they come in and that's, that's a problem. But most souls born or souls like games, have some sort of arena set up for your boss fight or your big fight that you are nothing. Unless it's already in there. Nothing will interfere. It's between it's you and whatever mechanics that thing has. And then you fight it. And you congratulate yourself when you've beat your head against the wall for ten or eleven times just to finish the first fight that you've done.
Try 50 for me anyway.
Right.
Okay.
So I think within the realm of a souls like itself, I think the world is as treacherous as the. As the. The goals you're trying to accomplish. You know what I mean?
Okay, so that's a. That's a good one to pull at. But I'm thinking of Elden ring. Now, I'm terrible at these games. I've never been good at them, but out of all of them, I've played the most of Elden ring, I've played through most of dark souls. Two, I bounced off of one a little bit, and I sample three, just dived into three a little bit. But I played a ton of elden ring and I didn't find the world that hard. Well, you know what? I guess I'm going to take that back because when you go into certain caves or certain, like, I wouldn't call them dungeons, but there's. There's like dubbed.
There's. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I get. I do worry that I'm going to die down there. And when you. And it sucks when you die because you lose your. You lose your souls or your runes.
Right.
I guess that's. I guess that works then, that the world is a factor in the difficulty, I guess.
Think of it. Think of it this way and we'll use Monster hunter world because that's the kind of the one that we're trying to match up. Right. When you fire up and you fly into the land that you're gonna go hunt this monster in and you hit the ground, you're ready to go running, right? You're ready to go and take your. Just go balls the wall and take out whatever's out there. When you wake up on the high wall of Lothric, which is the first land of the area, after you beat, like, one of the mini bosses you're terrified of. Oh, God. This entire. This entire area is horrifying to me because I don't. I will lose everything just getting to the next step. I'm just trying to find the next bonfire or save point, whatever, you know, whichever version you're playing just so that I can take a breath to get to the next thing. I think souls like are more stressful in the environment. Getting to the next goal then monster Hunter was super. Like you said, it's hot, fast pace. I'm going to go find this thing. I'm hunting this thing down and then I'm going to kick its butt when I see it. Dark souls, more like. I'm going to walk so slow through this swamp and try not to get poisoned and try not to get sneak attacked and try not to get blood damage and try not to do all these things. Mitsuda made it very clear that the reason there's no difficulty scaling and it's as hard as it is across the board is because he wants players to feel a sense of accomplishment when they finish whatever it is they're trying to finish. May it be just getting through Fairance keep. May it be beating the lords of Cinder or getting through Dracula or whatever I'm trying to name drop here. So people actually have my credibility on all the Dark Souls games that I've played.
But I mean, you've beaten all of them. I think nobody's gonna take that from you. It's fine.
I haven't been the DLC three yet. We're working on that. But that's beside the point. The point is, is that there, there's, I feel more stressed. I mean, not now because I like playing it and it's entertaining to me and I'm better. But you still feel, I still feel that sense of I don't want to go there. Like I want to go in that area. I don't want to deal with. I hate this part of the game. And as you keep climbing because most of the time you replay the first half of the game a lot so you're comfortable with it. You know where everything is. You know the secrets, you know this, that and the other. So you kind of breeze through the first, I don't know, 2 hours of the game and then you get to that part where you have not played a lot of because you have not repeated it quite a bit. Because it's the part where you either fall off and come back later or something or else happens where it's not a repetitive thing. And the more you go, you go, oh, I forgot about this. Oh, I don't like this. Oh, this is stressing me out. Oh, God. I'm like, I've got this much health. I got one estus left. I've got 17,000 souls and there's a dark knight with a bow and arrow trying to hit me from afar. And I'm out of arrows. Like, I'm just going to stop. I can't play anymore and take a break.
Yeah, yeah, there's points. There's points in Elden ring and dark souls where I just. You just hit that one death and you're like, okay, I'm done. I'm just. I'm just not going to do it anymore. Especially when it's a death that you saw coming or you knew it was preventable, but it just a skill issue.
Right?
Like the one, the. The reason I stopped dark souls, I think it was two originally when I first played it. I think I mentioned this before in a past episode, I was crushing it. I was doing so well. I was exploring, getting the lay of the land. I was loving. I was grinding enemies where I could. I was doing great. And then I had a large number of souls on me and I got cocky and I went. I just pushed, I pushed a little bit further into the, into the dungeon or the layout of the castle, whatever the hell it was. And there's a door. And I opened the door and it was pitch dark inside. And I'm like, I probably should go back to a bonfire. But I fought all the way here and they're going to respond, screw it, I'm going to go inside this room. And I went in, the door behind me closed, and there was not one, but like three or four enemies in a small space. And I got my ass handed to me and I just uninstalled. I uninstall it like street Fighter six and it gave up for like two years. I eventually went back. I eventually did go back, but that experience kind of, just kind of turned me off of it. So I did a lot better with Elden ring, but, okay, so the world is stressful. The world is. Is in a lot of ways more difficult than the bosses. I think I can. I can agree with you there, especially when I look at Monster Hunter rise, which is the most recent one. As soon as the map opens, you hop your doggo and you just sprint. Or if Monster Hunter world, you leap off the nearest edge without. Without any care about fall damage or nothing. You don't give a crap, you just go, you're absolutely right. It's a different tone. So I can agree with you there. So souls, like a true souls like you get that sense of dread and worry and fear as you strategically go through a level, just trying to get on that next checkpoint. I'm with you there.
Right.
So I'm not as familiar with bloodborne and soul and Sekiro like you are. Isn't Sekiro more. More open? Isn't there some verticality to it? Like, don't you have, like, a grappling hook or something?
Yes. Well, Sekiro is. You say open. I don't think you mean open world.
I think you mean more like wide open spaces. Vertical.
Yeah, you get a lot of trees. There's a lot of, there's the thing about Sekiro, which is really cool. Sekiro, however you want to pronounce it, if I'm wrong, tell me in the discord. It's fine.
The thing about Sekiro, saying it way wrong. It's okay.
Sekiro. Sekiro. I've heard it numerous different times, though. If Matsuda wants to come in here and correct us, please. I love you.
Notable listener, press B.
Sekiro has a lot more high flying aspects. It's a lot more jumping around. Like you said, a lot of bloodborne, I think bloodborne in all three. Dark souls and demon souls have a jump mechanic, but it is cumbersome, and it's literally just to get from one ledge to the other. Sekiro has introduced the jumping mechanic into the game to add a more high flying kind of feel and a jumping back and forth with that. And then they added it to Elden Ring on top of that, but it's still not. The mechanics for jumping in Sekiro are fucking night and day versus Elden Ring's jumping mechanics in that. Um, Sekiro, when you get used to playing with those skills and the jumping and the, and the harpooning and the, you know, all that stuff, the grappling stuff, you feel awesome. And I've said it in the past before when we were talking about what we like about games that we play, games that make me feel like a badass. Sekiro gives you that just, I can. I am invincible. I can do anything. After you take down a boss, and then you get in the next area and literally die by the next enemy. But that's how it's designed to go. Um, the pairing system, the blocking and the dodging, it's a souls like, but it's. It's such a different creature than anything else within that.
Okay, so even though there's grappling hooks, it's a more agile, more more faster, I guess, movement. It's not as fast as monster hunter, but it is definitely faster than dark souls, no?
Yeah.
Even though it's faster movement. You still have that difficulty between bosses, the. The lead up to the new area. You still have that worry that you're going to get, you know, killed by an enemy because you misstepped. Yep.
If you misstep, you can lose all your. You don't get souls. You get. Gosh, I can't remember what the. The coin with the experience points in Sekiro. It's been a while since I played that, but the one benefit that. That Sekiro has, that dark souls hasn't, but they. They still put the. The yin and yang into it, or, you know, they make it balanced enough is that you can instantly kill things. If you sneak up behind them or drop from above, you can wipe them out. You can even take out mini bosses. But how they balance that scale is that Sekiro is called. Sekiro's died twice. Because you can resurrect yourself and start out from where you were fighting. It's not respawning at a bonfire or a safe point. You literally can bring yourself back to life and fight that person again right where you're at with a new life. Well, okay. The enemies have that same attribute as well. So when we talk about things going into phases like we do, which we will probably talk about boss phasing, Sekiro does it with a second life for the boss. Ok. You take down his life bar, and you'll see a little circle, and it'll go dark, and then they'll come back to life and have a whole new mechanic. And some of them have three different life scales that you have to have to figure out how to deal with.
Okay? So even if you. Even if you backstab an Insta kill, that's. That could potentially be just like one life of that creature. Okay?
Right, right. It's like battle toads. If you die anywhere and use a continuum battletoads, you might as well start over.
You start over. Yeah. I hate that game. All right. The reason I'm asking all these questions and I'm trying to drill down on the definition of this, because there's other games I've liked quite a bit. The other one was Jedi Fallen order or also Jedi survivor. More recently, although I have not played Survivor, I've played a lot of fallen order. And when I played that game, within ten minutes, I'm like, oh, it's a soul scheme. Because there's bonfires, basically.
Yeah.
And there's bosses, and it's got. Is very heavy on dodge. Rolling, fat, rolling, force rolling, parrying. As well, yeah, force, but, yeah. So there's a lot of that mechanics, is there? It's also, if you play on the regular difficulty, it can be quite difficult. That was a hard game for me to beat. I think I even knocked it down a few notches on a few encounters. So there is adjustable difficulty in this game. And I think my most recent playthrough, I actually played it easy because I didn't want to deal with the soul psych stuff. I just wanted the damn story. But it's got souls, like elements. Bonfires, combat, animation. Heavy all out there, but the difficulties adjustable. And I didn't find at any time the enemies between boss encounters were hard or difficult. I never really worried about it. Some sequences are a bit tricky. Like, I think when you're in Dathomir, I think it is in fallen order. There's a couple hallways where I'm like, screw you, but I didn't die very often in that game, except at bosses. Because you're a Jedi, right? So you have, like, a line of stormtroopers shooting at you. You're a Jedi. You're deflecting blasters back, and you're knocking them back and forth. It wouldn't be a Star wars game, and you wouldn't be a Jedi if the mooks or the henchmen were difficult. So does that still qualify as a Souls game, then, or do we think it's disqualified?
I believe it is. Souls. Like. Like there's roguelike and roguelite. We could almost create our own genre of souls light in this game, where it has the basic elements of. You rest at a bonfire. Everything comes back, which is one of the biggest things about a souls game. You. You use that bonfire to usually get experience from or level up your character that you collect from fighting things. Like, if you. If you ran through the entire game and didn't fight a thing, you didn't get an exp. You're not gonna level up. But if you're good, if you're really good, you can beat any souls game without leveling up. I've seen people do blood. Level one runs on bloodborne.
Yeah.
Where they don't level up anything, and you can still beat the game with no experience. I don't know if you could do that in fallen order or. Sorry, Jedi survivor or either one of those are the same thing.
So the thing with. With the Jedi fallen order is there is a skill tree. I don't think any of the skills are necessary. Maybe there's a few that you unlock as, um, it's kind of like a Metroidvania, where there's certain abilities you have to learn to beat the game, but there's a lot of the skills beyond those. Those trees, you know, like extra moves or bonuses to, you know, throwing your lightsaber and flurry and all that. You don't need those, and you don't have to worry about those, but there's certain baseline unlocks you need to get, I believe. But they don't need XP. I think they just. They unlock, and it unlocks the tree, and the rest of the tree is XP, if I'm not wrong. So I think you probably could beat it without leveling anything up. I have to take a look at that. That's an interesting challenge. You're right, though. I've seen people beat even elden ring, right. Naked with a giant club. And I've seen people do it. It's. It's.
Let me solar her is done with a bucket on his head and a sword. I mean, right. You don't have to. You don't have to level up. It's. It's almost a luxury to be able to level your character up in an rpg, of all things. You know, it's like, oh, I get to do this. Not. You have to do. It's like, it's funny to think of it that way.
It's like playing Zelda and only doing the three hearts right, not picking up heart pieces. Some people enjoy their games, and some people just want to, you know, hate themselves. You're gonna play it with three hearts? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's. I'm not. I'm not at that level. I mean, November's in our twitch chat over here, and he keeps telling me I should do a ladle run. Ladle run for dark souls two ladle. Not. Not of. Not a useful weapon. I don't know if you've used the ladle to fight anyone before. It is not a very effective weapon.
I'm trying to think of. Didn't somebody do. I think somebody did an elden ring run with just shields. Was that it, or was that Zelda?
No, there is different games. There is. Well, there is a build in Elden ring where you can use the dual shield build.
Dual shields.
Get through okay. And get through it somehow. It's probably a big pain in the ass, but can be done.
Okay. Okay, so basically we're saying that there's souls likes and now there's souls light.
Now there's so light, and it's so coined by press. Thank you.
Yeah, we're gonna trademark that term. You don't use it. We see you YouTube. We won't touch souls mania, but souls light, that's. That's fucking ours.
Soulsvania off limits. Souls light.
Yeah. All right. I want. I want credit. Wait, but you know what? This makes sense, though, because then I would consider monster hunter world a soul's light because there's elements of it. Or, like tunic. Right? I love tunic. And people keep saying, oh, it's a top down souls. Like, I mean, yes and no. Right? There's definitely bonfires. There's definitely. You lose stuff on death. Right? Like, there's. There's a risk reward mechanic to it. Right. But it's definitely not, like dark souls. Not. Not. Not entirely. It's more puzzle game than anything else.
And it has the accessibility ability and accessibility ability that you can change to make it so that it can be one or the other, so.
Right.
But I'd still argue even with that now, I played it differently from the rest of you guys. I kept the. I kept the stuff on because I. But I would still argue that it's. That it is very souls in its aspect of fight things to level up. You lose everything if you die. And you have to start from the beginning of an area. And you're literally. I felt like I was looking for the next save point, like the next bonfire or the next area that I can take a break. Because the irony behind the bonfire is what do you do at a campfire? You chill. You take a breather. You're relaxed. You cook some food, you roast some marshmallows, you just chill. When you think campfire or bonfire, you think party time, kick off the shoes and kind of trail chill. Right. So that's what a bonfire is, essentially, in. Dark souls is a place to catch your breath and just think about what you've done and if you're willing to continue to do more of what you have already done to get here. Um, so, yeah, I. If we're going to use the souls light acumen and say it, that's. That, then it would definitely fit. I believe that. That area that you and I discussed. But there. I think it's more souls, like, than Monster Hunter World, would be my personal opinion.
I don't. For me, it's just the bosses. Like, the monster hunter world bosses. Just the. The amount of, like, experience and learning you need to do with those, you. You really need to learn the pattern. Especially some of the higher tier tier bosses. They get quite difficult and they're hard. Right. And they are. They're very intimidating, especially world. World of arise. I feel like that. I think it belongs in the souls. Like, although I'm with, well, soul. Souls. Light. God damn these terms. Yeah, but, yeah. Tunic. The reason I say tunic is light. Over. Over. Like. Right. I feel it's less like a Souls game because the back half of that game, it's not even the combat anymore. The combat is really only a third of that game. The true game in tunic. And I won't talk about it further in this episode. We did do a full spoiler episode on Tunic, which hopefully people want to listen to or watch because it was a great game. The back half is totally a puzzle game, though. It's a puzzle game. It's an experience. It's a meta thing. It's not a combat game. It's not a Zelda Dark Souls thing, although you might think so in the first couple hours, but it's so much more, and I haven't seen that before in other games. So. Okay. Sinister is asking about lies of P. Lies of P as a souls like, but it has difficulty settings.
Let's. I want to verify that. Let me verify that there is difficult. I have it, but.
Okay, have you beaten it or you.
No, no, no. I've made it. Liza P does not have difficulty settings. And all players must beat the game the same level of challenge. So Liza P is as close to a souls like game and in. In play. When I fired up Liza P. I played a demo months ago. I was watching a streamer that I really like. Late night Retro had pulled it out, and I was like, what the hell is this? This is some new soulsborne game. It looks like a fromsoft made game. Basically, lies of P is Pinocchio and a dark soul setting. And it couldn't be any more dark soul setting. It's got the same. The same dark background, the same dodge mechanics. When you first start up the game, you approach a bench and you get to choose your play style. So if you want to be strength, quick, or balanced, you pick whatever weapon that is and then from there, you continue onward and play through the game you are looking for. They're called stargazers. A stargazer is essentially a bonfire, and that's where you go to level up. And if you rest at the Stargazer, you guessed it, everything gets recreated. You fight your way through the level, then you find yourself in an arena boss fight, which I fought the first boss, and I actually beat it. Pretty proud of that. And then you go on to the next level. And the story, the story continues to go much like in Dark Souls. I mean, we know the story of Pinocchio. It's obviously a very twisted story of Pinocchio. But the story is told as you're playing through it, through the NPC's. There's a. There's basically, there's like, a narrator talking to you, which I believe is the fairy godmother. But I don't know yet. I haven't confirmed that yet because I haven't gotten that far yet. But she's telling you where to go and what to do as you are progressing. But you are fighting mechanized puppets that have attacked this city that are crazy. The boss fights in some of this game are insane to see, like, okay, puppets turn into. I guess the best way to say is steampunk machines that you have to fight and get through. So instead of blood, there's oil, you know, and there's. It's really. I gotta say, liza P is extremely well done. If you are a Soulsborne player and you are interested in something that's a little bit different, I know there's games like remnants out there that is supposedly a Soulsborne. I've never played it myself, but I know a lot of people compare it to that. There's another one that came out that I thought I was hoping was gonna be a little bit better, but it kind of fell short. Was mortal Shell Immortal Shell is a soulsborne type game where you inhabit different bodies of people and take on their attributes. And if your shell dies, you basically escape that shell and have to find a new one or you're weak until you don't find, you know, find another one. It's got a really cool aspect to it. I was hoping it would be a little bit better. I played it for a little bit. It's just a little too slow for me in that whole speed fighting thing you can almost start with. Cindestar has brought this up in MP discussions about armor core six. It is a fromsoft game. It's got kind of a similar. The only thing that's different about armor core six being more soulsy is the world is not as frightening as the. The giant boss fights that you have to get into.
Right?
They are arena bites. You get into an arena with a boss, and then you take it on and you hit your head against the wall, because some of the. Some of the fights in that game are ridiculous when you first start playing it and don't know what's going on. But that's. That's how most souls games are, when you get into a boss fight, you're. You're staring at the thing you have to take on that is sometimes five times your size. And you're like, always, yeah, what am I supposed to do with this? Like, it's. It's in. It's all. It's a puzzle. It's the same kind of puzzle trying to figure out how to take it down.
But armor corps six, though, it's mostly shooting, right? Because you're mechs, it's so. It's not very animation dependent combat, though. It's more action y.
There is some dodge rolls there. I mean, not dodge Rolls is dodging. There's like strafing, boosting, or whatever you can do. You can do the. The hovering back and forth. So it's a lot quicker. It's hard to say that it's souls esque to its deepest core, but it has attributes of it that you could argue maybe. I don't think near is very souls like. That's much more rpg, more third person rpg action rpg. I will say the no series is very souls like. Wu Long, which is just came out, unfortunately did not take very well to pc is a very soulslike game as well as the remaster rerelease. I don't know if it's a remaster, but Lords of the Fallen is another. I think it's viking driven souls like kind of game.
Oh, I didn't know that was a souls like. Okay, yeah.
Lords of the Faun, I think the one that just came out just recently is a remake of an older version from, I think, PlayStation Three. I don't know. I'm treading in very light water here. I don't know if that's true or not, but I know Lords of the Fallen is very souls esque in the way that it plays. Dodge roll boss arena fights. World is scary. So on and so right.
The one game I was. I was expecting to be more of a souls like than it is, is Dragons Dogma two. When I. On paper, I'm like, oh, that's got to be like a souls like kind of game. It could not be further from a soulslike game like. It has the idea of the campfire system where I don't know if the first one was like this, but in Dragons Dogma two, as you're traveling, exploring the land, which is quite a big map, as you take damage, your. Your maximum health does decrease over time and it won't go above a certain point unless you stop and do a camp or you go back to town. So there's that element of like you need to stop at a bonfire to upgrade your skills and re equip skills and to kind of heal yourself. Stuff doesn't automatically respawn, although things do respond respawn quite quickly. But the combat though, the combat was almost disappointingly not souls like because what I was expecting is very action y arcadey beat him up style combat. Lots of high flying, jumping off cliffs, both daggers at the backs of giants. Right. But it's, there's no, there's one class. The fighter class has a shield and you can block with it. Otherwise there's not much the way to defense. Right. It's not one of those like Dodge roll type things. You're not fat rolling in Dragons Dogma. I think there's some evade abilities but they're very deliberate. For a certain class you have to equip them. So like when I, when I'm playing it, I was thinking it would be more like, you know, witcher three, which is very much about, you know, parrying and dodging or dodging especially for Geralt. And there's not much of that in the game. And I felt kind of weird playing a game that was so close in theme and giant monsters and exploring, but the combat couldn't be somewhat so different. It's kind of wild. Sisters mentioning Metroid dread as a souls.
Like he's also saying hell divers too. Could also be.
So is he just trolling? Yeah, trolling.
Saying scary world is hell divers to a souls. Like hell divers two has fat rolling. This freaking guy. No, it's, you know what we're trying to tell you. It's, it's, it's. There is. November said it best is true. There's this very, there's very few games that have really hit the nail on the head as much as Liza P. And in the no series, those are the two closest souls game that if you're playing them you're like, I'm, I'm playing a dark soul. This is Dark Souls. Fromsoft made this game and they didn't and come close to it.
But when did demon Souls first come out?
That was for PlayStation three and I want to say oh, it's got to be like oh seven or oh eight. I'd someone mind balance that because I'm not sure, but okay.
But as a genre it's still fairly new so it's still the point of word now because games typically take between three to six years to develop. Right.
Right.
So I mean it's now 2024. Well, okay, so it's not been that reason. It's still a new genre. I guess so. I mean, it hasn't got the point where, I mean, other developers influenced by fromsoft are taking all their ideas. It's not. It's not quite so blatant, but there's definitely themes from those games is being carried over in spirit into other things. Like somebody. Somebody was debating with me that breath of the wild was a. Had souls like elements. Right. Just the. The way the combat is, it's very dodge, very, very shield like parrying. You're exploring the world. There's no. There's no consequence for dying.
Right.
A lot. But the. The combat was very lot more deliberate. Right. So. Right, there's that. So I don't know.
I could see. I can definitely see souls esque elements in breath of the wild. And, um, the other one whose name is eluding me.
Yeah, I can read the new one, which sucks because it was one of my game of the year contenders. How easy. I forget. It's what my game of the year picks are.
Talk to k something earlier.
Tears of the kingdom.
The kingdom. That's what.
See, I knew it was talked. I knew the ANa, I knew the abbreviation.
It's okay. Nintendo doesn't watch us work. We're good. It's fine.
That's good because we probably get canceled real quick. But yeah, no, I I. The Jedi fallen orders is a good example of taking souls esque. They're cherry picking the difficulty and the design and the world design, but. But with. With dark souls stuff, which. And it's so funny to think that it came out in 2009, and I mean, we're 2024 now, so it's almost. We're getting close to 20 years old on this thing.
Right.
But it still doesn't feel like it's that old, but it feels like it's been around forever. Like you talk. Souls born, Dark Souls is the meme for your measurement for difficulty for any game. So if you're like, even playing a retro game, like, let's say eight two for sinistar. That's Dark Souls esque for him. You know what I mean? I'm dropping that because you're here, but, you know, I mean, like, it's Jake's inability to not buy a new game and call it name of the year. That's Dark Souls for Jake.
That's.
That's. That's. That's two souls esque for him. Yeah. Fomo. Fomo is dark souls for me. I can't. I can't. I have to try it out.
So I won't. I won't use that definition because you can't. You just can't call any difficult game of Souls like game because it's difficult to. For a very specific way. Right? I mean, I'm not gonna call Mario Brothers. Mario Brothers won or lost level souls like. It's hard, yes, but it's not souls like, but there's other. There's definitely room for other perspectives or genres or games like tunic above, you know, top down, right? Souls like the one that came out a number of years ago. It's not new salt. And sanctuary is a 2d game. And when I first played it, I didn't. I didn't. Had not played Dark Souls before. And I was trying to figure out why this 2d game is so fucking hard. Because it's a brutally difficult game with really awesome combat and a wild, wild, wild variety of weapons. And when I eventually played Dark Souls two, that was my first one. I'm like, oh, that's what they're doing. They were doing a 2d version of Dark Souls.
Blasphemous is another version of a 2d platforming slidescroller that has dark, dark souls or souls esque elements in it. When you die in blasphemous, your body, you lose all your xp and all your leveling and you have to go find it. And you also rest at different locations and save points to move on to the next stuff. And some of the boss fights are in arena now. Again, it's a side scroller, and it is retro artwork, so it's very retro esque looking, but it's. It's hard. That game is hard as shit. Like, blasphemous is difficult. I felt really proud of myself when I finally started getting somewhere because it also has metroidvanian aspects where you have to go find something to progress into the next area. So souls. Vania is probably blasphemous. Probably fits into that brand new category that we heard about today, which we're.
Not going to steal. We're going to double down on souls. Like, I. Souls, light souls. Like, I need to get t shirt for this. Souls lights all. All the taste of dark souls, but half the calories, you're half the race. Did you ever play cyber shadow?
Cyber shadows?
It's a game.
I did. I love cyber shadow. It's a great game.
I don't think. I don't think it would even fall into our new definition of souls. Light but it has that same like you're trying to get to the checkpoint and then you're just dying a lot. To get to checkpoint boss has taken multiple runs. It's quite a difficult game. It took me a lot to beat that one. So there's.
I get such a ninja gaiden, Ninja gaiden feel for playing that particular game that it never even crossed my mind to put it into that kind of. That genre.
It's.
It's much more ninja gaideny, ninja Gaiden ii kinda.
Right kind of feel. We're just. That's okay. It's on brand retired.
So.
Yeah, it's probably more of a Metroidvania, if anything. I think it's probably falls into that category. But it is interesting though, that that's a game where it's. It's quite difficult. And you are fighting for that checkpoint. That whole idea of you're fighting to get to the next checkpoint, I think is really key to what I would consider a souls like, for sure. Yeah. Cause you're right on that point.
There is that. That aspect of I just need to get to the next area. If I could just get to the next area, everything will be fine and I'll figure it out. But I gotta get some breathing room so I can plan my next attack. Because with. With these action rpg's, there's a lot less action and a lot. I mean, there's a lot of action, don't get me wrong, but there's a lot less. Like I'm just gonna take two swords and just go flying through this area. That's how I used to play dark souls. And that's why it was so difficult for me was because I was dying constantly. Cuz I'm charred headed, as we coined in the stream. And I just key. I just keep doing the same thing. You build a strength build and you just go swinging and. And you can't do that. You have to. You have to come up with a plan of attack and you have to watch everything closely so you know where the weak points are.
Yeah. And like even dark souls two, which. That's the one I played the most of those games. And uh. I didn't start getting progress in that game until I realized you can't run headlong into the rooms. You have to take every single fight, literally every single fight. I'm not even talking bosses. Every enemy you see, you have to take one on one and be slow, methodical and deliberate with your actions. Like dark souls two has. There's one area I don't know the names of the locations. I don't have the lore book behind me. But you're in this castle, like, outdoor area, and there's just a series of these gigantic, armored, fat enemies. There's, like, a dozen of them that you have to proceed to, and every single one of them, they're slow. They have patterns. But if you don't learn those patterns and strike when you're allowed to, you just don't get anywhere. Once I realized I have to stop and look at the patterns of enemies and memorize every pattern, that's when the game kind of clicked for me, and that's where it has that, like you said before, almost a puzzle like element where the fun of that game is figuring out and learning how to beat the patterns of the enemies. But Dark Souls definitely has that for every single goddamn encounter. Elden ring, I found less. So I found, most of the time, I could probably just sneak behind an enemy and backstab them or ride the horse. The horse was a bit of a cheat for me. Or I use the summons and spells. I was using the summons quite a bit in Elden Ring, which is fine. It had all the cool stuff of Souls games in there, but I liked how there was options to make some of the encounters easier for me. I guess we could also argue, though.
There'S something else I wanted to bring up, which is also a very important aspect to Souls games that we haven't really covered. But I think Elden Ring took a lot of the Sekiro sneak attack, finding other ways around things, and brought that over to Elden Ring in a less shinobi battle kind of way into a more dark Souls kind of way, because, I mean, Elden Ring was the first open world game, right? Everything else is linear. Bloodborne, sicoro. All the Dark Souls are all linear games. You go from point a to point b, which Elden Ring was open world. So you can make the decision to go wherever you wanted. You could start anywhere you want, and you weren't wrong. It's however you wanted to play the game. So they just took, like, they keep taking little pieces of their previous games and then kind of splashing them in there. And I think that's what. That's what Sekiro brought to Elden ring for that one. But let's talk about another attribute that is also, I believe, in tunic, which adds to its soulsy, dark, soulsy esque nature is having to have stamina. Not having. You cannot. You cannot flail at anything. You have to make sure you have enough stamina to not only fight something, but to get the hell away from it. So you can't. My biggest thing is, I'm a button masher, right? So I mash buttons, and that's death. That is death in any kind of souls game, because you run out of stamina, and you're pressing the button, you're like, why am I not attacking? Is because you don't have a stamina, and now you can't roll out of danger, and this thing's wind enough to put the hurt on you and you. And you're done. Like you are. You can't walk back fast enough to get out of there.
So even blocking, I think, in those games, usually drains the stamina meter to a degree. I mean, it depends on the game, but, yeah, we're. That is true. Where even combat itself punishes you if you're not using your resources wisely. I guess I'm thinking Elden ring has the magic meter, like the mana mana bar, but it had stamina as well. And you're right. If you're spamming attacks, you got nowhere. You had to be very deliberate what you're doing, even in Elden ring.
Yep.
I'm trying to think. Did tunic. Yeah, tunic had the stamina bar. I turned it off. That's how I beat that goddamn game. Especially when I realized combat didn't matter.
Sekiro does not have a stamina bar. That's. That's one of the only ones that I don't believe it does. But it has a different level of challenge that it gives you, because it's so vertical and because it's high flying and because you can do different things, they add different things into the game that make it difficult, because you're not. You're not dodge rolling. You're dashing. You're dashing from side to side, getting out of the way quick, trying to jump over something. It finds other ways for it to trick you. Like, if you're jumping over to get out of the way, there's no iframes. Things can grab you and throw you back or kick you in the face or something. So there is another aspect of difficulty they really wanted to hone in on the parrying and the blocking and the timing of breaking people's repose down so that you can really get in there and start doing some cool damage. It's. It's a. It's one of the things that I liked about Sekiro was that you could just go crazy, but you didn't need to you know what I mean? There was other ways around things.
Yeah. I like. I don't have the appetite for these games like you do. I. I do like them, but it just. The time come in to beat them is I just don't have time for these games. I'm too busy not playing Street Fighter six well, but if I were to play another one besides Elden ring, because eventually I'll finish that, I think I would probably play Sekiro. That's probably the one I would play. It's a. I would also like to. I'm interested in bloodborne because, like, the transforming weapons is a really cool mechanic there. And I love, like a. It's almost like a Castlevania vibe to that game.
But I'm just.
I've been waiting for pc release. It's been forever since it came out on PlayStation. I'm waiting for pc release. I don't think we're going to get one now, but don't hold your breath.
I think PlayStation is just saying, we're not going to redo anything with this game. We're not making a sequel, and we're just going to leave it here on PlayStation four. So.
Ggs, it's so weird. It's. That's a fromsoft game too, right?
It is.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah. Souls born is a mixture of the souls, right? Dark souls and bloodborne together. So.
So that's so wild. I'm really curious to see what Fromsoft is working on next. Like, it was nice to see them do an armored core game that was really well received. I don't know what they do next. It's. Something tells me it'll be an elden ring too. I'd be interested in that. I love the open world of Elden ring. That what's. That's what's really sold it to me. So maybe we'll see what they do next.
I have. I have heard unfortunate rumor that there will be no more dlc for Elden ring. And there may not be a second that there will be something else that's coming. Mitsuda's not going to give up on his poison swamps and his dark undertones and his lore hidden amongst his items. You know that's not going to happen. We're going to get something else that's going to be equally as cool. I mean, they took armor core six and made that game bad ass. That game is cool as hell. I've preached about it on numerous episodes in the past. Please go check out our backlog because they're really, really good.
Yeah.
But yeah. Bloodborne needs to get to pc. It needs to get somewhere that has better accessibility than either a PlayStation four or five, because Bloodborne, that was my first sister Fianna game that I played when I first joined the podcast with you guys, and I gave it another chance, and I'm glad I did because I fell off that game pretty, pretty hard, but I beat everything else that I played. But the story in that game is excellent. It's. It's got, like you said, it's got the Castlevania, obviously. It's the Cthulhu, the Lovecraftian storyline and all that stuff that goes with it. And it's very, very twisted and dark, and it's a. It's a lot of fun to play. Yeah.
Yeah. You know, I'm not. I'm not sad that Elden ring might be a one and done, right, the DLC. I'm still debating whether I'm going to pick the DLC up because it's not. It's not cheap, but it does seem like it's a beefier DLC than we've seen in other fromsoft games. Like, I think Dark Souls three had a couple dlcs, but when you combine them together, that's the same price of what they're doing for Elden Ring. And it does seem like there's the same amount of content. And this one is just a one dlc that's big. It's more of an expansion than anything else. Right. And I'm not really. I'm not really hung up on the lore of Elden Ring. I mean, I've joked enough over the last couple years about it with you that. What is, what exactly is the dung eater and all that crap? I still like the games. I kind of. I'm now at the point where I get what he's doing, where there's just the hint of enough lore and you fill in the blanks in yourself and that's fine. So I'm not hung up on the lore. So as long as the next game they do that's in this style, whether it's Elden ring or another dark souls or a sekiro, that's open world. An open world. Sekiro would be badass, right? Where you have a mountain traveling between regions and it's just. Or you have more freedom in towns that grapple around. That could be pretty. Pretty kick ass. I mean, there's. What's that? What's the other one? Ghost of Tsushima, I heard, was kind of like this.
And ghost is coming. It's now, that's not a fromsoft game. It's a different. It's a different company altogether. But it is. It's coming to pc, I think, if not already, really soon, people. Ghost of Tsushima is beautiful. That game is absolutely stunning and has, am I gonna get torched for this? But it has some pretty accurate cultural references throughout the game where it's not, it's not magic and might and it's not dark souls or anything scary or creepy. It's, you know, it's humans fighting people and mongols versus, you know, the Japanese in that whole feudalistic time. But it's. It's a, that's a really cool game I'd love to have. Here's the thing about the dark souls, Sekiro, all that stuff. These games are very linear, but they don't feel linear. Like, they feel. They feel really open. And I think it's because of the way that they have designed how. How open everything looks now. It's. You can't go anywhere you want. Not like elden Ring, where you could literally walk basically anywhere in the game as long as it's within the boundaries of the game. But even looking at Dark Souls three, when you first walk out and you see the high wall Lotharik and you see the castles, you feel like you can. You go there. You're gonna go there at some point. You just have to follow the path to get there. But you don't feel claustrophobic like some of these other souls s games that are very linear where you're like, I gotta follow this line to get where I'm going. You feel like you can go in any direction that's out there. It's really neat how they design them.
Dark souls two, there's branching paths, kind of. I mean, I guess there's still one way of going through the game and you're gonna go everywhere anyway. But, I mean, there's definitely hidden secrets. Items are hidden everywhere. There's a few. There's a few items I found in dark souls to where I'm like, how the hell's they may know where this is. Like, I felt like I stumbled into it.
I mean, shit, there's that element of disappearing walls. I mean, there's. There's breakable walls that are somewhere in there. So.
Yeah, so when you have that, right, actually, Elden ring has that too. It was. It was a hundred hours before I figured out there were disappearing walls. And in that game, my mind was blown. So there's that element to it. So when you have that kind of freedom to find secrets, it doesn't feel as claustrophobic as maybe I would originally thought. So I'm with you there. Plus, when you're. You kind of just see the battlefield in front of you, right? You could always see in a distance the enemies, and you kind of figure out, how am I planning to attack this area? And when you have to, like, see the whole scope of the feel in front of you, it doesn't feel linear because you kind of feel like you have an option of which way you're going to tackle the enemies. The. The openness is in how you fight, not necessarily what the terrainia traverse. So I'm with you there, Ghost of Tsushima. I might. I might have to look at that one because that's the one there where they're. It's like a homage to japanese, old japanese samurai movies, I think, is what it was.
Yes.
You can have.
You can. You can play it with the black and white directoral, you know, view of how it used to look back in the day and have, you know, the actual Japanese with english subtitles. So, you know, if you don't speak, you can understand it, but you can make it go as real of a movie as possible. And I got it. That game is. It's not a souls game. It's not souls esque, but it is gorgeous. Like, I don't feel like it's souls. Like, I would. I would say it's more monster world like. I mean, you're not looking really well. You're not looking for one big enemy.
But the.
The world isn't as scary. It's more like witcher. Yes, I would say it's more like Witcher.
It's more like Witcher three. Okay.
Um. Oh, God damn it. I just playing like forbidden west. Like, you're just traversing the world and you run into things and you fight them, and then you move on to the next thing and then camps that you're gonna go clear out to help people, you're gonna save people along the road while you're going. It's very much like Witcher. I would definitely. That's a really good analogy.
If that's what it's like, then I actually will probably like it because I love Witcher three, and I love that style of game. It's less punishing then I do. Like, I really liked Elden ring, and there's a lot of, for me, a lot of reasons I like Elden Ring is because of elements that I felt were in Witcher three as well. But, you know, I'm gonna probably check out ghost of Tsushima. Maybe they'll leave my sisyphean game next year. No, because I'm gonna pick something easy next year. I gotta pick something easy next year.
I think Elden Ring should be your sisyphean game for next year, personally. But that's just me.
Me, I don't know. After the run of luck I'm having with my picks, I think I might pick something easy peasy that even my children could beat, like Mary brothers one. I think that's what I'm going to pick next year because that's, that's not a difficult game, right? Anybody can beat Mario Bros. One, love you sensar. Eight two, it's fine.
Mario paint is Jake's next year game. You got to play the fly swatter game.
The fly swatter game is kind of hard. It ramps up. Can you get diamond rank and fly swatting?
Ramps up. Even try fly swatting. Get good. The Souls esque fly swatting game.
Yeah, that's right. The souls like, you know, you got.
To get to the flies. The fly zapper to rest so that you can level up your fly swatter.
It's. It's nice that this is a trend, though, for games because I always like, I like both sides of the spectrum. I love it when a game is, I used to say this all the time. I like it when a game respects the player's time. So, which means I don't need a hundred hour game, I don't need a very difficult game. Just give me a nice bite sized game with a great narrative and fun gameplay. I'm good. But I do like the longer games, the more difficult, challenging games too. I like both sides of that coin. So I like that there's this kind of genre of games which, you know, going in are, are going to be difficult, but it's totally beatable if you're just willing to learn the systems and learn the patterns and kind of immerse yourself in the combat. I like that about these games. Like, I used to bounce off Monster Hunter because at first glance I'm spamming the buttons, I'm not doing anything. I'm doing terrible. Once I sat down and learned the game, learned what it wants you to do with the combat and what the loop is. I got really into monster hunter hard. I have hundreds of hours in those games and I think it's the same. When I got into Dark Souls two. Once I learned the mechanics, I got into that game pretty hard. Didn't beat it, though, because it is difficult, but I got pretty deep into it.
It's. This is going to sound funny, but, you know, most people, I find most people, when they kick off playing dark souls, they spin off of it immediately. This is too freaking hard. I don't even know why I'm trying to play this, but there's an itch. There's an itch in the back of your brain. Maybe I can. I think I can do this. Let me come back at it. And that game, and I think I know why it's called Dark Souls is because it literally takes a piece of your soul that you can't get back until you go back and accomplish whatever's out there. I like a challenge. I love a challenge. And I never in my life ever viewed myself to be any kind of Dark Souls fan or fanboy, which that I have greatly turned into as of late to the point of. Again, I'm buying these books. I'm trying to figure out the lore. I want to know the story about it so it's clear. And Jake and I joke about it, but it's true. The stuff is really not well defined because you don't.
Yeah, you don't.
When you play Dark Souls, you don't play it for the story. It's not an rpg that's out there to be like, I want to see what happens next. It's, I want to take this guy out, I'm going to take this thing out, and I'm going to get as far as I can in a sitting, and then we'll come back and do it all again tomorrow. I'm going to get better at this game. It's going to happen. And it's more of just the challenge in the gameplay itself is what makes the story what you want it to be. It's. It's crazy to even think that someone's like, it's like Napoleon Dynamite. We're going to make a movie that has nothing to do with anything, and everyone's going to frickin love it. It's like Seinfeld. The shows don't make sense. There's just an experience. And that's exactly what this turned into for me. And it turned into like, holy crap, I'm a Dark Souls streamer now. I'm a Dark Souls player now. I revisit it. We're revisiting three right now because we got talking about this on MP's. We talked about making this episode. I was obviously very much excited about it. And in doing so, I was like, I should go back and, you know, scratch the itch that's starting to come up a little bit. And now, now I'm committed, and we're going to play the whole damn game again, and I'm going to try and finish all the DLC, plus the bosses I have yet to beat on stream. I'm looking at you, nameless King. You're going down.
That's what I can.
80 hours game.
I think when you consider the DLC, it's good, but it's a beefy game.
It'll be up there in the hundreds, probably, and with the way it'll be.
Up there in the 200s, it's a hard one, though. Okay, so I'm gonna agree with you 100%, though. When I first played Dark Souls, Dark Souls two, that's when I first started with. I bounced off it because going in, I saw the stats, I saw the items. You pick up dungeons and monsters. I thought it was a JRPG or an RPG adjacent game. And while there's rpg elements to it, it's not an rpg. Yeah, you level up, but it doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter what level you are in those games, really. Like you said earlier, the episode, you could beat at level one if you're good enough. It's a skill thing. So when I first started playing it, I thought, oh, it's an rpg. I'm into this. And then I quickly realized that it wasn't an rpg, and I kind of bounced off it. And that's where I'm just like, it's its own genre. It deserves to be called a genre. Souls born, souls, like, deserves to be its own separate thing because it is a unique genre. That's not rpg. It's not action combat. It's a mix of all these different things together in a very unique thing.
Yeah, it's. It's really hard to take souls and. And call it anything else than. Other than what it is itself, you know? I mean, like. Yeah, like you said, it's an rpg. It has rpg elements. The leveling up does help. May not seem like it, but unless you're amazing at this game and can walk through it without taking a single hit, which people have done, God help them, you know, you're. You're going to want to level up, and you'll add all that stuff. And losing the souls is actually very heartbreaking when you have all this stuff saved up, like Jake said he had all this time, and when you second guess what your approach is going to be, should I go? If I go to the bonfire, all the crap that I fought to get here is going to come back. I got to do it all over again. Maybe behind the door, there's sanctuary behind it. Maybe there's three undead people that are going to beat the ever living hell out of me. I don't know. But I know one thing is, I don't want them to come back because I already know what I dealt with to get here. What's beyond this door may not be as bad as what got here. And then you find out that either, oh, shoot, there's a bonfire. Holy crap. Thank God, or, nope, that was a very poor decision. But then you learn from that, and you don't go back in that room again. Or you. You don't kick the door down this time. You open it and you kind of filter things out and you fight them one on one, like you said. You know, there's. Yeah, this game is definitely a teacher, as opposed to just someone that's just beating the ever living crap out of you. It teaches you to play these types of games completely differently than what you're used to. Just button mashing your way through any kind of action ARPG. That's our action rpg that's out there.
Yeah, it's definitely. The risk reward is definitely big in this game. Right? Like, I lost. I lost that reward when I went to that darker room. But if had I beaten that section, having gambled all the souls on me and just pressing onward, forward to another bonfire, if I had made it, that would have been very satisfying.
Right, right.
Sadly, it wasn't. But the risk reward is part of that, you know, chemical in your brain that kind of catches you, right? Where once it triggers that serotonin drip feeds in. Right. Where you feel so badass is so accomplished. It's definitely a thing.
Yep. Beating some of the bosses on there definitely gives you that adrenaline rush, and you're. And then you come down and you're like, why? Why do I feel like I'm buzzing? Like, yeah, I'm gonna go to the next. Like, I'm ready. Keep going. Let's go on to the next thing. Because you're so excited about it, and it's always the worst decision you can make to be like, oh, let's go on the next thing. It took me 15 hours to beat this boss, whether. What the next one's going to be like, and it's. It's all about the wonder of what will happen next.
Yeah, they're so long, though. But they. They are good games. They're just so long.
They're only long if you're not good.
Yeah, well, I'm not good at these games. Like I said, I do hope. I hope they do another one. That's Elden ring, like, with the open world where it gives you the option to kind of just, you know what? I'm having a bad time with the bosses. I can't progress there. I'll go try a different boss, or I'll go grind some giants for 15 minutes and let out some steam and then go back and try again. I like that. I don't get, you know, stuck in one hallway, and it can't progress. I hated that about dark souls two and one. But Elden Ring was lot easier. You still had to beat them. You had to beat everything. But at least I didn't feel, like, stuck, right?
Yeah. You definitely had options. You can also go in and find some cool, like, summons or a better weapon or something that's out there in the world that doesn't involve having to get somebody's remembrance, which is essentially the soul from Elden ring to make a cool weapon with it. You can go get, you know, the blood katana, or you can go get the moon, the moon shader, the sword of faith and devotion, whatever. The fire sword that everybody liked that.
They know that store is badass. When I found that, I found that without guides. That was awesome. That's such a cool weapon. Yeah. So no one else has options, Jarred? Anyone else has options? Presbytocancel.com chart has 205 episodes of our podcast. We knew in this for almost four years. I love, there's so many episodes to listen to. That was a great segue, saving that one. Yeah.
You know, this, we talked about Elden.
Ring before, you and I, and I think, and we did an episode on Tunic. There's a couple of these games we talked about in the past, and they are fun to talk about because they are so. They are so unique compared to other things. Right. It's even when something. Something is copying that formula, like Liza P, they still feel really great on their own. Right. With the style and whatnot.
Liza's Liza P is as close to, like, bloodborne, a new bloodborne version as you're going to get from the original.
Yes.
It's really that good. And November had mentioned it. But to be honest with you, if you want bloodborne for pc, go buy Liza P. It's much.
Check that one out.
It's great.
It's great. It's all right, J.
We're. We are adding to Jake's I'm not going to place a street fighter six list already on this episode, which I make.
Games came out this week, dude, if we. Indie game release week.
I think honestly, Jake and I can have this discussion after we're done with the podcast. Maybe we. Maybe we'll add a list of the games we talked about that our souls like that. If people are interested, they can go and and check it out in the comments or something like that. Or even put it in our discord so that people can go and see, yeah, discord. It's not dark souls, but it's close to it. Or, you know, I want something that's so close to dark souls, but not dark souls. Check this one out. So we'll. We'll figure something out with the discord for you guys. Well, this was fun. This was a. This. Not that any of our episodes are not fun. There's not one episode where I go, God, I'm glad that's over. But much like a lot of God.
This was a bracket episode chart. Because you and I would just fight for an hour, figure out the worst games your guys bad takes. That's okay.
Wow.
No Metacritic to decide battles here. This is.
You're just mad that I'm beating you in the Metacritic game.
Fuck you are. You are so far ahead in that. It's wild.
Thanks. Stellar blade. I even got urgent.
Well, now that Nintendo is like half admitted they have a new system coming, the world, the industry's worst kept secret. But they've said it's basically getting announced this year, but it's not going to come out to 2025. So half my picks on the fantasy critic poll are like unnamed mainline Mario platformer. Well, that's not going to come out this year.
So Jake really gambled on this one this time.
Really tried. But like you picked, you picked some winners. The only thing I have for me coming up is the Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy Fourteen's dawn trail. That's got to review good. Better review good. Otherwise you're going to take it away, you know?
Yeah.
All right, Jake.
Well, is there anything else that we'd like to add to this? Very vague. And don't worry, we're going to put all of our item descriptions in the chat by the end of the episode so you can follow this along. So it's less complicated.
Yeah, let me shout out a couple of things I've been doing. So I've been, I've been guesting like of all the podcasts when I have time. So I don't know if the episodes are airing anytime soon. So the first podcast is retro wars with a guy named Danny. He's a fantastic guy. Very, very person. He's got a really strong personality. He's very opinionated and is good. And we've done a few episodes. We did do one on Shadow the beast, which I think comes out soon. You know how much I love Shadow the beast. And I record another one with him recently. So retro wars, he's also on YouTube now, doing really well on YouTube. I'm almost jealous, actually. And then I just recorded an episode with, with Dave over remember 64. We did do an episode with him in February where we did the n 64 brackets, care of Metacritic. And I did an episode with him and Jiggy looked back talking about Superman 64, which is fantastic experience. Yeah. But it's, it's been fun having conversations, other podcasts. So I'm going to toss that out there. So if you are a podcaster yourself and you're listening and you want one of us to guest might be open, at least I'll try to be. So feel free to.
I'm also done. I'm also down to guests with, with everything. We, we really enjoy doing this and we like, we definitely like spreading our wings amongst the other retro slash non retro podcasters that are out there. We're actually might have a special visitor coming here in the next couple of weeks for our own podcast here at Presbytery. Cancel. Won't tell you when, who or what it's going to be about because I know a lot of you guys like to have that, that blind side hit you in the face. So be a good time. As for me, I have returned to twitch in some form. Last night we played some dark Souls three. I was happy to get back to my comfort soul food game, as I like to call it, Dark Souls three. It's been a lot of fun getting back and kicking the rest off of one of the more difficult games out there to play, which some will argue it is not, and some will argue what is wrong with me? But I don't know what's wrong with me. My mother still hasn't explained it to me. I also fired up a little rim world. That's been fun. That's been chill right now, but we haven't been raided by massive hordes of people. So right now it's very relaxing. I keep saying, I'll get back to Horizon, zero horizon for Ben west, and I might not. I don't know. My list is growing. And since I already beat my Sisyphean game this year, my stretch goal, much like sinistars, continues to change and morph too. You know what? I didn't finish the dark souls dLc ever. I haven't finished the nameless king or the Lord of Cinder on stream yet. Maybe that'll be my stretch goal or sister and I'll just do a dual stream together and we will diamond rank Street Fighter six before Jake does. That's probably so.
Look, assholes, I did install it again, and more than that, I actually turned it on. I booted it up, I selected a character, I did some combo trials, and I actually went online, thank you very much. Did I win any battles online? No. Am I even close to dime rank? No. But I played Street Fighter six. I'm proud trying to learn it. You know what it is, is I'm struggling with the. The combat timing on it. Fuck you, sister. It's not bullshit. I actually played the game.
Go look on steam.
You can see I played recently. I played at least a few matches, at least one. But it's like half of what the combat. The comb timing is pretty tight. Well, I'm you. I'm so used to guilty gear strive, which is also a hard ass game, but I took the time to learn it. I just need to learn Street Fighter six. But this week alone has been like. Despite the Sony and Helldivers controversy and other stuff going on with Xbox, indie games are killing it this week. Hades to early access came out, which was so impactful. The guys who did dead cells, I think it's evil emperor Empire games. They have a prince of Persia. Evil empire. They have a prince of Persia game coming out. It's supposed to be the 14th. They're delaying it a couple weeks because of Hades two, which is wild smart. And then there's animal. Well, came out yesterday, which is a fantastic, like, it's not tunic, but it has that meta secrets and puzzle y vibe to it that I'm really digging. So animal well came out. There's like four or five indie games just this week that came out that I wish I picked for fantasy credit because they all did really well. So it's kind of like the year of indies, I think, for anybody who's into that kind of scene. So if you're not into the $70 Triple a games, there's a lot of cool indie games that have come out this year.
Indie games are really, really rising to the challenge. I mean, they've, there's been some great, great new stuff out there. Great old stuff that I keep going back to. I redownloaded into the gungeon the other day. You know, a roguelike. That's been a lot of fun to play, but it's, you know, it's a great indie type game, so. And I cannot get enough of binding of Isaac. That game is awful, and I love it.
You're still playing it.
I love visa, you know, when I can't think of anything to play and I'm over bilateral, I fire up some Isaac. It's just. It's easy to fall asleep to. So. I know I have weird dreams and nightmares. After I'm done playing stuff with nightmares.
It's still a great. It's good.
So, yeah, we've got a lot of really good things coming up, so don't go anywhere. And please hang out with Jake, myself, sinistar, guy, prime, and werewolf. We'll be all back here together at, I think, some point soon.
Um, well, GP is off for a few weeks, but I think most of us are back next week, uh, with our special guest, which look forward to. And then. Yeah, well, we got lots of stuff coming up.
Fantastic. All right, Jake, thank you so much for being here. People in the chat, people that will listen to this on all the podcasts where you can find us, Spotify, iTunes. Uh, itunes music. Now, since Google isn't a thing anymore. I believe we talked about that the.
Last time, making up things, dude. Like it. It's apple itunes, and they don't even call it itunes anymore. It's Apple podcasts.
Oh, it's always gonna be Google podcast is gone.
It's YouTube music, which you. Look, just go to YouTube, press me to cancel. Subscribe to us there. Then you can watch our lovely faces. If you're dead set against audio, yes, Spotify. I heart radio, Amazon music, YouTube music. You can find us there. But, yeah, don't. Don't make up things. I already bought press b.org because of your. Because of your crap.
Go buy itunes music, then.
No, sure, don't sue Apple.
I got to find something good here. Jake, you got to find something good to say to send us off. Oh, well, I got something.
This is why we need wolf. Without wolf, we have nothing to finish an episode off.
No, I got one. Don't worry about it. Guys. This has been press b to cancel Ashen one. Please bring me more souls.