Before I begin The Ringed City, the final downloadable expansion for From Software's existentialist fantasy epic Dark Souls 3, I have to prepare. Unlike most games, the expansions to Dark Souls titles aren't additional, isolated new bits of game---they're embedded directly into the world as it already exists. If you don't have a save file progressed enough to access the new stuff you just bought, you'd better get to playing.
So I do. I dig into a character I haven't touched in months, prodding horrors I've already conquered and moved past. I get stronger struggling against a boss I don't care about fighting. I win and fight another. The whole time, I'm asking myself, in the back of my head: why bother? Why have I ever bothered? With only the vaguest motive in mind, I push forward and gather the necessary strength to win.
The Dark Souls series never makes anything easy. That's much of its allure, to a certain subset of players, so much so that the promotional slogan for the games has often been "Prepare to Die." This is the typical narrative you hear about Dark Souls: that it's good because of the satisfaction that comes from managing insane levels of challenge. It's a rhythm of tension and release, struggling and struggling until you finally breathe the fresh air of victory. This being the world of games, of course, many Dark Souls fans will insist that the exact opposite is true. They're easy, these fans will say. You just don't get it. You have to give it time.
This last expansion is a chance to figure out if that's true or not. A final excursion into the world of Dark Souls---the developers have said that this will be the final game in the main series, at least for the foreseeable future---to try to understand its pleasures. I've loved all these games. But here, at the very end, I'm asking the same questions I asked at the very start: Is this journey worth taking?
Namco Bandai
