Dark Souls 1, to me, used to feel like a game in its own bubble. Having played through Castlevania 1 before beating Dark Souls 1, I somehow never made the association between the two. Nothing even remotely close to a comparison crossed my mind beyond small aesthetic similarities. That is until recently.
I’m currently replaying Dark Souls 1 to gather footage for an Elden Ring video. Naturally, I had played Elden Ring first. The game design in the Dark Souls trilogy is such that if you move from each game in chronological order, as I did, you can feel the differences between each title without feeling like there was too huge of a step taken from one game to the other. That is, they blend together nicely.
But if you go from, say, Elden Ring to Dark Souls 1 without pause, you’ll notice a huge swing in differences as huge as map design to the smaller stuff like differences in the nuances of movement. This is the exact experience I’m having while playing through DS1 post-Elden Ring.
And these differences have made me acutely aware of just how similar Dark Souls 1 plays to Castlevania 1. Movement itself in Dark Souls 1 is more heavily tied to your attacks than in Elden Ring, much like Castlevania, which locks the player in place when whipping ne’er-do-wells.
Elden Ring features a combat system that allows for players to regain control of their player very quickly after a swing, where Dark Souls really locks the player in place once they make a decision. Playing through DS1 with the Zweihander makes me feel like I’m whipping skeletons all over again.
Castlevania also relishes in the forced linearity of its world design, which Dark Souls somewhat follows. In Dark Souls, the order in which you do things in each half of the game is up to the player, but when accomplishing those tasks, the route you take is almost always the same from playthrough to playthrough. Castlevania, being an 8-bit game from way back when, had the sort of level design you’d see in the classic Mario game: Left to right, right to left, and one way through. In this way, the route you take to accomplish anything in Castlevania is always the same.
It’s unclear to me if this new comparison is due to Elden Ring being less like Castlevania or Dark Souls 1 being more like the classic title.
GLHF,
-E
You must be logged in to post a comment.