This story was written by Rich Stanton.
Note: This article contains story spoilers for Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, and Dark Souls III.
Games criticism has its weakness for auteur theory, and many, myself included, are guilty of crediting individuals for work done by teams of dozens, if not hundreds of people. Hidetaka Miyazaki—director of Dark Souls III, Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne—is one of the problems when it comes to rejecting the possibility of a "singular vision" entirely, however, because the games he has directed have a unique flavour and seem—I accept this may be an illusion—to be designed around characteristic principles.
It's not that a Souls veteran would claim to know anything of Miyazaki personally from his worlds. But you do get a sense, another illusion perhaps, of a guiding mind that anchors all these disparate parts into a whole.
The games directed by Miyazaki have thus far been of an extraordinarily high quality, and one of the reasons for this is that—before Dark Souls III—each takes place in a distinct world.
Dark Souls III makes the surprising decision to directly follow the original Dark Souls, something that Dark Souls II avoided almost entirely. There's a good reason developer FromSoftware typically avoids straight follow-ups, and that is the importance these games place on the RPG element: that each player feels their story is the real story. Or, to put it another way, a key part of the appeal of these games is that their lore is carefully crafted around ambiguity, so that you can interpret or insert your own take on the story.
But Dark Souls III creates a canon. If certain events didn't happen in Dark Souls, then the world of III would make no sense, and so our Chosen Undead now has an "official" way he progresses through the game. Gwyndolin must have survived events—possibly Priscilla too—we learn that Ornstein was an illusion, and to top it all off we know that the Chosen Undead eventually links the fire (one of two possible endings). It closes off certain possibilities in the original game, even if only mentally, in order for Dark Souls III to exist.
This in itself marks a departure for Miyazaki's directing style, and in this context it's interesting to consider some of what Dark Souls III explicitly revisits alongside his comments on the original game. It's not about proving motive per se, so much as adding a little authority to the speculation. If I suggest that Lost Izalith—a much-criticised environment in Dark Souls—was the original game's biggest failure as an environment, likely due to the fact its development ended in a rush, that's my opinion. But when Game Informer asked Miyazaki about his regrets for the original game, Lost Izalith came top.
"Don't want to elaborate on this very much," said Miyazaki. "There was a different person assigned to this area, and although I was involved, I don't want to pose very many negative comments for his sake. It can be a learning experience for all of us."
Lost Izalith is supposed to be the remnants of a great civilisation that, in attempting to recreate the First Flame, unleashed instead demons and the element of Chaos. Based in part on Angkor Wat—a temple complex in Cambodia and the largest religious monument in the world—the actual city in-game is tiny, and bulked out by a huge surrounding pool of lava filled with unfinished monsters. I'd be amazed if the latter aren't placeholders that simply had to be used for time constraints: huge pairs of legs without a top half that stomp through the lava and jump on the player. Topped off with the Bed of Chaos, the most frustrating boss in the game thanks to random pit deaths, Lost Izalith was one of Dark Souls' few low points.
Dark Souls redux
So Dark Souls III returns, reworking elements big and small from the original design into something new. Izalith this time around is beneath a smouldering lake, which I rather spectacularly discovered by crashing through the roof impaled on a great arrow. Named the Demon Ruins, this is a warren of tunnels—not quite a labyrinth, but dense—where the walls are overgrown with tree roots, speckled with fire-coloured fungus.
These rooms are filled with the corpses of Capra demons, Taurus demons, and Stray demons, each of which is a boss in the original game, here piled by the dozens in death. The former residents are feral, some walking on all fours, and beaked pyromancers give glimpses of the fire this city once held. Gwyn's black knights can be found scattered around these ruins, after their attempt to seal away Izalith's mistake.
The original area had no spatial complexity, so this one is packed with secret rooms, powerful treasures, and NPC fights and invasions. Lost Izalith's boss was a disappointment, and so this time the Taurus demon is reimagined as the original demon, the Old Demon King, split-through with fire and explosively powerful. The Burrowing Rockworm was another original Izalith monster which, clearly, the developers had run out of time to properly animate, so the model was stuck in fixed positions on walls and fights. In the Demon Ruins we fight the heir to this half-finished design, a spectacular mid-boss that dives in and out of the smouldering lake.
Izalith is a relatively straightforward example: an area that the developers were originally dissatisfied with, and got the opportunity to do-over. But other influences are more roundabout. There is one minor character in Dark Souls, an NPC assassin named Ciaran, who used unique "tracer" weapons—a pair of gold and silver curved blades—and specialised in parrying opponents (as further shown by the effect of her Hornet ring, which boosts crits.) She is strongly associated with Knight Artorias, and there are hints of romance, while she will only fight the player if attacked.
Ciaran's legacy emerges in several ways during Dark Souls III. An area of the game is dedicated to the Abyss Watchers, a group of undead that continue the legacy of Artorias by battling against the spread of the abyss. Artorias was known for being "unmatched with a greatsword," and has an amazing greatshield to boot, but the Abyss Watchers have inherited this with a twist. They wield their greatswords alongside a curved parrying dagger.
The implication is that the origins of the Abyss Watchers may lie more with Ciaran than Artorias, which not only neatly parallels one of the original game's big twists (that the legend of Artorias was based on another) but brings a sort of closure to the question of their relationship. The Abyss Watchers may also have a slight meta level, being basically a bunch of Artorias cosplayers that link the flame en masse, but we're moving away from Ciaran.
This character interests me because her legacy can be glimpsed through mechanics, in that parrying technique, and at another point when the game goes even further. The Dancer of the Boreal Valley is a late boss who is decidedly not Ciaran, but instantly reminded me of something Miyazaki once said about her character.
"It is hard to pick up one weapon for players to see [in the original Dark Souls DLC] but [Ciaran's] tracers you point out are good ones I would like them to check," Miyazaki told IGN. "Since we did all the basic weapons in Dark Souls, these additional ones may look different. Most have a specific image of the user in them, so they tend to be peculiar according to that. I suppose the tracers strongly reflect an image of a particular user—they look like a rare set of weapons, both of which are different in the way they are handled."
The gold and silver tracers were great weapons, but to me never reflected the NPC Ciaran. Their deadly grace is reborn in the dancer's fighting style, a rapidly altering blend of stalking and dual-bladed pirouettes. As you move back and forth, the dancer's swings are great sweeps punctuated by savage stabs forward, and as the fight intensifies so does the rhythm of attack-and-dodge. I wouldn't claim a direct lineage necessarily, but perhaps this boss bears some similarity to Ciaran's original concept.
Dark Souls III is full of examples like Izalith and Ciaran, and doubtless many more have flown over my head. But if we've looked at how the game revisits aspects of Dark Souls, it's also worth considering how it brings in the black sheep of the family: Bloodborne. Where Dark Souls was about the undead curse, Dark Souls III is set at a point where even the dead are coming back to life—corpses are piled everywhere, and the Cathedral of the Deep seems set up to dispose of them. The Deep in question here picks up Bloodborne's Lovecraftian themes in order to display another angle on the collapse of this world—the idea of some unknowable, uncanny, incomprehensible thing waiting in the dark, just beyond man's ken.
Why does this matter? While Dark Souls III is a straight sequel in some ways, it's also a capstone to the overall series of remarkable games FromSoftware has produced in recent years, including Bloodborne, and so incorporates aspects of their mythology. This is not Demon's Souls 2 or Bloodborne 2, but those games are as much a part of this lineage, and they overlap at the edges of Dark Souls III.
There's an illustration in Dark Souls: Design Works, a book containing development sketches and notes, that shows the ghosts of New Londo, the women who died when that city fell to the abyss. An unknown hand has added, translated, "don't forget to put bells on the weapon hilts." Alongside details like this the Bells of Awakening have a minor role in Dark Souls' lore, but in Bloodborne bells became one of the major themes—the way hunters crossed worlds to aid and abet each other.
Dark Souls III begins with a bell awakening both the Lords of Cinder and yourself, before establishing them as crucial to the way characters and worlds are crossing over and piling atop each other. There's an evolution in the lore of Dark Souls here, from bells developing from a minor theme to a major one, which coincidentally seems to predict their centrality to the apparently unconnected future of Bloodborne. It's not that FromSoftware is just good at repeating motifs or dropping hints, but that it pays so much attention to detail in the original designs that, at a later date, they can become larger parts of the tapestry. The ideas resonate.
There are more direct links like Saint Aldrich, the Cathedral of the Deep's Lord of Cinder, who is a twisted mirror image of Bloodborne's Lawrence: one constructs a religion around imbibing blood, one on the consumption of flesh. Both have an urge to share their habit, and both lack true insight into the wheels-within-wheels. The eldritch (Aldrich?) twist of the knife is that cannibalism translates unusually well into the world of Dark Souls anyway. Saint Aldrich's thinking makes sense: if consuming souls grants you power, why shouldn't consuming bodies?
Is this the end?
The most interesting part of Dark Souls III's continuation of the original game is what it does with Gwyn's firstborn—which is on its own terms a great success, but has a wider effect that is more negative. In the original game Gwyn's firstborn was unknown because, due to his "foolishness," he had been stripped of his divine status and whitewashed from history. But the game had several candidates for who it could be, including Knight Solaire, Dragonslayer Ornstein, and the blacksmith Andre.
Each of these characters had evidence pointing to their connection, some of which was of course tenuous in the extreme, though you could make a case for each. The most popular candidate was Solaire, thanks both to his friendly relationship with the player, and to a pile of circumstantial hints ("the old god of war still watches over his warriors").
The firstborn is a secret boss in Dark Souls III and, though he has links to them all, it turns out that he is none of these characters. Instead Gwyn's son, the inheritor of the light, was a great dragon-slayer before taming a stormdrake and allying himself with his former foes. Gwyn's rise to power was predicated on his destroying the ancient dragons, so you can understand the subsequent rift and historical revisionism. The story makes sense, the character model is magnificent, and the fight is an absolute barnstormer—one of the best in the game, beginning with the Nameless King atop his stormdrake before accelerating into a crackling duel with the god of lightning.
The only trouble is that the real power behind the lore of the first Dark Souls came in its big, open-ended questions, such as: who was Gwyn's firstborn and what happened? The fact that the original game offers several plausible answers doesn't diminish this question but adds to the mystique. Everyone has their own take, their own version, their own story.
That's why the encounter with the Nameless King ultimately left me feeling a little hollow. The developers did a great job in answering the question of who he was—it's just that learning the answer made the question much less interesting. Part of creating a canon in the way Dark Souls III does means excluding certain threads, which in this case means discarding the many carefully woven possibilities about surrounding the identity of Gwyn's son in the original game.
It's not that answering questions is bad, and in many cases this is exactly what we want and expect from sequels. But the Souls series has pioneered a style of RPG narrative design that is constructed around ambiguity. It depends on players' active involvement, and their drive to answer certain big questions in the world, even if there are no firm answers. We are fascinated by trying to piece together the unknowable. It's hard to escape the feeling that, in flat-out answering one of Dark Souls' core mysteries, Dark Souls III has made the overall lore that little bit less interesting.
You win some, you lose some. This speaks to the final and wider point about Dark Souls III as a sequel, which is that it is intended as a capstone. Miyazaki himself has said he will not direct another. But even if he hadn't we could tell from the way this game brings in all of its predecessors, paying homage through means direct and indirect; the vibe of Latria being recreated in Irythyll Dungeon; the return of the Anor Londo dragonslayer archers; the subterranean mythos of Bloodborne seeping in through eyes, bells, and outrider knights.
Dark Souls III feels like an ending—perhaps not to the Souls series, which Bandai-Namco will doubtless try and continue, but to FromSoftware's incredible run of four Souls games and Bloodborne. It signs off this most wonderful of series with a master's flourish. From Dark Souls' opening areas you can see corpses turning into trees, you are the Ashen One in a world clinging onto embers, and later you'll find dragon babies. Each game has covered the cycles of linking the fire, desperately trying to stave off the dark, but such details suggest something outside of this myopia.
Some might think that in Dark Souls' Ash Lake, where we find trees that support the world and an everlasting dragon, the embered past was being hinted at—ash has to come from somewhere. Throughout, Dark Souls III shows hints that this world is returning inexorably to arch trees and everlasting dragons. It never quite finishes the thought, but we have an idea what this might look like: it's the first thing Dark Souls ever showed us.
Rich Stanton is a videogame journalist who has written for Eurogamer, Vice, The Guardian, and others. His first book, A Brief History of Videogames, was released last year. You can find him on Twitter at @richstanton.
