Dark Souls: The Ultimate game?

Totally undeserved rant incoming!

Dark Souls is a cultural phenomenon of a game within the world of the gaming community, and those who've fallen for it's depressive, fatalist, doom-trodden charms have a hard time hiding their masochistic love for this franchise. (It's me. I'm talking about me in the third person.) With the amount of love this franchise has received, spawning from a title that seems pretty outwardly janky to the uninitiated, it really is no surprise that this game has established its very own mythical space above the pantheon of gaming. I mean, this is a game that has influenced the creation of an entire sub-genre around it, dozens of copycats try to reshape it's formula and glean some new side of it's gameplay that they can explore, fans drool over the prospect of any type of continuation from it's premise, even the spiritual successors; and FromSoftware just can't stop making them. Which is good for them, I suppose. When you find your niche, you should stick with it. But is it the Ultimate Game of all time?

I bring up this most arbitrary of questions because very recently we saw the ever-famous Golden Joystick Awards come and go with such little fanfare that I totally missed it. (Seriously, who advertises for these things? Would it kill them to invest in ad space on websites?) There were a lot of gaudy announcements of the night, including the very question award of 'ultimate gaming hardware' which went to the PC. The PC? That seems almost like a pathetically cheap answer, doesn't it? That's basically saying "The ultimate gaming machine of all time is the one that you could theoretically make with imaginary unending funds, access to currently depleted resources and enough specialist technical knowhow." You gave your 'ultimate award' away to a freakin' idea! Heck, I have a PC that just about matches pace with last generation hardware and am simply in the wrong tax bracket to even think about upgrading- yet the PC is 'The Ultimate'? Not, the influential NES, the groundbreaking N64, or heck, the single biggest console of all time, the PS2? A game console that arguably did more for gaming than any other console before or after it thanks to it's proliferation into pop culture? Nah, "It's a computer because those desktop boxes can fit the shiny strobe lights", I guess.

So I'm not exactly jiving with the concept of the Golden Joysticks so far, that much is clear. Some of the big awards for this show are actually being handled either entirely or mostly by fan votes, and so we can expect a certain level of short-sighted 'excitable fan' syndrome with these rewards. Those contributing aren't taking the time to consider the award objective, ponder all angles, and then graciously picking the single choice that best exhibits the word 'Ultimate'. Nah, they're just picking what seems familiar at the time and sticking with it, which sort of takes the prestige out of these awards a little, doesn't it? I mean sure, 'power to the people's voice' or whatever, but when the stakes are set up like this then isn't scoring a win less a testament to your ability to stand the test of time in the minds of the thoughtful and experts of the field and more just- who has the most rapid fans that are going to jump on any online board voting opportunity? Who care rightly say?

I don't trust awards and award ceremonies, is the basic takeaway you should be getting from all of this. I think they're rarely awarded purely for the merit they pretend to be about, whether intentionally or otherwise, and more often than not turn out to be utterly meaningless on the general stage. So it's with a great amount of learned suspicion that I approach the grand claim that Dark Souls is the Ultimate game of all time. Don't get me wrong, I adore Dark Souls to a fault, as one can easily see from merely browsing this blog a little and seeing the more than two blogs I've dedicated to merely positing theories about it's lore, and my interpretation of it and it's meaning. This isn't the sort of mild passing interest of someone who played through the game once so that they could hang their 'I beat Dark Souls' award on some imaginary wall of accomplishments. I adore these games. But still I have to question this specific award.

Firstly, when we take a look at the other games that were up for the ultimate reward, holes in the steadfastness of this title start to form themselves. You've got your questionable entries like SimCity (for 'ultimate game'? Really?) To your cookie-cutter run-of-the-mill you-couldn't-have-this-vote-without-including-them old school titles, like Tetris, Pac-Man and Space Invaders. (No Pong... arguably the world's first video game... just going to ignore that one are we?) And then you get to the actual contenders here. Halo, well that game pretty much built online FPS standards, that's a world changer for video games. Minecraft, moved beyond a game into a cultural movement for it's time. Half-Life 2, defined an entire generation of games. Metal Gear Solid, raised the bar for video game storytelling in all facets. And then you see Dark Souls. Influential, artistic, stunning- but Ultimate? I don't know, something about that rubs me as wrong... or as a vast oversimplification at the very least.

Of course, at the heart of all this is the burning question: what do we even mean by 'Ultimate'? I mean if we're talking of 'best games' there are usually specific qualifies to help ground the candidates. 'best online game' 'best RPG' 'Best action game', and usually with an 'of the year' tacked on for good measure. But here we don't get that. No, it's 'Ultimate or nothing', and with that comes the question. Are we talking about what game is the best product? Because even then I don't think it's Dark Souls. Personally, I think Dark Souls III is more fun to playthrough, and most everyone else seems to agree that Bloodborne is the best Souls game. (Again, I haven't played, so I can't say.) Is it the game with the biggest influence on gaming? Because that could easily go to The Legend of Zelda, Call of Duty, GTA or Minecraft for their much more pronounced influence on the way that the gaming industry has trended, rather than just pioneering a subgenre offshoot of Action Adventure games. No matter what way I cut it, I can't find a slice of this conundrum that ends with Dark Souls wearing the crown of 'Ultimate'. In anything. Truly.

I think there's a sort of fetishization that surrounds the Souls games, and specifically the one's touched by Miyazaki, and I think it stems from genuine love that sometimes branches into something a lot less genuine. These game are art-house titles with a great director, a talented team and publisher money behind them, and that shows in their odd-ball aesthetic and oftentimes impenetrable charm. As far as art-house games go, Dark Souls has managed to beat the odds and become somewhat mainstream in perception (at least compared to it's contemporaries) but there's still a decently larger percentage of players who've heard the hype about it over those who have actually sat down to play the thing. But sometimes those that do, emboldened by the reputation, come away with a sort of brow-beaten reverence towards it. They've been told it's intelligent, flawless, a masterpiece, and they come away nodding their heads without ever having formed those thoughts independently for themselves. I mean if we're talking about this game like it is flawless, let me offer a single counter: The Bed of Chaos. There, literally the worst boss From have programmed in the last 11 years, is an unavoidable encounter in Dark Souls- what's that about?

None of this is to crap on Dark Souls, by the way. I love the game and if Miyazaki is as moved by this reward as his written statement seems to imply, then I cannot be more happy for a creator I truly respect and admire. But I just find the very concept of this reward totally vapid and meaningless, and undeserving of a game like Dark Souls. Or heck, any game it could have been stuck onto. Whatever 'Ultimate' was supposed to evoke (I suspect it was intended as a 'throw a bone to the audience' style reward of fluff and glided pomp) lies absent from it's significance and no one is going to better off for it. Dark Soul's team aren't going to printing that on any new physical release they have upcoming, (because they don't have any) people who hear about this aren't going to suddenly rush out and buy the game as if this is the validation they've been waiting for, and no one is going to appreciate the game any more or less than they already did. So well done, Golden Joysticks, you made a nothing burger and we all bought it. Yummy.