Published on 11th Oct 2011 by Anthony Gibson - Has had 166 views

My First Few Hours Playing Dark Souls

IN THE BEGINNING

I need to immediately point out that Dark Souls is banana's. It's the hardest game to date on any platform and as many of you can imagine, I'm getting beaten severely by everything within a 50 years radius.

But before all that talk of death, I installed the game to my XBOX 360 hard drive, grabbed a coffee and proceeded into the game. I decided on playing a Knight since I liked that character class in Demon's Souls (even though I sucked royally at that game too).

I then proceeded to hit the accept button and thus doing so... I fell into a strange world filled with even strange, angry creatures.

THE PLAYTHROUGH

I started out quite well. I made my way through the tutorial rather simply, picking up the shield and sword on-offer after the first few minutes of play. I sliced my way through the enemies thinking 'well, this is going well' when all of a sudden I'm faced with a brutish boss that's interested in cleaving my face off.

Luckily enough, I escaped said boss thanks to the note left on the floor and continued on through slicing the hell out of everything that dared to face-off against my mighty steel. I eventually found myself above the tutorial boss, now I have the upper hand! I lunged myself at the boss, cleaving it in the face. Then an 'oh crap' moment set-in and I found myself up against the nasty beast.

The fight against the tutorial boss wasn't too bad. I wailed on him for a while and blocked nearly all incoming hits using the shield. He went down on my first attempt thus allowing me to continue on my adventure. From there I was picked up by a crow and flown to the proper starting area of the game, Firelink Shrine.

Firelink Shrine allowed me to save my progress through the use of the bonfire present. There was also an NPC that let me join a Covenant so that I could snap-up some interesting items later on in the game. My main aim was to continue on, pick up as many souls as possible and get higher stats (levels) for my character.

I made it into Undead Burg which has a lot of enemies and a bonfire. Saving at the bonfire was a great idea as enemies re-spawn upon each usage of the bonfire allowing for some early game grinding. I grinded until level 10 and picked up the various humanity, firebombs and Gold Pine Resin from enemies I had slain. From there, I continued on through until I reached the first true boss of the game, the Taurus Demon.

The Taurus Demon was a nightmare. I kept getting stuck in the wall and was unable to get away from it for long periods of time. I died eight times to this beast before eventually using the ladder tactic many have used thus far to take down the brute. Three swift blows to the head were all it took and he went down like a ton of bricks.

That was my first few hours in Dark Souls. I'm looking forward to writing new bits in this blog-series as I think this game deserves some proper recognition for its difficulty but fair gameplay. I'll be adding new blogs based on this game. I hope you enjoyed this peek into Dark Souls.

THE GOODS