PixlBit

I think that's one of the reasons they closed the door on the series. I'm excited to see what he's got planned next. 

Hope you are well, Blake!

I am well Snee. How are you?

I am Godly, as usual. :p

Do they want you to ... BARRELL ROLL a bunch? 

But you must also use bombs wisely and use the boost to chase.

Fox, get this guy off of me!

Oh yeah, one more thing. No matter how hard you try, you can't kill Slippy.

"Enjoyed by everyone, but loved by no one." It's inevitable that a popular niche game will get dumbed down for the masses and for profit I guess. With every new Souls game, my appreciation for Demons Souls and its oddness grows more and more.  I think I've somewhat tried to articulate this in the past, albeit very poorly, but  I hate when Souls-like games take away from souls hard 'getgood' combat mechanics, but not the beautiful dark odd world and level designs, atmos, mood, mystery, exploration. I'm not trashing the Souls games or Soulslikes in any way, they appeal to my love of dark themed and punishing games, but I wish they borrowed more from Demons world than trying to make everything hard just because. 

Also, where have you been? E3 just passed and not a peep from you? What are you most exited about. Also, I really like this YTer. Who are your favs? I love YT analysis of my fav games. 

This is why I loved Hollow Knight so much. It got that being hard wasn't everything that Souls offers. I do wish more games would take that message though.

 As for E3 games, I'm obvious excited for the new metroid games. Metro looks awesome as per usual, A Way Out looks interesting too. The Wolfenstein trailer looked awesome too, and there are honestly way too many games there that I liked the look of to mention. Especially some of the smaller stuff looked great.

 If you want more yters like Matthewmatosis, check out Joseph Anderson, Super Bunnyhop, KingK, Writing on games, The Gaming Brit Show, The Geek Critique, Mr BTongue, Noah Caldwell-Gervais, Errant Signal, and Mark Brown. They all do super in depth looks at video games of all sorts.

 As for other Youtubers, Cool Ghosts are some of my favourites. They're funny, cheery, and insightful. Dark Pixel offers some great insight into the behind the scenes of JRPGs and other Square Enix titles. I could honestly go on for hours, but I'll cut it short. If you need anymore let me know. I watch far too much youtube.

I guess the AAA treatment means making things less weird and easier to play. I agree about Demon's Souls. I love the look of that game. One day, I'll have the patience for the gameplay. 

3 might be a good place to jump in then. It's still great, but it's faster paced and a bit more forgiving. I'd maybe look up a beginners guide before you play any of them though so you're not stumbling through the dark.

I really want to start with Bloodborne. Not sure why, but I like the look of that game. 

Watched the video and I guess I'd say that I generally disagree with the critiques of the newer games. I agree that Demon's Souls brought something totally new to the table, but in my opinion each progressive game further refined the series and each offers some variations on the core hook to make them individually unique.

For instance, Dark Souls 3 is my favorite of the series. I believe it to have merged the nuance of the Souls games with the speed and aggression of Bloodborne. It's a fascinating world with superb immersion and the combat and gameplay feels the tightest of the whole series. Demon's Souls has lots of great stuff, but it's also incredibly rough around the edges, and frankly, it's tough for me to go back to it.

I do believe they put a wrap on the series at the right time though. I don't think we need the series to be annualized, and I love what they were able to accomplish with Bloodborne by establishing a brand new universe. I'd love to see them do that again and give us another fresh world to fall in love with.

I also do think that the video is incredibly PVE-centric in its views. It shortchanges the combat system quite thoroughly by only looking at its application in PVE. Having played literally hundreds of hours of PVP, I can tell you that the combat is incredibly deep and nuanced and there's a whole lot more to it than just timing rolls. Just having all of the options of multiple melee attacks, magic, pyromancy, faith, projectiles, items, etc, on top of the crazy build varities, there's so much that someone can bring to a fight that it makes the system much deeper than is credited in the analysis.

I can agree that the games have certainly gotten very roll dependent in the PVE, but one could argue the older games were best played in that fashion too. Most bosses are super easy once you figure out how to exploit rolling iframes. I won't disagree that Demon's Souls was much more imaginative when it comes to bosses and I think it goes without saying that the newer games have certainly adhered to a very particular boss formula that has gotten a bit tired when you look at where things started.

All that said, I think every game in the series has its own unique flavor, and generally speaking I love all of them near equally. I just don't have the same pedestal that others seem to have for Demon's Souls. It's a fine game and I totally appreciate what it brought us, but it's the one I've played the least and have the least interest in going back to.

Both myself and the reviewer like the newer games. He reviewed them, and Dark Souls 2 is the only one he dislikes. I don't mind 2 that much honestly. And I like 3 a lot, just less than the first 2. The games got very focused and very safe after that.

 I guess it just depends on what you want. Personally, I got into Dark Souls and Demon's Souls because they created a world and atmosphere that absolutely captivated me. There was nothing else like them. I think the addition of warping and the lack of creative insanity hurt the series a fair bit though. Bloodborne proves it's still there though, but they maybe need a new theme to work with.

 PvE is honestly the only thing I care about in Souls. I like invading and co-op, but honestly I don't care about that shit if the world design, level design, and From Software brand of weird isn't there.

I can understand only liking the series for PvE. I was like that with it for a long time. It took DS3 to pull me out of my shell in that regard. I honestly am not big on invading and co-op, but Red Soapstone 1v1 battles are like drugs for me at this point. I've sat outside of the Pontiff bonfire PvPing for more time than I'd care to admit. Co-op/invading is fun for a bit, but I find that it loses its luster pretty quickly for me.

I guess I took particular offense with his belief that the combat isn't that deep. I mean, it's just objectively false considering there's an entire meta game when it comes to PvP. So many of the patches they make to the games are specifically for the PvP meta to limit OP builds that begin ruining the meta.

I do fully agree that level design, imagination, and cohesive world design is of great importance for the PvE portion of the game and I also agree that the games got pretty safe after Dark Souls 1. I actually think 2 tried to shake things up a bit, but kind of missed the point in some regards. The DLC, while great in its world design, has boss fights that are just hard for the sake of being hard, nearly to the point of being unfair especially after the huge trek it takes to just get there. The whole game fell victim to the "add more enemies to the boss fight" to up the ante. Similarly, 3 did that with the whole multi-phase fights. There's a degree of laziness to it that is undeniable.