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Welcome back to Lordran, and to the adventures of the undead warrior Andromeda! Those who followed this series over the past year know it's taken some time to get to this point, but at last we come to the final entry of Michael117's Dark Souls Diary. In this series I've been explaining the more memorable battles and experiences from my first playthrough of FromSoftware's 2011 action-rpg. The last time we saw our warrior she had faced a wall of giant minotaurs in the Demon Ruins, burned in the lava of Lost Izalith, and hacked ghosts asunder in New Londo Ruins. Today she faces skeletons in Tomb of the Giants, gets a library card in the Duke's Archives, and fights the Lord of Cinder in the endgame!

Tomb of the Giants

This place is every bit as dark as it seems, and those arrows are as huge as they look. I was lucky to have acquired a Sunglight Maggot helmet earlier in the game, which emits a light around you and is the perfect kind of item to have in this dark place. I died a number of times on the path to the Tomb of the Giants sliding off dark ledges, and getting shot by giant arrows from hidden skeletons in the distance. In the dungeon proper there's huge dog skeletons that can take a beating and dish it out. They hit in combos with a lot of force which can zap all your stamina and leave you open to get mauled. If you're not careful you can fall off ledges while they push you around as well. If you're patient and have stealth spells or rings, you can avoid some of the battles and creep around the Tomb of the Giants. There's an area right before the boss battle where terrifying poisonous baby skeletons respawned infinitely and destroyed me in a heartbeat once they surrounded me. But they can also drop Humanity, making this the best place in the game to farm for it!

Duke's Archives/Crystal Cave

Luckily this place is well lit, so I ditched the Sunlight Maggot helm. The Duke refers to the dragon Seath the Scaleless who presides over the area. In the war between Man and Dragons Seath betrayed his own dragon-kind to help Lord Gwyn achieve victory, earning himself a Dukedom from the human Lord. The epic library in the Archives isn't all fun and games though, he uses all the knowledge to help him run corrupt crystal-based experiments as he searches for immortality. As a side effect of Seath's dangerous search, tons of Crystal Golems and other monsters prowl the grounds. The two giant boars that wait in a narrow hallway at the entrance to the Archives ran me down more than once and my strategy had to get pretty desperate. I had to draw them into more open space where I could dodge, hack, and shoot them as they charged around me.

Seath himself waits for you in the Crystal Cave, which has some walkways that are even more dangerous than the ones in Blighttown, for two reasons. Some of the crystal walkways are invisible, requiring you to inch across them and throw prism stones out onto them in order to see where the paths lead. Even once you figure out how to get across the cave the paths themselves have very sharp and tilted geometry and can make you slip off pretty easy anyways. Right before Seath I had a chance to murder some big clams, but not before some of them lurched into me doing huge damage and making me fly through the air. Beware the clams.

Farming before the endgame

Once I conquered the Duke's Archives and the frustrations of the Crystal Cave, I knew that I only had one area left to explore, the Kiln where the final boss waits. Dark Souls veterans told me that after you finish the game you get sent straight to New Game+, a new playthrough where enemies do more damage and have higher HP, so it's a good idea to farm for whatever useful items you want before you get tossed into the grinder again. I did a ton of grinding for souls in Anor Londo so that I could level up, buy lots of items, and upgrade my weapons and armor.

Kiln of the First Flame

This place has a destroyed beauty that awed me the first time I came upon it. I wonder what it use to look like before everything turned to mountains of ash and burnt ruins? Even in a state of destruction it's beautiful, but when it was young and bright I bet it was quite a spectacle. Here is where the First Flame was housed (protected?). The First Flame is the most historically significant magic to appear in the lore of Dark Souls, but it's still unknown exactly how it came to be and why. It was from the Flame that Gwyn attained his Lord Soul and became so powerful, mighty enough to kill dragons with spears of light, leading the charge in a war that changed the world forever. The First Flame gave light, warmth, and life to the world, but now it's dwindled to a smoldering pile as the world goes dark, and the grand house it was kept in lies in ruins.

Gwyn used to be the Lord of Sunlight, but after sacrificing himself in an attempt to save the First Flame he became the Lord of Cinder. Unfortunately his backstory is more interesting than his battle. He's a one note kind of boss and game director Hidetaka Miyazaki has said he was very disappointed how it turned out. It's a fun melee battle but it's not a good final battle, and it doesn't allow you to play as you like. It doesn't account for ranged, magic, and stealth character builds. To survive his onslaught and beat him I had to become a tank, equip the heaviest armor I could, soak up attacks, and then dish out an attack when I had the chance. I've never been good at parrying, but during the battle I was lucky enough to land two of them, opening Gwyn up to critical attacks for huge damage that helped me take chunks off his health bar. Gwyn killed me 4 times as I learned his patterns, but the 5th effort was my victory. It was fun but it wasn't nearly as exciting as earlier battles, and it wasn't nearly as difficult as the 14 times the Stray Demon killed me or the countless times the Four Kings killed me. As anticlimactically as the game ended, it was still pretty cool on the lore side and I enjoyed the ending that I chose (there's two different endings to pick between).

Final Thoughts

Now that the Dark Souls Diary has ended and the game is completed, I can look back on the entire experience and judge it in its totality. All the beautiful landscapes, memorable level design, the fear of entering new areas with unknown dangers, the need for patience and skill, the fact they reward you for being methodical and thoughtful, the steep challenges, the immense feelings of reward and triumph, the rock solid polish in the combat system, the feeling of connecting with other Dark Souls players and sharing our experiences, finding secrets, building the perfect character I want to role-play as and using the weapons I like most, and most of all finding out that this game has an immense and nuanced story with a world history hidden in it that's even more thought provoking and interesting to me than Mass Effect, Dragon Age, or the Elder Scrolls.

There were times I hated playing this game and wanted to stop, but every time I beat a boss I was drunk with so much joy and enthusiasm I knew I had to keep going. Once I settled into Lordran and learned what this game is actually all about I was shocked at how much time, thought, detail, and intention was put into every little aspect. A smile comes across my face when I encounter people who still think Dark Souls doesn't have a story. I think to myself, "They don't see it." in such a way it makes me feel like I know something special that they don't. If you play the game, open your eyes and ears to what the game is saying (and not saying), read the narrations in item descriptions, and think about the world you're in you come to realize the story isn't the least bit random or generic like it appears to be at first. It's huge, spanning multiple ages, with magic, family, estrangement and alienation, falls from grace, war, love, death, triumph, politics, noble comradeship, bitter hatreds, secret conspiracies, glorious civilizations, stunning engineering, foreboding darkness and more than enough mystery to keep you interpreting certain events and certain people.

Even with the chugging frame rate and steep barrier to entry, this game is a classic of the 7th generation (remember how fondly the uniqueness of Shadow of the Colossus is held now despite the issues it had at the time?). Dark Souls isn't for everybody, but those who fall in love with it will find a high quality piece of work to role-play in, and a great community to share experiences with. Dark Souls is more than competent in its combat, it's well wrought, thoughtfully colored in the world it presents, and it narrates a grand story in a way I've never quite seen before. All the misconceptions people told me about this game before I played it turned out to be wrong. There's a huge story in the guts of Dark Souls, but in order to experience it you have to change your mindset and stop expecting the typical cinematic-heavy delivery and tutorial laden devices to show up like they do in other games. FromSoftware introduce the basics to you, but it's your journey as the player to discover the nuances of all the mechanical systems and to uncover the story like a detective game. They never cheat you, all the tools to beat the game are right there in your hands, you just have to bring the skill and smarts to get the job done, and when you defeat bosses and survive areas you'll get a great sense of accomplishment in addition to the enjoyment of the combat.

Dark Souls is my favorite RPG now, it's made me think differently about how I could design levels, difficulty, combat, quick-saving, and systems in my own game ideas. It's definitely not a badge of honor, it's simply a video game, and it's really good.

If you want to look back on any entries you missed:

Dark Souls Diary 1 - Character creation, Undead Asylum, Burg, Parish

Dark Souls Diary 2 -The Depths, Blighttown

Dark Souls Diary 3 -Catacombs, Sens Fortress, Great Hollow, Ash Lake, Great Wolf

Dark Souls Diary 4 - Anor Londo

Dark Souls Diary 5 - Demon Ruins, Lost Izalith, New Londo Ruins

Thanks to everybody who enjoyed or followed these, it was a lot of fun to write them out and share my adventure with you, through all the suffering and triumphs.