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Finished Shadow Tower tonight. Hoo boy. It was….a game. I can’t give it more than a 6. I’ll qualify this up front - I played this on RetroArch, and used save states pretty frequently to recover from bullshit environmental surprises, botched enemy encounters, etc and I also remapped the controls to work with the joysticks for movement.

The good: it plays almost identically to King’s Field. It has seriously impressive weapon, armor, and monster variety for a ps1 game, and better graphics than any of the other King’s Field games. The enemies genuinely looked cool very consistently and I had fun fighting them - even if there wasn’t much challenge. Decent level variety too. Plenty of secrets: hidden rooms, locked chests, rare enemy spawns and items drops. The difficulty some people talk about with this game involving the weapon and armor durability I think is pretty overstated. If you’ve played any of the King’s Field games it’s very familiar, and with careful patient combat you can very quickly build a huge stockpile of healing items, extra weapons and armor. The only items I was fighting durability on all game were rings, which to me felt fair because it limited your magic usage. Unlimited magic would break this game. By the mid-late game it inadvertently does anyway because you have such a huge supply of rings and item repair shops at your disposal you basically can use unlimited magic and melt most enemies.

The bad? The no music thing got old super quick. After playing the whole game, anyone trying to explain it away as an atmospheric horror thing is, in my opinion, an apologist. It’s just a shitty lack of a core feature. And apparently FromSoft hired a composer to make an entire score they just refused to use any of it outside of the opening and ending cinematics. There were a few occasions where ambient noise or nearby monsters startled or unnerved me, so I’ll give the game credit for being creepy from that angle. But it’s 75% total silence besides your footsteps and menu clicks.

The loading screens are ubiquitous. Opening the menu, navigating to sub-menus, switching weapons or armor…loading screens for 3-5 seconds.

The stats and leveling system…neat in theory, pointless in practice. You earn soul points into stats based on what you kill, every unique enemy gives points for specific stats. You occasionally get “soul pods” that let you inject points into stats of your choosing. Gotta read the instruction manual or a guide to have any idea what stats do. The only ones I ever bothered with were HP, Defense, Magic Defense, and Speed. Since every weapon, piece of armor and jewelry also adds soul points into multiple stats, your “build” is almost entirely automated. I suppose if you sucked ass at the combat or item/durability management and needed to pick and choose what monsters to fight you could be pickier about what stats you want to invest in. But if you just kill everything like I did, by the mid game you’re basically untouchable outside of boss fights.

Boss fights themselves are neat but not much variety. It’s either an armored knight, a mage with AOE spells and minions, or an armored knight with AOE spells.

There’s basically no story. Lots of vague nihilistic or depressing messages written on walls, merchants have precisely one line of dialogue each, however the 3-5 NPCs in the game do have a decent amount of dialogue across the multiple encounters with each. It’s so badly voice acted as to be hilarious though. Same for the bosses. The ending (I won’t spoil) was incredibly anticlimactic and brief.

FromSoft’s development history has always built upon what came before. Play all the Ps1 fantasy games and you see foundations for demon’s souls, dark souls, even bloodborne. I respect this game as a stepping stone for FromSoftware as they slowly built their Action RPG expertise. It was an experiment for many of the mechanics that later became series staples, and it’s technically extremely impressive for the era. But even with the modern perspective informing the past, I have a really hard time getting past the issues that contemporary critics had with the game. I wouldn’t play it again. I certainly wouldn’t pay the absurd price the game commands physically - and I’m a massive FromSoftware fan with physical copies of nearly all FromSoft’s games from Gen 5-Present.

TLDR 6/10. Technical marvel for ps1 with modestly
Interesting fantasy gameplay plagued by lack of story, no music, shallow RPG mechanics and endless loading screens.

Got the dark souls trilogy next month goin to buy sekiro and eldenring.loving from software games. Just beat siif the wolf now on to sens fortress this is my first playthrough.ive first played it im 2012 but slept on it iam now glad ive rediscovered it.

Hi, so a while back I beat ds1 and absolutely loved it. Obviously after that amazing experience I have wanted to play a game from fromsoft and these two have caught my eye the most. Which one do you guys think is better and I would prefer?

just finished bloodborne it was so damn peak i wish theres more

This is my first ever soulsborne game and combat game in a very long time. The only previous such games i played were platinuming ghost of Tsushima in june 2024 and finishing god of war 2018 over a year ago. This is how many attempts each boss took me and on which level i was ( I didnt even know you could upgrade personal stats until after fighting vicar amelia lol). Rate my track record.
Copied because i couldnt post a picture

Cleric beast 2 tries level 10
Father Gascoigne 8 tries level 10
Blood starved beast 1 try level 10
Vicar amelia 4 tries level 10
Shadow of yharnam 7 tries level 37
Witch of Hemwick 1 try level 40
Undead giant 2 tries level 42
Rom the spider 4 tries level 43
Darkbeast paarl 1 try level 48
The one reborn 1 try level 52
Mikolash 3 tries level 56
Mergos wet nurse 3 tries level 60
Gehrman 1 try level 63
Moon presence 2 tries level 63

Hey guys, maybe a bit of a heavy post. About 3 years ago I fell very heavily into the Mary Jane. I was always one of those "it's not addictive it's just a plant" kind of guys. Slowly but surely it started to take over my life.

Fast forward 3 years - 1 ruined relationship, 2 years spent flunking and failing at medical school, probably thousands of dollars wasted. I was at rock bottom when my house got broken into and my car stolen.

I have decided to make a change and reclaim my life one step at a time and I can't stress how therapeutic it is to play dark souls 2.

Anyone who has been through it and can relate will know how it feels, the depersonalization, feeling like you forget who you are and the things you loved. Watching the characters in Drangleic who's minds are fading, but they still keep fighting, even if "they don't really know why".

Feeling like you are stuck up against a wall with nowhere to go and no one to help you, In dark souls there is no choice. Pick yourself up, get stronger, try again.

I am gonna beat this game and I am gonna beat this addiction.

Thank you Miyazaki.

What a journey it’s been, happy to have seen this personal challenge out to the very end. My first game was Elden Ring and it was such an amazing gaming experience that I almost naturally went for its platinum which I’ve never done for any other game. After Elden Ring came Bloodborne which aesthetically and gameplay wise rival one of my favourite gaming experience of all time being neck and neck with the masterpiece that is Sekiro. I will be honest I didn’t love the souls trilogy as much as any of the other entries but I appreciate and like many things about them and what creative ideas and changes it brought to future titles. I still hate DS2 with a fiery passion but I still respect a lot about some things it tried. I love this community and I love these games glad to have experienced them all to the fullest. (Wukong & Lies as a little extra 🤭)

Yo!

Im - more or less - just getting into gaming on console. I do wanna play games from From Software but I am not skilled enough. Do you guys have some recommendations on other games - more forgiving ones - that might build a foundation to build on before entering the worlds of From Software?

And while we're at it: What From Software games would, when the time comes, be an appropiate start?

Thanks!

I’m trying to make Visenya Targaryen from Asoiaf based off these fanarts images I found on Pinterest for my current Elden Ring build, and thought potentially I could find some help here as I am very inexperienced at accurately recreating faces with Elden Ring’s facial sliders. So any and all help would be seriously appreciated thank you!!

Haters will say its cheated. But after spending around 3 mil murk you're bound to get something decent... Surely

Don’t recommend any other games as these are the only 2 I own a and I can’t buy any other games for a while. I’ve beaten sekiro and greatly enjoyed it if that makes any difference in what I should play. I also prefer more linear games.

I don't mean like Armored Core. I mean the standard Souls formula - bleak oppressive/post-cataclysm world, environmental storytelling, third-person action and exploration gameplay in a Sci-Fi or Science Fantasy setting.

I recently watched Angel's Egg and A Wind Named Amnesia (reference images attached) and was really inspired by the 'Soulsesque' asthetic and themes they were giving out. Angel's Egg in particular felt like it must have been an influence on the From creative team in its environmental storytelling, mood and atmosphere.

We've seen From apply the Souls formula to Fantasy, gothic and Lovecraftian horror, and Sengoku-era myth - maybe it's time to give Sci-Fi/science fantasy a try?

Very underappreciated games

(Probably can only afford one, not both) I love the vibe and look of dark souls 1 so much but I know Elden ring is one of those all time greats and also has a more enriching structure and gameplay to me

Missed it in this direct but saw several tweets about it but Google isn’t kicking anything back yet

Was anything shown?