Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition is an expansion to Dark Souls as well as the PC’s port of the game. It’s been a while since the game’s release and from it came a lot of mixed opinions. For a lot of people Dark Souls is an amazing game that can get addicting fast. For a few it also has an amazing and deep story. For others it’s a way they can prove their dominance over others players. For some though it’s too hard and there doesn’t seem to be a point. I’m just here to talk a bit about the game and what it’s expansion has to offer.

The game starts off explaining the origin story for the world you play in but not much else. There is a beginning tutorial but even that is cleverly hidden a bit since they attempted to make the game more intuitive and don’t hold your hand like most tutorials we’re used to seeing with more recent games do. The continuation of the story also happens with a similar mindset. The world in general is pretty big and every character seems to have it’s own back story (even the crow). However, it’s not made obvious and you have to listen in on a lot of dialogue before you start to really pick up on things. Some of it is event oriented as well so you might not even experience it on your first play through if you don’t know where to go for it. This makes the game very immersive and wonderful as well as kind of obnoxious. During the multiple playthroughs I’ve had I loved how I always learned new things about the game. Whether those things were purely about the story, and gave me a better picture on the world around me, or they taught me a valuable gameplay lesson that improved my skill and experience as a player I always felt rewarded for it in the end. However, it’s not surprising when you hear people wishing that the game wasn’t as vague about certain topics. I’ll admit that I wouldn’t have figured much out about the point of humanity if it wasn’t for the community being helpful with it’s wikis. I also wouldn’t know as much as I do about some of the story if I didn’t know about some of it being context driven. I really love the rewarding feeling I get from figuring this kind of stuff out but at the same time I wish I had the time to experience more of it. I don’t think the game should remove all it’s ambiguity, because that would defeat the purpose and remove a lot of fun out of the experience, but I feel like asking for it to be a bit easier to figure out in some cases would be nice and I’m sure I’m not the only person who believes that.

Now I’m not asking them to change the gameplay or difficulty at all. I think the game scales incredibly well with player skill as you progress and that after the first couple bosses you’re left feeling very accomplished in whatever skill set you decided to go with. I don’t want to go too much into the game’s basic combat, or lack there of depending on how you play, because I think it’s something that has to be experienced first hand. I will however talk more about the game’s expansion. Prepare to Die edition adds in new bosses, area, patches, and is the game’s PC port edition (aka my chance to finally experience the game). I wont go into too much of what the dlc adds bosswise but I will say that they’re all pretty great. All the added bosses add more of what you’d expect from Dark Souls without recycling bosses or ideas. It also adds in new enemies as well as new areas (for the most part) and some other nice things (possibly too nice). But it’s not all about new things, it’s also about a new platform. However, as a PC port it’s kind of rough. The textures aren’t too great, even when compared to the console’s, and it seems to take more power to process the game on PC as well. This is most likely because FromSoftware hasn’t had too much experience porting their games over and is still a bit rusty at it. It’s forgivable, especially since the push to PC came from fans and not the developers, but it’s still not the best. These issue can be fixed by mods but these mods are community made so they’re not really part of the official game experience (in the context of what was released by the developers).

In the end Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition gives us what we wanted, more Dark Souls. It’s not much of an addition but the game itself is so extensive that it’s enough to keep us busy until the second game comes out. Especially so if you’re a newer player jumping into things for the first time. Normally the few issues I have with a game keep it from being perfect in my mind. Things like graphic hiccups, processing issues, and things that may or may not need changing keep it from being as great as it could be. However, the whole experience makes those things negligible to me. It may be hard to believe but I feel like the only way to believe it is to play and experience this game for yourself. It’s not just a great game, it’s one of the greats.

5/5