Verdict:
Passable
Content Warnings:
Violence, body horror, themes of overwhelming despair, insects, spiders
Do you play as a woman?
You can choose your gender when you create a character.
Do the women drive the story?
No, women are not a significant driving force in any of the games.
How many men are there?
Most NPCs are men
What are the Romance options?
None
Is the game any good?
The dark souls series is one that has left its mark on culture in a very unique and interesting way by appealing to challenge and difficulty exclusively. They hold universal acclaim and boast large fanbases to match.
For the purposes of this blog though they are okay at best.
The problem isnt so much that you cannot play as a woman, you can! It’s nice. Passing grade. However, to get more than that you need to give me a reason to play as a woman, or aknowledgement as a woman, or some kind of change. The souls games do not do this, to them no matter your gender you are just another undead.
This is not necessarily bad! It would be annoying if games treated women differently all the time, or had stat changes exclusive to women. After all, living in a more equal world is the goal, right?
That is the real challenge in evaluating games like these, since having the option is so good and makes the games much more approachable. At the same time it can sting when it feels like that choice amounts to nothing, not even a pronoun change. Since the blog is more dedicated to looking for games that highlight and feature women, these games are not well suited for recommendation here. Please remember that this doesn’t reflect in the quality of the game, but on its ability to meet a very specific set of criteria.
That out of the way, the Souls games share a lot of common elements that make them easy to talk about as a group. They are combat focused role playing games played in third person. Your task is to go through a series of levels in order to fight the boss, with the goal of either unlocking more areas or claiming a specific treasure. Combat is slow, with attacks being something you commit to, potentially leaving yourself open to counters. Combat is also very lethal, with most enemies killing you, or being killed, in only a couple hits.
Gameplay is punctuated by bonfires, safe zones where you rest to restore your health and healing item reserves. The exact mechanics of them vary between installments, but they all serve the same purpose as places of calm and rest in between dangerous areas. They also serve as respawn points for when you die.
You will die, a lot. Over, and over, and over again. The design is set up in such a way to make it very difficult to get through on your first try. Most of the time, this feels fine. Difficult encounters and traps for the unwary feels reasonable to try multiple times. There are more than a few issues with poorly telegraphed attacks and bad hitboxes that make the design begin to feel frustrating though. Exacerbating that, is the fact that you lose all of your souls when you die.
Souls serve as the currency in the game and are used, most often, to level you up. Leveling up offers mostly marginal increases, but you will be leveling up a lot and those rewards will stack up eventually. Unfortunately, as mentioned before, if you die you lose all your souls. The upside is that the souls are left on the ground for you to come and claim once you respawn. The downside is that if you die on your way to reclaim those souls they are lost forever. There are enough stupid ways to die in the game, where certain controls (notably the jumping) can feel imprecise, that this does not feel like a fair chance every single time.
What’s more, to have the design and the marketing both focus so heavily on repeated death through trial and error makes the decision to punish death more harshly than almost anyvgame I have ever seen totally baffling. You would think they wouldnt punish you at all, to better facilitate your ability to try again, but that isnt the case. Its one of the biggest flaws in the entire series, and no changes are made to that mechanic in any of them.
Outside of that and a few hiccups, the mechanics are solid enough, they change from game to game, but not so much that you will have to relearn anything if you play through the series.
The 3 games in the series also share very similar art direction. They are dark, gritty games with a heavy empahsis placed on decay and death throughout the many environments. They evoke many of the common tropes of horror, though it never really feels scary since you never feel helpless, but it does establish a mood of hopelessness. It ties into the mechanical design cleverly, while keeping things mostly clear. The series is rightfully praised for its excellent visuals.
For my money the best looking of the games is Dark Souls 2, not because of its graphical fidelity, but because it pushes the environments so much further than the other games are willing to go. Dark Souls 3 in particular seems almost afriad to do anything too unorthodox and so many of its environments feel underwhelming, while the second game in the series is much more experimental and the impact is significant.
When it comes to narrative, the Souls series sits in a difficult spot. The games are often praised for their lore and worldbuilding, with the writing often cited as being excellent. I am forced to wonder if we’ve played the same game.
The individual games have their own stories, loosely speaking. You are given a bunch of terms you dont really understand, and sometimes told where to go. The entire series suffers from an insufferable need to be vague about everything. Nothing is ever presented as fact, nothing is ever explained, nothing is ever told to you. You get parts of rumours, riddles with no answer, guesses, and meaningless platitudes instead of any actual story. To me it feels like the games are so busy trying to look important and deep and serious that they forgot to actually write anything interesting.
That does not always extend to the character writing though, and thankfully there are a few very good characters in the series. For the purposes of this blog, the Emerald Herald and Lucatiel of Mirrah are probably the most interesting. They both show up in the game Datk Souls 2, where the Emerald Herald acts as your guide and levels you up. She is a mysterious figure, but she does show some genuine emotions, and eventually you get a few, mostly unsatisfying answers from her. Lucatiel you will meet on your travels, where she will offer to help you. She is one of several NPCs that you will meet and learn about if you are dilligent with exploration throughout the game. You will be able to summon her to help you with some bosses, and if you do that will help progress her personal story. Her story is best seen or experienced, but iIgenuinely felt for her, and when I found her armour in Dark Souls 3, I wore it for the entire game, since it reminded me of a character I cared about a great deal.
Ultimately, any of the games are worth playing, and are safe to play if you only want to play as a woman. Personally, I think Dark Souls 2 is the most unique and interesting of the bunch, making it my favourite, but that isnt a particularly popular opinion. If you do play them, I wish you the best of luck, you’ll need it.
I Want to Play as a Girl 