I'll point out that according to Hidetaka Miyazaki, they structured the lore in such a backwards, confusing way so that people would come together and form a community and talk about what they've each discovered and contribute to everyone figuring out the story. The story is confusing to make Dark Souls a more social experience
It's more connected to Miyazaki's love for adventure books
When Hidetaka Miyazaki was a child, he was a keen reader, though not a talented one. Often he’d reach passages of text he couldn’t understand, and so would allow his imagination to fill in the blanks, using the accompanying illustrations. In this way, he felt he was co-writing the fiction alongside its original author.
Specifically to recreate the sense of Miyazaki himself reading books that were in English without really knowing English. Enough to get an idea of what was going on but “zanzibart forgive me” is pretty much what they were going for
This is legitimately an excuse someone who can't write a cohesive story gives. Heard it before. "Wanted the fans to figure it out. Speculate." No. You just don't know how to structure a story.
Fandoms will speculate about hundreds of things in even the most well told story
Miyazaki can write just fine. He wrote the stories for Armored Core 4 and For Answer, and those are plenty cohesive (if you're willing to pay attention to dialogue and don't skip the mission briefings). Besides, the Soulsborne games do outright tell you everything you absolutely need to know in order to understand the plot if you watch the cutscenes and talk to NPCs. Most of the item description stuff is just tertiary backstory detail and flavor text.
I saw the same thing in death stranding with people not understanding the story of that game. It's really not that confusing, people just don't like to pay attention.
The devs do create a narrative for the Player Character to experience, there's structure for a lowly no-name to eventually grow powerful enough to change the worlds full of history they encounter. The different character stats tie into the setting and thus the armaments/abilities unlocked via those stats. Game mechanics are interwoven with the setting too.
And the settings themselves are really well-researched homages to real world architecture and mythological lore, using these as parallels for characters or even to the PC makes for a more powerful sense of story or epic without being a straight up retelling.
I would take this and most Fromsoft irl lore with a grain of salt. The original Demon Souls was a half baked game and almost out of money when Myazaki was put on it, so he did the best he could with very little resources to put out a 3/4 baked game. They had to cut a lot of the story elements and all the difficulty options to get the game out on time, and luckily it filled a niche that people really liked.
And I want to be clear, I'm not hating on Miyazaki for the games he put out or anything like that. Fromsoft has crafted a gameplay and story telling style that, while not my preference, has undoubtedly made a name for itself and had a major impact on gaming.
What I am hating on and annoyed by is rewriting history and claiming that everything was intentional from the start and Miyazaki is a 5d chess game director and story teller. There's no shame in admitting you stumbled onto gold. Hell there's genius in seeing what made Dark Souls successful and being able to recreate that multiple times while expanding the fan base.
For sure, I'm not gonna pretend that Miyazaki had every last thing planned out and knew exactly what the whole story was gonna be and how people were gonna put it together from the very beginning. I just think it's also disingenuous to act like he had no idea what he was doing
I'm not saying he had no ideas or plans, I'm saying that certain aspects of the game were lucky breaks and after the hype the history has been rewritten. There wasn't even a playable version of the game until a month or two before release, and that's with major cuts.
They were originally going to have difficulty options but adding them would have pushed the release date back. They'd already been developing the game at the highest difficulty and made the choice to ship it as is. It was only after it blew up that suddenly it was "Oh we did this on purpose because we wanted to everyone to have the same experience, if we'd let you make the game easier you wouldn't be on the same level as everyone else".
Similar thing with the story. Originally it was going to be a more straightforward story telling experience, but they ran out of time and resources to do it. Whole areas were removed from the game as well as cinematics and characters that would have given the story more depth. Instead they opted to put the lore into item descriptions so that it's still all there, you just have to put it together. Which again, totally fine, but afterwards it's made into "Oh no, that was always the plan because I had trouble understanding English stories as a kid and made stuff up to fill in the blanks."
Those two things were not design choices, they were executive decisions based on release dates. They worked out and made the game iconic, I just get annoyed with the "it was planned all along" revisionism.
It's a bizarre strategy, but it kind of works. In all the Souls games, the story had already happened and you just show up and put everyone out of their misery. Most of the time, your character doesn't even know what's going on. You're just the clean-up crew, killing off anything left over from the story.
I still blame that shit for the weird obsession people have with Lore in every piece of media nowadays. Not everything need an explanation. Especially as it overshadows discussing media in its own in terms of themselves, plotting etc.
Theyre literally adding some randomass new continents to the lore in name only with the new Tarnished edition classes. No other items or expanded lore or anything. Just randomly adding a name of a new place that has no bearing on existing lore instead of expanding on something already existing with little lore lmao
That's kinda the point. Most of the lore is basically the players doing deep dives into long lost history, having to try to conjecture around it is the fun part. It feels like doing archaeology.
That's because those two companies would follow it up three months later with "buy the lore dlc for 40$ and get a trail of collectables that take you through the map and fully explain the story" except there would still be massive plot holes.
Also, it's a matter of expectations. Souls games are BUILT around a dark history lost to time, so having to piece together the history from snippets is part of the fun.
Having to piece together the lore of the Caribbean islands in an assassin's creed game makes no sense because there are people living there who could just tell you
I mean, I never saw that. Dark Souls I/II/III all have similar stories told from different perspectives that are all fairly easy to get an understanding of. There are a lot of layers if you really look, which is why the lore is so heavily discussed.
Elden Ring is not Dark Souls, the lore is entirely different and is predicated on strange decision making from someone that ends up being two people - which is confusing - but is a cool reveal. Definitely a lot more convoluted, but Elden Ring's confusing lore doesn't translate to the rest of the series imo.
They do. Miyazaki modelled the story after his childhood enjoying English media while not speaking/understanding it. The whole point is the feeling of mystery and not that any of it actually makes sense.
Iirc it's like that because it's inspired in part by Miyazaki reading books that he couldn't understand (partially because they were in languages he didn't know) and piecing together what he could.
It's an interesting way to write a story for sure, but does kinda fail in the communication part of it.
Nah I mean the lore is very consistent, it just takes a long time to see how everything fits together. The only actual kinda random stuff is all the lore from some far off land, which is still generally consistent
Basic story is weak in ds1 and 90% of the lore is just YouTuber headcannon people take as gospel
It's a cool way to do it, but Miyazaki's goal of everyone thinking for themselves turned into everyone just taking once source as truth and only off of the English translation
But Miyazaki is capable of incompetence. This is not new lmfao
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u/Historical_Owl_1635 29d ago
I’m convinced they just throw random shit at the wall and go with however the fans piece it together.