Dark Souls 3: FromSoftware should never have gone back

The following article was originally posted here on arstechnica.com, and is written by Rich Stanton.

This article discusses the nature of Dark Souls 3 as a sequel and how the affects the narrative and continuity of the story and lore of Dark Souls. As a sidenote, authors often do not control what the title of their article will be, and has expressed that the title as displayed is perhaps a bit hyperbolic.

via arstechnica.com

Games criticism has its weakness for auteur theory, and many, myself included, are guilty of crediting individuals for work done by teams of dozens, if not hundreds of people. Hidetaka Miyazaki—director of Dark Souls III, Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne—is one of the problems when it comes to rejecting the possibility of a "singular vision" entirely, however, because the games he has directed have a unique flavour and seem—I accept this may be an illusion—to be designed around characteristic principles.

It's not that a Souls veteran would claim to know anything of Miyazaki personally from his worlds. But you do get a sense, another illusion perhaps, of a guiding mind that anchors all these disparate parts into a whole.

The games directed by Miyazaki have thus far been of an extraordinarily high quality, and one of the reasons for this is that—before Dark Souls III—each takes place in a distinct world.

Dark Souls III makes the surprising decision to directly follow the original Dark Souls, something thatDark Souls II avoided almost entirely. There's a good reason developer FromSoftware typically avoids straight follow-ups, and that is the importance these games place on the RPG element: that each player feels their story is the real story. Or, to put it another way, a key part of the appeal of these games is that their lore is carefully crafted around ambiguity, so that you can interpret or insert your own take on the story.

If this has interested you, please continue to read the article here.