My Personal Ranking of the Soulsborne Games

Dark Souls has been one of the most culturally significant video game series over the last decade, spawning a new sub-genre of games like it and basically setting a new standard of comparison for melee combat, level design, and difficulty. The series has been so popular that it really needs no introduction -- if you haven't heard of Dark Souls by now then you've been living under a rock, and even if you've never played any of them you surely know what kind of games they are. I began playing the series with the original Demon's Souls and have kept up with every release since, though it took me a while to get around to Bloodborne and I still haven't played Sekiro, although from what I understand Sekiro is more an evolution of Tenchu than Dark Souls, so it maybe doesn't fully belong in the "Soulsborne" category of games. With each release of a new Soulsborne game I usually find myself having mixed opinions -- while usually enjoying each one, there's usually some aspect that leaves me a little unsatisfied or subtly disappointed. So I thought it would be fun to review all five games against one another, comparing their relative strengths and weaknesses while attempting to rank them in terms of my personal favorites.

When brainstorming this list and trying to figure out how I'd actually order them, I went back and replayed large chunks of each game, just to refresh my memory, and so I decided to base these rankings on a combination of how much I remember enjoying each game the first time I played it, how much I enjoyed replaying it, and finally how well it compares to the other games in the series mechanically. So in other words, this is not a purely objective ranking of how good the games are technically, since I'm putting a lot of weight in my own subjective feelings in addition to their more technical design elements. If it were purely objective, then believe me they would be in a very different order. All of which is to say that this is my personal opinion, so don't get offended if I don't have the exact same feelings as you do.

Bloodborne Review: Interesting, but Ultimately Disappointing

Dark Souls has been one of the most influential video games over the last decade, with its unique gameplay formula and entire presentation becoming a standard of comparison whenever people talk about melee combat, level design, and difficulty in other video games. The Souls series has been such a cultural phenomenon that it's essentially become its own sub-genre of games, with the "Souls-like" term catching on as a way to describe other, similar types of games who've taken clear inspiration from Dark Souls. In 2015, between the release of Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3, developer From Software released Bloodborne, a main-entry "Souls-like" (or Soulsborne) game, which is basically just a spin-off from Dark Souls, taking the core gameplay concepts and mechanics from Dark Souls and giving them a complete make-over with a whole new setting and a bunch of mechanical tweaks on the familiar formula.

Speaking as someone who's played all four of the Souls games in order, starting with the original Demon's Souls, Bloodborne breathes a lot of new life into a gameplay formula that's become a little too tired and repetitive over the years, but ultimately doesn't set itself apart from the Souls series as much as I would have liked it to. In practice, my experience playing Bloodborne started with excited optimism as I relished the positive effect many of its changes had on the core gameplay formula, until about halfway through when I started to feel like I was just playing Yet Another Version of the exact same game I've already played four times previously over the last decade -- this now being the fifth. And the more I played, the more I started to feel subtly disappointed and underwhelmed by some of the game's other design elements, and by the missed opportunities to do something more with the potential that a spin-off game could have.

Gothic 1+2: Masterpieces in Immersive Design

Gothic 1 and 2 are some of the best open-world action-adventure-RPGs of all time, and part of the reason why is their uniquely immersive gameplay designs. Developed by the small German studio Piranha Bytes and released in 2000 and 2002 in their native Germany, Gothic 1 and 2 were truly ahead of their time; while not the first to implement scripted NPC scheduling and reactions, they were already doing so years before Bethesda supposedly pioneered that concept with Oblivion, while some of their other design elements like in-world skill trainers and the process of forging weapons aren't really seen in other games, even to this day with almost two decades of industry advancements since the original Gothic. Some of their design elements may be a little quaint or antiquated at this point, but for the most part the immersive design of Gothic 1 and 2 is timelessly brilliant and contributes to a feeling of atmospheric immersion that often isn't found in other games.

Gothic 1 vs Gothic 2 - Which is Better?

Gothic 1 and 2 are some of my favorite games of all time, being some of the most deeply satisfying and immersive action-adventure-RPGs that I've ever played. While most people in the early 2000s were raving about how great Morrowind was, I was busy playing Gothic, and my experience with those games fundamentally altered my ability to appreciate other, similar types of games because the early Gothic games were truly ahead of their time and did some really impressive things that other developers weren't doing at the time, and still aren't doing to this day. I sometimes struggle, however, to decide which of the two Gothic games I like better. With Gothic 2 being a direct sequel to the first game, directly continuing the story with many of the exact same characters in the exact same world, and being built on the exact same game engine, they're about as similar as two games in a series can be, and so I often like to think of them as essentially one game broken into two parts. At the end of the day, however, they are separate games with some key differences, so I thought I'd take some time to review the two games against one another and discuss the relative pro's and con's of each game.

The Importance of Gothic 1+2's Music: A Review of Kai Rosenkranz's Soundtracks

A lot of different components go into making Gothic 1 and 2 such great games, but one of its more subtle, understated triumphs is the excellent quality of its soundtrack, composed by Kai Rosenkranz. Music is something that I feel often gets overlooked when it comes to video game reviews, because most gamers aren't music critics, and aren't very knowledgeable about what goes into making great music -- we just know what sounds good, and what doesn't. The thing that makes Gothic's soundtrack so good, to me, is that it strikes a perfect balance between melody and ambiance -- it has enough melodic structure that you can pick out themes and quickly come to recognize its motifs, while also serving as an ideal backdrop to set the tone of your adventures, without crossing too boldly into the foreground and calling too much attention to itself.

Resident Evil 2: Great, But Imperfect

The Resident Evil 2 remake has been possibly the most-anticipated release in the Resident Evil series, considering how well the original game is beloved by fans. Ever since the first game got remade on the GameCube in 2002, fans have been clamoring for a similar treatment of the sequel, which many actually consider to be the better game. Two decades later, we finally have the Resident Evil 2 remake, but it's maybe not quite what people really wanted, at least not initially. Gone are the pre-rendered backgrounds, fixed camera angles, and awkward tank-controls that were so iconic and representative of the first three games; in their place we now have an over-the-shoulder Resident Evil 4 style third-person shooter perspective in a fully three-dimensional environment. While the shift in perspective may make it seem to have more in common with some of the more recent Resident Evil games, rather than the game it's supposed to be based on, the remake is definitely more of a classic survival-horror game in the vein of the original trilogy than a modern action shooter. In fact, it's probably the most old-school survival-horror game to be released by a major publisher since, well, Resident Evil 7, and the remake is even more of an old-school survival-horror than Resident Evil 7 was.

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Review - Interactive Storytelling in a Movie Done Right

Netflix's Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is an interactive movie about an aspiring video game developer in 1984 trying to finish his first major game release while feeling like his life is spinning out of control. The movie plays like a "choose your own adventure" book or game where, at certain points in a scene, an interface will appear on screen asking you to make a binary choice for the character, which is then played out in the following shots and can lead to a lot of different pathways to over five different endings. As the story continues, the main character, Stefan, begins to realize there are weird forces controlling his life; he begins to relive past traumas, starts having demonic visions and conspiratorial dreams, and slowly descends into a surreal madness as reality crumbles around him, all while struggling with the normal tribulations and speed bumps to meet the deadline to release his first game, Bandersnatch.

For anyone unfamiliar with the series, Black Mirror is a dark science-fiction anthology series on Netflix, a bit similar in tone and style to The Twilight Zone, where each episode explores a concept about the darker possibilities of technology. Iconic episodes deal with being able to "block" people in real life (like on social media), using reality television as a form of criminal punishment, using memory implants for police investigations, and having one's consciousness uploaded to a virtual reality mainframe after you die, among many others. Bandersnatch functions as a feature-length stand-alone episode that can last 90 minutes or more, depending on your choices and how much of it you choose to explore. I don't normally review movies on this blog (although I have on a few occasions, and I used to have my old Video Games in TV series), but this movie deals directly with video game themes and its interactive nature makes it feel almost like a game, so I figured I'd share my thoughts and observations on it for those who're interested.