Master of Children's Card Games

snakelinksonic:

Masahiro Sakurai is a Japanese game-design veteran. He created the Kirby series and the Smash Bros. series for Nintendo, and now he and his team at Sora are hard at work on Kid Icarus: Uprising for the 3DS. A busy man, no doubt, but even he found the time to hardcore-play Dark Souls for a while, an experience he wrote about for his column in this week’s Famitsu magazine.

His first impression? About what you’d figure. “It’s a game with the sort of difficulty level where you’re killed instantly if you let your guard down,” he wrote. ” Every mistake causes you to pay a severe penalty. You’re constantly watching out for back attacks and pincer attacks, always tapping on stone bridges before you cross them. Every corner you come across takes on vital meaning. What if there’s some foe I can’t defeat on the other side? Should I try not to make any sound? Am I all right on stamina? What if there are enemies on both sides? Anything behind me right now? And so on, and so on.”

Sakurai went on to note that this extreme difficulty is tolerable — enjoyable, even — because of the rules the game world follows. “There are bonfires throughout the game that refill your life to maximum,” he explained, “but if you use them, all enemy positions are reset. In other words, you’re traveling from a bonfire to the boss, or to another bonfire, and that’s the equivalent of a ‘round’ in the game. You also have Est flasks which can be filled for 5 uses (later 10) at bonfires. If you feel like you’re short on Est, you can either turn back or keep going. It’s an item that inherently forces you to make a strategic decision during each ‘round’ of play.”

Once he got used to this, Sakurai found it relatively easy to proceed along. Then problems popped up. “There’s an important item, called a Fire Keeper Soul, that enhances the effect of Est flasks,” he said. “I was having trouble against this butterfly-shaped boss, so I was looking around for items that could help me. So I found this item and used it…but nothing seemed to happen. It raised the Humanity stat, but nothing else. Going back to the start point, I realized that you’re supposed to offer the Fire Keeper Soul to a certain person in order to permanently power up your Est flask. This game runs on autosave, of course, so it was too late for that — I had wasted a golden opportunity.”

It was a vital error, and in the end, Sakurai regretted it enough that he decided that a restart was necessary. But even that decision was a tough one to make. “I thought to myself ‘Well, should I really go through with this? Is it that bad of a mistake?’” he wrote. “The thing is, this sort of thing happens all the time in games, especially RPGs, running into situations where you permanently miss out on important items or story events because you didn’t know any better. I make every effort to avoid reading strategy guides or sites because I want to explore worlds for myself, these worlds that dozens of people worked hard to build, with as fresh a perspective as possible. This can have its drawbacks, because there are some things where it’s completely to your advantage to have previous knowledge about. In the end, though, there’s a lot of fun that comes out from the fact that you can’t go back. This game wouldn’t have been half as fun if it wasn’t built that way.”

Despite the mental anguish, Sakurai is definitely a fan. “It’s really refreshing to play a title that so constantly has you wondering about the could-have-beens,” he concluded. “It’s a reminder that games can conjure feelings in you that no other form of entertainment can, something I’m reminded of as I toil through my restart.”