With any genre in any medium, there are traits that define the genre. Action movies involve fight scenes and chases. Role playing video games involve leveling a character or characters. Science fiction is set in the future and involves technology that we don't have today. In addition to the defining traits, though, there are also conventions that inevitably come to define the genre. In action movies, the main characters is likable, and he gets the girl. In role playing video games, combat is turn based. In science fiction, space ships travel faster than the speed of light. Whenever conventions develop, though, someone decides to throw them aside, and often with great effect. Antiheroes in action movies, real-time combat in RPGs, and space travel that leaves its passengers far younger than those they left behind. Sometimes the genre changes in reaction to a work that reassesses it. Other times, it doesn't.

I'm not sure how much of an impact Glen Cook has made in the fantasy genre by subverting a rather enormous quantity of its norms, but whatever it is, it's not enough. Fantasy is, I imagine, defined by a level of technology that predates guns and electricity, by magic, by mythical creatures. But the genre has come to be about the epic struggle between good and evil. It has somehow come to revolve around young, unlikely heroes thrown out of peaceful lives and into conflict. It has come to involve handsome men falling in love with beautiful women, and vice versa. It has as much to do with the world in which the story takes place as it does the story itself. It is full of flowery names that are punctuated by apostrophes and dashes, with a generous helping of odd consonants jammed together uncomfortably.

Some of those things I enjoy. Some I tolerate. Some I detest. None of them, however, are really necessary in a fantasy novel. In Chronicles of the Black Company, Glen Cook tosses them all aside. He actively flaunts several. And by and large, it is to great effect.

The Chronicles of the Black Company are told from the first person perspective of Croaker, a physician and annalist working with the Black Company, a band of mercenaries. No, not mercenaries with a heart of gold, who only work for the cause of justice. Mercenaries. They fight for pay. It's not a philosophical thing; it's their job. Croaker makes it clear that some of their members do some pretty heinous things. The character himself makes a point not to whitewash, and notes that he often glances over some of the darker aspects of his profession. He muses often about the lack of black and white, about the reality of us and them; that there are good people under each banner, and bad ones, too. But the characters in the book are not without ethics and morals. There are lines which they will not cross, and some acts that they will not simply turn a blind eye to. The effect of it all is that the Black Company feels real. It feels like a group of paid soldiers who kill for a living and who have become used to some of the ugliness that entails, but who are still human at the heart of it.

Glen Cook's writing here is sparse and direct. Characters are introduced without a mention of their physical characteristics. After three books and eight hundred pages, I have virtually no idea what Croaker looks like. I don't know what color his hair or eyes are, how tall he stands, the kind of clothes he wears, or the color of his skin. Only truly remarkable characteristics get pointed out, and only a few times in the whole of the books. Characters are their names and their actions. And their names and their actions are unique and memorable: One-Eye. Goblin. Elmo. The Captain. Raven. The names are simple and emblematic in part because recruits in the Black Company are usually given new names on entering, often because they're running from a past they want to forget, and part because in the world of the Black Company, knowing someone's true name is a form of power.

That same paucity of detail extends to world building, as well. Cities are simply named - Beryl, Oar, Charm - and only described in the simplest terms. There are no essays on the histories, culture, food, or architecture of the lands Croaker passes through. The world is there, and it's a dark, gritty one, without being oppressively so. Cook does not dwell on the details of the evils of war, as Terry Goodkind and George R. R. Martin have a tendency to do. For certain, this is no Robert Jordan or Goodkind or Martin. The writing is taut, without a word wasted, with the focus all on the plot, the characters, their actions, and the action.

Magic, too, is a force in the world - and a very powerful one - but it's a vague one, not truly understood by Croaker, since he's not a magic user himself. I could tell you all about the inner workings of the magic of The Wheel of Time, and of The Sword of Truth, but all I know about magic in the Black Company is what Croaker knows. I know what it can do, but I'm not sure where the limits are, or how things work. And that's fine. It's sort of beside the point.

The characters are not typical of fantasy, either. Croaker, as previously mentioned, is a decent guy, but he's also a mercenary. He's not a prophesied hero or a young rebel. By the end of the Chronicles of the Black Company, which collects the first three books of the series into one large tome that forms a complete story arc, he's actually rather old. There's not a traditional, sweeping fantasy romance present, either. The world is not a place without love, but there's not exactly a grand romance between two beautiful young heroes pulling the reader through the pages.

Chronicles of the Black Company is really fantasy boiled down to its essential elements, with many of its norms twisted around. All that the books aren't leaves far more room for what they are. It's a story that moves quickly, with a focus on action and dialog and plot. The first person aspect makes it immediate, compelling, and at times urgent. It's witty, sarcastic, and direct. It takes the sweeping, chess-board feel of modern fantasy and pulls it back to an intimate, direct, personal level.

I liked it from the first page, but I don't think I really grew to love it until the third book of Chronicles of the Black Company. By that point I had really come to love virtually all of the characters, particularly ones I had not been so sure about at first, and I honestly had no idea what would happen to them. I didn't know who would die - but I knew that some most certainly would - and I didn't know who would win, and I didn't even know how the relationships between some characters would pan out. But I wanted to know all of it, right away, and when I finally put down the book, way, way late at night, after hours and hours of continuous reading, I was more than satisfied with how things ended. I wanted more, though, too, and thankfully, Glen Cook wrote more than three books about the Black Company.

Demon's Souls was perhaps the most out-of-nowhere one-of-the-greatest-games-ever of all time. If that makes sense. Even in retrospect, looking at From Software's previous titles, the absolute brilliance of Demon's Souls doesn't quite compute. They had a few games you may have heard of, but none of them were really that memorable or awesome. The King's Field games were apparently the spiritual predecessors to Demon's Souls, but you're a rare person if you've played them, and from what I gather, there really isn't an easily traceable line from the quality of those games to the perfection of Demon's Souls. But regardless of how difficult it was to see coming, Demon's Souls is one of the best video games ever made, surely the best of its generation, and probably the best of a span greater than one generation, too. It's in my top five ever, and I'm certainly not the only one who would put it there. It's an amazing game that pushes boundaries that people didn't even know existed, and moves in directions no one else thought were there.

All of that is a grand way to say that Demon's Souls (henceforth DeSo) made Dark Souls (DaSo) one of my most anticipated games ever. Its release was my version of a religion holiday, complete with the clouds parting as a single ray of sunshine illuminates the game while a fanfare of trumpets swells and all of that. It was a pretty big deal for me - and many others. And all of that is a grand way to say that evaluating DaSo can be pretty difficult. It inevitably involves comparing it to its predecessor, DeSo, even as I attempt to evaluate it on its own merits. There's a lot that I can (and will) say about DaSo, but I guess the root of it is pretty simple:

I love Dark Souls.
I hate Dark Souls.
I love Dark Souls.
I hate Dark Souls.
I love Dark Souls.
I hate Dark Souls.

It's like an abusive spouse that I keep coming back to. It's so beautiful and so amazing and treats me like no other games do and it's so oh wholly shit I fucking want to murder it I want to take it out of the PlayStation and just break the disc over my knee and I'm done playing it I'm never going to play it but I'll give it one more try because it's so awesome and so incredible and I guess I don't hate it that much after all and...

The love and the hate both come from identical and disparate sources. It's easier to start with the things that cause both love and hate, because they are the trademarks of the series.

First of all, DaSo, like DeSo, is a very, very, very fucking hard game. The kind that you will not find anywhere else. Truly. It's somewhat old school in that it demands perfection from you, and in that it can suddenly go from being absolutely goddamn fuck-this-game impossible to being trivially easy once you get the patterns down and finally figure out how to cope with this or that enemy. And it can and will go right back to being absolutely goddamn ridiculously hard once you stop taking something that has become easy seriously. The game will punish you if you're not careful, thoughtful, and cautious. It all but mandates patience, study, and calculated response.

One of the major aspects of DeSo that made the difficulty tolerable was that it was fair. Crushingly fair, even. If you rolled backwards to avoid an enemy and fell off an edge, it was because you stopped paying attention to the existence of that edge. If you got pinched by two enemies and attacked from behind, it's probably because you ran ahead too fast, screwed up your positioning, or didn't take the enemy seriously enough. The game was basically without bugs, and weapons and enemies reacted as you would expect them to. In the close quarters of a claustrophobic hall, an enormous sword that you have to swing from side to side isn't worth much, but a stabbing spear is. Everything made sense, and everything was fair. If you died, it was your fault.

In DaSo, that's true... for the most part. It becomes less true the longer the game goes on.

First of all, the game has an easily reproducible bug that bites me in the ass on a regular basis and frequently causes my death. Walk around an enemy in a circle with your shield up, by holding L1. Wait for the enemy to strike and miss, and then lower your shield by releasing L1 and swing your weapon by hitting R1. If you hit R1 at just about the time you release L1, nothing will happen. That, in and of itself, is an enormous frustration, but it won't get you killed - it'll just prevent you from getting in a strike that you should have. What will get you killed, however, is pressing L1 to bring your shield back up when an enemy is about to attack you. Instead of bringing your shield back up to save your life from an incoming blow, pressing L1 will trigger the attack that R1 never triggered. This is maddening.

It took me perhaps sixty hours to realize it, too, but this bug extends to other events, as well, such as using healing items. For the first umpteen hours that I played, I would curse the game for not drinking a potion when I told it to drink a goddamn potion, leading to plenty deaths. Eventually, I realized that the same thing was happening - I was trying to drink a potion just after dropping my shield, and thus it ended up never happening. This is not consistent behavior - you can queue up abilities while getting hit, and you can use them while your shield is up (which will drop your shield). But if you trigger the action just as your shield is dropping, you'll end up doing nothing.

I've run into a few other weird bugs that killed me, too, but they've been rare enough that they don't cause me the frustration that the one above does. That said, it is annoying when you're deep in a difficult area, loaded with souls, and you just finished killing an enormous demon on a tiny ledge far above a pit of lava, and, as you stand there, solidly on ground, he falls over at your feet, disappears, and then you are suddenly well off the ledge and falling to your death.

More annoying than one-time deaths to bugs like that, though, are some of the approaches that the game takes to generating difficulty. They remind me far more of the modern day Ninja Gaiden games, which I always felt were guilty of using cheap tactics to ratchet up difficulty. Making every enemy take twenty hits to die while at the same time making them capable of killing you in one hit makes the game harder, but it is the cheapest, laziest, easiest way to make it more difficult, and it does not make it more fun. Toward the end of the game, DaSo becomes guilty of this, too.

Witness the four-legged skeletons deep in the Tomb of the Giants. One of their attacks, should they randomly choose to use it, will deplete even the most well-equipped warrior of all their stamina, which means that there's no way to block their attacks. That, in turn, means that if you're not supremely well equipped, or even if you are and you don't have all your stamina when they start attacking, you will unavoidably get savaged, and most likely for enough damage to kill you, or come very close.

Witness perhaps the single worst part of a game, where you run up a narrow ramp to a narrow ledge with two archers shooting arrows at you the whole time. If you even so much as block one of the arrows, the knock back will knock you off of the ledge and to your instant death.

Witness the wolverine rat things in the forest, with a roll attack that will do significant damage to you, and that is, mysteriously, unblockable. Everything else in the game that I have met thus far is blockable. This appears to be a normal physical attack. Why can't I block it?

It's actually very similar to the attacks of the skeleton wheels, which roll into you, and are blockable. What's wonderful about those guys, though, is that their attacks, like those of the four-legged skeletons, will hit you again and again and again, chipping away your stamina until it's gone, unless (again) you're extremely well equipped and have plenty of stamina to spare. If they make it through your shield, they will hit you again and again until you die. That's annoying enough, but it's even more annoying when the game throws you into a valley full of them, which means that one hit - often coming from behind you, where your shield will do you no good - will stagger you, dropping your shield, leading to instant death. It's also annoying when the game throws you into a series of tight corridors filled with them, preventing you from rolling to dodge them.

It's also annoying when enemies - even bosses like Giant Ornstein, have unblockable (practically) instant-kill moves. And it's annoying when victory over bosses such as Great Wolf Sif seem to be dependent almost entirely on the luck that you have with the AI. I fought him many times. When I lost to him, he typically chose to jump around constantly and charge me again and again. The time that I beat him (and to a lesser extent, the times that I did well), he chose to stand around while I stood beneath him, raking at his stomach with my battle axe.

Most of the time DaSo is just as fair as DeSo, but too often, it feels like your death or triumph is left up to luck. It only takes one unfair encounter in an hour to ruin that hour's worth of play, and those unfair encounters seem to mount as the game rolls on. In DaSo, the creators quite obviously tried to make the game more difficult than DeSo. They succeeded, but unfortunately, I feel like they had to resort to cheap tactics like nigh-unavoidable instant-kill hits to do so. In this regard, I think that DaSo takes a bit step back relative to DeSo.


The other core component of DeSo, and DaSo, is the game's startlingly creative, asymmetrical approach to multiplayer. In most games, multiplayer is a separate mode that is entirely symmetrical. There's League of Legends, in which the map is quite really a map that can be cut down the middle to form a mirror image. There's all the various FPS games, in which deathmatch means that each team gets a nearly identical half of a map and identical weapons, and for each the goal is to kill the other. Granted, the genre has taken a big step forward in that regard in the last several years, but even with differing objectives, things still remain highly symmetrical.

In the Souls games, however, multiplayer is an integral, always-on part of the game, even though it's ostensibly a single player game. The tremendous difficulty of DaSo, like DeSo, is blunted by a number of non-traditional multiplayer features. You can view in-game hints from other players, voted on by other players. You can see short replays of the last ten seconds of an unfortunate player's life, potentially warning you of ambushes ahead. If you're stuck on a boss fight, you can summon other players to help you out. They have to be in their "dead" or "hollow" state, and you have to be in your human form, and there is no direct text or voice communication allowed between you, but they can and will help you beat bosses. If they do, they get souls, they get humanity, and, if they're in the right covenant (think guild), they get a reward, too. There are more atmospheric multiplayer touches, as well - like seeing ghostly images of players currently alive and in your area wandering by you, or seeing the statues of other players killed by being turned into stone via a curse.

But that's all fine. That's well. That's good. That's awesome. Granted, summoning players on a boss can make the fight utterly anticlimactic, but that's something you learn and react to accordingly. I usually don't call for help, unless I'm sick of the fight and want it to be done. You have no real complaints from me there.

Where I do have complaints is in the PVP aspects of the game, and particularly, with relation to the aforementioned covenants. All of it sounds so very, very, very cool on paper. I was shitting fish as I read about the many aspects and goals of various covenants. I was excited and awed. I was amazed that From Software had taken things in a direction no one else had even considered previously. When I actually got into the multiplayer in question, though, I found it to be one huge, colossal grief fest.

For example, let's take the Darkmoon Covenant. The point of the covenant is to seek out the guilty - those that have broken their covenant or have invaded other players and been indicted by them. Since you are a spirit of vengeance, the player gets no warning when they are invaded, and if you kill enough players for the Darkmoon, you get rewards. You also receive a ring, which will allow the covenant to summon you to invade someone in their home turf.

Sounds awesome, right? It does to me, anyway. I am the embodiment of vengeance! I will be rewarded for destroying the guilty!

Here's how it actually works out.

First of all, the home territory of this guild is Anor Londo, which happens to be home to a very hard boss fight. How do you take down a very hard boss? You get help from other players. How do you get help from other players? You turn human. What happens when you turn human? You open yourself to invasion from other players.

Do you see the problem here?

I was frustrated with the Anor Londo boss fight to the point of quitting the game. I decided to go human and make the two minute run from the safety of the bonfire to the boss fight, where I would summon help and hopefully win the fight. Virtually every time I attempted to do so, I was invaded by other players and killed, which means that I go from being slaughtered for hours on end by bosses to being slaughtered instantly by other players. In addition, turning human to get help takes humanity, which is rather precious and somewhat rare. The apparent solution to my frustration with the difficulty of the game was a more frustrating, more difficult problem. Which is to say, there is no solution.

To make matters even more hilarious, when I finally did open up the Darkmoon covenant for myself, I, too, put on the ring to invade other players because I, too, wanted those rewards. I became part of the problem that I hated so much. Well, in theory, anyway.

The way it went for me was something like this: I put on the ring, I wait awhile, I get summoned. I appear in Anor Londo, and as my character does his stand up animation that segues into my control of him, I notice that I am surrounded on all sides by three hostile players. They kill me inside of one second - literally - and I am returned to my world, dead. I probably spent twenty seconds loading into their world and loading out of it, and I spent two seconds playing watching my character be killed.

I keep the ring on, hoping that I will be summoned to another world, and I am, except it's the exact same fucking bullshit. Then I get summoned again, and it's back to the first guy's world again, where I die. Again. And after five or six of these instances, I take the fucking ring off and never use it again because it's fucking bullshit. People just stand around and farm summoned invaders, which goes so far beyond the reverse of the intent of the covenant that it's hard to describe it.

No matter which side of the PVP equation I am on - invader, invaded - I feel like I'm being griefed. It's a frustrating, unfair mess regardless of your position. There are more covenants, and they all have more or less the same flaws. They even accent a few other ones.

Earlier on in the game, I was part of the Forest Hunters covenant, which works in a fashion similar to the Darkmoon. Put on a ring, and when unfriendly players come into the covenant's home territory, you can get summoned to fight. I eventually racked up enough kills to get my rewards, but what I found there - in addition to the issues mentioned above - is that the people camping the forest for PVP kills were also likely to practice a very particular sort of power leveling. You only get summoned into the worlds of people within 10% of your level, but you can spend souls on gear, upgrades, and spells, in addition to leveling up. I'd often be pitted against people with similar stats to mine, but who were twice as far through the game, with armor and spells many times better than what I had, making them effectively twice my level or more.

So the amount of "fair" fights I get into (since the game is asymmetrical, and invaders have the advantage of having monsters on their team, and hosts have the advantage of using healing potions and calling other players for help, there's no such thing as truly balanced and fair, but you know what I mean) works out to roughly ten percent of the fights that I have. Even in those, though, things aren't really fair.

DeSo had some notoriously bad net code. I backstabbed people without doing any damage to them. I got hit by attacks that didn't happen. I rubber-banded around the stage, going ten steps forward, appearing backward, going ten steps forward, appearing backward. DaSo is improved, for certain, but it remains largely the same. I have been backstabbed by people I am facing. I have been hit as if my shield was down while my shield was up. Once I was backstabbed by someone in front of me that I was hitting, while I was hitting them, and it did no damage. The relative reliability of the game's mechanics go out the window when you get online. It makes me think I shouldn't even bother trying to get better at PVPing, seeing as how it's unreliable at best. Better to just luck out, get the ten kills I need to get another rank in my covenant, and then move on.

There was a certain purity to PVP in DeSo, too, that is sorely lacking in DaSo. I DeSo, being human was a relatively rare and precious thing - while dead, you had between 50% and 75% of your maximum life, along with all the other benefits like summoning other players. Being invaded really ramped up your tension, because you did not want to die while human. Even more importantly, though, invading was a big fucking deal. Invading and losing would mean losing a full level, which at best meant a long stretch of farming to get it back, and at worst meant that you lost the point of dexterity necessary to use that cool new sword. The rewards were nice - you stole their human form and their souls - but it was much about PVP as anything. You didn't do it if you weren't into the PVP. And if you invaded, you made sure you got the kill, no matter how long you had to take. You'd lure the player back into a choke point surrounded with enemies. You'd wait in that one great ambush spot. Too much was at risk to just charge in and take your chances.

In DaSo, by contrast, if you die while invaded, you lose humanity, which is annoying, as it is somewhat precious, but it can be farmed off of a variety of creatures, bought from a number of vendors, and found all over. Far, far more importantly, however, in DaSo, if you invade and you lose, you lose... nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Can you see a problem here?

For the host, there is plenty to lose. There is relatively little to gain. For the invader, there is everything to gain, and there is nothing to lose. Why not go balls out? Why not invade non-stop? There's at least one covenant that requires ten PVP kills (you can farm an enemy for the kill tokens, but it will take ages). You have all the reason to invade, and no reason not to. The game is, unwittingly or otherwise, designed to be a grief fest. And it is. It is as badly exploited and unfun a PVP system as I have ever played in any game, anywhere, ever. I have missed lots and lots of content because I have no interest in being human because it means being invaded nonstop.

If you're human in an effort to get help on a boss, expect to be invaded constantly. If you're invading to get kills for a covenant, expect to be farmed by ridiculously out-of-your-league players. If you have a balanced, fair, interesting, tense PVP fight that doesn't end with your obliteration in two seconds, treasure the experience; it will not happen again soon.


There are other bizarre steps back, too, simple but inexplicable. In DeSo you could see that it would take 34,587 souls to level up. In DaSo, you cannot, meaning you have to guess how many souls you need to collect before leveling. How does that make any sense whatsoever? Every single person I know that has played the game has remarked on the very first occasion of being able to level up. Every goddamn one.

There are also some strategy guide or pure-dumb-luck only events, which may not be that much of a step backward from DeSo, truth be told. The convoluted actions you are required to perform - and not perform - at very specific points in very specific ways make me wonder if any human could have ever done them properly without the help of insider knowledge or a walkthrough. This is hardly unique to the Souls games (Final Fantasy, I am looking at you), but it still sucks.

And then, for the rest of the game, there are steps back for every step forward. Every positive brings with it a negative.

For example, the scope of the game is absolutely, mind-blowingly unrivaled by anything else I have ever seen, heard of, or played. Absolutely. Unrivaled. Immense. Epic. Incredible. The size and scope of the environments in the game is just unbelievable. Unbelievable. I cannot reiterate those words enough. There are plenty places in the game - Ash Lake, Anor Londo, Kiln of the First Flame - that make you just stop and stare. The graphics are incredible, the framing is incredible, the concept is incredible, the atmosphere is incredible, the scope is incredible.

But the framerate! Oh, the framerate! It is fucking amazing to look down from my ledge on a huge, arching bridge that is hundreds of feet above a shadowed, swampy pass between two walls. A pass that is hundreds of yards wide, between two walls that must be half a mile tall. It is amazing because of the scope, but it is more amazing because I can see the spiderweb shambling of rotted wooden planks and ladders that are built against one wall, leading all the way down it, into the swamp, and then up the wall on the other side. It's fucking amazing. Amazing. But the three frames per second that my Playstation 3 is getting is not amazing. It is not amazing at all.

And then there's the size of the game. I'm not sure how long DeSo took to make, but I am sure they spent as much time hammering out the engine as they did hammering out the content. DaSo, however, is basically 90% the same engine, which means that the development crew could devote the two years of development to making content, content, content. And they did. DeSo was a reasonably sized game, with probably fifteen to thirty hours worth of content on your first play through, more if you're a completionist. I am at the end of DaSo - but doing completionist-type things before I finish it - and it has taken me some ninety hours to get there. Ninety. That is immense. The world is probably five times the size of that in DeSo.

There's ten times as much armor, as many rings, as many weapons, as many spells. There's a whole new spell type - pyromancy. There are far, far, far more zones, with far more unique flavors. There are covenants. There are optional areas. There are bosses all over the place. There are secrets. There are vendors. The game is just goddamn massive.

But it almost feels too big to me. DeSo left me begging for more when it ended. I was praying for downloadable content. I am not quite done with DaSo, but I am pretty much burnt out on it. I think when I finally finish the game, I will feel relieved. I don't know that there's anything I would cut from the game, but I feel like there's almost an exhausting amount to do.

And there's the whole one huge, seamless world aspect of the game, too. DeSo had you entering five separate, distinct levels from the Nexus, your home base, your safe haven. That was where you went to level, to store items, to buy things. In DaSo, the world is one huge, enormous, seamless entity. There are absolutely no load times while traveling, which is pretty fucking impressive, and there is between little and no direction on where to go. Bonfires, scattered throughout the world, make up your mini havens. Given the proper upgrades, when you're at them, you can repair, store items, level up, and more. They're where you'll respawn when you die. They're where you restock on healing items.

Part of me misses the Nexus, the ebb and flow between killing monsters, acquiring gear, and gaining souls, and then going back to your safe house to spend those souls, level up, store items, and talk to NPCs. There is something approaching the Nexus in DaSo - another hub for NPCs - but it will not be your lone base camp. It has been broken up and scattered throughout the world. Ultimately, I do think I prefer DaSo's bonfires, but they are different, for sure.

One thing that they do allow for is an overhaul of the healing items, which is a great step forward for DaSo. In DeSo, you farmed certain mobs for healing herbs. Any time farming is an integral part of being able to progress (and healing items are necessary, which means farming was), you have a problem. In DaSo, you refill your healing flasks whenever you visit a bonfire, and if you want to spend the humanity, you can up the number of flasks you'll get each time you visit that bonfire. It's a nice system, and one that I have no complaints with.


There is plenty to love about the game, really. The level design is amazing. The graphics are incredible. The animations are incredibly lifelike. Attention to detail and little touches that make the game abound. The music - while limited - is perfect. The sound effects are excellent. The atmosphere is great. The voice acting is wonderful. What little dialog there is is perfectly crafted. The amount of technical brilliance on display in the game is nothing short of astounding, really. It feels like From Software is on a completely different level than every other game out there. Almost like they're cheating, or something. They flawlessly pull off things that other games don't even begin to attempt. The scope of their vision is daunting. DaSo is just so flat out amazing in so goddamn many regards that it boggles the mind.

In the end, there is nothing out there even remotely like Dark Souls - except for Demon's Souls. That makes it both the obvious and the only point of comparison, and it also makes it extremely hard to judge Dark Souls unto itself. I love it. I hate it. I love it. It's amazing how easily I can switch from just hating the game and wanting to snap it over my knee to wanting to prostrate myself before its brilliance - simply by writing about different parts of the game. Playing it is like an exercise in experiencing the ups and downs of a bipolar relationship. It's so incredible, but it's so frustrating. The only thing I can really say is that it absolutely requires playing. Games like this stand alone.

In my experience, the quality of most bands' releases tend to take one of four trajectories:

1) They flat line out, and always suck
2) They flat line out, and are always good
3) They start inspired, releasing a few great albums, and then lose their inspiration and devolve into crap
4) They start out rough and not so great, figure out their craft, and then release excellent material

If you had asked me back in college when I first heard about Death Cab For Cutie (after the release of The Photo Album, to be precise), I would have told you that they were number 1. Three albums, and nothing really worth listening to? Not a band worth investigating. Their material wasn't bad, per se, but it wasn't worth the effort required to obtain a CD or download mp3s. If you had asked me about four years back, when I discovered (or rediscovered) them, I would have told you that they were number 4. Yeah, those first three albums weren't great, but holy shit, Transatlanticism is fucking fantastic, and Plans is one for the ages. For the ages. And were you to ask me now, after the release of Narrow Stairs, and very recently, of Codes and Keys, I'd tell you that they're moving into the lesser seen territory of number 5, which is either the band that sucks, peaks, and then sucks again, or perhaps the band that is just spotty as all hell.

The first four songs on Codes and Keys are all decidedly mediocre. None of them offend my musical sensibilities, but none of them make me want to listen to them again. The first sign of any creative life from the band comes in You Are a Tourist, the album's one stand out, crank-the-volume song. The driving, low bass and simple but forceful drum beat are the heart of the song, while the catchy guitar riff and shimmering arpeggios that are played over top of it are the ornamentation that take it from good to awesome. Everything in the piece is exactly where it should be, every guitar part is perfect. I compulsively reach for the volume knob when You Are a Tourist comes on. It is a song that breeds hope and confidence.

And then Unobstructed Views follows it, and it is like the slow deflating of a balloon. It's not a bad song. It's north of mediocre, even. It's different for Death Cab, like much of this album. There's less guitar, more keyboards and synth, less catchy guitar riffing, more ambient noise on this album. But this is no Kid A or The Age of Adz. It's not a reinvention, and it's not particularly good, either. It doesn't fall totally flat, but neither does it truly succeed, as those two albums did. The obvious and inevitable comparison is that, eight years later, Death Cab For Cutie has finally start taking heavy influence from its most famous side project, The Postal Service.

This isn't exactly the bubbling electronica-pop of The Postal Service, but it's significantly closer than anything else Death Cab has put out previously. It's probably a middle ground between Give Up and Plans, really. Unobstructed Views is completely without guitar, and in fact completely electronic save the piano. Monday Morning has guitars, but keeps them low in the mix. It's one of the better songs on the album, and one of only three that really stand out to me. Underneath the Sycamore is the other of those songs, and is my favorite behind You Are a Tourist, and sounds the most like the Death Cab For Cutie of Transatlanticism and Plans of anything on Codes and Keys.

The rest of the album's second half isn't bad, I suppose. St. Peter's Cathedral could have come from The Postal Service's next album, Portable Television's piano gets tiresome, and Stay Young, Go Dancing is pretty enjoyable. The album is something of an analogy for Death Cab's career thus far. It's spotty. It's unpredictable - and not in the sense that they're doing surprising, amazing things, but rather that they're sometimes doing that and sometimes making mediocre, uninspired music. Parts of Codes and Keys are great, but most of it's not. Parts of Death Cab's discography are great, but most of it's not.

I would have never expected Plans after listening to The Photo album. For something that great to follow something that middle of the road is quite a surprise. I didn't expect an album as middling as Narrow Stairs after the brilliance of Plans. After Codes and Keys, I have no idea what to expect. Is Death Cab just in a slump, or have they blown their collective loads on the back-to-back brilliance of Transatlanticism and Plans? Have success and happiness left them without inspiration? Given their unsteady arc thus far, I won't even hazard a guess. I feel like Death Cab For Cutie has gone back to their first three albums, except this time they have way more money and thus way higher production values behind them. I hope that Codes and Keys is a low point rather than another point on a gradual slope.

When I first listened to Okkervil River, I didn't think all that much of them. I listened to The Stage Names several times, and while it certainly wasn't bad, and a few songs seemed pretty okay, it didn't really click for me. I couldn't get into it. I forgot about them, and then months later, I picked up the album again, and for whatever reason, something had changed. The Stage Names was great this time around. I saw them live, I bought their entire discography, and I loved it all. Some albums I had to warm to a little bit, but it all seemed like my kind of music even on first blush. The Stand Ins came out and it was fantastic. Okkervil River was my band. They were one of my favorite active rock acts. I loved them.

Just recently, Okkervil River put out their sixth proper widely released album, I Am Very Far, and I feel like I am back to the start of paragraph one. I listen to I Am Very Far and think to myself, "this isn't bad - some of it is even pretty good, I guess." But none of it really clicks. None of it really hits me like their other material does. The Valley, the album's opener, is pretty rocking, I imagine, with its aggressive, stomping rhythm and percussion, and its neat and highly selective use of instruments outside of the traditional rock realm. The Rise, the album's closer, seems to touch some strong emotional material while also holding to an odd time signature, the intentionally-slightly-off vocals subtly drawing attention to that fact. Everything in between those two, well, suffice to say that I can't really remember what any of them sound like.

Somehow I feel like I'm making a conscious effort to like I Am Very Far. I have listened to it again and again and again, hoping it will grow on me. I'm not even sure what, precisely, is different about this album, about Okkervil River now. Will Sheff still pens literary and emotional and insightful lyrics. The band still explores the seam between folk and indie rock. The instrumentation is still expansive, the style of the songs still varied. I think that, if anything, the band sounds thicker on this album. I've read that they double tracked most of the instruments. Perhaps that has something to do with it? Or maybe it's the fact that this is their first non-concept album in eight years? Has that affected their sound? Maye the recording process was different, or the production and mixing?

Okkervil River definitely sounds different - somehow - on I Am Very Far, and I am also definitely not as fond of it at this point as I am of any of their previous works. Try as I might, I just can't get into it. Some kind of connection is not being made. Maybe I need a few more listens, or maybe seeing them live in a week will spark some kind of crucial light. In the meantime, I guess I'm forced to admit that while it's okay, I just don't like the album that much.

Despite being more or less my favorite band ever, it has been quite some time since I saw Explosions in the Sky headline a show. It's not for lack of want or trying, either; the last time they headlined anywhere near my location was in October of '04. I guess they come around like they put out albums - not all that frequently. Six and a half years is a lot of time for a band that hasn't quite been around twelve, and a lot can change over that sort of time. A lot has for EitS, I think, though there are enough variables at work that it's kind of hard to pin down what's responsible for what.

First, let me speak of the venues, because I think they're a crucial component. I'm going to discount the time that I saw them open for Smashing Pumpkins, because it was obviously an odd show where virtually no one cared about them. When I saw them the first time, they played the Wexner Center for the Arts, a very nice art hall on the Ohio State University campus. I think they had some very, very limited kind of bar there, perhaps just wine, and I believe that all drinks were to be kept outside of the performance hall. It had two levels and held about five hundred people. Everyone that was there was, without a doubt, there to see EitS. They were dead silent during the songs, only applauding at the end, and the mix was perfect. When they ended the song on a climax-to-silence finish of The Only Moment We Were Alone, you could have heard a hipster drop his thick-framed black glasses.

This time around, they played the Outland Live, a bar in an odd area just outside of downtown Columbus. It was one of the more perplexing venues I've ever been to, perhaps the first I've ever been to that seemed to specialize in serving up the finest in industrial goth scenery. With pool tables. Do goths do billiards? I'm not really that familiar with the whole goth culture, but I have never seen anything that indicates to me that goths are into billiards. Overwrought iron wall fixtures and concrete sculptures, sure. A giant fake marijuana plant, well, I guess. Spray painted mannequin torsos probably fit. Beer? Okay. Coffins? Definitely. Altar / shrine bearing an over-sized picture of someone who I can only imagine recently passed away? Perfectly appropriate. Billiards, though? Hmm...

In any case, the venue was actually very nice, as bars go. High ceilings, outdoor areas, air flow, spacious, etc. The stage was in a very large industrial-style garage. Only one level, and I would be shocked if it even held twice as many people as the Wexner. Why not play somewhere bigger? Somewhere that wouldn't sell out in a day? There was also a bar and a half inside the stage area, on top of the bar in the adjoining area. I mention this because I think it might be very relevant.

Six and a half years is a lot of time. I have no doubt that EitS's music has reached new audiences in that time. Allow me to put on my best snob voice: I do not think that is necessarily a good thing, at least from the perspective of a concert goer such as myself. I wish them all the success in the world, and I hope their music reaches and touches millions, but goddammit, I wish the people seeing them live cared as much about their music as I do.

Different types of music require different types of audience behavior. You do not talk at a classical concert. You also don't really talk at a jazz show. A circle pit is entirely appropriate at a punk or ska show, and moshing is thoroughly acceptable at a hardcore metal show. You don't mosh at a jam band show, but you can dance like a fucking hippie on LSD, because there's a good chance that you are. But you don't do that at a post-rock show, unless you want to seem kind of dumb. In my opinion, the other thing you don't do at a post-rock show is talk. Post-rock is akin to classical. It has huge dynamics. Parts are very quiet. Parts are very loud. It switches between the two rapidly. Also, the songs are long and multi-segmented, and quiet often follows loud, so you also do not applaud before the song is over at a post-rock show because you might drown out parts of the song.

As you can probably guess, all of the above occurred at the Explosions show at the Outland Live. They started off with Memorial, and the beginning was very quiet. Very quiet. People did not stop talking. They barely quieted down. It was actually difficult to hear the music over the crowd. People screamed and cheered after climaxes, crushing the quiet parts of the songs that followed. People talked during slow parts throughout the show, providing a marked distraction. Some fucking idiot screamed "that's fucking brutal!" or some other stupid shit during quiet parts following loud parts. The entire audience could hear him. Easily. There were two women in front of me who talked constantly, whether the music was loud or quiet. They only looked at the stage on occasion, and only paused their chatter to whip out the cell phone and post on Facebook. After about thirty minutes, one of them took a picture of the stage, and then they left.

I know full well that I sound like a bitter, jaded elitist, most likely because I am, but what is the fucking point? If you want to talk, why pay $25 a ticket, shout over the music, fuck up the experience for others, post on Facebook, take a picture as evidence you were there since you likely don't know or remember a single song that was played, and then leave a third of the way into the show? It was a sold out show, and two actual fans probably would have loved to have had those tickets. Is this the new concert experience? God, I (almost) hate to be some kind of fucking Luddite purist about this shit, but put the fucking phone away. Stop taking ten shitty pictures a minute with the flash on, stop posting to fucking Facebook, and stop texting your friends telling them about how you're at a fucking show. Are you really even at the fucking show? Really? Why not put the fucking distractions away and actually experience the show?


So, shitty audience aside, the show itself was great. Explosions played about as awesome a set as I could hope for. There were two songs from each of the old albums, and three from the new, yet-to-be-released one. Roughly in order, the set list was Memorial, Yasmin the Light, The Only Moment We Were Alone, The Birth and Death of the Day, Catastrophe and the Cure, and Greet Death, with three new songs scattered in the middle. With the exception of the opener and the closer, Explosions had a fifth man on stage playing bass, leaving all three string-players in the band proper to play the guitar. They really throw themselves into their songs, which makes a pretty enormous difference, even if it's only visual. Their music is powerful on the stereo, but hearing it and seeing it played live brings a certain intensity that you just can't get at home.

The new songs were all pretty excellent, I thought, and were all markedly different while still remaining true to what makes Explosions Explosions. One had sampled vocals, another had a sample drum loop, and the third had a long segment - perhaps half of the song - that, well, grooved. As in, if an LSD-addled hippie were to start dancing to it, it would not seem horribly out of place or forced. I'm pretty excited to hear the new album, as it has been a number of years since the last, and I'm interested in getting my hands on this new material, hearing it a few times, digesting it. I like what I've heard thus far.

The more shows of all sorts I go to, the more I seem to realize that ones in which all aspects - audience, mix, set list, performance - turn out wonderfully are rare indeed. It's obvious in retrospect, but for some reason, I don't know that I've always realized that. As much as I wish I could have traded the audience for another one more respectful of the music, the other three aspects, all of the ones directly under Explosion's control, were pretty fucking awesome. They put on an excellent live performance, and they're a required attendance if they come within a hundred miles.