One detail I do like about the Seath fight is that Seath is blind so if you make your footsteps silent (either with the ring or the spell) he has more trouble tracking you. In fact because of his blindness its pretty easy to trick him into breaking his own crystal (which leaves him stunned for longer than when you break it iirc) which is actually the best strategy for cutting off his tail.
I like to think that Seath is responsible for Braille existing in the Souls universe (as we see in DS3 with Braille miracle tomes), seeing as he’s both the biggest book lover/hoarder in the setting. Then again I think some of the books actually have legible text in them if you blow up the textures so maybe he just had his sneeple read to him.
Seath definitely raises a frontal tentacle into the air in the opening cutscene (2:37 in the video I checked with), but it looks like he already has some minor crystal growth going on in it, which would not seem to make sense, unless he started crystalising the actual minute he got his hands on the primordial crystal. As for his bulbous growth, the crystal seems to spread out from it to a certain extent, so it might be the site of initial infection/introduction - I agree it’s abnormal.
I was curious of this too, so I went and rewatched it. It’s hard to tell, but he does seem to have his little octopus tentacle side tail visible at 6:08 in this vid.
Seath actually has a weakspot. It’s just his front basically. He takes extra damage if you hit him there and if you use fire you can deal the craziest amounts of damage to him. Downside is that spot right in front of him is the riskiest of spots. But it’s kinda worth it to just wail on him from there. If you have high enough curse resist you can just tank through it. I used a chaos bonewheel shield once and just ate through his health from the front.
Also: To chop off his tail you need to attack it further in the back than would seem reasonable.
All in all it’s definitely not a good boss fight. I was looking forward to im in my first run and was very disappointed. Seemed like it could have been a great boss fight judging by the intro cinematic.
Seath is one of my favorite characters of the series, though. I kinda like the idea of a scholarly dragon who drove himself to madness with his desire to achieve some form of immortality. And what he wrote down in all those books actually also has an effect on Logan. There’s also a non zero chance that Seath’s soul has, in fact, become immortal due to whatever it is that he did. It’s just his body that’s dead now. But that’s speculation based on info from another game and then only if you choose to interpret it in a specific way.
Most bosses have weak points, but it’s just safer and easier to wack the most far flung spot on their hitbox, that’s more what I meant. There’s no real reason to try to hit, say, the Gaping Dragon’s head when his creepy legs will do just fine and not involve a 3 mile run
Most playthroughs I’ve seen never really get into the backstory of the game, so I’ve never really noticed how good its intro is and how well it shows the decline of the major bosses. Seath works especially well; the dragon that you first see standing on a hill of other dead dragons winds up driving himself mad due to his inability to gain the immortality the other dragons had. The personal details of the characters are really well done, but are easy to miss when the player is just running from place to place.
Bloodborne can suffer from this as well IMO I took down Amygdala during my first playthrough by taking the longer but safer route, I only learnt about it’s weak spots after the fact… It feels like a strategy you can get locked into without noticing it after fighting so many big bosses with similar strategies.
I really like the phrasing about how the undead curse messes with Nito’s ability to “keep things dead”.
Because it’s a little weird that death != end of the flame. Mostly we tend to think of death as the extinguishing of fire and light, and so it seems like not linking the flame would be just what Nito wants and this thing about the fire should be like Nito vs. Gwyn battle for supremacy. But that’s not it… the end of the fire means there’s no more death, but no more life, which is sort of what being undead is. The whole system has to go and Gwyn and Nito are just parts of it.
Maybe in the same way that Seath and Anor Londo have gone on too long, Nito has gone on too long. There’s too many dead, his realm is over-stuffed. He’s like the fat corpse baron who has profited too much from the life->death economy.
Yeah, it’s very important to recognize that before flame, the game very explicitly talks only of eternal, unchanging dragons and archtrees, and that death itself was created out of flame. And of course, death was crucial to Gwyn’s rebellion, given that it was needed to destroy the dragons for real
As we explore more of the Lord Souls, we’ll see that each one represents something deep and primal, a building block for the entire Age of Fire. Nito’s soul represents Death and Decay, a final defeat to ensure the old order can never challenge the new, while Gwyn’s represents illumination (both metaphorical and literal, physical light), and all the good and bad that that represents. We see by far the most of Gwyn’s Soul throughout the game, so there’s still a lot to get to, and we’ve seen precious little of the other two, but the hints have been there, and future areas will let us dive much deeper
The game very cleverly plays with expectations and connotations that things like “flame” have built up in our culture, and it’s very interesting to think about
I think it’s also worth noting that Pinwheel and the Necromancers are pretty relevant to demonstrating the distinction, they covet Nito’s power to bring the dead back to life, but this is portrayed as being very different to the way in which the curse prevents the undead from dying.
I love underwater ruins type areas, so New Londo Ruins is very much my jam, aesthetically. It just looks so cool. The long-armed ghosts, though, not as much.
I know the ghost at the end was doing its attack animation, but it looked like it just tripped and fell over after killing you.
My favorite part of New Londo is that in 1.0 you had to go there to get your curse lifted if you got cursed. There were purging stones you can get outside of New Londo but they were very rare (I think they were nice enough to give you one before). Now the undead merchant lady sells them.
I agree that this is for the better but I kinda, in a masochistic way, appreciate the original design of you going down to the Depths to meet the Basilisks and get cursed only to learn that, unless you have a purging stone, you have to go to New Londo. I think mismatched armor merchant man Domnal is the one to tell you that. So off you go, to what is essentially an endgame area just to get your curse lifted. To make things worse you have to go through the hardest room of the area to make that happen. And if you didn’t read your item descriptions, which back then barely anybody did, you might not know that Transient Curses work as a substitute for getting actually cursed, so as soon as you are uncursed you have to go back through an area where you could have easily missed one of the ghosts hiding inside a wall with no way to defeat them. Welcome to Dark Souls.
I look back at this time with a laughing and a crying eye. It really was an adventure to go cure your curse. But an experience that I don’t want to repeat. And many people would have given up instead. And as I like to say, the only way to lose at Dark Souls is to give up. So it’s easy, beat your head against that wall until it dies and gives you its souls.
I really, really enjoy the way New Londo is designed. There’s no bonfires, only a series of shortcuts you open and falls you can make that enable you to skip through a lot of it, and because of how it’s positioned relative to Firelink and one other area connection you can open up down there, it’s literally impossible for a new player to get stuck.
Which is really, really important because New Londo, like the Catacombs is an area a new player can go into, and potentially persevere through! The Catacombs actually does something similar in that it hides its only bonfire in the actual real meat of the area behind an illusory wall, and then you don’t get a bonfire until a little into Tomb of the Giants after the player has hopefully(!) looked at the first giant skeleton in the pitch black surrounding and gone “noooope”. But even then it’s still entirely possible someone could get down there, say “fuck I can do this” rest at the Tombs bonfire and then honestly for a lot of new players that could potentially just be game over then and there. Getting back out of Tomb can be a nightmare at that stage, and if they keep progressing they’ll only further get stuck, or eventually come to the gold fog and realize their dedication is only rewarded with what basically amounts to a huge “fuck you”.
From a design standpoint the fact you can go down that far in the first place is really dependent on a player being able to recognize Tomb of the Giants as a clear “back the fuck up buddy” moment which I think it does telegraph fairly well, but New Londo circumvents the problem entirely by marking progression through making the journey shorter instead of placing check points. A new player can both open up shortcuts for the eventual return and even grab a Firekeeper Soul meaning an early journey is still quite productive, but never can they inadvertantly wander in “too far”.
Chosen Undead: So I need to be cursed to hit these ghosts?
Game: Yes
CU: Aren’t I already cursed, since I have the dark sign?
Game: Different kind of curse.
CU:
Game: You’re also not exactly ‘chosen’ or ‘undead’ FWIW.
CU: fuck this
Game: I knew you’d go hollow
I like Ingward. He’s a surprisingly complex character, even in what little we see of him, a man forced to make a terrible decision but standing by his convictions even as his sworn allies abandoned him
