[DS] The Most Tragic Boss In ANY FromSoft Game And The Power Of Loss (3h video essay)

"Less is more" isn't exactly a new concept. The human brain loves to latch onto the inklings of a pattern and extrapolate. When the context isn't there, the brain will invent one (or several).
JJ Abrams made a career of taking this to the extreme (never giving any answers, ever), which I used to think was genius, but now I realize is just lazy and annoying. FS at least has answers, or broad strokes of them for smaller stories. They just don't walk the player through it beat-by-beat.
- I've also found that FS are really good at outlining the moral weight of lore elements, like you can pretty much tell right from wrong, even though you don't understand anything about what's been done. Or that's what I got from how they lay things out, at least. Like, "I have no idea what or why that person wants me to do, but something feels fishy about it," kinda'.
  
  This is exactly why i love DS1. 99% of the NPCs hype you up to link the first flame as if it is the right thing to do. If you don't question it or pay attention to any of the lore then you just think that they must be right. The more I learned about the lore, the more I was on Kaathe's side.

https://youtu.be/xzc_04yuP0o
- Ah, the bambieshart's brocade quest. The video really sells the voice acting!
  
  heheheheh........
  
  He nailed the Souls NPC voice.
- exactly

This ignores pages upon pages of lore in item descriptions, though, which goes something like, “Sweet Grass — an herb from a distant land, cultivated by the dark monks of Seringrad, and used for healing rituals. The exiled senator Myrmidon of the Kingdom of Loss is believed to have poisoned his fellow senator and former lover Zanzibart following a legislative dispute during the Anecdotes using spoiled Sweet Grass, which produces a highly toxic sludge when rotting. Restores 10% health upon use.”
This is what’s great about FS games as far as I’m concerned — for those that want to read into the lore, it’s there to go through, but for those who just want to bonk, they can just bonk, and aren’t tied down to 30 minute cinematics that lay it all out for them. It’s like an inverted Kojima game, it’s all tell-don’t-show-but-maybe-ok-show-just-a-little-bit and does a 1 minute cinematic and leaves the rest as an exercise to the player to sort out. If they want to sort it out, they can, and if not, they can just continue to bonk and maybe later on put on some YouTuber’s three hour long explanation about the game they just finished and have it play in the background while they barbecue. And yeah, sure a bunch of t might be vague and contradictory, but goddamn it, it gets people talking more than the 30 minute exposition-heavy cinematic ever could.
- I agree to an extent. I like this style of storytelling just like the next souls enjoyer but sometimes it's a little too obtuse and convoluted for my taste. I feel like Sekiro struck a good balance between showing some actual story and plot and also leaving some storybeats up for interpretation. Be it because of things purposefully left unmentioned or because of background lore that's not essential to the plot but is there to enrich the world building.
  Elden Ring is just too convoluted for me personally, for example. There's 10 mainline characters whose names sounds absolutely alike - Godrick, Godfrey, Godroy, Morgot, whatever - and the plot is as vague as ever. I know most of the plot by now, but I haven't watched a big lore video by someone like Vaati to explain it all and wrap it up in a tight package.
  Sometimes, you just want to experience story without needing to resort to outside sources to get a grasp of what's happening.