FromSoftware’s 2016 conclusion to the Dark Souls trilogy is an achievement not only as a conclusion of a game franchise that defined a generation and spawned an entire subgenre of video games, but as the end of an ambitious story focused on the themes of depression, resilience, the human spirit that drives us to live, and the exhaustion of the same that can lead even the most tenacious of survivors into desiring, at long last, the rest that the finality of death promises.
The Dark Souls trilogy is known principally not for its renowned difficulty, but for the unique way in which it treats death as a mechanic and a part of its greater narrative structure. The protagonist of Dark Souls III is the Ashen One, a fallen undead warrior who is not a hero. Instead, they are not only a failure, but one that is being called upon by an exhausted world as a last-ditch effort to link the fire and continue the cycle that keeps the world within the status quo it has been in since the primordial god of fire, Gwyn, refused to let the grandiosity of his age pass on but chose instead to sacrifice parts of his soul to artificially prolong it. In each game since—and implied through the narrative to have gone on for thousands upon thousands of years—a hero rises to “link the fire” and keep the world artificially alive.
But as Dark Souls III demonstrates, even the grandest of bonfires eventually burns down to ashes.
Where Dark Souls III excels is in the way it truly makes the world around the player feel just as tired of it all as the denizens that inhabit it. Ash and ruins dot the landscape as monuments to the abuse against nature that it has taken to keep it all going up until now. Moreover, most of the inhabitants of Lordran are mindless hollows, zombies that have been killed and resurrected so many times that in the endless expanse of their eternal lives, they have forgotten who they are. Instead, they go through the motions of who they once were—be that weeping in the places that mattered to them, mindlessly performing what only their muscles remember of their profession, raging against the frailty of their own minds in a feeble attempt to remember, or lashing out at those they once considered closest to them. Dark Souls III puts forth a fundamental conceit—that in a life that stretches on long enough, even the strongest will grow tired of it all without a purpose to drive them forward.
Through that conceit, however, the game asks a far more fundamental question without ever stating it explicitly: in a world where life can be prolonged, seemingly indefinitely, when is it time to accept that all things must have an ending?
Just as the Ashen One returns to life until their quest is complete, or the player gives up on the journey (thus symbolically “going hollow,” or succumbing to a state of mindless undeath and despair), so too do the characters the player meets with each subsequent playthrough via the New Game Plus option. No one will remember the actions the player took in the previous run, though they retain all of their skills, equipment, and stats. This allows the player to explore their better and their lesser natures within the confines of a world that is too tired to fight—or often even care, anyways. Everything and everyone will be there on the next go-round, so long as the player chooses to continue. It doesn’t matter how tired everyone else is, or how futile each repetition may be.
But the game can only go on for so long. Inevitably, the player will explore every possible questline, and experience the ultimate fate of each character that they meet. It all invariably ends the same, with the climactic battle against the Soul of Cinder—an incarnation of every previous Lord of Fire, and thus every previous player of the franchise, into one singular enemy. And even then, the player will still be presented with a choice: will they continue yet again in a dying world with nothing left to offer them, or will they finally close the book on Lordran and symbolically allow it to finally rest?
If the player didn’t find their answer to this question in the base game, they certainly do in the DLC “The Ringed City.” Often considered by fans to be the “true” ending to the franchise, the story takes the player to the ancient stronghold of the human city, thousands upon thousands of years and linkings of the flame in the future. By that point in the timeline, the player can’t even find Firelink Shrine. The world is coated in ashes, burying the once-great monuments to the ambitions of men and gods. What few hollows remain are hunted mercilessly and consumed by Slave Knight Gael, who seeks the blood of the Dark Soul to provide pigment to his lady’s painting—a last-ditch effort for the inhabitants of the world to escape into a new one where the vicious cycle will no longer touch them. But by that point, it no longer even matters. So much time has passed that the Knight’s lady is gone, and so too is the world that he fought and even relentlessly consumed to protect. He can no longer even recall why he’s seeking the blood, only that it is his purpose and what drives him forward in a world blanketed in ash, and you are the last bearer of that blood standing in his way.
And so you fight, in this far-flung future, for the sake of a world that doesn’t matter anymore because the hope it carried too is dead and can no longer carry you, much as you may wish the memory of it might. In a sense, the battle is the final abuse, the final indignity on the corpse of a world that has been sustained far beyond its natural end point, until nothing but ash and dried blood remains. Because even when sustaining an ancient corpse that can no longer enjoy the things that it once did, and is sustained only by fragmented memories, the human spirit still fights for even those droplets of hope that things can persist just that little, tiny bit longer. Long enough to find loved ones lost to the ages, perhaps. Or long enough to wait for the ones we wish to say goodbye to, and the edge of the end of the world.
When your world is exhausted and old, and all that is good has passed away into the ashen sands of time, will you choose to hang on to a purpose you can hardly remember, or will you finally say goodbye even to hope?
Kelsey Nichols is a freelance writer and author based in Pennsylvania. Her writings range from the depth of lived experiences and current affairs, to retrospectives and bone chilling horror.
