Soulslike - Discussion, News, Memes

"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.

https://youtu.be/xzc_04yuP0o

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.