R.R. Bigman
Coolest Guy
There’s also no co-op or PVP elements, which is a big part of the Souls experience.
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Elden Ring is finally real
Huh, my own understanding of the genre is a little different. What I would consider essential elements are
-High difficulty that encourages player skill progression (as opposed to in-game character progression)
-Obscured story that needs to be pieced together from lore and NPC dialog
-A decent into some sort of underworld. I.E needs a blightown
-Corpse runs in general
-A meeting of a fallen modern age with a mythic past
-A NPC that goes "heh heh heh."
I think the genre is wider than most seem to and would include things like Sekiro, A Ghost of a Tale, or Death's Door. Ultimately it's more a sense of style than specific gameplay mechanics.
And here's the thing. Cutting Sekiro out of the genre seems absurd when its a game by the same studio and the same people and is in conversation with their previous games. It's part of the tradition of the development of Souls. The ways that its different are just as important to the ways that its the same and making it "some other thing" is to ignore that conversation entirely.
-High difficulty that encourages player skill progression (as opposed to in-game character progression)
-Obscured story that needs to be pieced together from lore and NPC dialog
-A decent into some sort of underworld. I.E needs a blightown
-Corpse runs in general
-A meeting of a fallen modern age with a mythic past
-A NPC that goes "heh heh heh."
I think the genre is wider than most seem to and would include things like Sekiro, A Ghost of a Tale, or Death's Door. Ultimately it's more a sense of style than specific gameplay mechanics.
And here's the thing. Cutting Sekiro out of the genre seems absurd when its a game by the same studio and the same people and is in conversation with their previous games. It's part of the tradition of the development of Souls. The ways that its different are just as important to the ways that its the same and making it "some other thing" is to ignore that conversation entirely.
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Yeah, but I specifically wanted a physical copy. I knew what I was getting myself into!
Sekiro doesn't have corpse runs.
I would generally agree that it fits into a broader definition of the "genre" but not a very strict one.
Yeah, consequences for death are a key. The things that are in the Souls games that aren't in Sekiro are mostly just "normal RPG things". Sekiro applied the essence of the Souls mentality to a different genre, action games.
These are all true. Sekiro clearly has the bones of a Souls game underneath - A lot of elements bear strong resemblance to Souls games, though it plays very differently in most cases. There's a very strong argument that because of its divergences - The basic movement, the combat mechanics, the traversal, the lack of customization and variety - it doesn't fall under a basic "Souls-like" style. It plays much more like a "character action" game by way of Souls design ethos than like another Souls game. In fact, one of the most common complaints was that Souls series veterans had to unlearn a lot of their Souls reflexes and learn Sekiro's unique ones because they were so different that just playing it like a Souls game straight-up was usually a bad time.
Also very good points. Let's see:
-High difficulty that encourages... Check.
-Obscured story that... - Debatable. Sekiro's plot is told much more straightforwardly than any other Souls/Borne game, with story cutscenes and dialog, explicit backstory, etc. There are also layers of Souls-like backstory hinting to be pieced together, but fewer and less critically, I think, than any of the other entries.
-needs a blightown - Poison swamp? We got that.
-Corpse runs in general - Sekiro doesn't have corpse runs. I see the conversation developed into "Death has consequences" though, and I agree that it overall handles the feel of dying in a similar way.
-A meeting of a fallen modern age with a mythic past - Kinda? I think this counts, sure, though the remove from the mythic past and the present here isn't so distant or so obscured as is typical with the other Souls games.
-A NPC that goes "heh heh heh." - Got it.
I think your last point gets to the core of it, in that you can define them mechanically or stylistically. That would take us down a very long, twisting path into "What is a genre, really?" but to abbreviate it for the meantime, I think genre in games has always been defined mechanically. But I also think that "Souls-like" isn't a genre at all, but represents a certain style of adventure/action RPG, much like I think the Metrovania is a style of platformer rather than a genre unto itself. Both are subgenres at best that ape the style of archetypal entries that crystalized new gameplay elements and/or perfected new syntheses of existing elements to create something not quite like anything that came before.
I think the "Souls-like" style/subgenre can't be divorced from its mechanics though. When we got Shovel Knight dropping money to be picked back up on death, it drew comparisons to Dark Souls despite not really ticking any of the other boxes - the "blood pool" mechanic showing up in so many other places all display clear influence back to Souls, even if DeS was not the game that first invented the idea (was it? I literally don't know); it still popularized it in a big way. Scattered checkpoints with respawns on death or rest, skill-driven difficulty, some manner of currency loss... That's what I think of when a game is described as "Souls-like."
But you're not wrong that a lot of Souls-like games sit very strongly in a stylistic groove cut by Souls as well. I honestly wonder if that means it's a defining part of the genre, or if it just means that people aping the original do so in more ways than one. Has anyone created a cheerful, colorful Souls-like game yet? One with most or all of the mechanical similarities intact, but none of the style?
I think part of it is also that when we say Souls-like, i.e. we're saying that it "is like Dark Souls," that can mean anything. This game has X, Y, and Z stylistic elements just like Dark Souls. That game has A, B, and C mechanical elements, just like Dark Souls. Maybe those two games have little or nothing in common, though. Are they both "Souls-likes"? Is only one of them? Are neither of them fully a Souls-Like despite being like Souls?
I think Sekiro is definitely "like Soulsborne games" in a lot of ways, though the basic ways we've traditionally defined game genres aren't particularly common there. Like Adrenaline mentioned above, it took the stylistic ways of being like DS and applied them to the action genre. Does that make it a Souls-like?
This I brought out on its own because it's a very different point, but a very cogent one.
Sekiro diverged from previous Souls games in a lot of ways. It de-emphasized one of the arguably-central mechanics, the dodge roll, and introduced an entirely new one, the high jump. The stealth aspect, barely extant at all in Souls, became central to traversal and combat alike. Its whole pace of combat changed, with constant running, no stamina management, and the long back-and-forth rhythm of parries rather than a single well-timed counter. Et cetera.
But, we also know that at least some of these elements have made their way into Elden Ring. Sekiro-like jumping and vertical traversal are here, and so is stealth traversal and combat. If anything, I think this might be kind of a retroactive Soulsification of Sekiro after all - They took the bones of the Souls games and built a divergence with a lot of experimentation and twists on the formula. But rather than a branching path (or at least in addition to it - who knows what the future will bring?) a lot of those elements were then added back into the base formula. When you look at DeS-DS3-BB, Sekiro seems rather disparate gameplay-wise. But when you include Elden Ring into the overview, we see that Sekiro absolutely fits into the bigger picture of the Souls series evolution regardless of whether someone considers it a "Souls-like" or not.
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I recently saw a game description that described itself as a "souls-like JRPG" with a turn-based battle system, and at that point I realized my definition of "like a Souls game" does not necessarily align with others.
This reminds me that I completely forgot the collector's edition(s?) existed and that I wanted one, shit. It's probably too late to grab one, huh?
Souls games have a lot going on, so "the point" might vary from person to person.
I didn't play Sekiro (yet), but I did notice that jumping made it in to Elden Ring. I'm curious to hear what other influences it had. Like, I felt that Bloodborne influenced DS3 in a bunch of ways, and Elden Ring probably has stuff from all of their games, even though it looks the closest to Dark Souls. And for all we know Elden Ring may change things dramatically in ways we haven't seen yet.
I didn't play Sekiro (yet), but I did notice that jumping made it in to Elden Ring. I'm curious to hear what other influences it had. Like, I felt that Bloodborne influenced DS3 in a bunch of ways, and Elden Ring probably has stuff from all of their games, even though it looks the closest to Dark Souls. And for all we know Elden Ring may change things dramatically in ways we haven't seen yet.
All great points Paul and I especially like this one:
I think we can make a case for Souls-likes as a genre or at least as a subgenre if only because Demon's and Dark were such hot fire that they lit the imaginations of a lot of other creators who took those games' ideas and forms as inspiration. There's enough of these "-likes" that are working in a similar (if not always identical) space that its worth drawing a loose circle around them so that we can refer to the trend with an easy shorthand. That's the point of genre, right? Not to classify and exclude, but to refer simply to common trends, traditions, and expectations in works of a similar nature.
Part of the issue too might be there isn't a common consensus on terminology. I prefer "Souls" because I think it's the most elegant (especially compared to "Soulsbornes") but it is unclear to what it refers to. It could indicate games in the tradition of Demon Souls, it could refer to FromSoft's output from Demon Souls to Elden Ring, or it could refer specifically to the connected series of their games that have Souls in the title. I suppose "Souls-likes" is the best descriptor, but "Souls" on its own is just more cool.
I think we can make a case for Souls-likes as a genre or at least as a subgenre if only because Demon's and Dark were such hot fire that they lit the imaginations of a lot of other creators who took those games' ideas and forms as inspiration. There's enough of these "-likes" that are working in a similar (if not always identical) space that its worth drawing a loose circle around them so that we can refer to the trend with an easy shorthand. That's the point of genre, right? Not to classify and exclude, but to refer simply to common trends, traditions, and expectations in works of a similar nature.
Part of the issue too might be there isn't a common consensus on terminology. I prefer "Souls" because I think it's the most elegant (especially compared to "Soulsbornes") but it is unclear to what it refers to. It could indicate games in the tradition of Demon Souls, it could refer to FromSoft's output from Demon Souls to Elden Ring, or it could refer specifically to the connected series of their games that have Souls in the title. I suppose "Souls-likes" is the best descriptor, but "Souls" on its own is just more cool.
jpfriction
(He, Him)
If you pull a lever to unlock a shortcut it’s a souls game. This isn’t hard guys
Johnny Unusual
(He/Him)
Can only imagine this to the tune of the Chipmunks Christmas song
Yeah, "Subgenre" is another option I was thinking of beyond a "style" of a larger genre. I guess it gets back to "What is a 'genre' anyway?" Like, are Marvel movies, or superhero movies, their own genre? A subgenre of action/sci-fi movies?
Also, "Soulsborne" is redundant as a genre descriptor (and clunky as hell, of course). It does describe the series, I suppose, but that's in a weird position anyway - here are 5 games very clearly of a piece with each other, and 4 are "Souls" and then there's this other one called "Bloodborne" for some reason. Elden Ring is about to complicate that even further, or make people throw their hands up and just say "Souls." Which will probably just get increasingly antiquated as we go forward and no game from this studio has Souls in the name or involves the concept very much.
Selden Rinbourne is the JRPGest name ever.
the reviews for this are pretty good
R.R. Bigman
Coolest Guy
It looks like all the critics were blown away.