The Dark Souls series has long been seen by fans as a Litmus test for whether a person is a true hardcore gamer or someone who just dabbles with casual games. Regardless of one's feelings on the matter, there’s no denying that the games are hard for someone trying them out for the first time and some people just can’t seem to develop the skills necessary to beat these games.
As a result, the internet has become chockfull of memes regarding the difficulty of Dark Souls and the casuals who are discovering this for the first time.
10 Chests
In many games, chests are a welcome sight as they promise better weapons, helpful items, coin, and other goodies that can provide relief and progress for the player. But for fans of Dark Souls, this isn’t always the case.
Dark Souls likes to troll its players with mimics: creatures that appear to be chests only to attack and devour any unfortunate soul who tries to interact with them. It’s a level of gaming mechanic most casuals will never experience and is jarring for those diving into Dark Souls for the first time.
9 Finally Over
Beating that first Dark Souls game is a thrilling and euphoric experience as all that hard work and patience has finally paid off and one can sit back and watch the cut scene role. While even veterans will admit beating the game is a great feeling, it pales in comparison to how a casual player feels when they’ve finally overcome the game.
For the player who came into Dark Souls after playing games that required little skill and encouraged save-scumming, it can feel like traveling to Mt. Doom as a lowly hobbit with a short sword and next to no combat experience.
8 COD Vs Dark Souls
The Call Of Duty series has long been criticized for making the single-player campaigns easier in order to accommodate a larger, less-skilled customer base. Sure the early games and certainly the multiplayer might require some skill, but later games? Not so much.
But even the hardest games in the franchise can't compare to the Dark Souls series. For Call of Duty to even be comparable would require a mission where the player takes down a tank with only a knife. It’s because of this that Dark Souls players roll their eyes whenever anyone brags about how quickly they beat Modern Warfare Remastered.
7 Arrow To The Soul
A recurring meme for Skyrim are the numerous NPCs who claim they used to be adventurers but were forced into retirement after taking an arrow to the knee.
Yet they can hardly complain if you look at what the heroes (maybe villains) of the Dark Souls series had to go through. These individuals were taken down with weapons the size of towers, set afire, doused in acid, eaten, crushed in mighty fists, tossed off cliffs, and peppered with so many arrows they looked like pin cushions, yet they kept going.
6 Current Generation Gamers Are Casuals?
This funny meme introduces a premise that many gamers have been claiming for years, that games like Dark Souls seem hard because we’ve been pampered and coddled by game developers. There’s no denying that certain triple A titles employ sneaky mechanics to make the game easier if the player is having trouble and this is likely having an effect on skill levels.
Maybe it’s because of this that childhood favorites like Crash Bandicoot are now considered rage games. Once upon a time, we had the skills, but those skills have atrophied from years of easy games and now we find ourselves struggling to beat the games we breezed through as kids.
5 Monsters
Skyrim is an incredibly fun game and it was a glorious feeling to take down your first dragon and absorb its soul. Going up against the massive reptile, surviving its elemental blasts, and burying that axe in its head one final time was a rush.
But facing a dragon in Skyrim hardly feels like a meaningful accomplishment when you go up against the gargantuan monsters that litter the Dark Souls series. These behemoths can become so large the player must resort to attacking a small portion of their body in the hopes of doing enough damage to bring it down.
4 True Veterans
After obtaining powerful artifacts, creating mega potions, leveling up the hero, and learning dragon shouts, the player is practically unstoppable by the end of the game. Making them feel like a kid who’s the biggest baddest warrior in their make-believe land.
Dark Souls, on the other hand, offers no feelings of having epic power at one's fingertips. Even at the character's max level with the best weapons one can still perish from a few hits from the endgame bosses. The player is never safe and walking away from these games makes one feel like a grizzled veteran, aware of how lucky they were to survive.
3 Sleep Is For Casuals
Dark Souls requires a significant investment of time and practice to become skilled and beat the game. For those who find this masochistic style of play exciting it can often feel like one is being forced to choose between getting better and getting enough sleep.
What’s even worse is there’s an unfortunate relearning phase after players take a break, even to go to bed. The player will come back the next day and require a few attempts at bosses and certain areas to regain your skills from the night before. Knowing this it’s hard to justify sleep when it means one's skills will atrophy and they'll have to climb that hill again the next day.
2 Tutorials
In many casual games (or games less difficult than Dark Souls) the player will start out as a lowly character who's guided and supported as you learn the game. Some games even start the player as a baby, as this meme shows with Assassin’s Creed II to ensure that one doesn’t get in over their head.
Dark Souls takes a much different approach with their tutorials. Instead of easy enemies and simple tasks, it often dumps the player right into the action with the first boss being one of the first ten enemies one will face.
1 Veterans Vs Casuals
This meme shows the horror and overwhelming odds casuals can feel when going against veteran Dark Souls players in pvp combat. Anyone who thinks they can just hop in multiplayer and dominate before beating the single player campaign is going to have a situation similar to this.
Dark Souls is a great game that turns the average gamer into a hardcore beast if they’re willing to put in the time. But it’s definitely not casual friendly and one will quickly find out in multiplayer these players were able to take down the monsters in single player by becoming monsters themselves.