Seven tips for Dark Souls fans to keep away their frustration

Bandai NamcoBosses can be bastards in Souls games, and Dark Souls III is no different. Sometimes you'll need to swallow your pride and call for help from other players.

Leading up to the launch of Dark Souls III I’ve had close to a dozen friends, acquaintances, and even strangers tell me something to the effect of this: “I want to get into the Souls games, but they’re too hard and too frustrating.”

I completely understand where they’re coming from, because I was once in their shoes.

I played, grew frustrated with, and rage quit From Software’s original Demon’s Soulsand then later Dark Souls. I would play these enormously challenging games for an hour or so and feel as though I made little or no progress, that I’d just wasted my valuable and limited gaming time. And over the course of several nights of play that sense of frustration – and of wasted time – would grow until eventually I stopped playing and never resumed.

But something changed with Dark Souls II. Not because the game was substantively different from its predecessors (it wasn’t, as far as I could tell), but because of the way I approached it. I had more time to invest. I knew what to expect. I had a fresh sense of determination. And I carried forward some insights that I’d begun to develop playing the first couple of games. Armed with all of these things, I set aside a full evening and dove in headfirst.

And I ended up having a fantastic time. I still died — like, a lot — but after that first night I felt like I was finally beginning to understand what these games are all about. And as I forged deeper and deeper into monster-infested dungeons, still dying frequently along the way, I began to feel a sense of achievement for having accomplished something that not all gamers (including my former self) have the perseverance and fortitude to do.

I was suddenly and completely hooked.

I’d love to help Souls fence-sitters and rookies have a similar eye-opening experience with Dark Souls III. And so I offer the following tips – all of which I wish someone would have told me before I began playing these games years ago.

Bandai Namco

1. Set aside plenty of time for each play session

This will prove a tall order for people with hectic schedules, but try to give yourself two or three hours each time you sit down to play. Half-hour and even hour-long sessions are apt to end with you feeling as though you made no tangible progress and that you just wasted your valuable time, making you unlikely to return. Longer sessions, on the other hand, will likely leave your character several levels stronger and with one or two new bonfires reached. You’ll feel like you’ve accomplished something.

2. Learn when to retreat and spend your souls

When you gain enough souls to level up, stop whatever you’re doing and head back to the shrine to spend them. Yes, all the enemies you just killed will respawn and you’ll need to fight them again. But you’ll be stronger, more familiar with the terrain so you know what to expect, and more likely to make it to the next bonfire without dying. And if you do die, you’ll have less to lose. Perhaps more importantly, the level you purchase with your souls will have a strong psychological impact. It representsprogress. It’s one thing that From Software’s gamesmiths, devious though they may be, cannot take away from you (ED Note: except in Demon’s Souls, those bastards).

3. Fight smarter, not harder

I know I just said that levelling is important, but equally important is learning how to fight well. These games are all about skill and tactics – as proven by speedrunners who can beat them in just a couple of hours with low-level characters. Can’t beat a boss? Try moves, magic, and skills you may have been ignoring or avoiding. When facing a crowd, try advancing slowly to draw foes out to fight one by one. Consider using precious items – embers, moss clumps, and resins – you’ve been hoarding to give yourself a momentary advantage. Experiment with weapons of varying range, attack speeds, and skills, and rings that provide a slight elemental or HP edge. Sometimes success may simply be a matter of changing from heavier to lighter armour so that you can move just a hair faster while draining a tad less stamina.

4. Go slow

This is a hard one to overstress. Whenever you find yourself exploring a new area the dangers of which are still unknown, move slowly. Peek around corners before entering rooms. Scan the ceiling for threats from above. Keep your guard up and move at walking speed – if only because walking speed won’t rouse the attention of enemies whose backs may be turned to you, letting you get in a free first strike. Think about how you would act were you in the shoes of your avatar — i.e. fearing for your life with every footstep—and proceed accordingly.  

5. Take time to read explanations, and don’t be afraid to experiment

The Souls games throw a seemingly endless stream of exotic items our way — including dried fingers, pale tongues, and rubbish — sometimes without much clear advice on how or when to use them. Don’t know what an item does? Tap the item info button call up an explanation. If you’re still unsure of its purpose (and you’ll be surprised how often this happens), don’t be afraid to experiment. You’ll never know what a mystery item does if you don’t try using it, and you’ll likely find yourself still learning and appreciating the advantages offered by some items right up until the last battle. Also, you can call up an explanation of what every stat means on your inventory screen, do this often.

6. There’s no shame in calling for a little help

I’m generally not much for online play, so when I first started playing Souls games I pretty much just ignored the online functionality or switched it off altogether. I eventually learned this was a mistake, not just because the notes people leave on the ground can literally save your character’s life, but because there are times when calling for help can save you hours of frustration with a particularly fearsome boss. If an enemy really has your number, use your soapstone to lay down a message offering coop support. Wait a moment for one or more players to answer your call, then pass through the boss fight fog with your new army of knights and slice and dice your foe to bits.

7. When all else fails, try the Internet

Some elements of the Souls experience are so esoteric that you may — by your oversight or the developer’s omission — never stumble across a proper explanation within the game. Example: In Dark Souls III, I had a terrible time understanding what causes (ED note: the following might be considered a spoiler by some, so the text has been made white to conceal it. Highlight the text to read.) “hollowing” (the physical withering of your character) or how to fix it. Turns out that hollowing begins if you accept a free level upgrade from an NPC, then slowly worsens with each death. The only way to reverse it is to acquire Purging Stones, which can only be found in later dungeons or purchased from another NPC. Even then, you’ll still need to spend souls (and potentially hundreds of thousands of them, depending on how long you wait) to heal something called the Dark Sigil in order to properly cure the hollowing. Almost none of this was clear to me within the game, and it was driving me mad. I’d reached hollowing level 99—my knight looked like an oily skeleton—before I decided to try to find an answer online. It took about two minutes. The moral: Try to find solutions within the game (you’ll be proud of yourself when you do), but don’t feel bad if you have to rely on others. The Souls community is always eager to help.

Taxpayers of the World, Unite!

Perhaps the simplest thing to say about the "Panama Papers" is something most of us already know: The rich are not like you and me.

The deepening scandal, born from the leak of a vast trove of documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, has inspired a curious mixture of shock and apathy. The documents, which show the extraordinary lengths the global elite have gone to in order to shield their wealth from taxation, are at once big news and old hat. They provide the nasty details of the kind of business most savvy people assume goes on all the time. You and I pay our taxes; the wealthy find ways to avoid them. For some, reading about the Panama Papers will feel like being told by your parents that Santa isn't real: merely the final confirmation of a suspicion that you have harboured for a very long time. The game is rigged, and unless you are part of the global one percent, it isn't rigged to help you.

The rich are their own nation now. 

Were our system healthier, our governments and institutions more responsive to public demand, our people more convinced that the system worked the way it's intended, our courts and legislative bodies more conducive to securing justice at the expense of the moneyed and the connected, we could expect mass indictments, reform of tax and trade law, and a wide-scale rethinking of what, exactly, we're globalising in the age of globalisation. A healthy social system would mark this moment as a historical turning point. But this is not a healthy social system, and most of the people living within it know that, and so few of us can muster much in the way of righteous indignation. This is depressing; it is also rational.

Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world's biggest creators of shell companies. Photo: AP

That isn't to dismiss the importance of the leak or to attempt to snuff out hopes that it might lead to prosecution, though the precedent set by the near-total absence of criminal charges following the 2008 financial crisis is not encouraging. Rather, the point is simply that while this leak should inspire outrage and, I naively hope, change, the actual information provided has not so much opened us to a new world of understanding as merely enabled us to see the details of a world that we already know far too well. That the super-rich utilise shell companies and tax havens, that they employ shadowy entities to help them hide their finances from government scrutiny, that they play by an entirely separate set of rules than the rest of us — these are the banal assumptions of anyone who has even a loose grasp of global capitalism.

Still, the sheer diversity of the players involved is remarkable. The roster is thick with international bad actors, present and past, who we already knew full well were nefarious: Vladimir Putin, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak. But sprinkled among them — and there are surely more nuggets to be found — are prominent figures from the world of international politics, sports, and entertainment whose reputations had previously been intact. The martial arts star Jackie Chan shows up in the documents, which allegedly demonstrate his connection to six separate companies involved with Mossack Fonseca. So does Lionel Messi, the Argentinian soccer player widely regarded as the world's best.

Nothing in particular unites the various people and groups found within these documents, except for the only things that matter: their incredible wealth and their incredible desire to keep as much of it as possible. This is the new cosmopolitanism, the 21st-century international community, a community of those with the resources to belong to no nation. If the traditional symbol of globalisation has been the closure of a factory in Ohio and the opening of one in Bangladesh, the new symbol might be entirely digital, a computer in Panama wiring funds between, say, London and the Bahamas, on behalf of a Russian billionaire who made his fortune in Saudi Arabia. The very idea of countries dissolves into an impossibly complex digital network of shady dealings, undertaken by those with no particular loyalty to country and plenty to themselves. Even referring to the country of origin of the super-rich seems quaint. The rich are their own nation now.

A protester throws an egg at the parliament building as hundreds demonstrate in Reykjavik, Iceland. Photo: Getty Images

There are obvious resonances with international political conditions. For years now, discontent and instability have been a constant of world news. The Arab Spring, anti-immigration animus in Europe, left-wing protest movements in the United States, heated elections in Greece, strikes in China, anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar, and on and on. Anger appears to be the default state of the world political scene. As this list shows, this anger has not congealed into a definable political direction. Instead, political parties and leaders the world over, both principled and opportunistic, seek to take advantage of a profound and loud message that is being expressed by regular people: Something has gone badly wrong. Scandals like the Panama Papers provide further fuel for these feelings, demonstrating to the global 99 percent that their feelings of being cheated are justified.

In the United States, the spirit of civil unrest has played out most obviously in the current presidential primaries. Both major political parties are facing unexpected insurgent campaigns for their presidential nominations.

Yet despite this sense of agitation and unhappiness with the status quo, neither of these insurgent candidates stands a particularly good chance of becoming president. The establishment parties are flexing their muscles. For as much as the American voter might favour dramatic change, it appears that the elites who run the country maintain their control of the system.

Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world's biggest creators of shell companies.

That same sense of the inevitability of elite domination attends the international discussion of the Panama Papers. For as much controversy as will surely follow, and as much anger as I'm observing in reaction to the story, there is another palpable feeling attending these discussions: exhaustion. The seemingly permanent hold that the elite have on power inspires anger, but it also inspires weariness. We can be sure that some small number of figures implicated by the Mossack Fonseca documents will see an indictment; we can be equally as sure that the vast majority of the wealthy figures named will continue to enjoy all of their old privileges. The only thing that seems more certain than the continuing outrages brought about by the malfeasance of elites is their ability to avoid any consequences for those outrages.

It's an old saw to say that political ignorance breeds political impotence. Knowledge is power, goes the propaganda. Concepts like false consciousness depend on the idea that average citizens lack understanding about the economic and social systems around them and thus are incapable of changing them. Yet I can't help but feel that the truth is darker: Knowledge of how deeply corrupt the rich are, and how inoculated they are from the consequences of that corruption, makes meaningful action seem like an impossibly difficult task. Solutions to the vast inequalities in wealth and power that grip the world seem either insufficient to create change, too sweeping to become reality, or both at the same time. Thomas Piketty, whose 2014 book on the inevitability of wealth inequality under capitalism caused a sensation, argued that perhaps as much as 10 percent of world GDP goes unaccounted for in taxation thanks to schemes like those outlined in the Panama Papers. Yet his solution in that text, an international wealth tax, seems at once feeble in what it attempts and simultaneously far too ambitious to become actual reality.

The situation is not hopeless. Progress is possible. Look at Iceland, where the prime minister has just announced his resignation, in the face of fierce public protest over financial machinations he had tried hard to keep secret. But to move forward, we need to recognise how badly things have gone. In his 2012 book, Twilight of the Elites, on the collapse of public faith in institutional authority, Christopher Hayes writes, "We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities, and the consequences of this simple, devastating realisation is the defining feature of American life."

As the Panama Papers make clear, this is hardly a condition unique to the United States. With the passage of time, the title of Hayes's book has come to seem naive. For as surely as elites have failed us, their grasp on power seems as sure as ever. Our trust in elites may be dying, but they seem quite capable of navigating a world where no one expects to trust them. What we are confronted with is a world in which this communal understanding that our elites have cheated, lied to, and failed us makes no difference to their ability to hold onto power. We expect this from them; we would be more surprised if they weren't cheating the rest of us. The question is, will anger at the corruption and failure of our elites dissolve into apathy and exhaustion, as people come to believe there truly is no alternative? Or will it explode

?

Why the Panama leak is important to everyone ?

Benjamin Franklin had not heard of Mossack Fonseca when he observed "nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes," and the Panama-based law firm might have changed his mind. Mossack is at the centre of a huge tax and money-laundering scandal, now coming to light thanks to the so-called "Panama papers". What exactly are these papers and why do they matter?

Companies such as Mossack specialise in helping foreigners hide wealth. Clients may want to keep money away from soon-to-be ex-wives, dodge sanctions, launder money or evade taxes. The main tools for doing so are anonymous shell companies (which exist only on paper) and offshore accounts in tax havens (which often come with perks such as banking secrecy and low to no taxes). These structures obscure the identity of the true owner of money parked in or routed through jurisdictions such as Panama.

But authorities (and disgruntled ex-wives) just caught a break. Over 11m documents have been leaked from Mossack's secretive offices. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) this weekend went public with its findings that the firm had, wittingly or unwittingly, helped clients evade or avoid tax, launder money or mask its origins. More astonishing than their methods, which are well known, was the scale of activity and the people involved.

The 2.6 terabytes of data are thought to contain information about 214,500 companies in 21 offshore jurisdictions and name over 14,000 middlemen (such as banks and law firms) with whom the law firm has allegedly worked. Although by no means all of these are criminal or even shady, the first public examples make for telling reading. On the naughty list are people such as Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko, who promised to sell his business interests on taking office.

He seems to have merely transferred assets to an offshore shell. Other heads of government, such as Russia's Vladimir Putin and Iceland's Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson are suspected of hiding ownership of offshore assets by putting them in the names of friends or relatives. Mossack denies any wrongdoing, as does Mr Gunnlaugsson. A spokesman for Mr Putin has denounced the allegations as a case of "Putinophobia".

After the initial naming and shaming, it will become clearer in the coming weeks who was using these structures for dodgy reasons. While examples of the offshore industry enabling dictators, terrorists and drug cartels will (rightly) capture much of the attention, it would be a shame if other miscreants escape. The global industry of service providers, which sell financial secrecy to those who can afford it, have in some cases done more than just feast on poorly designed tax policies.

The Panama documents suggest that some actively looked the other way when faced with a less-than-clean client. An estimated 8% of the world's wealth ($7.6 trillion according to Gabriel Zucman, an economist) is stuffed away in offshore accounts, most of it done perfectly legally, as a raft of public relations people hasten to say as their clients' names are flung around in the press. But legal or not, the newspapers taking aim at Mossack and the like will strike a chord. They are in tune with contemporary sentiment: the fundamental disconnect between global elites and the rest, for whom taxes are as certain as death.