How 'Dark Souls' Stole E3 (Without Even Being There)

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How 'Dark Souls' Stole E3 (Without Even Being There)

The company responsible for the Dark Souls series first announced Elden Ring back in 2019, then thought the gaming world would totally handle them going silent for two years. They finally released the first trailer during E3.

Though the double-jumping horses won it Game of the Year right there and then, what drove most players mad is how this might be the closest thing we'll ever get to a new Dark Souls. Another driving source of the hypetrain is how the story of Elden Ring story is being co-written by George R.R. Martin, which partially might explain why it's taking so long.

Though we enjoy the confirmation that this wasn't just an elaborate prank that would've turned out to be the definite worst thing to happen in the past two years, it also comes at a cost.

Some other cool things related to Souls happened while Elden Ring was under quarantine, the coolest of them being the appearance of the Daily Elden Ring News YouTube channel. For a whole year, it was our exclusive source of hot Elden Ring updates, which, as you know, were none. However, fans of the Souls series aren't ones to be stopped by insurmountable odds, so the channel just kept posting videos every day, even though they were almost always just 20-second clips where the only news was that there was no news at all.

But Elden Ring wasn't even the only title trying to fill the soul-shaped hole left on our soul by the absence of Dark Souls. To compete with one of the most anticipated reveals of all time, Square Enix showed Stranger of Paradise, Final Fantasy-themed Souls-like title, through what looks like a trailer of a lost PS3 game that they forgot to edit … 

And write dialogue for …

Making matters even darker, the trailer came accompanied by a gameplay demo, which was actually broken and unplayable upon release. But there's at least the silver lining of seeing a game that lives up to its E3 presentation.

To cap it all off beautifully, Castlevania, the main inspiration for the Souls series (if you ignore its creator's poor understanding of his own language), is also getting a hot "new" game. Castlevania Rondo of Blood is coming to the US for the first time. You can get it not for the Switch but for the TurboGrafx-16. Yeah, okay, that probably warrants an explanation. That's not an edgy new console named by someone who just woke up from a coma he'd entered in the early '90s for blowing too hard on a cartridge, but actually, a 30-year-old piece of hardware that a cool group of restorers are bringing games to. Now that's rekindling the flame.

 Looks better than Stranger of Paradise.

Top Image: FromSoftware, Inc.

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