While waiting patiently for the release of both the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake and GTAVI, I’ve been revisiting the original Dark Souls. I’ve never beaten Dark Souls; the first time I played I got as far as defeating Gaping Dragon and then noped out when I hit Blighttown. This time, I’ve stuck it out, and am all the way through most of Anor Londo. Game’s great! What a classic! Mostly!
I love games that are rude in the extreme to the player in comical ways, and this is something FromSoftware excels at doing. God, Dark Souls is such a hilarious asshole to me. Whether it’s crap like this:
Or this:
Funny! I am, quite genuinely, laughing about both of those situations. What I am not laughing about, what I am in fact internally and nearly externally screaming about, is a very specific encounter in Anor Londo that has become my own personal house of horrors.
“Ah, yes, Ornstein and Smough,” you say knowingly, recalling the challenging boss duo of Anor Londo. But nay! It’s not them. Even though I am, in fact, currently stuck on them. It’s not Ornstein and Smough who are the issue. In fact, I am confident that I’ll be able to defeat them in a few more good attempts.
No, my trouble, my horror, my agony in Anor Londo is not in that room, but in the room right before them. This room:
© FromSoftware
Man, fuck this room! It’s so unassuming! So basic! Why am I having so much trouble with this room?
I know why. It’s a combination of stubbornness and rage that’s tripping me up. But also they did not have to make this room so damn frustrating.
To get to Ornstein and Smough from one of the two nearest bonfires, you have to run through several long corridors. One run is mostly empty, but has two big, chonky unavoidable knight enemies at the end before you hit this room, so it’s non-ideal. The other run is peppered with silver knight enemies, but you can outrun all of them easily. The run itself is long, but not too dangerous.
The problem arises when you reach this point. If you aren’t me and simply want to sprint through the fog gate to face Ornstein and Smough, that’s entirely possible. But if you’re a stubborn fool like me, you’ll want to summon Solaire of Astora to join you through the door and fight alongside you. You’d do this both because he’s a badass and an invaluable aid against the otherwise punishingly difficult Ornstein and Smough, and also because he’s utterly cool and it’s genuinely fun to team up with story characters for major battles. Yeah! Praise the sun!
Unfortunately, Solaire’s summon sign sits all the way across the room, and there’s no way to activate it without drawing the wrath of every enemy within. Let me walk you through a diagram:
So the plan is to move from the right-hand side of the church’s upper floor to the left, descend a flight of stairs, summon Solaire, then continue down the rest of the stairs with him and through the fog gate. Simple, right? Wrong. The key thing to understand is that any attempt to bring Solaire through that door without first killing all three enemies in the room will simply result in Solaire fighting those enemies instead of following you to Ornstein and Smough. Sometimes he’ll engage them for a while, take far too much damage, and then finally follow you. Other times he’ll just…stay here. Forever. Until Smough crushes you with his hammer and it’s already too late.
The reason Solaire will fight these enemies is that their aggro range is enormous. Essentially anywhere in that church apart from the very top floor, they’ll spot you and begin advancing. I’ve tried every conceivable combination of routing to avoid and/or lose their attention, but nothing works. On top of that, summoning Solaire takes several seconds, so there’s no way to just rush through and grab him en route to the door. Killing them it is, then.
The archer on the left must be dealt with first, but fortunately he’s fairly easy. It takes just two, or three on a bad run, swings of my large axe to bring him down, and I can reliably dodge his arrows simply by sprinting toward him. No problem at all.
The problem lies with the two large enemies downstairs. They’re incredibly frustrating! It takes several solid hits to the back to take them down—frontal attacks are useless against their massive shields. They also have a habit of leaping backward or casting an irritating spell to knock me off balance, then healing themselves. On top of that, I occasionally misread their attack as a spear strike when they’re actually slamming their entire shield into the ground, dealing massive damage across a wide radius and usually catching me, knocking me down and forcing me to slowly pick myself back up, only to be stabbed with a spear the moment I stand. Ugh!
The thing is, on paper, they should be very easy to defeat! I’ve managed it, many times, without any trouble! They’re slow, and their attacks are blatantly telegraphed. Dodging should be a breeze. And yet. I’ve completed this run so many times now that I’m starting to overthink the whole encounter, and I keep either losing a ton of much-needed Estus flasks and charges of Great Magic Weapon, or they just completely wreck me. Or maybe it goes smoothly. Maybe I push through with full flasks and full health, summon Solaire, and march straight into the next fight. But God damn, that was so time-consuming. The run alone is long enough without having to deal with one small guy and two massive damage sponges at the end. But factor in how long it takes to kill these three every single time, especially when they self-heal…ugh. Why couldn’t there just be one fewer big guy in here?
This is it! This room is hell! Those archers up on the ramparts behind, the ones everyone complained about? They’re a walk in the park compared to this ridiculous room! Get me out of this nightmare! Forget Halloween—this place shows up in my dreams every single night! I’m getting chills just writing about it! This year I’m going as a giant stomping knight for Halloween and scare myself!
No! I’m not changing my strategy and giving up on summoning the sun bro. What are you even talking about?
Also, also, I have to burn a Humanity back at the bonfire every time I want to summon Solaire. Sometimes they kill me before I even summon him, and I lose the Humanity. I am now out of Humanities. If I want to do the fight with Solaire at my side, I have to go farm some more. The easiest way to do that is to run all the way back out of Anor Londo, through Sen’s Fortress, back to—
God damn it.
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