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:
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 issue is when you get in here. If you’re not me, and you just want to run through the fog door and fight Ornstein and Smough, you can just do that. But if you’re a stubborn fool, as I am, you want to summon Solaire of Astora to accompany you through the door and fight with you. You want to do this both because he’s badass and a great help at dealing with the otherwise very challenging Ornstein and Smough, but also because he’s cool as hell and it’s fun to team up with story characters for big fights. Yeah! Praise the sun!
Unfortunately, Solaire’s summon sign is all the way on the other side of the room, and there’s no way to activate it without drawing the ire of every enemy in the room. Here, let me show you a diagram:
So the goal is to get from the right-hand side of the church upstairs to the left, head down some stairs, summon Solaire, then head the rest of the way downstairs with him and through the fog gate. Easy, right? Wrong. First, what’s important to know is that basically any attempt to get Solaire through that door without killing all three enemies in the room first will result in Solaire fighting those enemies instead of following you to Ornstein and Smough. Sometimes he’ll fight them for a bit, sustain way too much damage, then follow you. Sometimes he’ll just…stay in here. Forever. Until Smough murders you with his hammer and it’s too late.
The reason Solaire will fight these enemies is because their aggro range is massive. Basically anywhere in that church apart from the very top floor, they will see you and start moving. I have tried all sorts of combinations of pathing to avoid and/or lose their interest, but no dice. Also, it takes several seconds to summon Solaire, so there’s no way to just speed through, quickly grabbing him on the way to the door. Murder it is then.
The archer on the left must be dealt with first, but fortunately he’s pretty easy. He takes two, on a bad run three swings of my big axe to go down, and I can pretty reliably avoid being hit by his arrows if I just sprint at him. No problem.
The issue is the two big guys downstairs. They’re so annoying! They take several good swings to the back to kill: front attacks do nothing against their big shields. They also love to jump backwards or use an annoying spell to push me away, and then heal themselves. Also, sometimes I misread their attack as a spear attack when really they’re slamming their whole shield into the ground, which does a ton of damage in a large radius and usually hits me, knocking me down and forcing me to slowly stumble to my feet again, only to get stabbed with a spear the second I’m up. Agh!
The thing is, they should, on paper, be very easy to kill! I have done it, many times, with zero issue! They are slow, and their hits are very obviously telegraphed. Dodging should be a cinch. And yet. I have now done this run so many times now that I am starting to get in my own head about fighting them, and I keep either losing tons of much-needed Estus flasks and charges of Great Magic Weapon fighting them, or they just wallop me entirely. Or maybe it goes fine. Maybe I get through it with full flasks and health, summon Solaire, and head on into the fight. But God damn, that was so time-consuming. The run by itself is long enough without having to fight one small dude and two big damage sponges at the end. But if you include how long it takes to kill these three guys every single time, especially when they self-heal…ugh. Why couldn’t there be just, like, one less big guy in here?
This is it! This room is hell! Those archers back there on the ramparts, the ones everyone complained about? Cake compared to this stupid room! Get me out of this horror show! Forget Halloween, this place lives in my nightmares daily! I’m getting chills just writing about it! I’ll go as a big stompy knight for Halloween this year and scare myself!
No! I will not change my strategy and stop trying to summon the sun bro, what are you 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 gotta go farm some more. 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.
