In the same area theres also the man-serpent that is leaning against a wall and he doesnt attack you, you wonder why hes there until you make it to the boulder contraption, it always makes me laugh watching him get pelted with boulders from all the way up the slope.
One time I went to ash lake early to get the dragon head stone. I ran all the way back up to firelink but forgot the elevator was at the top... needless to say, I took a break after 😂
It's all fun and games until a fifth king spawns in the Four Kings fight. Though it's neither an intentional joke nor a consistent phenomenon, it's undeniably funny. Lethally funny, even.
@@minerman60101strange everyone calls that the Smough and Ornstein like fight (mostly cause one big boy with a lanky friend) but in truth Godskin Duo is the Four Kings of Elden Ring
@Grimsly3736 facts Godskin duo on farum azula is legit more akin to Four Kings than ornstein & smough tbh have no idea wth people got that comparison from
if you don't manage to kill the 1st king they will stack up I should know I jus got past that fight the other day on ng+4 an before I had completely emptied their health bar it was a 3v1 only reason why I survived was cuz I had havels Armour an shield on with the wolf ring.......😑🤦🏻😅 on a side note 161 poise in ds1 is completely bonkers
I love the man serpent scripted to run in front of a door before being clobbered by a boulder just as the player reaches them. Going from "an enemy! I must fight!" to "oh, boulder got him" is hilarious and a great way to show the player that they need to watch out for boulders
Honestly, the comedy starts even earlier than that. Even if you don’t put much effort into character creation; you pick a class, a gift, a name, and a basic default appearance… a few seconds later, you meet your character who has NONE of that and is a walking beef jerky! Amazing 😂
I was so confused on my first playthrough cause I didnt understand what humanity was or why my character looked like jerky, I thought that it was just a cosmetic feature to show how long your character must have spent in the asylum before being freed, and I was more confused when I jist stayed like that for half the playthrough. 😂
my first souls was elden ring and i still remember spending an hour designing a ridiculous looking character only to slowly dawn on me how much i’d trolled myself when i spawned in in full samurai armor
@@TheBoneSerpentI spent the whole game with a full helmet on, and when I finished I used Ranni's hat with a new build and kept thinking "is that really my face ?"
I found a message that was just “target lock ahead” and the guy doing the collapse gesture. I target locked right onto the boulder below. I had to collapse after seeing the mighty presence of boulder.
the best message in DS1 is the last note en the ground in the tutorial that says something along the line of "Well played ! keep moving forward". When you finish the tutorial it's just a pat on the back and giving you the next step. When you come back to the asylum later, you go forward into the building just for the floor to collapse under you. I laughed so hard the first time it happened to me.
@@Grimsly3736 Probably because they were so amused by their teleportation chests gag this time around. Mmmm.... Mimics that teleport you instead of killing you when they eat you! ...and soon as I wrote that, I realised they already though of a teleportation-eater with the Abductor Virgin!
Eldenring definitely has fewer comedic moments, but Goldmask T-Posing in front of a crying Corhyn will always be hilarious to me. I've had so many playthroughs but I still always take a moment to join him T-posing and laugh at crying Corhyn
What do you mean fewer, bro there's so much of it even in the early game 😂 1:22 They even recreated that in elden ring near the first map in limgrave, you can see the giant on top ready to jump 😂
I think it's a commentary for something too, with Corhyn following and interpreting Gold Mask's tiny finger twitches every step of the way, without doubting him once if you don't do the quest a certain way. Now, I don't know if Gold Mask is an allegory for over-zealous religious leaders and their servants who follow their every move with awe, or what, but it's somehow funny
@@wannabepoet9647you actually kinda got it backwards. corhyn is a fanatic who has a completely black and white view of the golden order and what it is and can be, while goldmask understands that it is subject to change and deeply flawed. when you give goldmask the info he needs to figure out his plan, corhyn starts losing it because he can't understand what he's doing and refuses to believe theres anything to fix
It's like my family always says, "To Beat Dark Souls, you need to ring the Bells of Awakening to get to Anor Londo and retrieve the Lord Vessel, then fill the vessel with all the lord souls."
One of my favorites are the magic bone boulders in Carthus, the experience of seeing it go down the stairs after dodging it and assuming your safe only to see it coming back up the stairs full speed a second later is indescribable the first time
Then you find the goofy ass hat wearing architect of your suffering in a corner. He may look like a clown but you are in fact the clown for falling for such shenanigans.
Funniest Dark Souls moment will forever be the "I'm sorry" carving in Oolacile and how you obtain it. Elden Ring's reveal of the Two Fingers being literally two giant fingers is pretty great though.
When I first played Elden Ring all the NPCs talked about the Two fingers like they were a super secret society for tarnished and it hyped me up, and then you open the door in roundtable hold and I laughed so hard when the Two Fingers was litterally just a giant hairy hand with two fingers and saggy skin, I made a joke with my brother that the hand was just never the same after "The War"
The open world of Elden Ring gets its humor mostly from having weird little guys everywhere. Turtles, albinaurics, those stone worms. Goats that roll around like Sonic the hedgehog. Also putting merchants in ridiculous places. They're always like "business has been slow lately..." Yeah dude I wonder why! 😂
One of my favourite bits of Elden Ring humor is if you use the Wandering Nobles ashes against a dragon or other large boss. Instead of joining the fray, they just try to run away and cower in fear and it's like "Well, what did you expect?" because that's the exact same thing they do in the world when you fight them.
I love the merchant that’s in Caelid where you have to run up a hill past like 7 giant dogs and rams that will attack back, and then has the audacity to say he hasn’t seen any customers lately.
You see, the rolling boulder that breaks into Oscar's room is part of the healing tutorial! If you were at full health when he gives you the flask, you either won't try it, or try it and feel like you wasted it! It's like a less on-the-nose version of that part in Helldivers 2 where they just freakin' stab you!
I don't know about you, but I found "Random Lobster that transforms into a Grafted Scion" in Liurnia to be pretty funny all on it's own, for what it's worth. You deffo get set-up fighting the one in the tutorial that's deliberately meant as a showcase of "Wow this enemy is bs hard and not cool" and the lobsters reveal themselves to be similarly hard all throughout that part of the world, so getting an _already hard_ enemy that turns into yet another hard enemy is just like. Yeah that does it for me
this is one of those things that soulslikes have trouble comprehending, and is what makes dark souls 1 stand out so much for me. this game achieves a tone/vibe that no other in the genre has come close to replicating, not even fromsoft's own subsequent releases
I feel the same about DS2, not because of its humor (as there isn't much), but because of its dreamlike nature, leaving a much somber and nihilistic taste than the first DS, which I consider to be more philosophically diverse.
You should check out Demon's Souls if you haven't already. The original if you can but the remaster is acceptable imo. coolest environement and vibes of any game i've ever played
@@SpiderMan-gf1lc DS2 always reminded me of King's Field more so than other soulslikes. Some mechanics of the game and said dreamlike atmosphere is probably why.
Im glad you pointed out the humor element of these games. A couple favs are the two giant skeletons that team up to kick you off a cliff in DS1 and the swinging log trap that snaps off of its rope in Bloodborne. I also agree that that humor is harder to find in the open world of Elden ring, the funniest gags being the monsters that randomly turn into other monsters, although I find the open world of ER much more comfortable and even calming or sublime to explore then most dark souls locations.
How bout Alexander's sus dialog, player's messages, patches immediately nope out in radhan's arena, literal "raining dog" in Limgrave, "deathbed companion", our steed called "Torrent", the first npc we talked calling us we have no beches and his weapon is banquet, the fookin dung eater? 😂 Idk what else, but the joke are there and all of this only in the early game 😂
YOOOOOO I have a very special memory of that log trap in Bloodborne I was playing in the living room where the TV is and my father and sister happened to be watching. I managed to dodge the trap by the skin of my teeth and yelled "INHUMAN REACTIONS" in my excitement - shortly before the log came back to smack my behind.
I'm surprised you didn't include the brick joke if you find the secret way to return to the Asylum. You wander back into the boss room in reverse, no doubt thinking about how they got ya so good way at the start of the game... then the floor gives way to drop you into an ambush with the ACTUAL Big Chungus in the basement you saw and mistook for Roof Chungus.
There's a set of stairs in the mental ward area of the Bloodborne dlc (right before Maria) that uses perspective to trick you into missing a gap in it before the door and falling to your death. Getting a side profile view of that staircase as my friend Ryan mindlessly walked off it mid sentence may be the hardest I've ever laughed at anything in my life.
When your fighting a mimic chest they close distance by doing a DOUBLE ROUNDHOUSE KICK and flying across the air towards you I never laughed so hard when I fist saw them do that for the first time and they conpletely whiffed. 😂😂😂
There’s an interview in one of the dark souls design works books where Miyazaki says the Mimic moveset was based on his favorite Japanese wrestler. And now every time I encounter a Mimic I think about that.
"Oh, I get it: Malenia's so difficult because she's a one phase boss. Her 'second phase' is just the Waterfowl Dance. For a second there, I thought she would get even tougher than this." - Me, after fighting her for hours, right before I got her to phase two. One of my favorite From Software jokes.
Goddess of Rot is one of the funniest things I've seen in a game. Spend hours hearing "I am Malenia, Blade of Miquella," spend six minutes or more on your winning attempt, get immediately oneshot by Scarlet Aeonia.
I've found a bunch of humor in the Seemless Co-Op mod with a buddy in Elden Ring. Nothing quite like hearing "No, wait!" before they splat next to you on the elevator you took down first.
I'm shocked OP didn't specifically mention elevators. Elevators in souls games are an endless source of comedy. You can fall down them, so can your coop partner, so can enemies. I've had some truly looneytunes ass moments with enemies and elevators.
The amount of times I've rushed past my friend while jumping just to fall down into a hole and hear him burst out into laughter as he hears my character's scream...
My favorite part of getting into these games was slowly figuring out that they were just giant, interactive Looney Tunes episodes. Playing Elden Ring at launch and wandering into that one dungeon that's actually two identical dungeons that trick you into thinking it's all the same area was absolutely hilarious. Actual "Wile E. Coyote painting a tunnel on a wall" shit
Ah, the classic Twice Twice technique pioneered by Mario Maker troll level designers. Honestly I feel like there's a lot of overlap between well-made troll levels in mario maker and fromsoft's games
Darkroot Garden is probably my favorite area in Souls for this; it's filled with bizarre goofy-looking creatures, but it's leading up to the most depressing boss in the game (Sif). It feels almost like One Piece in the way that details like the talking cat, the hidden bonfire, and the Crest of Artorias door feel like jokes on a first pass, but actually add to the story of the area in a meaningful way once you understand the full context.
Getting backstabbed by Maldron while trying to use a mechanism in Eleum Loyce was one of the funniest things that happened to me in DS2. The way he wags his finger at you afterwards is absolutely classic. They kind of recreated that with Tsorig's ridiculous "Thank you" gesture in DS3, but Maldron was really something special.
@@dorongrossman-naples9207 Eleum Loyce's Maldron was exceptionally galling and hilarious because he was introduced to us first as a despicable red phantom in Brume Tower who, if he didn't destroy you right out the gate and emote at your corpse, retreated into that curse-filled tower full of enemies. So then running into him in Eleum Loyce looking like a friendly White Phantom, you're like, "Uhhhhh, you're nice now? Ok..." Turns out nope. Still despicable and cowardly. lol Fromsoft really took the opportunity with the DS2 DLCs to up their game of red phantom behaviors by incorporating certain situational behaviors and emotes, and then man alive did they run with it when they expanded the cast in the SotFS edition. Quite the rogues gallery of rage-inducing, scummy red phantoms. No other Souls game took red phantoms that far (forgive me if I'm mistaken here and not remembering examples from other games).
Ds2 had the best emotes (honestly the best animations as a whole). I specifically love the finger wags and the super hyped ones. They’re so out of place in the medieval settings and it’s hilarious.
I would personally recommend Dark Souls 3 as your first souls-like. It's much shorter than most of the other games, is very generous with upgrade materials allowing you to experiment with different weapons pretty freely and has a pretty straightforward weapon upgrade system. It also takes out a lot of the rough edges that you see in 1 and 2. Protip for virtually any souls-like game: Health (usually called Vigor in most souls-like games) is a bit of a god stat in souls like games and leveling it can make your run much easier. Until you have a near capped weapon, most of your damage is coming not from stat scaling but from the base damage increase from upgrading your weapon. Also due to the nature of the game, being able to take an extra hit from a difficult enemy will often make the game easier than being able to down that same enemy in a couple fewer attacks, because you are already expected to hit the enemy much more than you get hit. This is especially true for boss fights.
@@webbowser8834 Additionally it allows you to experiment with builds more freely than DS1 or Bloodborne due to the ability to respec when you're aware of how to, and although DS2 does this much better it's not a great one to start with due to how different it is to just about all of FromSoft's other games since Demon's Souls.
Dark Souls 1. That has to be the first one. It might not look as flashy and might not have the freedom of Dark Souls 3 or Elden Ring, but it's an experience unlike any other to complete that game for the first time. I can't imagine it would be the same after playing any later Fromsoft titles. It has this "gotcha" moments, this things that it teaches you and prepares you for, this things that it shows you for the first time, that aren't just the first time for you, but also for the genre. The imperfections of it make it more beautiful, and those imperfections, that feeling of exploring something completely different together (you and the creators) kind of fade away in subsequent titles. There was no "formula" for a souls-like before, so it was about discovering it, and there is nothing like it.
I heard you guys talk about Dark Souls humor briefly on Windbreaker recently, glad you went more in depth here. I always thought the humor in that game was often overlooked.
Blighttown might well be the most hated area of the entire game, but that just makes it hit all the harder when you nervously climb up a ladder only to find a random ghoul calmly sitting inside a giant jar. It's the epitome of deadpan humor--so bizarre and self-assured that you can't help but laugh.
"How bizarre" is such a perfect way to describe the souls games and their worlds. I love them so much. For me, at least, a lot of the humor in Elden Ring comes from the characters/ NPCs and especially the dialogue. There is a lot more of it in Elden Ring than any other souls game, so there are more opportunities for lines to stick out. There is just something so absolutely hilarious about a dying man wearing trash bag armor in the middle of a road screaming about some dragon that kicked his ass (the setup for the joke). And then later he shows up again when fighting said dragon to deliver absolutely hilarious yet banger voice lines (the punchline). CURSE YOU BAYLE!!!
Favorite bit of humor is in Messmer's 2nd phase cutscene where you see the shadow of his snake imply it's growing much larger and then it cuts to it looking exactly the same with the same stupid :3 face with Messmer saying some of the most terrifying dialogue in that game.
@@Sharkamfss I love Messmer's lil snakes so much 😭 they really are so gosh dang cute. The intro scene where it is all close up in your face doing the "no maidens?" face killed me
I agree that the "humor", if we can call it that, seems to be more specific to fully voiced cutscenes. -Margitt the fell essentially roasting you AND killing you repeatedly while it wasn't even him at full power or even him PRESENT. And his roast is poetry too. He starts by calling you a FOUL tarnished (tarnished meaning, quite literally, an object that has lost it's sheen, such as silverware.) and then almost sarcastically praising your ambition, likening it to a burning flame. Punchline: he's gonna extinguish that flame. Gameplay significance: if you give up on the game at this point because of margitt being a difficulty spike, he will have extinguished your flame. Succeed, and you get to one-up him. Added irony: "margitt the fell", if we translate such old-timey-speak to modern day english, would quite literally mean "margitt the foul". So he's also being a giant hypocrite about it, himself part of a race of people that were, in the eyes of the golden order, "tarnished". Then there's Godrick the Grafted, essentially one giant incel meme. Cuts off his own hand (in the meantime, he can still take damage, which a lot of players will make use of. Unfortunately, if you're standing too close, the cut will also damage you.) while screaming. Pretty fucking metal. And then his arm turns into a dragon, a being he heretofore glorified, but whose corpse he is willing to defile and appropriate. Mogh just has massive pervert vibes (in my opinion, what it means for an empyrean to have a consort, is far different from just having a sexual or even romantic relationship. All of the empyreans require a consort in order to rule. Lorewise, it seems that one elden lord and one empyrean regent must ALWAYS maintain the order that rules. This seems to be something divine, not romantic. Mogh, in my mind, is therefore not the pervert the fanbase depicts him as, or at least there was never enough evidence of that, even before the dlc.) He also calls the battleground the "birthplace of our dynasty". His hall is bathed in blood though, and he himself emerges from the gaping wound of an egg in which the arm of miquella is shown. Essentially a giant "womb" metaphor, from which he is birthed in a river of blood. Pretty gnarly, just like real human births. That he himself chucks the blood of his "blood mother" at you reaffirms the whole "femininity" and "birth" themes. Pretty much like Bloodborne did, with the blood mother essentially being the same as formless Oedon (spoilers I guess.) The fire giant throwing a spastic fit and ripping off his own leg as a sacrifice to a god that is also a giant eye ON the giant. Radagon having red hair as a curse, which he hated, as his hair was likened to that of the fire giants. Radagon being Marika just adding more questions as to exactly how it is that marika didn't just NOT make radagon have red hair then... Marika being crucified, therefore appropriating the christian cult's symbolism of the "savior", even though she's the direct cause of the shattering. Much like the humor that this vid provides. It's not really the "gut-laugh" type of humor. It's more akin to irony, or laughing at the absurdity of this horrid world.
It took me a bit to find your channel. I hope you continue Cold Takes here. Your content is excellent, and I hope it takes off for you wherever you pitch your tent.
Sen's funhouse becomes fun when you get hit by a giant ball, fall lower onto other stairs and get hit again by that same giant ball, killing you without you being able to do anything, i was litterally crying laughing when that happened to me
Their idea of humor is putting an enemy around a corner of a cliff ready to push you off or making something look harmless only to learn the hard way how dangerous it really is. They want moments in the game where you can get pointed at and laughed at which I'm all for 😂 The humor is definitely still there in Elden Ring but limited to more linear spaces as you said. Open room? Could be a ceiling slime. Stairs with a item in sight? Probably going to collapse on me. They try to put those same jokes out in the open world areas too. "Ah, an item with fingertips surrounding it. Surely this isn't a giant hand monster; that's ridiculous". "Oh a Knight on horseback in the first area, could be a boss but shouldn't be too hard". Our suffering is usually the joke but it drives us to be better. Maybe that's why these Souls Games are so fun.
One of my funniest souls moments was in Dark Souls 2. There's this castle that you go to and you spend quite a bit of time inside of it, exploring various rooms, fighting baddies, normal stuff y'know? And then you find a long ladder which you climb down into a room with a door. But this door is special. Y'see, most doors lead to a corridor, or a room, maybe even a parapet or a courtyard or something. This door leads to absolutely nothing. A dead drop that instantly kills you. Now if you're careful and look after you open the door but before entering, you can see the drop and avoid your doom. But by this point, you have entered dozens of doors, most of them not putting you in any immediate peril and even the danger of the occasional ambush can be mitigated by simply holding the block button and/or staying healthy. So naturally, when I came across this door I just assumed it was a normal door and ran right through, dying instantly, and it was *hilarious*. So yeah, that's my "funny dark souls moment" story.
@@Jormyyy I wanna say it was in the Bastille, but one of the areas you visit later in the game. IIRC the Bastille was freaking massive, so I doubt that narrows it down all that much. This all happened 4 or so years ago, so I would not be shocked if I got some of the details wrong.
@webbowser8834 Ohhh I think I know where you're talking about! In the Lost Bastille, room with all the royal swordsmen before the Ruin Sentinels, at some point on one of the floors of that building is a door that just... leads to nowhere. The door opens and there is nothing but a drop that kills you. In the bastille there is also the door with a skeleton holed up in the rubble as well.
@@Jormyyy Yup. The "Door leads to immediate ambush on the other side" is a Dark Souls classic. Pretty sure they all have that. The door to nothingness is unique to DS 2, based on my experience at least.
The funniest thing to me in these games came with the Elden Ring DLC and is a direct joke; you can pick up a lone set of a Boss's leggings which reads "A cruel joke; for he could not wear them". There was absolutely no reason to do that.
My favorite thing about that is that you can buy the rest of his armor set from the finger reader crone in the roundtable hold. But not his pants. Because he would not wear them, of course they aren't part of the set she's selling.
I think Elden Ring's humour is more on the nose, it's about bizarre and silly things. Hitting things with a finger, a giant angry cannibal riding a tiny horse like a meteor with a whole festival to kill him with halo music. Getting teleported to the caelid tunnel. Pumpkin heads. laughing at the george r r martin thing by making a sword that's like the game of thrones throne. Big flat headed ants and you can use that head as a shield yourself. A man in an armour covered in ears and eyes calling himself the all-knowing. Ranni sitting on books to make herself taller and more commanding. The initial promotional stuff being all hyping up Godrick and making him out to be a big, important, terrifying, interesting thing, then the game comes out and everyone dunks on the guy. Rennala has a big curvy hat like a banana. Mohg looks like the sataniest satan to ever satan and that overtness is a kind of funny, too. There are just big rolling silver balls that chase you dlwn, including being so prominently placed after already introducing the concept of enemies dropping on your head multiple times, just, such big balls over head, so prominent, that it's more of a laugh and a dare to see if the player is willing to walk under than a real trap. Enemies wearing stone heads that aldo bash you with them. A big anchor to hit things with, which i can't explain why that's funny, but it is. And so is being able to create a small moon and send it at things. Giant-headed dogs and ravens, generally this game uses a lot of big heads and that's funny too. Kind of in a classical-harkening big head mode kinda way. An armour with two giant goat horns poised to always make everything clip and look ugly with it. Fighting boatmen leisurely boating. Summoning heads of dragons to spew things. Goat-rolling. The noble Godfrey discarding his armour, weapon and lion to start using wrestling moves on you. Also the snark on item descriptions, like saying Mohg might just be a blood-soaked lunatic, or the noble greatshield, whatever it's called, about little lordlings cowering behind them, or the hoslow set about diallis being more talk than trousers, using such an old-sounding way to mock him. The humour is there, it's just a lot less complex and cross-cultural than before.
I don’t think this video has any grounding at and it’s hilarious trying to see commentors pull out humor like it’s an admirable or necessary quality. None of this is really humorous here or in the video and certainly not good humor. Jesus, gaming criticism is so bad.
@@nezahuatezI think Frost made his point well, how DS1 uses its linear areas to set up practical jokes. He didn't say that Elden Ring didn't have any humor, just not this kind of humor due to the open structure of the game not beint condusive to the set-up, build-up punchline structure
One of my favorite examples of this is the Sen's Fortress elevator. You see that it's over a pit; you see that the platform is covered in blood, you see the jumping off point it serves you on a golden platter; but there's something inside you that still wonders "what's ALL the way up?" When you find out, you can only laugh saying "it's Dark Souls, I don't know what I expected."
This is such a great video! Making me brainstorm elden ring moments that are pure comedy, and i have to give a shoutout to the Redahn fight. The tiny horse, the start of the second phase, and most importantly, Patches! Just peak comedy gold.
It is true that the open world is often not funny, but I love coming up somewhere and there's just a giant monster with a silly name immediately kicking my ass.
This is such a great video. The first time I've heard someone put into words the humor I see in the Souls games. Even just the goofy enemy designs are undeniably, intentionally funny. The lanky run of the torch hollows, the oversized false eyes of the basilisks, those damn clams... Also your voice is very relaxing to listen to, like an old school radio host.
6:14 I think this was actually a really smart choice on From's part, making the open world feel more lonely and giving time for introspection and reflection. It's brilliant really.
I just want to say, early game traps for comedic effects are used a *lot* in Fromsoft's precursor series Kings Field. In Kings Field 4 they've got an instakill lava pit that'll kill you in the first five seconds if you walk forward. A hidden wall with a fancy chest hidden inside. You open it for a skeleton to pop out and summarily bonk you. There's also tons of parts where you can see the devs trying to subtly guide the player along as well. Your analysis/review is on point.
"Humor" is an interesting framing of an idea I've noticed for awhile, and I completely agree with it. Souls games are legendary, so when someone else tries to touch the genre, they touch it with a sort of respect and reverence that stops them from getting in that humor. A souls imitator would never include the punching mushrooms, because it feels too goofy, and they're trying to do something BIG and IMPORTANT and NOT SILLY AT ALL. I think because of that, they often miss the mark.
@@littlemoth4956 the format of an open world makes it impossible to set up the kinds of jokes Frost describes in this video (and he even touches upon this himself)
I think the "setup, buildup, punchline" structure (or, if you'd like, "incident, tension, release") and how it frequently fails in Elden Ring is key to why it sometimes feels clumsy in comparison to the earlier games. While it does deliver on it in spades in certain locations (like the looping dungeon in the capital sewers), it frequently feels like in the overworld, sometimes i just get hit by a punchline without any setup, sometimes i find a setup but it takes 15 hours to find the punchline and at that point i might not even connect the two, or the tension of a scenario is just so monstrously extended that the release feels underwhelming (that's it?!).
wholeheartedly agree mr frost. for some reason i just find myself finding the other souls games less than ds1. i do like ds2 a bit aswell. but i think you summarise it well here. the lack of -albeit sadistic- humor is the heart i am missing in those games.
The simpler, easier-to-design-and-implement kinds of humor that FromSoft does are really just their enemy/character designs all being a little unhinged. Sheep that cartwheel around the plains, edgy badass warrior who's actually just a snail's Stand, fat guy who flips on his side to roll around the room, turtle pope, etc. And that's all just from Elden Ring. FromSoft is really not afraid to put goofy-ass stuff in their games, and that's a big part of what helps them feel fun and interesting instead of just dark and depressing.
I think the small little touches of funny nonsense also add to the world and it doesn't take itself too seriously. Like the funny mushroom people that punch really hard, the naked butcher women with a sack over her head invading you like a psych ex or the cartwheeling goats.
What a good fucking video. Very thoughtful. I will say, as someone who has never liked Soulslikes, the open world is what finally did it for me. If I want to see the world but can't beat a single boss, I can just go somewhere else. Exploration has always been my favourite part of games, and the bosses standing in my way, keeping me from what I really wanted, were extremely frustrating, so I just played something else. Now, I can enjoy both.
Each souls game has some special quality to them like this. You're totally right that 1 is absolutely the most humorous of them. 2 i'd argue is funky, or something along those lines. It tweaks as much as it can, constantly playing with it's concepts, both mechanically and thematically. 3 is refinement. The themes are destilled, the combat smoothed, every detailed polished. It's something i've always found remarkable about the trilogy in particular. Every game has an incredibly distinct personality, but are recognizably the series.
